I am sad to learn about the passing of John Blanche. My friend Tim has written a nice article about him for Wargamer and Kelvin remembers the time Blanche sent him a postcard. The documentary The Grim & The Dark has posted the entirety of their interview with John Blanche. It’s quite lovely listening to him speak.

I don’t know if I really understood who Blanche was and his impact and influence until I got into the OSR and every other person was obsessed with the grimdark. As a child I would have encountered his artwork in Fighting Fantasy, alongside some of the other greats of British fantasy illustration, but I don’t know if I was cultured enough to dig into what I was seeing beyond thinking it was cool. Getting into Warhammer exposed me to even more of his art and who he was as a creator. He was an incredible artist. There are so many drawings of his I love, but this one of a Sister of Battle is one of my favourites. What a legend. A real loss.

Last summer Games Workshop released the 3rd edition of Horus Heresy. For those keeping score at home, I managed to play three games of 2nd edition before they moved on. I find their urge to constantly churn their rulesets annoying, but that seems to be how it goes with their games. I probably don’t play enough Horus Heresy to justify all the boxes I have bought, but I have bought some boxes. The heart wants what the heart wants: I love those weird looking terminators.

I have managed to play a few games of 3rd edition now with Evan. We discovered that the Honest Wargamer shared some house rules for low point games that are kind of perfect for the amount of models we want to think about. The house rules for this format he has dubbed Squads restricts the game to 750 points, with further restrictions around the sorts of models you can bring, and some small changes to scoring. The house rules pack also includes some sample missions. The tweaks are quite small, but work well to scale the game down.

That said, with Heresy a small game can still feel quite big. My 746 point list was:

• Centurion
• Tactical Squad (10 models)
• Tactical Squad (10 models)
• Tactical Support Squad armed with Plasma Guns (10 models)
• Contemptor Dreadnought armed with Gravis Chainfist with in‑built Heavy flamer, Gravis Melta Cannon, and a Havoc Launcher.

32 models across 5 units still felt like a lot of minis on the table. Evan’s AdMech included even more models.

We are pretty out of practice playing the game, and unfortunately the rule book doesn’t make the game particularly easy to quickly pick up. The rule book has some of the most dreadful rules writing. So much word soup. Everything feels more complicated than it needs to be. Of course we are playing because there is still a lot to love about the game and how it works. The rules encourage a lot of flavourful situations—once you manage to parse what those rules are trying to say.

It took us a little under 3 hours to get through the game. I can’t imagine how long it’d take us to play a full 3000 points game. A lifetime, presumably. We would probably be better off playing with some experienced players. That’s what made my first experience playing at the tournament work so well.

This is currently the game Evan and I have been focused on playing. There is time for us to figure it all out. I need to name all my guys and figure out the narrative for these games. That’s where the real fun of playing lives.

It is our patriotic duty to buy Canadian Mothership modules. Emergence is a funnel adventure—like you remember playing in DCCRPG. Emergence takes place Henko Acquisitions Correctional Complex. Players play inmates who wake up after some unknown accident has damaged the facilities. They must try and escape to the surface. There is a whole lot more going on, some of which I’ll discuss below, so if you are thinking of playing stop reading now!

The game was written by Carson Brown, with art by the always excellent Brandon Yu. This is one of the books I grabbed at this years Breakout Con, which was honestly mostly me shopping. Brandon’s cover is amazing. You can almost always judge a book by its cover.

The prison complex is quite dynamic. Carson has done a lot to make prison an interesting space to explore. To start, it’s flooding! The rooms in the prison will fill with water as the players explore the space, eventually ending up mostly submerged. Every 30 minutes of game time the players will roll a d10 and increase the flood level of the location by 1. (There are 10 locations that can flood within the subterranean portion of the prison.) The power in the complex is also fluctuating. The adventure begins with the power barely functioning. Certain locations and actions by the player can move the power level up or down, which also impacts what the players can do in various locations.

The prison map is presented abstractly. Because of the flooding and damage, the route the players took to get to the starting location of the module, at the bottom of the facility, isn’t one they can follow back out. To model the confusion and unknown, each path between two locations passes through an additional location, which is determined randomly. Once determined this new location is fixed. Four of the locations in the prison are cell blocks, and a random table is used to determine what are two notable locations with the cell block. You would likely roll up these cell block locations before play, so you can figure out what’s up and which factions control them. The map in the book is nicely put together, with space to track the connection locations, cell blocks, and the the flood levels of the rooms.

The descriptions of the connections and cellblocks are more my speed, a handful of sentences, easy to quickly read. The descriptions of the ‘proper’ locations in the prison are longer: not walls of text, but also not the quickest to parse. Some room descriptions talk about the geometry of the space, where entrances and exists are located, or how one location relates to the others in the physical space of the prison. I personally don’t love this when the maps are all abstract. In this module you don’t even know what new location players will find while travelling between the spaces.

There are 6 factions described in the module, each highlighting one aspect of the prison. They are flavourful, but as presented it’s not often obvious how each would feel about one another, or about the players. To my mind, the descriptions would also be better if they focused on how the factions are reacting to current drama at the prison. Before running I would probably flesh this out more.

The rules for creating simpler funnel characters for Mothership are featured early in the module, after introducing the DM to the events taking place and the nature of the prison. Each of the characters a player creates is a prisoner. You roll 3 sets of d100 to determine their 6 digit serial number. These numbers will be used to help determine stats, and also tell the DM the truth behind a characters crime (eg: they did it, they were framed, they had a sham trial, etc). There is a new “Cohesion” stat specific to these funnel characters that begins at 3 and moves up and down during play. Players won’t know what this stat is actually for initially. The adventure includes your classic 4-up funnel character sheet.

Cohesion is tied to the underlying secret of the module, a fun twist that will help make this funnel feel like a funnel. The players are all clones! They will turn into mindless fungus monsters if they don’t find stabilizer drugs. These drugs are littered throughout the complex here and there, but certainly not enough to keep all the characters alive. The players may end up having to run away from the fungus zombie monster version of themselves. A character that reaches 20 cohesion is free of the curse.

The module ends with some suggestions on what concluding the adventure may look like, and possible future adventures. The back interior cover page is a search the room table. Something the players might do often so it’s handy to have there. The front interior cover page has stats for all the monsters, and sums up what the flooding and power levels mean. The map of the adventure is found dead centre in the module, so it’s also easy to find. Good job team!

I really liked this module. It seems like a great way to get introduced to Mothership: it’s kind of bleak, there are weird monsters, corporations being dirt bags, etc. There will be lots of chances to sacrifice one of your characters to save the rest. Also lots of chances for ignoble deaths. That’s what you want in a funnel adventure.

Sam believes people consume text with more patience and thought when it’s presented in prose: bullet points and styled text encourage the reader to zip around skim. I can see that argument, but it’s almost certainly the case different people consume information effectively in different ways. A while ago I wrote about how Patrick’s approach to writing is a form of usability, which I think relates to this core point Sam is trying to make. Orthopraxy’s Eat the Book remains a great recent read on this topic.

A lot of caveats and comments on a post I’m sharing, but I’m sharing it because I often dislike the same sort of writing Sam does! We can do better, whether you choose to do better with a paragraphs or bullets.

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Joined by Johan Nohr and Jarrett Crader, Luke has written a hex crawl adventure for Mork Borg, Tephrotic Nightmares. That’s a solid posse of RPG people. I had impossibly high expectations for this book.

Tephrotic Nightmares is about the sea of ash, a region that was ruined by The Arsonist. Dark Sun had a Sea of Silt, so perhaps I am already biased towards liking this book. The very first thing we learn about this place is water is the currency of note, letting us know what is important and valuable up front. (I was reminded of light in Veins of the Earth.)

The order elements of an adventure are presented in is something I find intriguing. After the introductory page explaining you are exploring a sea of ash, we jump straight to rules for sailing this silt sea in Mork Borg. Luke writes about the various modes of transport available to the players, Mad Max like boats, and the various weapons and defences available to trick them out. The book came with a map and chits so you can play a wargame. Hells yeah!

Factions come next. There are several. Their bases are placed on the hex map of the region. Each faction is described briefly, with a goal, their current challenges, offerings and rituals. These are a sentence or two, and hint at how players may end up interacting them. None are presented in a way that they are explicitly in conflict with one another. The typical units that make up the faction are described, with stats for Mork Borg, along with the vessels each faction uses for travel. Between Luke’s writing and Johan’s art, we get a vivid picture of these groups without too much faffing about.

A bestiary follows. Everything is flavourful, starting with a small and vicious dog, the ash mink. Luke lets you know people are harvesting bodies for water, like Dune. Johan draws some cool witches.

The back half of this book are locations of varying sizes found in the ash sea. There are 22 places in all, starting with the headquarters of 5 of the 6 factions. The region is fairly large, most hexes aren’t described. As this is a sea, that makes sense. Ships move 1-3 hexes per days, so there will be a fair bit of multi-day travel to get from location to location. There are random encounter tables, but I think a GM would want to think about how they want to run the parts of the game that are sailing between locations.

The Bloodhunter Fortress has NPCs who can let the PCs know where to find various monsters. Perhaps the campaign becomes a monster hunter game for a while? The Urniversity will pay PCs to go map a region of the sea. Perhaps the its a game of exploration for a while. The Pyromancers of the Cold Hearth, home of the Burnt Offering faction, will reward players if they find the holy book secreted away within the hidden fortress of the Arsonist, the person who created the ash sea. The Necromancers of the same faction want that book as well. More adventure for the PCs. Locations can feel a bit disconnected from one another, but I found them cool all the same.

The first big dungeon detailed is the faction headquarters of the Cannibal Count. His mount-manse is detailed over 12 pages, with art and maps by Johan. Maps are repeated so you don’t need to flip pages when running, a nice touch. Room descriptions are short and punchy, as I like them. Luke informs the reader that unless the players are hostile encounters should be social, but these people are cannibals: there’s gonna be tension there. These are strange bureaucratic cannibals. Lots of departments and assistants to assistants, working despite their boss seemingly being long gone.

Hex 11 describes a shipwreck, a creature within may take a character hostage and demand the captain of the boat return. But where is the captain? I thought this might be an exercise for the reader. The GM will make something up, maybe some random NPC in one of the faction bases is the captain. Reading ahead, we learn he is a prisoner in Hex 18, The Grinding. So this is still an exercise, just not the one I thought: make note of where they are!

The book concludes with another big dungeon, which takes up 20 pages of the book. The “big boss”, the Arsonist, is found here. As with most everything in this book, there is nothing pushing the players here, though I imagine through the course of play they may find their own reasons.

I was reminded of a False Machine joint based solely on the amount of cannibalism in this book. It feels like every other group you meet eats people.

Tephrotic Nightmares is interesting object: the spine is exposed: you can see the stitched binding and it will lie perfectly flat. The other pages aren’t cut, you need to peel them apart as you read. Your first encounter with the book is a bit of an experience. The hardcover book is genuinely lovely, and if you can afford its price I would recommend it wholeheartedly over a boring PDF. Johan has done an incredible job with the art and graphic design—unsurprisingly.

It was interesting to read this book after reading His Majesty the Worm. In contrast to the exposition and support in HMtW, Tephrotic Nightmares really doesn’t hold your hand. Here are rules for sailing around, here are a bunch of weirdo factions, here are some monsters, here are some places. How you thread it all together is left up to you. Proper OSR nonsense! I really love books like this. A sandbox of stuff. The writing is strong. The art is great. It’s all very atmospheric. But is it too static? If there is criticism to be had, I suspect it will fall here. I think this sort of adventure is perfectly fine. The GM will figure out what’s up, along with the players, through play. From running adventures like this, stuff gets messy when the players get involved.

My friend moved to New York City for work. A weird time to head South, I suspect most people want to travel in the opposite direction. I’d rather he was still here, but there is one perk from his being away: I can mail books to him. On his last trip back he brought with him a copy of His Majesty the Worm (HMtW), by Josh McCrowell. HMtW is an OSR game designed for dungeon crawling. The expectation for the game is you’ll create a megadungeon that your players will explore over many sessions. Unlike most dungeon crawlers, it borrows very little from D&D. Grab a tarot deck, because this game doesn’t use any dice. Wild!

There is probably no world where His Majesty the Worm is someone’s first game, but the book does all the work of introducing itself to a reader new to RPGs all the same. A little later in the book Josh presents a player’s manifesto, which serves as advice to the players for how to approach the game. I love RPG books that approach teaching their game without making assumptions about the audience and their past experience and competency. The books has the games principles up front, setting expectations for the reader. I have lots of experience playing OSR games, but HMtW is quite different, so I believe these sorts of first principles introductions can still be broadly useful.

Character creation feels far heavier your typical OSR game, there is a bit more to do, and Josh encourages you work through the process during a Session 0.¹ As part of session 0 players will flesh out characters together, narrating snippets of their past to settle on scores for their character’s attributes, and fill out other parts of their character sheet. I kind of hate anything that feels like it’s adjacent to backstory, but at least this time you’re coming up with it together with your friends. I also find more involved character creation can put players at odds with the “your character can die at any time we will make a new quickly” ethos of OSR play. I think part of the social contract when it comes to killing player characters is that if it takes a long ass time to make a character it’s a little impolite to kill them. Josh does provide a new adventurer checklist for players to use to jump back into the game after a character dies, or if a new player joins. I haven’t actually tried making a character, so me imaging how fast or slow it might be is all you get.

Characters have Bonds tying them together, charged when acted upon, those charges spent for benefits in play. Bonds feed into the mechanics for camping. This is a part of Torchbearer that I thought was interesting, but I am not that big a fan of how Torchbearer actually works in play. It’s nice to see other games try and do something meaningful with this activity that feels like it should be a bigger part of play.

Moving past character creation we get to an explanation of the crawl phase of the game, where you go adventuring in dungeons. Josh does a great job of breaking down tropes for the unfamiliar. Another example of building something that’s broadly accessible. There are rules for social encounters, and far more involved rules for combat. There is lots going on with how combat works. It seems like bluffing would be a big part of the game since it’s card based, everyone has a random set of 4 to work with, some cards are played face down, etc. There is advice for playing online, but I suspect the game would be far more fun in person, with physical cards. (I suppose all RPGs are more fun in person.)

Shopping, the scourge of all RPGs, is handled in a nice way in HMTW. You pay for upkeep when you return from the underworld, deciding on an impoverished, common, or luxurious lifestyle. To buy new gear you select anything from gear lists that match each lifestyle, limited only by what you can carry. I love this idea, something easy to steal for other games.

HMtW is a very procedure heavy game. Play is structured into 4 phases: the City phase, the Crawl Phase, the Camp Phase, and the Challenge Phase. During the City phase you’ll make preparations for your dungeon crawling, deal with any events that may be taking place, and perform any downtime actions. The Crawl phase is your typical dungeon crawling session, moving through the dungeon in search of adventure. The Challenge phase is this games name for combat: you’ll fight monsters of the underworld. Finally the Camp phase is where you will rest and recuperate in the dungeon, bonding with your fellow adventurers.

The game’s structured play loop (city, crawl, camp, challenge) will likely feel familiar to those of you who have read Torchbearer. Of course, Torchbearer itself was modelling the play loop of old-school D&D, so there is some about of the snake eating its own tail here. Both camping and downtime in the city are given some mechanical heft uncommon in many OSR games. When I asked Josh if he was inspired by Torchbearer he said not really, he was far more inspired by OSR blogposts. My theory is that a lot of the OSR’s obsession with procedures around the time Brendan wrote his seminal post on the topic is all from people borrowing ideas from Torchbearer, but I have no real evidence to back any of this up.² There is perhaps a layer of distorted inspiration?

We get GM’ing advice at the midway point of this chonky book. Like Apocalypse World, time is spent articulating what the GM is even supposed to do, what doing a good job will look like. It’s funny this feels like an obvious section to include in an RPG, but it is one that is often glossed over. Josh covers most everything a GM will need to know to run the game effectively. It’s a well written GM section. There is practical advice for each phase of play. That’s what I like to see in these sorts of GM guides.

The book ends with some fantastic appendices. I really like the city creation rules and sample districts that are Appendix D of His Majesty the Worm. (Appendix C was Dungeon Denizens. Josh could have swapped those two: a real missed opportunity.) Each Tarot card details a district ready to be used. Another things you can steal for other games. The next appendix is advice on how to create a megadungeon: again, eminently stealable. The book concludes with some dungeon seeds and a sample dungeon to put everything you have learned along the way together. Everyone should include an adventure in their game.

It’s interesting to read a game that is trying to hit the same notes as other OSR dungeon crawling games, but that is coming at it from a totally different place. You can’t carry forward assumptions from other games when it comes to the rules, there is no d20 roll high to fall back on. That said, a carousing table is included so no one will question the game’s OSR bonafides. HMtW isn’t the sort of game I typically play nowadays. I often reach for games with almost no rules, and then struggle to run them all the same. This is a game I do want to run or play, though. It’s so unusual and different. It’s also clearly the option if you want to run a Delicious in the Dungeon game.

I spent a little bit of time over the last two days getting ready to play Mythic Bastionland. I made a map over the holidays, but didn’t finish filling it with stuff at the time. I was writing down NPC names, rolling on spark tables, and getting enough notes down so that there was some solidity to the world the players were going to explore. Mythic Bastionland encourages some amount of improvisation with its structure, but if you lean too deeply into that games can start to feel meaningless. (Chris has a small blurb about this risk in the book as well.) There was more I wanted to prep before this game, but my personal brand is not doing that extra work. Honestly it all worked out.

I asked some friends I hadn’t played games with in a while if anyone was free to play, people from back when G+ was a thing:

• Alex is playing Sir Creed, The Masked Knight
• Ben is playing The Pearl Knight
• Ian is playing Renard of Red Velvet, The Hooded Knight
• Kyana is playing Sir Turquoise, The Turtle Knight
• Zzarchov is playing The Fanged Knight

A few of us had played the game when it was being play tested, but no one had played recently, so it was all new to all of us.

The engine of the game is exploration. Mythic Bastionland is a game about exploring the wilderness, travelling from hex to hex in search of adventure. A day is divided into three phases: morning, afternoon, night. You roll for a wilderness complication at the end of each phase of the day. On a 1 you encounter an omen for a random myth in the realm. On a 2-3 you encounter the omen of the nearest myth. On a 4-6 you’ll stumble upon the landmark inside the hex, if one exists. As you move through the world you should expect the myths causing trouble in the land to bubble up. The game should create situations for the players to resolve.

In theory, half the time the players should be bumping into something weird like they are exploring the Southern Reach. This session the players rolled too well: they encountered an omen for a myth with their first wilderness exploration roll, and then never rolled a 1-3 for the rest of the session. Sometimes that’s how it goes. The result was a quieter session, but I used that as a chance to better introduce the world they were exploring.

It can be tempting to try and inject some drama into a game when the dice and your notes say otherwise, but I generally like to play things straight. You need quiet sessions or moments so that there is real contrast when the drama does arrive. I am not a fan of trying to manicure a perfect story up front. It’s almost always more satisfying when these things happen organically.

We played for 2 hours, ending our session in one of the holdings. I actually had good notes for the holdings, having rolled up many NPCs and other drama about the places. (This was easy thanks to all the spark tables and online generators.) I forgot to roll for the local mood when the party arrived at the town. A lesson for next time. That might have been the only rule I forgot today.

[Update] When I shared my experience with running the game online, I mentioned that I had the players rolling the wilderness event rolls. This is normally how I play. I like to have the players roll the hazard dice. In this game that’s likely not the right approach. Knowing that you have encountered an omen seems fine to me, I normally run games where I try and be clear and telegraph what’s happening. But knowing it’s a random omen versus the nearest one maybe tells the players a little too much about what’s going on. That knowledge may make the myths and omens feels a bit less mysterious.

The plan is to play for the next few weeks. An enjoyable start to a new campaign.

• All the room keying hacks you see really aren’t necessary if your room keys are short and quick to read.
• You should start room descriptions with the things players will notice right away. Don’t bury the lede.
• You should cut anything extraneous. You could take the time to list out all the torture devices found in the torture room, but I would only bother if there is some value in letting the GM and players know about the particulars. A GM can likely ad-lib there is a rack and iron maiden if those things are simply there to provide colour.²

To me, there is more value in trying to write something short and evocative, than try and turn it into a deconstructed sandwich.

Chris outlines how to create a realm on a single page in the book. Elm Cat has an incredibly thorough post about getting started with Mythic Bastionland that also discusses making a realm. They expand upon Chris’s advice with their own, based on their experience having run the game for a while. Chris’s video of preparing a realm for play is also great. He walks you through his process. You can watch how he uses the spark tables to flesh out a setting. ¹ Chris preps his realm in an about an hour. It took me longer—but not that much longer! These two resources are well worth reviewing.

I started by making a map in Hex Kit, a fun activity in and of itself. I decided to start a fresh map rather than continue off the one I had made a few years ago. In my head this campaign could be a prequel to the game I had thought of running, where the king is dead and knights wander the wilderness as transformed monstrosities. I can come back to that idea later, perhaps informed by how this Mythic Bastionland campaign unfolds.

With the map done, I got to populating the realm with some holdings and landmarks. I followed Chris’s advice and examples. The system works! I enjoy the act of building something out of random seeds, trying to figure out how everything could fit together. My first ruler was interested in gambling. So was my second. And so was my third. I thought of re-rolling, but the fact that three of the four leaders in the land are gamblers feels like the seed of a story. These sorts of connections bubble up as you work through the tables. I think our brains are just wired find a way to make everything make sense.

I need to actually play Mythic Bastionland, so will try and avoid being overly effusive, but even in this lonely fun of prepping the game it feels like Chris has made something really spectacular. I don’t consider myself particularly creative, but the book will make sure you can build something weird and interesting. Making a realm and figuring out what’s going on before the players show up was fun. Will it all work in play? I gotta assume so, since everyone else can’t shut up about how great the game is. Stay tuned!

I had wanted to get my Carcosa session recaps back online for some time, and decided to do that for the month of December, using it as an opportunity to talk about running the campaign at the same time. After posting them all I finally wrote a post I had intended to write back when the campaign concluded: Advice for Running a Hexcrawl, A Decade Too Late.

I also wrote 10 reviews in 2025. I haven’t written this much about games since 2013. I ended up reviewing as many war games as RPGs and modules last year. Wargaming has ended up becoming where I spend a lot of my time and energy. Those games were: Xenos Rampant, Trench Crusade, MAC Attack, Space Gits, and Blood Bowl. For RPGs I wrote about: Skorne, Constant Downpour Remastered, Nirvana on Fire, Wandering Blades, and Crown of Salt to close out the year.

There was one post I wanted to write before the clock ticked over to 2026 that I didn’t manage to get in under the wire: a comparison of Carcosa with Mythic Bastionland. I feel like there is something to say about both those games, I just need to think a bit more about what exactly.

Hopefully 2026 continues the trend of more blogging: for myself and for all the other people I see starting blogs and returning to their old ones. 2025 feels like it was a big year for blogging.

Back in 2024 I decided to track all of my purchasing and painting of minis. This was an attempt to buy less and paint more. It was a nominal success. This year, not so much. Whenever my life becomes too busy I find I channel my hobby output into pure consumerism. I ended up buying box sets that will certainly be fun to paint, but that remain unpainted (and often unbuilt!) as we come to the end of the year: Kill Team’s new Tomb World set, the Horus Heresy 3rd Edition Starter Set, the Dark Oath Slaves to Darkness army box, and the Fangs of the Bloodqueen box. Those last two I really only bought because Meeple Mart was having an “everything needs to go” sale. I ended up with 161 new models between those boxes and a few other small purchases. That’s a lot of new models!

My painting happened in small bursts: the Stormcast at the start of the year so I could play Spearhead; my Trench Crusade Heretic Legion in the spring, when the minis arrived; some orks from Slade, which I thought I might use for Space Gits; the rest of the Stormiest in the summer to finish painting the Skaventide box; the Wildercorps Hunters so I could use them for a Warcry game. I managed to play a lot of games this year, but nothing that required me to do a lot of painting. I played lots of Spearhead and Warcry, but primarily using minis I had already painted.

I’m disappointed with how the year ended when it came to my painting. It’s a hobby I really enjoy, so I should make more time for it when I can. It’s often easier to play video games or watch TV, which are also enjoyable activities, but ones I probably put more time into than I should.

My goal to start 2026 is to start painting the Darkwater boxed set. The game looks like a lot of fun, and I managed to get a good chunk of them primed when the weather in December was a little bit warm. My friends and I have started playing Blood Bowl, so I’ll need to get my team primed and painted as well. Hopefully getting those things out of the way will serve as some motivation to keep going.

Crown of Salt is an adventure for Mork Borg, written, illustrated, and laid out by Tania Herrero. This is seemingly the first adventure she has written, which is kind of bananas. This is such a strong first showing. Update: Tania let me know this is their second adventure! I’ll have to check out their Bottle Rocket, The Pit of Blasphemy.

The book has these little cut scene moments. I love it. — Me on Bluesky

The intro to the adventure is prose and art, luxuriously spread over several pages. A nice bit of story telling that is very reminiscent of video game cut scenes. We learn about an arrogant king, cursed by the gods to become a monster. I wonder if he will show up later? Tania isn’t going to tell us right away. But if you’ve read a book no doubt you’re aware of foreshadowing.

I don’t think I’ve seen another module approach breaking up the various sections that make up the adventure in this way. It’s very dramatic: it really help demarcate the various points in the adventure. Each section has these pages of bridging art and text that reorient the reader for what is to come. I really enjoyed the graphic design of these sections.

A different sort of module would tell you if the crow’s master is lost in the rifts or not, rather than leave it as a hash tag no spoilers mystery for the GM. — Me on BlueSky

The module opens with a description of the small town of Saltburg, where the adventurers can meet some hirelings, the crow above, and get ready to venture out into the wilderness. There isn’t too much to this town, which is fine, it’s not the main event for this module. The hirelings are interesting and dynamic. They feel like the main reason this town is described at all. We also learn what makes them particularly interesting on the page after they are all described.

Tania’s approach to writing Crown of Salt reminds me very much of the work of Patrick Stuart, especially Deep Carbon Observatory and Silent Titans. Not so much in terms of the modules content, but more around how the module is structured. Patrick often hides details from the GM, so that the act of reading the module comes with a sense of discovery that is mirrored by the players. Some people find this annoying, they have a vision of maximum table utility that demands tidy summaries of everything that’s going on. Certainly one way to make an adventure, but I think it’s reductive to think a more creative approach won’t work.

In the case of the crow mentioned above, knowing its backstory likely won’t impact how the encounter is run at the time the party first meets the bird. (And if you read the whole module, you’ll perhaps recall its deal.) With the hirelings you are a similar position. Even if you slavishly flipped from page to page only when required, you could run the encounter where the party does their recruiting, not knowing the hirelings share a dark secret. Tania’s approach makes for a much more engaging read of the module, and in general I think she avoids some of the issues that arise from being coy with all the details.

We in the business might call this a Flux Space™. I can see why Jason enjoyed running this with Trophy Gold, it feels like a great fit for how that game works, and its vibes. The exploration rules remind me of climbing from Veins of the Earth, perhaps an inspiration. — me on bluesky

The start of the module shares d12 reasons to risk ones life, each pushing the players to search for the fallen king (the Cantigaster), his temple, etc. I generally don’t care if an adventure includes hooks or not. I think the only hook you need is the social contract, “I bought this module so that’s what we’re doing,” but the hooks included in this book are good all the same. They do a good job tying the party to the adventure, and also help speak to the larger world. Regardless of how it comes to pass, the party will venture from the town to the rifts, in search of the adventure.

The rifts are presented as a sprawling unmappable space. My friend Nick calls this sort of site a flux space. Tania shares her rules for exploring such a space, which are very reminiscent of the climbing rules from Viens of the Earth. I’m curious to see how they work in play. Reading them I like them. She manages to capture a lot: how much time passes while travelling, if the players are injured along the way due to the route, the loss of provisions, the loss of equipment, and random encounters. To reach the temple, where they should expect to find the fallen king, the players will need to experience 4 exploration events. This approach is meant to simulate travelling through a weird messy underworld.

The encounters here are all pretty fantastic. There are 4 types of events, and 6 possible encounters per event. When you explore you will roll a d4 and a d6 to see what the players encounter. The encounters are all really engaging. It’s hard to pick my favourites. Many will lead to fun situations during the course of a game. I can see how this adventure would work so well with Trophy Gold. The module’s loose structure lends itself well for the similarly unstructured exploration rules of Trophy Gold.

There are a few places where the challenge of the module feels like it veers into rocks fall you all die territory. For example, one of the monsters has a random power that increases gravity in the area: the players must pass a DR12 test or die. There isn’t really anything the players can do to prepare for this situation, it’s a random power that might occur on a random round of combat. There are a few places where it felt like the module was challenging in a way that might not be fun.

This section has some layout choices I found a bit confusing, or places where the placement of information is a hinderance. There is a mini dungeon within the rifts, the Tomb of the Promised Princess. Instructions for finding the tomb are included with the description of the temple, and those are found well after the instructions for exploring the rifts: “only reachable by the guidance of the Latrofax or by rolling a repeated result in an exploration event.” It’s not unreasonable to imagine someone running the rifts portion of the adventure, unaware they need to watch out for duplicate entries. (Earlier, there are instructions on the page following the instructions for exploring the rifts, “Roll a d6 before determining the Exploration Event. On a 1, skip directly to the Promised Princess event. The chance increases by 1 each time.“ Is the intention to use both? I’m not so sure.)

Crown of Salt concludes with a small temple dungeon. You are stalked by the Cantigaster. Tania suggests he shows up when convenient or interesting, but offers up some simple random chance rules if just having him jump scare the players offends your no quantum ogres OSR sensibilities. — me on bluesky

The adventure ends with a small dungeon. The cut scene that introduces this section explains more of the background for the whole adventure. One last twist: a primordial god! The adventure really leans into Mork Borg’s vibes. Like Deep Carbon Observatory, the players will be stalked by the main antagonist of the dungeon, the Cantigaster. This dungeon is flavourful, like the rest of the module. Tania switches to a more straightforward layout at this point. I find the keys a little long to my taste, but I am a fan of tweet sized room descriptions.

We have made it this far and I haven’t even talked about the layout and art. Crown of Salt is beautiful. A lot of people try (and fail) to ape Johan Nohr’s style when it comes to making modules for Mork Borg. Often books just look messy and half assed, they don’t have the graphic design chops to pull off what Johan accomplished with Mork Borg. With Crown of Salt, Tania’s made a really lovely book. There are are occasional missteps, but in general I think she’s made something where the graphic design contributes to the story telling. Her art is fantastic. Like Gus or Luka, it’s always impressive to see someone who can do it all.

I really loved Crown of Salt. One of the coolest modules I’ve read this year. I regret not grabbing it sooner. I wanted to make sure I talked about it before the year was done. Telling you about it feels like a good way to close out 2026.

Whenever I say Warcry is the best game Games Workshop has made, someone always chirps up to reply that I am wrong, that title belongs to Blood Bowl. It was hard to argue about a game I have never played. Blood Bowl is Games Workshop’s skirmish fantasy football game. You are basically playing Jervis Johnson’s take on American Football. Now having finally played, I have to admit it is pretty wonderful.

My friends and I decided to get start a league. I grabbed the Imperial Nobles team, and a rule book. I more or less instantly regretted not just grabbing the starter set, as I could have sold one of the teams, gained a pitch and tokens, and come out ahead price wise. So, don’t make the same mistake as me. The Third Season of Blood Bowl has tweaked the composition of all the teams so you can field a reasonable team from one box. This small change is what got my friend excited about playing. It’s really what sucked us all in.

My friend had played Blood Bowl in the 90s, so helped the game move along. When I first looked at the rule book I felt there were a lot of rules to make the game go, something I mentioned to my cousin who played in twenty years ago. He scoffed and replied the game was easy! Now having played, I would agree. It’s all quite intuitive. It does feel a bit like football. There was some looking stuff up here and there, but we got into the swing of the game quite quickly.

Blood Bowl is played over two halves. One team will kick the ball to the opposing team: place the ball on a square and roll to see where it ends up and bounces. It’s then up to the other team to grab the ball and move it up the pitch. If you make it to the end of the field, the end zone, you score a touch down. You activate all your minis one by one until there is a turnover. There is a long list of cases that can cause you to lose your turn, but they all eventually boil down to: one of your models falls down or you lose the ball. When this happens play flips to the other player and they take their turn. Each half is composed of 8 turns in a normal game of Blood Bowl.

Your players can move, pass the ball, hand-off the ball, catch, block, secure the ball, and foul players who are knocked down. The actions do what they say on the box. Because you are trying to avoid turnovers, you will generally attempt safer actions first, before riskier ones.

Movement simply has you move down the pitch (a grid) a number of squares as dictated by your move stat. You can rush up to two times, letting you move an additional square each time on a roll of 2+ on a d6. But if you roll a 1 you fall over. In our game my fried Dylan’s catcher fell over getting into position. Play turned over to me, and my turn ended the exact same way. We somehow rolled 1s back to back when rushing. That’s Blood Bowl.

Adjacent players can block, attempting to attack the other player. There are custom block dice to roll that tell you what happens. Hopefully you push the person out of the way and/or knock them down. It’s possible you might get knocked down yourself. Like typical skirmish games there is an advantage gained by having more of your players adjacent to the combat. The offensive players gains strength for their friends, similarly for the defensive player. You roll one block dice if you match the opposing players strength, two if you beat it, three if you more than double it. The player with the higher strength choose the result. (So tackling stronger players is a bad idea.) A lot of the game is positioning to try and gain extra dice for your block roll.

Moving the ball down the pitch will involve passing, catching, and hand offs. The further you attempt to pass, the more difficult the dice roll required. Players have a pass stat, and need to beat their attribute score. Catching and picking up the ball require making an agility score roll. So you could make a perfect throw, but still fumble the catch. You could run to pick up a ball off the ground and fall over. That’s blood bowl.

The secure the ball action is new to this edition of the game, a way to help teams with low agility gain control of the ball in a more conservative way. You secure the ball if you roll a 2+ on a d6, it doesn’t require a roll against your agility stat. The catch is the action triggers a turn over. It never came up in our game, but I can see how it would be useful if you have strong guys who can protect the ball and move it up in the subsequent turn.

After two halves the player with the most touchdowns wins. I lost my first game. That doesn’t matter. I had a lot of fun all the same.

Blood Bowl plays more or less exactly the same as it did in the 90s. An impressive piece of game design. The game is fast and feels really dynamic. There is a lot of back and forth due. Grid movement and no line of sight to worry about helps keep everything snappy.

We were playing sevens, a smaller version of Blood Bowl. You play on a smaller pitch with a smaller team and a smaller number of turns per half. It’s a way to speed up the game. The rules are basically unchanged. Was great, no notes.

I will report back once we have started playing our league and have played more games. Like Mordheim, the campaign system for Blood Bowl is apparently a source of much fun. Is the game better than Warcry? I’m not so sure, but it is certainly one of the greats.

This isn’t the focus of your article, but it feels really good to see someone saying that their longest campaign lasted 23 sessions over roughly a year and a half. Way too many people seem to believe that the average gamer plays every week, without stopping, for years. — @vaskrag.bsky.social

It’s true! We can’t all be James. Those 23 sessions felt long and epic, and become more mythic in my head as time passes. The most successful campaign I have participated in was Pahvelorn. We managed to play weekly for the course of year and change. Even then we were imperfect, and that game hit 46 sessions before things petered out. When I ran Gradient Descent we started off strong, the first 7 sessions happened weekly, but the following 5 happened over the next 4 months! I have many stalled out campaigns under my belt. One day I’ll post about running Silent Titan, or Deep Carbon Observatory. Those games were fun, and we played for weeks … until we didn’t. There is nothing wrong trying and failing to get a game going. I appreciate when people speak plainly about their failures, along with their successes.

I always laugh when people talk about whether games support high level play, that this or that mechanic is broken past this or that level. Who are these people that play games that go long enough any of that matters? I can probably count on one hand how many characters I’ve played that have made it past level 3.

It can be challenging to keep a steady schedule, but I really do believe that the ability to do so is what leads to these campaigns that last for years and years. The game becomes a part of your life, you schedule around it the same way you might schedule around a soccer league. To quote myself:

Games stall out because people can’t get their schedules to match. Picking a schedule and sticking to it is really the only “mechanic” you need for long term play. This is The Fundamental Theorem of Gaming.

Maybe one day I’ll get there.

Masters of Carcosa is the longest campaign I have run. My friends and I played 23 sessions, starting at the end of 2014, ending near the start of 2016. The game began after Brendan took a break from running Pahvelorn, likely to focus on his PhD. I hadn’t run a game since I was a kid! Playing in Brendan’s Pahvelorn campaign was hugely inspirational, and has informed how I have run games since. With Pahvelorn we were exploring a megadungeon, with the occasional trips out to explore the larger world. I wanted to run a hex crawl, but wasn’t completely sure how to start. In 2014 it didn’t feel like there nearly as many resources available compared to talking about dungeon delving.

My plan was to run a game set in the world of [Carcosa][], a gonzo setting by Geoffrey McKinney, originally published as a small zine, in the style of old Judge’s Guild hex crawls. I was running from the fancier version put out by LotFP, which featured Rich Longmore’s incredible art. We learn about the setting via hex descriptions like the following:

• Village of 240 Yellow Men ruled by “the Fullness of Benedictions,” a chaotic 10th-level Fighter.
• 2 B’yakhee.
• On a natural stone outcrop is a 2 high statue of Hastur, made of an indestructible dull black stone. In front of it is a human skeleton. If anyone touches the statue, he will be cursed to carry the 40 pound statue with him always. The only way to lift the curse is to give the statue to a willing recipient, but no one wants the vile thing.

The book was pretty polarizing for lots of reasons, one being how phoned-in some of the hex descriptions are. I loved it all the same. You would be surprised how far “2 B’yakhee” can take you in a session. I enjoyed improvising off the small hard facts presented in the book and my own notes.

At the time I wrote a second review of Carcosa, after having run the campaign for few sessions. It’s interesting to look at the review now, as it focuses almost exclusively on how I went about setting up the campaign we would play. But how do you even run a hex crawl?

Sandbox play is long term play. A hex crawl is about exploring the world, and that’s hard to do in an interesting or meaningful way in a handful of sessions. If there is one lesson to be learned about running a sandbox, it’s that whatever rules & mechanics nonsense you come up with to make your game go, none of it will matter if you don’t actually play. I was inconsistent when it came to scheduling the game, and it was likely the biggest reason we finally stopped playing. Players would regularly miss sessions because they thought we were playing the following week, miss a game because I had to push it out a week at the last minute and they already had plans, etc. People will tell you that this or that game isn’t suited for long term play. “Mothership is only good for one-shots.” Bull shit. Games don’t stall out because the levelling mechanics aren’t interesting enough, or because high level fighters become too dominant, or the wizard knows too many spells. Games stall out because people can’t get their schedules to match. Picking a schedule and sticking to it is really the only “mechanic” you need for long term play. This is the fundamental theorem of gaming.

Related to the above, running an open-table will make it easy to keep a game going when people lead busy lives and can’t commit to regular play. For those unfamiliar, an open-table simply means there are no fixed set of players participating in the game. Session to session you’ll have a different roster of players playing. Masters of Carcosa had 16 players over its 23 sessions. Eric made every single session save 1, and the one he missed was over scheduling confusion, my mistake. Gus, Nick, and Dion were other core players, making most games. If we had kept playing Chris likely would have become another core player. Everyone else played a few games and moved on with their lives, dropping in and out. Brendan would require us to return to a home base at the end of each session, and I had the same rule for my own game. The players always returned to a safe settlement at the end of each session, which made the juggling of players work in the fiction. (Mind you, I think it’s best not to be too fussed about how Dwarf Icefingers suddenly appeared when he wasn’t in the dungeon last session.)

You shouldn’t prepare too much to start. Chgowiz says this best in his classic blog post Just Three Hexes, but this blog post didn’t exist when I started playing. Lucky for me, not prepping enough is how I live my whole life. I drew a mini campaign map focused on a smaller section of Carcosa, where I expected the game to begin before the players ventured off into the wider world. The players never left. They didn’t even explore all the hexes in my mini-map! A small region can provide years of play.

There is lonely fun to be had in prep, and you can often find ways to repurpose work you’ve done that will clearly never find the light of day, but it takes a lot of energy to keep a game going for a long time, so best to spend your time wisely. Prepping too much before you’ve even played a game feels like writing an elaborate backstory for your player character before a campaign begins. Good advice for players remains good advice for game masters: let things evolve over time.

You shouldn’t front load too much. When you finish a session, take copious notes. I would write recaps of each session, so I would remember what took place. Anything important for the future I would add as notes for the given hex. A throw away NPC can suddenly become crucially important. This is a more dynamic and interesting way to run a game—both for yourself and your players. You just need enough hard facts for the choices the players take to be meaningful. You can always build upon these facts as the game moves along.

When I shared the invites for my games on Google+ I would include rumours, things the players were made newly aware of, and reminders of loose threads from previous sessions. I maintained a Google+ post of all the open threads and rumours, so they wouldn’t forget about a weirdo they met in the wilderness, or a dungeon they might want to go back and explore. There was no overarching “plot” for the campaign. Everything that happened was player driven. For that to work you need a world without enough juice that there are different avenues for the players to pursue. In Masters of Carcosa the players were obsessed with destroying the Jale Slavers. There is a parallel universe where the campaign instead focused on exploring the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods.

I would seed information about the world and its machinations wherever I could. NPCs would tell the players about nearby settlements, or factions they encountered in the wilderness. The players would find letters on dead bodies, discussing what was happening in the wider world. In one Sages in town would trade information for gold, or send the players on little quests. I made an effort to try and always reinforce that there was a lot going on completely divorced from the players and their immediate actions.

I have written on this topic in the past, but it’s a mistake to be too coy about what’s going on in the world, what your factions are up to. There is a fine balance here. Some of the fun situations that occurred during the campaign came from my players being unaware of what was happening off camera. They set one of the villains of the game free in the first session. Many sessions later the same villain returned to recapture the base he was imprisoned within. Later still the players would liberate that base, unaware they had set this all in motion until after they had succeeded. A different faction was exploring the dungeon the players had no interest in exploring. They would find the occasional missive or hear a story about the cult looting in their place, but only if they travelled to areas where such news would be more likely to be found. I had another faction messing around in the region, Snake Men who had travelled forward in time to save their people. I was so secretive about their machinations the players never really knew they existed, just brushing up against the aftermath of their actions. If we had played longer, perhaps this would have made for a good reveal. Or perhaps the lack of information would continue to make it too difficult for players to make any meaningful choices about how to engage with them. Sometimes it’s fine for things to be a little gamey. I eventually moved to sharing what was happening off camera in my Carcosa-style recaps that featured hex descriptions and encounter tables.

I enjoyed being as surprised as my players when it came to what would happen during a session. I made extensive use of random tables to make the game go. This was perhaps partly an artifact of how terse Carcosa is, partly due to my own terse notes, and partly just my own preferences for how I like to run games. With wilderness exploration this feels like the most effective way to drive the game without relying on laborious prep. Groups of hexes would share a unique encounter table. The area around the players starting base began with: slavers and escaped slaves, a merchant caravan and their guards, bandits, Spawn of Shub-Nigguraths, and a unique spherical hunter robot that captures people in the wilderness to take back to its base. This table already tells a story about what’s happening in the region.

My secret sauce was expanding on these tables as we played the game. If an encounter with bandits was memorable, and they didn’t kill them all, they would return as a future entry on the encounter table. When the players desecrated a space alien tomb, stealing some armour, I added the Space Alien Strike Force who were trying to track down the culprits to the encounter table. This group ended up becoming an important mini-faction in the game, and close allies of the players. On multiple occasions the players released giant Spawn of Shub-Nigguraths, worshiped as gods, into the wilderness. Of course I added them to the encounter tables. It made the world feel alive when the players would bump into old friends or enemies, keep running up against factions they hated, or have to run away from giant god-monsters.

Players actions should impact their place within the world. If they are dirt bags to the slavers (as they should be) then the slavers will be dirt bags to them. I had a reputation system to track how the players were regarded by the various factions. I would give the players positive or negative reaction rolls modifiers based on their reputation, which was based on their actions in the game. I would stop rolling if it felt like their actions had firmly placed them on a faction’s good or bad side.

Factions should have their own goals, sometimes at odds with the players, sometimes at odds with other factions. They make progress towards their goals unless actively impeded by the PCs. The world should feel like it’s moving independently of the players. I was running things so long ago it didn’t feel like there was an obvious system to steal. Nowadays I would just use the rules from Mausritter. There doesn’t feel like much else to say here, they are so simple and good.

When I started running Masters of Carcosa I didn’t have any real rules in mind for how exploration of the world would actually work. I codified a procedure for adventure a few sessions into our gaming. This was heavily inspired by the work Brendan was doing in this space, what he would write up as the Hazard system.

I decided from the start that in the barren wastes of Carcosa travelling through any hex would be as difficult as travelling through any other. I didn’t want to fuss around with different travel times for different types of hexes. In Carcosa they all felt roughly the same. Brendan had written a post called Solipsistic Hexes that may have been some of the inspiration for this choice. A decade later, Mythic Bastionland takes the same approach. There are interesting choices to be had if your setting has roads, or varied terrain that encourages particular routes through the wilderness, but I think you can get far just having hard barriers the players need to navigate around. In my Carcosa game I had huge valleys, mountains, toxic rivers, etc, to block the player’s way.

The rules for how I ran wilderness exploration were quite short:

There are 4 wilderness actions: move, camp, hunt & forage for food, and explore. Characters may take two actions during the day, and one at night.

• The DM’s map of Carcosa is divided up into 10 mile hexes. There are no short simple trips through the wilderness. The world of Carcosa lacks proper roads, with much of the planet a rocky badland. Moving allows players to travel from hex to the next. (Some hexes, like those covered in mountains or filled with swamps, may require characters use more than one move action to get through.)
• Characters generally rest at night by Camping. Skipping a camp action puts the characters at a -2 for all rolls during the following day.
• Hunting and Foraging for Food can be done to attempt to find food (rations) in the wild.
• Exploring will reveal a random unknown location within the hex. The players may instead attempt to find a specific location they know is somewhere in the hex. If the location is well hidden, doing so requires the character with the highest wisdom score roll under their wisdom.

Re-reading this now, it isn’t that far and away from what Chris would settle on in Mythic Bastionland. It’s a shame he hadn’t written his game at the time, I could have just started from his work. After each action the players would roll an overloaded encounter die to see what complications arise. I settled on encounters on the 1 & 2, a complication on a 3, lost on a 4, and safe on a 5 or 6. These rolls ended up being a big driver of action in the game, because as noted above, each region had their own wilderness encounter tables, and they tied back into the game world.

And that was the game! The players would plan out goals for the session. Wander off into the wilderness. Get lost. Fight bandits. Rescue slaves. This was all driven from this loose process and framework for play. I started with almost nothing, and figured it out as I went along. You shouldn’t let a fear of doing it wrong stop you from playing. It’s honestly pretty hard to play wrong.

And so we come to the end. Did I know this would be the last session of the campaign? Hard to tell, but I posted about it going on hiatus shortly afterwards. This session ended up being a fitting conclusion for the campaign. Gus and Eric were both in attendance. We ended on real cliffhanger. The whole campaign had been building towards this moment: the party decided to attack the Jale Slaves based.

I had shared a dispatch from Space Alien Strike Force after the previous session, a couple weeks before we played, which might have nudged them towards this showdown.

The session ended with a giant mass battle, which I was once again unsure how to play out. I know I was tracking how many rounds it took to win the fight, and that would tie into casualties and other post-fight shenanigans. Maybe I have notes on G+ somewhere. Oh wait.

My map of the slaver’s base is incomplete, which is pretty funny since it was obvious early on that this was the one thread the party was most interested in pursuing. As it stands, my not finishing things worked out alright in this case.

Masters of Carcosa is the longest campaign I have run. 23 sessions, starting at the end of 2014, ending near the start of 2016. Sharing all these old play reports has been a lot of fun. I haven’t thought about this campaign in some time. Revisiting it now, all these years later, has me wanting to play Carcosa once again. It really is the fucking best.

Players:

• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia - Orange Women Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter

Dispatches from the Space Alien Strike Force

• All troop movement occurs via the large “front” door. The aliens suspect there must be at least one other exit, unless the slavers are idiots.
• 12 raptor riding guards always patrol the exterior of the slaver base. They think there are at least 18 raptors, based on how the guards rotate in and out of their shifts. They think they can get better intel with more time.
• 16 Jale Slavers took a group of 28 slaves North East. There are currently 13 slaves that remain chained outside.
• There have spotted one person that they suspect might be the leader. Unlike the rest of the slavers he was shirtless and wearing a large lizard’s head as a helmet.
• There has been too little troop movement for them to guess at troop size. They think there must be at least 60 slavers in the base, but likely more.

Recap:

• The party mills around in Invak for an extra two weeks, prepping for a big battle, thinking hard about what to do next when it comes to the slavers.
• Further news from the Space Alien Strike Force reveals that some slavers have returned with additional slaves (13 Red Men), 17 Jale Men look to have come to join as new recruits, and that’s about it.
• The party decides, “Fuck it, let’s just kill those mofos.”
• They ride out with an army of 120!
• A make shift pontoon bridge is built to cross the river.
• They leave part of their force behind, and approach with the most bad ass looking laser pistol wielding men and women.
• They approach the slaver citadel, and begin making demands of the guards out front.
• That doesn’t go well: laser fire is exchanged.
• Normangina manages to blow a hole in one of their “arrow slits”, exposing part of the base further up the mountain.
• They leave their demands staked to the ground and flee.
• The party makes camp, and waits for a fight that doesn’t happen. The next day they advance with their whole army on the slavers base.
• A slave is sent out from the base to parlay with the party. He informs them they must flee and never return. “the Overqueen of Small Petals” is an evil women, clearly one steeped in the ways of vile sorcery.
• The party isn’t having none of that. They decide there isn’t much point waiting further, and launch their big attack.
• One group of their number head up through the hole Normangina created earlier. The other bust through the front door after a bazooka is fired to make the entry easier.
• The army of Invak and Jahar pour into the base.
• The party come face to face with a group of 6 raptors and their riders.
• A vicious fight where several of their hechmen die, and Normangina is knocked out cold. (Though not before hoping onto the back of a raptor and commanding it to bite someone!)
• Dion’s character (name?) is almost killed, but the injury just makes him angrier. (Hulkamania Save vs. Death Rule!)
• The party is victorious after 4 rounds of combat.
• Orange Julia revives Normangina with a desert lotus potion.

What will happen to our fearless heroes?!

Comments:

• Ramanan S (2016-04-26 04:29): I wanted to write it out before I forgot what happened. Gus you’ve used two bazooka blasts. Everyone else who still has weapons with explicit ammo counts remember to mark off how many shots you have left. We ended in media res. Gus you can attempt to quickly tame the raptors before you end up embroiled in another fight. It took you 4 rounds to end that fight. So that effects what your next encounter will be FYI. 
• Chris G (2016-04-26 04:54): +1 for Hulkamania!
• Ramanan S (2016-04-26 04:55): First time that’s ever happened (natural 20 when making a save vs. death).
• Logan McCormack (2016-04-26 06:06): I just love to read your game reports! :D
• Gus L (2016-04-26 17:24): Oh yeah totally taming the raptors! We ride to victory! Also collecting a solid mob of extra combatants.

Post-Session Post:

The bodies of Jale Slavers lay motionless on the ground, their velociraptor mounts mill about confused. Fighting rages all about. The armies of Invak and Jahar have joined forces to fight the scourge of slavery once and for all. The fighting will be vicious. This day was coming: the Rainbow connection crosses the threshold of the Jale Slaver’s mountain citadel.

To be continued …

The game is on hiatus … for now! The Rainbow Connection fights the slavers for the last time. We will have to wait till next season to find out what happens.

This session was all about trying to make friends. The players had a zany scheme: dress up a slaver in the space alien amour they had stolen from a tomb in order to convince the space aliens it was in fact the slavers that were out there desecrating their holy sites.

They once again returned to the Space Alien outpost, no longer abandoned. They had returned to their experiments, making use of the deranged, spherical, hunter robot that stakes the wastes at night. The Carcosa book has this to say about the robot, which is what I used as the seed for my ideas for the this whole space and how all the parts fit together: “It will seek to abduct stragglers and take them to a small, hidden outpost to be shackled in close proximity to radioactive waste. Each hour spent thus requires a successful saving throw to avoid mutation.”

This is the session Asha Rey dies! I remember the session, but don’t recall if this was a surprise round followed by an instant kill due to the dice. Harsh if so. In my head this game was a real meat grinder, but there weren’t actually that many player deaths over the course of the campaign.

Wish I could remember the context for, “Chris P gets 15XP for just being an all around great guy.” He really was, though.

Players:

• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia - Orange Women Fighter
• Chris P.: Bone Crone - Bone Women Sorcerer
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party puts the space alien armour on one of the Jale Slaver bodies they killed and jam the body in a barrel with some salt and rocks to try and stop the body from decomposing too much.
• They travel south towards the space alien outpost, no looking much less abandoned.
• A group of space aliens—those the party “freed”—have gone to work repairing the outpost and continuing their experimentation.
• The spherical hunter robot exists to bring specimens to the wastes: they will consider turning it off, but promised to stop sending it West towards Jahar and Invak.
• The Aliens are far stranger than the ones you have met thus far. They seem cold and emotionless.
• The party gives them the heads up that people on Carcosa are fucked up, and then head on their way after learning the space alien strike force headed south east (towards their leaders tomb)
• As they get closer they see the same giant translucent T-Rex they saw last time they explored the tomb. It doesn’t see them and wanders South.
• The space aliens are nowhere to be seen, but look to have headed south, so they head that was as well, taking care to avoid the dinosaur.
• They come upon the poisonous swamps, which stretch out for miles. The aliens are long gone, so they decide to head back and wait for them to return to the tomb.
• On the way back they spot 4 savage Mi-Go who dive out of the sky.
• Asha Rey is killed instantly — RIP
• The fight quickly turns, as the party manage to kill the Mi-Go one after another.
• They camp near the alien tomb, waiting for the space aliens.
• The aliens come upon them in the middle of the night.
• They show the aliens the armour on the slavers body.
• The space aliens are disgusted with what was done and will join their fight against the slavers.
• Led inside to sleep, but party elects to sleep outside
• No overnight drama, they awake safe and sound.
• The Space Alien Strike Force head North, planning to scope out the slavers.

Treasure:

• The good will of the Space Alien Strike Force
• Chris P gets 15XP for just being an all around great guy.

Comments

• Ramanan S (2016-03-16 04:09): Let me know if i’ve missed anything. I’ll make an event thread for the next session. We can do the stuff that happens between sessions there.
• Dion Williams (2016-03-16 08:57): I was tempted to draw a picture of Asha-Ray exploding with the Mi-Go coming though “Chest Burster Xenomorph” style.
• Ramanan S (2016-03-17 05:27): Dion Williams do it!

More slaver killing antics, as the party heads north to investigate rumours of slaver activity. The party had liberated the Orange Man citadel North of their home base of Invak many sessions ago, but hadn’t returned in some time. This was another fairly vanilla session, but was a good setup for the next one, as they had plans for the body of one of the dead slavers.

Though the party was still completely uninterested in exploring the Putrescent Pits of the Ameboid God, I wanted to make it clear that there was another faction exploring the space in their stead. A note they find amongst the dead indicates someone out there was in search of as many slaves as they could get a hold of to explore “the pits”.

My notes for the first floor of the dungeon describe two factions. Lawful Yellow Man cultists who are trying to prevent access to the pits, and Chaotic Purple Man cultists that worship the Ameboid God and want to venture down. There were two entrances down to a level I never bothered mapping (smart!), once guarded by the Lawful cultists, the other a secret entrance discovered by the Purple Men. These Purple Men cultists were operating in the wilderness, though North of the players, so they never really encountered them.

My notes of the dungeon from that time. Maybe I’ll revisit this one day:

There are two levels of caverns above the actual Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid God. These natural caverns were built by the Snakemen thousands of years ago to cover the actual pit that leads to the Amoeboid God.

• Who is here? Ameboid God Cultists. (Two factions: one inside the pit proper, the other trying to find their way down.) Mushroom Men. Space Aliens. Irrational Space Aliens. Primordial Ones. Shohgoths
• The pit travels from level 3 all the was to the lowest levels of the dungeon, terminating at the giant Ameboid God. Several entrances to other levels via the pit.
• God is several (hundred?) feet below the lowest level
• Rival cults distributed between levels 3,4,5
• Shogoths on lower levels
• Aliens on 5,6,7 fighting irrational aliens
• Fungus Men distributed throughout?
• Primordial ones 8, 9 battle shogotths

Yeah, that could have been a fun time too.

Players:

• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia - Orange Women Fighter
• Chris P.: Bone Crone - Bone Women Sorcerer
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party leaves Invak and heads north to Investigate rumours about more slaver activity.
• They are accompanied by 20 Bone Men from Invak, who will reinforce the citadel to the North.
• At the ford where the party normally crosses the river they spot two fish like dinosaurs.
• After some investigation it looks like they have just fed, and ignore the party
• The citadel welcomes the party. They inform them of two settlements near by that are friendly to slavers: a citadel of Blue Men to the North, and a Village of Green Men to the North East (South of the Putrescent Pits of the Ameboid God)
• The party decides to head to the Green Men village, along with two soldiers from the citadel.
• Along the way they come upon 13 Bone Men, and 14 slaves manacled together.
• The party skirts around and rolls down some rocks onto the slavers below, killing one person and somewhat blocking the path forward.
• A big fight breaks out!
• The Bone Crone is wounded, but manages to survive a blast from a  laser gun.
• The party manages to fall back and pick off the slavers in smaller groups, finally killing them all.
• The party leads the captured slaves back to the citadel, where they sleep for the night.
• They head to Invak in the morning.
• They dig up the old space alien armour, which they plan to put on a dead slaver and present to the space aliens.

Treasure:

• 13 dead slavers can be claimed for the slaver bounty (1300 GP)
• 14 slaves freed (1400 GP)
• 2 Laser Rifles (“long” range, d10 ammo die, 2dCarcosa damage)
• 13 Obsidian Swords
• 13 Black / Brown “Leather” armour
• 14 manacles with chain and two sets of keys
• 200’ of strong rope
• 20 bone spikes
• A letter requests “as many slaves as are currently available”. A price of 50GP per slave is mentioned, some sort of bulk rate. “Must be reasonably able bodied, as they are to be sent down to explore the [putrescent] pits [of the ameboid god].”

Comments:

• Eric Boyd (2016-03-01 17:37): And two laser guns, d10 shot die, if I recall correctly. 
• Ramanan S (2016-03-01 17:38): Ah yes you are right!
• Bryan Mullins (2016-03-01 19:44): Nice one you all!
• Chris P. (2016-03-02 04:05): Gus L The tidbit about us finding a Jale slaver corpse and preparing to deliver it next session with the armor is probably relevant to you.
• Chris P. (2016-03-02 04:09): Also of note, that letter requesting the slaves, and buying at bulk rate, some jerk is REALLY interested in exploring the pits of the amoeboid god. We should look into this. Whomever is getting the Costco discount from the Jale slavers is not somebody I think we want breathing.
• Gus L (2016-03-02 06:46): Chris P. Indeed it is - with a day more notice  I will certainly be there - I don’t mind giving up the armor for friendship and protection from the alien death squad.

The session was another zany one, with a Godzilla-esque monster destroying a town and escaping into the wilderness. Of course the monster Yog would end up on the wilderness encounter table.

Session 20

• Alex: Bug Juice - Green Man Fighter
• Chris P.: Bone Crone - Bone Women Sorcerer
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir - Red Man Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia - Orange Women Fighter
• Dion joined late, and caught the end of the mayhem.)

Recap:

• The party heads west towards Torok, to investigate it’s relationship with the Slavers.
• The trip West is uneventful.
• They arrive in the evening, and decide The Bone Crone will play Queen Zelda, the Bone Men henchmen her guards, the rest of the party her slaves. 
• The towns people are willing to buy her story, and put up their illustrious host in what amounts to a fancy hovel.
• The party visits a nearby bar and proceeds to buy boozes for the towns people. 
• They learn about the strange creature Yog that lives in the centre of town, that it is placated by a steady diet of slaves and the sweet singing of maidens of the village, and that the town buys slaves from the Jale Slavers.
• That’s enough for the party to decide it’s time to burn this mother down!
• They pay some patrons to get the word out to the militia there are free booze going around at the bar.
• They investigate Yog and come up with a plan: they will torch the bar and hopefully a good chunk of the towns militia, kidnap the singing maiden, and book it.
• This more or less works out: they are stopped by 6 towns people, but 2 of that group are convinced this whole Yog thing is really dumb, the remainder are vaporized, with one survivor running off into the night.
• The party hops the wall and watches Yog destroy the town in the moonlight.
• They head back to Invak with two wandering monster encounters worth of complications!

Comments:

• Chris P. (2016-01-27 02:57): No XP, right? (Since we didn’t actually get any gold)
• Ramanan S (2016-01-27 03:19): Yeah … I need to see what people do for alternate / additional means of gaining XP. I feel like treasure hunting hasn’t really been a focus of the game for a while. Though the initial slaver animosity may have been due to the bounty on their heads.
• Gus L (2016-01-27 03:45): I would say Ramanan S​ that while treasure might not be the game’s focus neither is leveling. The rules are clear, the only thing I’d say is that when we finally sack these town we should get gp value for supplies and useful properties seized.
• Chris G (2016-01-27 05:26): How about giving an XP award for discovering a new settlement? Your game has a fair amount of exploring/getting lost.
• Chris P. (2016-01-27 20:03): Gus L  If the reward for the game has reflected something that is no longer the focus of the game, then the reward should either be removed or changed. If the intent is to stay first level/low power forever, then we should remove all pretense otherwise and eliminate the XP mechanic entirely.

At this point I was so far behind on writing my Carcosa recaps that I stopped! I should try and do it retroactively from my notes now.

Players:

• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Stephen M  - Chongo
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Chris P.: Bone Crone - Bone Women Sorcerer

Recap:

• In town the Bone Crone examines the dead Bone Men bodies, brought back from the snake men ruins.
• The party debates for some time on what their next course of action should be, before deciding to leave the snake me ruins alone to explore the slaver friendly towns to the East.
• The journey is uneventful: the party makes it to Joi unmolested
• They decide to set up a fake camp to lure people out of the town, who they hope to capture.
• Sure enough, a group of 10 Orange Men and Women make their way towards the campsite.
• The party wait for them to get close, than attack.
• Their apparent leader is knocked out in the course of battle, their second in command vaporized. Both leaders are women.
• The remaining men are captured, and marched back to Invak.

Notes:

• The captured orange men reveal the following: in Joi men are forced to work as slaves in underground mines while the women live in luxury in the beautiful city above.

Comments

• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 03:04): Let me know if I am missing stuff please: I waited too long to write this up.
• Eric Boyd (2015-12-29 03:16): What did the Bone Crone determine again?
• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 03:20): Ah yes, the dead bodies have decomposed to a point beyond what one would expect. They look and smell like they have been dead for weeks, despite being newly dead when they were brought to town. (When you guys were fighting them they appeared some what gaunt, but otherwise seemingly normal looking.)
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 03:22): You forgot me. I sad now.
• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 03:23): Ah yes: you beat me to my own game.
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 03:23): Also, Ramanan S they had the sensation of some kind of bad magic (or the equivalent of some other unknown force) that I had no familiarity with at all.
• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 03:24): Yes that’s right: the Bone Crone feels the mark of sorcery over all of this, but is aware of no such ritual.
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 03:36): We also found no biological markers inside of the bones or anything, at least not that we could identify. If there was any sort of wound reflecting what turned them into the monsters, it was lost among the many wounds we inflicted upon killing them.
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 03:37): Also no more radioactive than anything else.
• Eric Boyd (2015-12-29 03:40): Earworms or similar parasites would be really obvious with Bone Men, one presumes.
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 03:45): Hmmm, BY JOVE,  Eric Boyd  you may have it! MUSIC! Ramanan S  were they ever humming or moving unusually, like they were rocking back and forth or something?
• Beloch Shrike (2015-12-29 03:53): There was a session tonight? I never got an invite.
• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 03:53): No this was from last week. I just never wrote up the recap. I’m in holiday mode.
• Eric Boyd (2015-12-29 03:56): Chris P. I was thinking literally, not metaphorically: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ceti_eel But you might have something there…
• Chris P. (2015-12-29 04:29): Eric Boyd  yup, I knew, I just will use any excuse I can get for a pun. (Bonus points if it produces a good lead.)
• Ramanan S (2015-12-29 06:47): Music would be cute, but no they were basically totally stationary when encountered.

A circle of Bone Men stand watch around ancient Snake Men ruins. They exist in a state of undeath, and will not attack the party, but simply scream when they spot someone.

The Bone Men the players encounter were a magical trap guarding the now reoccupied Snake Men ruins. They surround the ruins and warn the Snake Men when people approach. The Bone Men were those taken from the Castle of Decline. If the campaign ran longer I think the players would have done more with this thread, but as it stands these ruins would remain unexplored.

The lack of treasure in most of this game was a running joke the entire time we played. I wouldn’t change a thing.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Stephen M  - Chongo

Recap:

• The 3 injured Blue Men from last session were in fact bandits!
• Their leader Aboye killed the person who runs the towns infirmary, and ran off into the town to try and flee with some supplies and a new weapon.
• The party aides in the capture of the bandits, killing the leader.
• The town guards execute the other two bandits
• You fear the incident may play into the towns already existing rampant xenophobia.
• The next day the party decides to head to Invak, but travelling towards the Snake Men ruins first, to investigate the strange bone man sightings.
• On the way there, they bump into the Space Alien Strike Force, which has been laying low recently.
• It turns out they had been exploring to the East, in the towns the party rarely frequents.
• Many towns to the East are friendly with the slavers—someone has to be buying the slaves, after all
• They think the party are foolish to be heading towards the Snake Men ruins—they seem to be superstitious when it comes to the Snake Men
• The party continues on, coming upon a solitary bone man standing alone.
• As they try and move past him they see that there are other such bone men in the distance.
• Chongo decides to investigate what’s up with these Bone Men by cutting the first one they saw down.
• As he charges the man spins his head around and starts screaming—perhaps they have some sort of supernatural alertness
• Chongo kills the bone man, no problem, though even in death the creature seems ‘off’
• The party hide to see if anyone comes to investigate the murder, and sure enough a group of bone men sprint out to the scene, and then proceed to sprint off in search of the perpetrators.
• The party attack!
• In the melee Chongo is killed, but his death is avenged by Normagina!
• The Bone men are all butchered in the end, their bodies piled on pack lizards as the party races off to Invak to investigate who or what they may be!

Treasure:

• None! Classic Masters of Carcosa.

Monsters Killed:

• 6 (Mysterious) Bone Men
• 1 Blue Man Bandit

Post Session Notes:

• Some of the Bone Men in Invak, originally from The Castle of Decline, recognize the bodies as their former friends and allies!
• The two towns the Space Aliens mention to you in their travels to the East are Joi (an Orange Men village) and Torok (a Bone Men village)

Comments:

• Eric Boyd (2015-12-16 01:49): Seems to me it would be easy to bait those Bone Men into a tripwire/pit trap/etc.
• Chris P. (2015-12-16 02:57): So how come all of you haven’t all been strung up for murder yet?
• Ramanan S (2015-12-16 03:46): They have done enough good stuff for the town people believe their story. (And it would match what the merchants shared the previous previous week.)

Eric and Gus had it in their minds to start building a keep, recruiting an army, and just moving on to a sort of domain type of play as they plan to go to war with the Jale Slavers. They had discovered their hide out in an earlier session. I hadn’t really thought through what that would look like. I made notes to myself to re-read the last OD&D book the Underworld & Wilderness Adventures to see what it had to say on the topic. Not bloody much, but it does tell you how much gold it takes to build a keep.

This session the party returns to the hidden citadel they had spent a few sessions trying and failing to enter, constantly battling Mi-Go in the process. Here they finally came face to face with another faction I had active in the region: the Protector of Truths and his war with the Mi-Go on the other side of Carcosa. This is discussed in my Carcosa-style recap of the session. I hadn’t fleshed out much about what this Mi-Go war was even about, which was good because the players didn’t want to figure it out either.

We ended the session with a roll of 1 on the settlement hazard die. Next session the players would learn what transpired!

Players:

• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Chris P: Bone Crone, Bone Women Sorcerer
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Daniel Dean: ????

Recap:

• The party starts work on a small keep in Invak, recruiting some labourers to gather and repurpose materials.
• The speak with the Speaker of all Graces, who agrees to let them recruit in town to form a militia. He fears an assault on slavers is too risky, but will give the idea more thought.
• Nick’s Blue Man henchmen (name?) & Mr. Whyte recruiting and training a militia in town.
• Hearing rumours about Mi-Go bothering the merchants the party head South to Jahar.
• Encounter 3 injured Blue Men in the wilderness.
• They heal them and bring them back to Jahar, who are really not too happy to be hosting random Blue Men within their walls.
• They return to the citadel, and climb through a large pane window to enter the Castle.
• They enter a large dorm style room, which they start to search when 6 Yellow Men walk in.
• Another Yellow Man, who appears to be a commander of some sort, and a Mi-Go join the fray.
• There is some talking, and then much fighting.
• The Mi-Go is killed. The leader flees down some stairs!
• 6 more Yellow Men join the fight.
• More murder, but then a call to stop fighting.
• The party meets the Protector of Truths, the person in charge of this Castle.
• They are fighting a war against the Mi-Go on the other side of Carcosa.
• They travel to the castle via a strange crystal device.
• They have been lobotomizing the Mi-Go and setting them free inside a cavern that connects to this castle, because of their leaders beliefs about killing.
• They are working with a handful of Mi-Go that are also fighting against this particular group of Mi-Go, for reasons unknown.
• He gives the party 1000GP gem as a ‘sorry for all the Mi-Go’ gift.

Treasure:

• 1 Black Gem (1000GP)

Monsters Killed:

• 5 Yellow Men
• 1 Migo

Note:

• Wandering monster check at the end of the session means future drama for the party! (I know what it’ll be.)

They meet my Carcosa take on Trap-Jaw. I had written up a Carcosa style He-Man encounters, though I didn’t end up using too many in my game: 16 Encounters on Carcosa & [16 More Encounters on Carcosa][h2]. Master’s of the Universe was meant to be core to the whole game, and I tried to inject littles bits and pieces of that world when I could. I wrote these encounters after reading Richard’s [How Brightly Coloured Should Carcosa Be][color]. This post about Carcosa and Masters of the Universe was one of the biggest inspirations for my game. It’s what got me thinking about Carcosa in a completely different way.

They also discovered that the Castle of Decline was empty. The Bone Men from that town had said they would join them in Invak many sessions ago, but never made it. The party would learn what happened to them for a few more sessions. (Half travelled south to Snake-Men ruins, others were captured by Slavers on route to Invak.)

Finally the players find the Orange Citadel’s former “God”, the Frog Spawn Llothali. They killed the creature so hard I would end up having lots of discussions with them about whether the laser guns in the game were too over powered. Probably, but we never ended up changing any of the rules.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Chris P: Bone Crone, Bone Women Sorcerer
• Terry: ???

Recap:

• Quiet in Invak, the party head south towards Jahar to inquire about raptor trainers and their staff. 
• On the way they encounter 11 Blue Men, one shouting about wanting their metal.
• They chase them off once they produce their armaments.
• In Jahar they learn their staff has the power to summon the evil old one Molkrom: the sage doesn’t know how exactly, but thinks vile sorcerers may.
• Merchants are readying themselves for a trip South to Cron.
• Head back to Invak to go after some slavers!
• No one will join them! Or will they?
• The Lawgiver of Winds joins the party after a rousing speech about slavery.
• Encounter a group of 12 slavers on the road while looking for the Slaver encampment!
• A battle breaks out, of course. The Slavers are aware of the Rainbow Connection and aren’t fans.
• Midway through the fight an old crone shows up, ready for battle! It’s Chris P. 
• This battle is bloodier than most: almost no misses till the every end!
• A jerk ass slaver wounds Renoir, and makes his escape with 3 of his friends.
• Capture 7 slaver heads and the vaporized remains of another
• They find the slaver encampment. As they were told, it is a base built into a hillside. Slaves are chained up outside, and raptor mounted guards are outside.
• The party decides now isn’t the time to attack.
• They make their way over to the castle of decline, stopping along the way at the former Orange Men citadel. 
• Continuing to the Castle of Decline, they come to learn it has been abandoned. They aren’t sure where the Bone Men may have went, as Invak seems like the obvious choice.
• Meet 4 Red Men on the road back to the Former Orange Men citadel, who they escort with them.
• Head back to Invak without incident
• Oh, the party also killed the Llothali without breaking a sweat. What?

Treasure:

• 800 GP in bounty for the dead slavers
• 1000 GP for killing the Frog God Llothali
• 8 Obsidian Swords
• 1 Laser Pistol (2dCarcosa, shorter range)
• 1 Laser Rifle (2dCarcosa, long range)
• 4 Waterskins
• 2 Lantern
• 8 flasks of an oil like substance
• 7 Week Iron Rations
• 16 Manacles
• 20’ Chain
• 50’ Rope
• 4 Small Sacks

The players had their home base in Invak, and had a strong relationship with the merchant town to the south, Jahar. At this point in the campaign they wanted to try and unify the region around the common aim of dealing with the slavers. There was a lot of travel between the two towns session, as they tried to negotiate an agreement. This was the session the Space Alien Strike Force finally made an appearance. They had been hinted at over the previous session, and were an entry on my random encounter table for some time. They were looking for whomever desecrated their tomb and stole the armour of their hero. Bad luck for the players: Gus’s character was wondering around in that armour. Had been since they found it. Hilarity ensues.

The players also reconnected with the women who escorted them to Invak at the start of the campaign, Queen of Autumn. Another random encounter roll? I don’t remember anymore.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Chris P: Bone Crone, Bone Women Sorcerer
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Evan: The Spangled Inquiry, Bone Man Sorcerer
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party heads South from Invak towards Jahar to learn more about the Staff of Avion and try and set up an alliance.
• The Speaker of all Graces seems disinterested in this idea, but doesn’t say no outright.
• Along the way they stumble upon the the Space Alien Strike Force: they are caught in a moment of rest.
• Gus hides behind a rock because he is wearing the amour they are looking for.
• The aliens have him sighted, so he ends up using his Solid Snake skills to sneak away. Meanwhile the rest of his team are friendly, and show the aliens they don’t have the armour. (And in fact saved their friends.)
• When they investigate where Gus was, they see no one was there.
• The party continues South, while Normangina takes a wide route to avoid the Aliens.
• Along the way she stumbles upon a dead body off in the distance, which she decides to avoid as well.
• Travelling further still she see a large Insectoid Spawn.
• She manages to distract it with her smell squid, and sprints further away.
• Finally she makes it back to the party.
• They travel back to the dead body, to see if it has any loot.
• They quickly learn there are several dead bodies, arranged in a circle head to toe with their arms reaching out to the centre. (So it looks like a spoke of a wheel.)
• They take one of the bodies, a Red Man.
• Evan’s character is loitering near by, he joins the group—strange. No one mentions it.
• In Jahar the party run errands.
• They convince the guard guild to recharge their weapons.
• Gus’ Bazooka and Evan’s teleportation Ray are fully charged.
• Drink with guards ends with crazy mayhem. The guards are even more friendly with the party now.
• Chris P’ character steals small change from all the revellers, earning 60 GP
• The next day the guards get the party an audience with their leader.
• “The One” gives the players a letter saying he will support a military alliance with Invak
• the party travels North, actively searching for trouble, but end up finding the Blue Menhirs
• They arrive in Invak and give the Speaker of All Graces the letter of support.
• Travel East looking for Slavers.
• Find Queen of Autumn and the group that had went searching for her led by The Illustrious Prince of the Bone
• They had actually just rescued her from a Spawn, which they fled.
• The party is looking for trouble, however, so they head back in search of the Spawn they were fighting
• Kill that thing so hard. I need laser proof spawn.

Other notes:

• Gus puts out a bounty for raptors! And Eric will match that! And a hiring bounty as well!
• Eric looking for binoculars, Geiger counter, which will be set aside in Jahar if the merchants find one.
• Staff of Avion is left with the Sage. Owed 200GP if he learns anything about it.

Treasure:

• 1000 GP in Spawn Bounty (200 GP for them, 800 GP split between the party) so that’s 133 XP each

Comments:

• Ramanan S (2015-10-13 04:49): The Queen of Autumn tells viewers to admit their mistakes rather than lying to cover them up.

  Wait, you guys didn’t learn that lesson.

• Gus L (2015-10-13 04:51): Maybe - more lies and a few dead bodies will bury a mistake pretty deep?

As you’ll see in the comments, I had been reading Blood Meridian, and the book and its mood started seeping into the game. I wrote about this a few years ago: A Carcosan Western. The game was meant to be light-hearted Masters of the Universe themed game, and while there was a fair bit of that, the game was probably more cowboys than He-Man. (That said, the Staff of Avion the players find this session is from Masters of the Universe.) The players were wandering the wastelands, having shootouts with bandits.

The dead man they find on the road was meant to be a clue something was amiss at the castle, but maybe not enough of a clue. The Snake Men ruins were another important site in the game the players would ignore. Kheret ils Nu’s Reliquary, which I wrote for the Trophy Gold megadungeon, borrows ideas from this campaign and these ruins my players never explored. The Snake Men would end up freed by the Dominant Reflection. They would restart their war with the Old Ones, so nominally aligned with the players, except to the Snake Men the players were just reagents for spells.

My rules for getting lost seemed to only come up when the party would leave their home base. They were constantly getting lost right next to their home. A little silly, but I kept with it because I thought it was funny.

[You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.][s14]

Players:

• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Women Fighter

News and Rumours:

• Trade has resumed between Jahar and Invak. The merchants are happy to hear you dealt with the cultists.
• The Illustrious Prince of the Bone, former head of the Bone Man village in the outpost, has not been heard from since heading South in search of The Queen of Autumn.
• Traders speak of wild aggressive Migo wandering in packs to the South, harassing their caravans.
• The Black Man rescued from the Cultists is planning on leaving for the Castle he is from to the West. (And wouldn’t mind company for the trip.)
• No word from the Citadel of Decline to the West in weeks.
• Aggressive group of Space Aliens continue to stop and search travellers to the South.
• Plus all the open threads from the open thread thread.

Recap:

• The party rests in Invak, having emptied out the (no longer abandoned) space alien outpost.
• Black Man “the Speaker of Benedictions” needs help getting home.
• Was hunting when captured by slavers.
• The party agrees to take him back to his home, being promised a modest reward for their efforts (and good karma, of course)
• On the way West they get a little bit lost—par for the course when leaving Invak, apparently.
• They wait till the evening to re-orient themselves using the stars.
• While searching for a place to camp, they find some ruins of the ancient Snake-Men. The place fills them with foreboding. The leave it alone.
• In the morning they head Northward. On the way they encounter a long line of Giant ants heading South West.
• They leave the ants alone and continue North.
• Further along they find a dead body, a Black Man whose head has been blown clear off (from laser a gun), gear scattered everywhere.
• They continue to approach the castle.
• The “the Speaker of Benedictions” goes ahead to get the gates opened.
• He is promptly shot at by two men on the parapets of the Castle.
• Attempts at parlay are for naught, so the Bazooka comes out.
• The doors to the castle are blown open.
• 4 riders on velociraptors ride out, two armed with pistols, two with clubs.
• Are long fight breaks out, but eventually the party succeed in driving away the remaining Purple Men who had taken over the castle. (6 flee into the wilderness)
• The party capture two of the raptors during the fight and by searching the wilderness for one that ran away.
• The party create a pyre and burn the dead Black Men that litter the castle.
• They, along with the “the Speaker of Benedictions”, take all the valuables and head back to Invak.

Treasure:

• 8 Laser Pistols (but “the Speaker of Benedictions” claims two as side arms)
• 9000 GP = 2250 GP each (since “the Speaker of Benedictions” claims a share of the gold)
• “Staff of Avion”
• Two raptors (4HD, AC 12, MV 160’), Feathered Orange hide. Immune to poison.

Comments:

• Ramanan S (2015-09-15 04:31): Feel like I remember more when I force myself to write them down right away. I should sleep for real now, though.

• Chris G (2015-09-15 05:33): Dang! I would have shat a brick when dudes on velociraptors came out of the gate.

• Dion Williams (2015-09-15 07:30): Sounds like a great session. Wish I could be making these.

• Ramanan S (2015-09-15 12:24): Me too. One day Dion!

• Ramanan S (2015-09-15 13:33): This session feels heavily informed by my reading cowboy books right now. (Though now when I look back at all the seasons they start to feel like Westerns.) You guys have good success killing over confident cultists and bandits.

• Chris G (2015-09-18 05:25): I remember you mentioning Blood Meridian. What other cowboy books are you reading? I’m on a major Western kick right now.

• Ramanan S (2015-09-18 11:22): Chris Geisel I said books I really meant that one, which should count for several. Hah.

• Chris G (2015-09-18 23:26): lol, too true. I got excited for a cowboy book recommendation.

• Ramanan S (2015-09-19 12:25): Gus can recommend several! There were some Elroy books he had mentioned a little while ago I have been meaning to check out. If you haven’t seen Unforgiven you should go do that now, though. There is a Japanese remake with Ken Wanatabe which is also cool.

• Gus L (2015-09-19 16:26): Chris Geisel The cowboy books I’d recommend are actually very limited:

  Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood” (1986) is just a great book. It’s the inspiration for the series of the same name, but very different.

  Cormac McCarthy “Blood Meridian” is amazing - is it a Western?  Mostly. In form certainly, but it’s very surreal at times, and very strange.

  As to Elroy, that’s more historically researched hard-boiled pulp detective stuff.  The darkest there is.  Very good - especially the LA ones about greed corruption and lurid crime. Elmore Leonard wrote a mess of Westerns and I know I’ve read a couple, but they’re pretty standard fare, well written and amusing though in his jaunty style.

• Ramanan S (2015-09-19 17:08): I’d actually say Blood Meridan is a post-apocalypse novel. I’m sure someone has written an essay about that.

• Chris G (2015-09-20 03:03): Gus L I’ve read Blood Meridian. I’ll check out Deadwood, thanks. There’s a collection of Elroy’s Western stories at a local book store here, do you think it’s worth checking out.

• Gus L (2015-09-20 03:17): Chris Geisel I haven’t read a lot of his Westerns, I like the guy’s writing and he’s pretty much at the core of that genre.

• Ramanan S (2015-10-07 12:32): I  think i’m going to start using my alternate time line re-stocking tables as a way to do rumours going forward. Sort of like meta-rumours, I guess.

• Eric Boyd (2015-10-12 03:25): Gus L Beloch Shrike How are we splitting up the haul, here? Two people get velociraptors and a low-charge pistol each, someone else gets the Staff of Avion and four laser pistols? Orange Julia would prefer a dinosaur if we go with that split.

• Gus L (2015-10-12 16:00): Well I figure dinos would be based on the mechanics. Normigina has Animal Handling 3 - what’s needed to ride the raptor?

• Ramanan S (2015-10-12 19:39): The raptors you have are domesticated enough you can hop on them and ride around. None of you would likely have practice riding them around for a fight, though. Maybe Normangina would be a bit better here? So you would need to practice that. They will likely run away if left unattended. They need to eat 3x the rations you guys do, but will happily eat the lizard meat available in Invak. Gus can try and train them to get used to your troupe so they know to stick around. Or to try and fight on command. Etc. Would probably take more time than a week?

• Ramanan S (2015-10-12 19:41): The Staff of Avion is 6’ long and inscribed with runes, clearly of snake men origin to any sorcerers in the group.

This session the players explored the rest of the Space Alien outpost. When the returned I had re-stocked the space differently, because it had been captured. The rooms that they had not explored previously were sealed, so that area was unchanged.

This session feels like some stereotype of an OSR game. The party wakes up all the Space Aliens that manned the outpost, who were in cryropods. Nick decided the best course of action was to knock one out while he was still disoriented, and run away with him. Maybe they were unsure what the deal would be with these particular aliens, and wanted to chat with one of them alone? This Space Alien ended up living in Invak, convinced he had been saved by the party and that all his friends were dead.

The rest of the session is typical Carcosa hijinks. They stumble up on the Frog-God Llothali that they had let loose in the wilderness when they freed the Orange Man citadel.

Spotty attendance after the last game because I moved the session a week, and didn’t create a new event. Once again, my biggest advice for running a long running campaign is playing on a consistent schedule. People will often say this game or that game have the mechanics required for long term play. Fuck that, the only mechanics you need are a calendar and actually showing up.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Dael Nyxon: Bargo, the Dolm Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party begins in the newly liberated space alien outpost. Before it becomes truly abandoned, they decide to investigate the remainder of the complex.
• They recruit a couple Bone Men to act as henchmen, who are a bit wary of exploring this portion of the complex.
• Prying open the locked door that leads north from the basement stairs, they find a small corridor, with 3 more doors.
• To the East is a room full of pods.
• Examining the pods they realize they each house an alien in some sort of stasis.
• Renoir attempts to shatter the glass door on top of a pod. His sledgehammer bounces right off.
• The party leaves the room, heading to the West most room. Inside they find a room full of strange plant life.
• The floors are littered with some dead plants and fruit, but not enough considering no one has been in here for years.
• While picking fruit the party sees that various autonomous robotic arms, etc, look to be taking care of the plants.
• The party moves to the centre room, the last remaining unexplored room.
• There is a large cylinder in the centre of the room that extends down into the ground. It pulses with red light. It’s cordoned off by a circular railing. The room is full of computers, and everything looks to be in working order.
• Orange Julia pushes a big red button!
• Slowly the pulsing of the cylinder comes to a halt. The lights in the complex turn off, and the sound of doors opening can be heard throughout the complex.
• In the dark, the PCs here another sound, the sound of the pods full of aliens opening.
• The party waits a beat to see what happens. They hear the sound of an alien retching. 
• Realizing the aliens might be disoriented from being in stasis for so long, Renoir decides to cold-cock one and kidnap him.
• Alien on his shoulder, the party book it out of the complex. Everyone else is milling around outside, confused by the loss of power.
• Seeing the party running away, they join in.
• Once a reasonable distance away, the two groups of captives head off: the Orange Men to their town to the East, Joi; the Brown Men to the merchant town Jahar.
• About half way to Invak the party spot what looks to be a giant frog off in the distance. That’s strange. Could it be the Frog-God Llothali, worshipped by those crazy Orange Men to the North. Yes, it probably is. How many giant-ass toads could there be?
• The party decide to take a longer detour to reach Invak.
• On the way they startle a group of 4 slavers.
• Bargo charges in and completely brains one.
• The rest flee post-haste.
• The party gives chase, but without more range weapons pursuit seems fruitless. (I should look up the LotFP chase rules, they might have been a better option for that part of the game.)
• The party regroup and head to Invak, where they are greeted as heroes.
• The Swift and Silent Beginning thanks the players for ridding the world of more cultists, and for helping fight the slavers. (You have more renown in the town.)
• Upon learning there is a space alien that was “rescued” from the complex, he asks that the creature be brought to him to be freed.
• The party wake up the alien, who has a surprisingly positive disposition.
• He is confused about where he is, what the date is, and what has transpired since his last week long shift at the space alien outpost.
• The party informs him that they saved him, that the rest of his comrades presumably died years ago.
• He decides to stay in Invak for now.
• The new bone men also start to settle in to their new home.
• The party travels South to Jahar.
• Orange Julia’s pack lizard is worn down from all the travel and dies in Jahar. (The merchants will buy his body to be turned into rations for 50GP—I forgot to mention in the session!)
• The party sell their weird alien fruit and call it a day.

Treasure:

• 100 GP for killing a slaver
• 550 GP for weird fruit
• 50 GP for pack lizard body.

My Carcosa-style recap of this session was as follows:

The Bone Man sorcerer, The Dominant Reflection (AC 16, MV 90’, HD 4, Chaotic) has taken over the abandoned Space Alien outpost, along with a sizeable group of Bone Men cultists. They worship the long dead Snake Men.

I had been teasing Bone Men cultists operating between the party’s home town of Invak, and the merchant town to the South, Jahar, for a few sessions. The Space Alien outpost was between the two towns, and was also home to secret village of Bone Men. It was time to finally scope out what was going on!

I had fun seeing this long running thread from [the start of the game][s1] finally lead somewhere. As I have mentioned earlier, the Bone Man the party freed from a cell in the very first session was actually a dirt bag sorcerer, the Dominant Reflection, imprisoned by the rest of Bone Men that lived in the outpost. While the players were wandering Carcosa, he was gathering up a crew of cultists, who then took over the outpost, making it their base of operation.

The players some how managed to steam roll their way through the outpost, building up a posse as they freed captives. The session concluded with them saving the town. One of the more He-Man sessions in the game. In the commotion the Dominant Reflection escaped! There is chatter in the comments about what happened off camera, whether it was cheesy or not to let the character escape. I thought not, and the players agreed.

The players convince the town’s leader to come back with them to Invak in the post game discussion. We would sometimes play out things like that in post game chat between sessions.

This would end up being the midpoint of the campaign, though I didn’t know it at the time. Kind of fitting we looped back to where we started.

Players:

• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Brendan: Missave Rage, Yellow Women Fighter 
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Chris P: Bone Crone, Bone Women Sorcerer
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party travels from Jahar North towards the “abandoned” space alien outpost.
• They see that it is guarded by two Bone Men, so they venture in via the radioactive wastes.
• The large centre room is filled with 9 bone men, reviewing maps and papers on large tables. The characters surprise the group, and kill a few before they can even retaliate. A few manage to flee to the basement.
• A long drawn out fight takes place on the main floor. Bone Men from various rooms join in. The party also encounter Bone Men from the original tribe that were living here, who join them in trying to shake off these cultists.
• The characters make their way to the basement, making quick work of two guards below.
• Moving forward they make their way to where they believe they will find the leader of the cult.
• More cultists are killed, and tribesman recruited, as the party marches forward.
• In the middle of the battle, the The Dominant Reflection looks to have made a break for it, his “throne room” sits empty.
• The party continue to travel around the basement in search of the sorcerer, but only encounter other former members of the Bone Men tribe, whom they free.
• By the time the party makes it back up to the top floor, and out the front door, the sorcerer looks to have fled.
• The party rest in the Space Alien Outpost, where they are heralded as heroes.

Notes:

• The Queen of Autumn was not amongst any of the people killed or freed. The leader of the Bone Men believes she escaped when the Sorcerer originally returned with his band of cultists to take over the ‘town’.
• The leader of the town, the Prince of Bone, gives your characters a 500 GP blood red ruby from the vault you passed when you first entered the basement.
• The Prince of Bone reveals that while they have no power over the Spherical Hunter Killer robot, they quickly learned that it can not “see” Bone Men. It completely ignores them. They also confirm your suspicion that it only hunts at night. They leave it alone.
• The Prince of Bone reveals that the sorcerer was previously imprisoned by the Bone Men here, because he was crazy-ass-crazy. They don’t know how he escaped, though they think it probably happened around the time Gus and Eric were previously here. He doesn’t put two and two together, because he’s so happy to be free. (You will recall you freed a naked Bone Man from a cell and fed him, before letting him run off into the wastes.)
• As before, the Prince of Bone asks that you not reveal to anyone the location of the town.

Treasure:

• The heads of 23 bone men cultists, whose bounty will be collected in Invak. (100GP per cultist killed or 2300 GP once you return to Invak)
• 500 GP gem
• 173 GP in random coinage from the 23 dead cultists.
• One laser gun (Brendan’s character has it)

Comments:

• Brendan S (2015-07-21 04:28): For my records: Laser gun has 9 charges.

• Ramanan S (2015-07-21 04:28): The leader had several rounds on you guys and ran around and back up the stairs. I don’t think you guys would have been able to catch him and his (now small) crew. How would you have handled pursuit like that? (He was the other 6 I rolled for initiative when you guys were fighting in the basement hall way.)

• Ramanan S (2015-07-21 04:30): You guys also managed to kill most of the bone men, which seems crazy. Whenever I read these old TSR modules with giant mobs of monsters I’m always at a loss for how it won’t just turn into a shit show.

• Eric Boyd (2015-07-21 04:32): Yeah, that’s tracking, not a chase per se, and you’ve let the party get away in craters and badlands enough times that I’d call this a fair call. We should’ve sent some of the freed captives back around to keep watch…

• Ramanan S (2015-07-21 04:47): On the one hand it seems lame to save my NPC, but on the other it seemed dumb to have him just wait for you guys when it was probably clear the tide was turning.

• Gus L (2015-07-21 06:05): I’d say this leader needs a talking to.  The city to the South of some non-bone men know where his people are, the sorcerer who kicked his ass last time knows where his people are.  The slavers will undoubtedly soon know where they are.

  We won’t come back and save him next time he gets taken over by a sorcerer - we’ll just bring the town guards and Invakians to kill everyone.  Everyone.  They won’t be a nuisance to trade anymore.  The major power in the area - the one we nominally work for/with is boneman - he needs to bring his people into Invak, and set up a life there - they should be welcoming.  We can help arrange that. If not, since he was a dude in a cell recently Normagina will encourage the other survivors to come with us to to Invak and let the crazy leader and the crazy sorcerer fight it out before we come back and murder the winners/survivors with Invak’s militia in a few months.

  This should  not really be a choice for them, small communities get slaughtered, mutated or taken over by nuts.  They are not even a small community now - time to join up with someone bigger.

  Also mumble mumble something about strategic hamlets.

• Ramanan S (2015-08-07 04:57): Alright!

  You can convince this fellow that staying here is a dumb idea. The group is still very suspicious of outsiders, but since you have shown up and saved them from cult-stupidness they are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.

  The leader and 5 of his followers are going to search for “The Queen of Autumn”, the women who escorted Gus L and Eric Boyd back to Invak during that first session. Everyone else will come with you. (I’ll look up numbers.)

  Also I realise I made a mistake with the people you were freeing from the cells. Not everyone is a Bone Man. Some people are captives from the region. They will also come back with you to Invak. I need to double check my notes for where people are from.

  This dungeon is basically cleared except for the central locked section in the basement. (The doors to the North when you go down the stairs.) The bone men have also not entered the area, lacking the appropriate pass key. They assume it’s where the power comes from. There is a strange symbol that they say means power embossed on the door.

  I should give you guys XP for messing up the cultist faction as well.

• Eric Boyd (2015-08-07 04:59): Do any of our assorted key cards open the basement?

• Ramanan S (2015-08-07 05:16): Sadly no. It’s the same sort of metal sliding door you see throughout, just locked. You can try and bust it open if you are so inclined. The Bone Men are superstitious about it, but won’t interfere if you want to mess with it.

When I would share invites on G+ for the Masters of Carcosa sessions I would include rumours and news the players had learned. There was also a post on my G+ community for the game where I would keep all the loose threads up to date. For this session the players knew the following:

• Trade between Invak and Jahar presumably remains on hiatus for now while Jahar’s merchants waits for this cult to move on or be replaced.
• The merchants will travel East to the Citadel of Brown Men known as Lessel.
• Deep One sightings at the Lake to the South.

During the session they would learn more about the deep ones, who apparently had emerald belts. (The deep ones in this game were effectively Mer-Man from Masters of the Universe.) This was the rumour the players decided to follow, resulting in a very straight forward session compared to some of the others: kill some cultists, free some captives, find some treasure.

The party finally learned some more rituals, not that it really mattered. The rituals didn’t really match the vibe of the game, even though Chris’s character was a real dirt bag sorcerer. He was constantly trying to learn and find more, and I basically didn’t really want them in my game so was kind of a real dick when it came to having them show up in play. For the most part playing a Sorcerer was just the hard-mode version of playing a Fighter. The classes were the same, but Sorcerers had harder XP requirements.

The next session the players will return to the “abandoned” Space Alien outpost that kicked off the campaign. It’s kind of neat that it happened to happen at what would be the midpoint of the campaign.

My Carcosa-style recap for the session is quite terse, because the session itself was very to the point.

Players:

• Chris P: Bone Crone, Bone Women Sorcerer
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Willie Burke: Grenn, White Man Sorcerer

Recap:

• The party decides to remain in and around Glom for the time being.
• The city is clearly built within snake men ruins, but no one in town seems to know or care—or at least won’t talk to the party about it.
• Rumours of emerald wearing deep ones send the party south to the lake.
• There they see a group of cultists camped near the statue and pillars visible last session.
• They approach closer and start examining the pillars: rituals!
• Then they get shot at.
• A fight!
• The obvious cultists put up a mediocre fight, missing like the cast of G.I. Joe.
• The party are victorious after a protracted fight. Captives are freed. New rituals learned. Success!

Treasure:

• 500 GP
• 5 Gems: 2700 GP
• 6 wax figurines of deep ones
• 4 Naginatas (6 grabbed by captives)

Rituals:

Summon Amphibious Ones - This eleven-hour ritual can be completed only on a fog-shrouded night. The Sorcerer must obtain the root of potency found only in ruined apothecaries of the Snake-Men. The sacrifice is a virgin White girl. As her life leaves her body, 10–100 of the Amphibious Ones will coalesce out of the mists.

The Blasphemous Sacrifice (to Bind Amphibious Ones) - This ritual cannot be performed on its own, but only as an adjunct to the SUMMON THE AMPHIBIOUS ONES ritual. It adds an hour to the time required to complete the ritual (thus twelve hours total). The sacrifice is further subjected to an hour of unspeakable tortures before being slain. At the end of the rituals, the Sorcerer will have complete control over the horde of Amphibious Ones for 24 hours.

The Call of Cthulhu (to Summon Cthulhu) - This 24 hour ritual must be cast while waist deep in the polluted waters of Carcosa. Once the ritual chanting and genuflection begins, the sorcerer must drown a Purple Men at the end of each hour of the ritual. All the victims must be a willing sacrifices to the Great Old One Cthulhu. When the life leaves the last of the Purple Men, Cthulhu will rise up from the waters.

This is the first session Eric missed! There was a mixup because I kept on rescheduling. This is why you need to be consistent when you’re running games!

In my Carcosa-style recap for the session, I’m much more explicit about what’s going on in the town.

Players:

• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Willie Burke: Grenn, White Man Sorcerer

Recap:

• The party begins the session in Jahar, where they returned with the body of a dead amoured space alien and a Bone Man cultist who attacked them on the road. They learned of the base the cultists presumably operate out of.
• Since there were only two players today the group decided to avoid the cultists enclave and head South with the traders.
• The party ended up in the city of Glom, the trip South was uneventful.
• The merchants stay in a quiet Inn, with no name but a strange ancient symbols etched on its door. Sorcerers will recognize this as the snake man word for Torture Gallery.
• The party wanders around town, which seems to be a surprisingly easy going place.
• They come upon a louder and more boisterous tavern.
• The bar servers two drinks, “lake water”, and a purple lotus concoction.
• Asha-Rea samples the lotus drink, Grenn the lake water.
• Each gets plastered in their own way.
• They wake up the next day back in the original inn. (TODO: make a carousing table!)
• The next day they explore the town.
• “the Joy-Giver of All the Living” sells tonics and potions made out of the lake water. They buy a “healing potion”
• “the Inestimable Fullness” is a tailor that is built like the Kingpin. They buy fancy hats from him, and Asha-Rea buys a set of clothes. They will be ready in a week.
• The party decides to trek to the near by lake to collect water for sale to the Alchemist.
• This occurs without incident, but the lake gives them a thoroughly creepy vibe. There are rumours it is full of Deep Ones.
• They see a monument of statues in the distance, surrounded by pillars. They don’t investigate!
• They return to town with two barrels of the bizarre lake water, which they sell for 50GP a pop.

The players had found a Space Alien compass in an earlier session and decided to see where it would lead them. I had decided it would lead them towards the tomb of a dead Space Alien hero. A nearby hex was described in the book like so:

In a pure white chamber is the perfectly preserved corpse of a Space Alien wearing a suit of reflective armor that protects against the following types of weapons: microwave, yellow laser, dysprosium, polonium, nickel, neptunium, cesium, strontium, radon, aluminum, boron, mercury, thulium, protactinium, niobium, and helium.

In my Carcosa style recap of the session, one of my fictional alternative endings to the session was as follows:

8 Space Aliens (AC 12, MV 120’, HD 3), part of an elite combat squad, pursue a group of Carcosan who have defiled one of their tombs through the badlands. They are armed with laser rifles.

They were first mentioned in the session 7 recap, and I likely added them as an entry on the encounter table for the region shortly after. The players would meet them a few sessions later. As I mentioned earlier, I would sometimes use the recaps as a way to share rumours, and also share news about the off camera world with the players. In the session 8 recap I shared that the Bone Men cultists were taking people back to an Abandoned Space Alien Outpost. The players would eventually return there, but I don’t think it was because of the mention in that recap. This is probably too subtle a way to share what’s going on, but it was a fun all the same.

I also used the other entry from Hex 1113 this session, having the mutant T-Rex show up.

There are no settlements in this hex because of the mutant tyrannosaurus (AC 15, MV 150 , HD 15, Neutral, 30 aura of radioactivity, bulging eyes, transparent skin) that slays anything in its vicinity.

The entries in Carcosa are quite terse, but sometimes that’s all you need for something to be memorable. I got quite used to spinning out whole sessions from a few sentences, both in my own notes and from the book.

Players:

• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Gus: Normangina 
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Willie Burke: Grenn, White Man Sorcerer

Recap:

• The party begins the session in Invak, having returned their from Jahar. They decide to follow the strange alien compass to wherever it may lead.
• They venture South towards Jahar, but about 4 hours out of town they stumble upon 6 White Men, presumably slaves, dying in the desert.
• The party splits up, with one group heading back to Invak to secure a rescue party.
• On the way back the encounter a Spawn, a Blue quadruped with a smooth hide, 4 eyes, and a beaked mouth. They give it a wide berth, and it leaves them alone.
• They rescue the White Men without incident, who are now recuperating in Invak
• The party heads South again, travelling towards Jahar.
• They make it to the town without incident and spend the night.
• The next day they head East towards the site the compass is pointing towards.
• They discover a small white structure.
• Examining it, they discover it looks to like a tomb for a dead Space Alien.
• The party takes the alien and his armour.
• As it is quite late they camp out in the wastes!
• At night a group of bone men wander by, but do not see the party.
• They party surprises the group.
• The bone man snuff out their torches, and a melee breaks out in the dark.
• It is violent, and the bone men are put down. One bone man is captured.
• The party returns to Jahar, but as they are about to leave a radioactive t-rex shows up!
• It is distracted by the pile of carrion and lets the party move away.
• Back at Jahar the party hand over the captured bone man to the merchant caravan guards.

Treasure:

• Space Alien Armour - full body and reflective
• 3 laser guns (from cultists)
• Well preserved dead Space Alien
• 50’ of Rope x 4
• 10’ of rusted iron chain, with manacles (no key)
• One small pouch of Green Lotus Powder
• Ceramic short swords, perhaps space alien in origin x 8
• 6 torches

I was still apparently not confident the game was actually fun, 9 sessions in. Reading these recaps now it’s funny how unsure I was about this game.

• Eric Boyd (2015-05-06 01:13): Side note: my character is named Orange Julia.
• Ramanan S (2015-05-06 03:45): I added items of note from the dead cultists. They were wearing leather like armour, but that would be ruined from the fight. Green Lotus Powder: A victim of the green lotus powder falls into an unconscious trance for 9-12 hours, then awakens in a state of extreme weakness and sickness. He can do little other than speak sparingly, recline, and eat and drink. The green lotus sickness does not directly cause death, but the body becomes very thin and the mind prone to despair. Eventual suicide is common among victims of the green lotus.
• Eric Boyd (2015-05-06 06:24): Is the green lotus powder something we can throw in someone’s face, or is it an ingested poison?
• Ramanan S (2015-05-06 09:43): I pictured it like a throw in your face sort of thing, like you make a small cloud. Ingesting works too and is probably a more reliable vector for administrating it.
• Chris G (2015-05-06 16:44): I freakin’ love these recaps. One of these Mondays I’ll get off work early enough to join.
• Ramanan S (2015-05-06 23:48): The actual sessions are probably less exciting. Hah.
• Chris G (2015-05-07 20:46): That sales pitch needs some work …
• Ramanan S (2015-05-07 22:03): Once I figure out how to be a good DM i’ll get on that next. Ha!
• Eric Boyd (2015-05-07 23:17): Hey, enough with the self-deprecation and imposter syndrome! If you didn’t know what you were doing, we wouldn’t show up.
• Ramanan S (2015-05-08 04:09): Fair enough. I think my main problem is everyone I play D&D with also happens to be an amazing DM. Ha! I think I can do a better job if I was like 20% more organized. One day.

… the leader of Invak would pay for the heads of Jale Slavers, and so the game because all about hunting the slavers and chopping of their heads. Blood Meridian, but in Carcosa. (Except the party would actually kill slavers, not any old person.)

Wait, I lied. This session the party does end up killing people and taking them back to Invak to collect their reward. Bad PR for OSR players everywhere.

Were these Bone Men slavers? No, I’m pretty sure they were cultists working for The Dominant Reflection. If you have been following along, in the very first session the players freed a Bone Man they found imprisoned in the Abandoned Space Alien Outpost. He disappeared into the wilderness, but that wasn’t the end of his story. At this point the players had not encountered him or his followers again, but that was soon to change.

The party also some how manage to turn the death of two hirelings they recruited in town into some positive PR, paying for their funerals. Jahar initially had a negative disposition to outsiders, but the group would slowly change that over the course of the campaign.

The main goal for the session was to pilfer Alien technology from the campsite of the lost Space Aliens they had rescued recently. This resulted—once again—in a battle with insane Mi-Go. How many times would I have the players fight Mi-Go? Several: I always listen to the results of the dice!

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Eric Boyd - Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Beloch Shrike - Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Dion - Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter

Recap:

• The party begins their adventure in the town of Jahar.
• 3 Brown Men guards are hired in Jahar for 10 GP a piece. They are well armed and seem competent.
• They encounter a group of 3 Blue Men who have escaped Jale Men who attacked them in Hex 1113.
• They give the Blue Men rations and direct them to Jahar.
• The entrance to the cavern has been filled in with rocks.
• The party dig it out and venture within.
• The cavern is quiet … too quiet.
• They find the alien camp site, and start pilfering the alien tech.
• But wait, it was a trap. 3 Mi Go descend from the ceiling to attack.
• They are joined shortly after by 3 more.
• 6 Migo are dead, 3 bodies in good enough condition to be brought back for sale.
• 2 Brown Men are also dead—everyone is sad.
• The party donate 200 GP to the Jahar guard guild. This leaves a very favourable impression of the rainbow connection within that community.
• Encounter 7 Bone Men on the road, they kill two, and are scared away by Orange Julia’s laser.
• The party suspects they are slavers—or at the very least would like to believe they are since there is a reward for capturing slavers.
• The Bone Men were curiously only interested in the Blue Men in the group.
• In Invak the party collects the ransom for the Bone Men “Slavers”.

Treasure:

• Rock Analyzer 500 GP
• 6 Sleeping Pods 300 GP
• 3 Mi Go bodies 200 GP
• Space Alien “Compass”
• 2 Bone Men “Slavers” ransom 200 GP
• Eric swapped his laser pistol for the dead Brown Man’s.

• Meaningful Player Choice
• Designing Warhammer (or any Wargame) Rules
• Create Professional Looking Wargames

Meaningful Player Choice is an incredible discussion on game design, whether you’re interested in war-games or not. The last video is about turning your ideas into a polished product. This is all top tier! Enjoy.

The caverns the party explore this session were another way I had imagined to get the party out of the region they were in. The Protector of Truths was leading a group of Yellow Men in a war against evil Mi-Go on the other side of Carcosa. The Mi-Go the players would encounter on this part of the world were those lobotomized by The Protector of Truths, so they were more like animals than intelligent adversaries. My notes for the NPC were: disfigured, easy going, idealistic. I made a small map of the caverns that lead to the hidden castle, and then a map of the castle itself. I didn’t figure anything else about this particular thread, or who the evil Mi-Go on the other side of Carcosa were. This was the right call, because this was another thread the players didn’t end up pursuing.

This session was also the first encounter with the race of Space Aliens that made the mistake of exploring Carcosa long ago, who now find themselves trapped on the planet. The players would encounter more Space Aliens as the campaign progressed: the scientists that ran the abandoned output that started the campaign, and the bad-asses of the Space Alien Strikeforce.

This was a funny session, with the party wandering back and forth between the nearby towns and these caverns, where they kept encountering Mi-Go and not making much progress through the caverns.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Dion: Asha-Rae, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Willie Burke: Grenn, White Man Sorcerer
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter 
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Richard Hawkins: Ulfire Sorcerer
• Stephen McCavour: Chongo, Orange Man Fighter

Recap:

• The party decides to return once more to the hidden caverns to try and make their way into the citadel it is connected to, or perhaps catch some MiGo.
• They make their way to the cavern without incident. 
• They begin exploring. The Mi-Go are missing when they arrive.
• They snake North, and come to a room the suspect is full of Mi-Go.
• Backtracking they stumble on some shocked space aliens. 
• They are trapped in this cavern, clearly out of their element, running to avoid mi-go.
• The party agrees to help the spacemen escape: a simple task, the space men are right near the exit.
• The party walk back into the room they just came from: which is now full of Mi-Go feasting on a dead Ulfire Man..
• A fight! No one is injured, except the Mi-Go. One is captured alive, even.
• The aliens call for their buddies to come pick them up. Give the party ‘dog tags’ as a thanks.
• They teach the party how to say “greetings” in their alien body language.
• The party returns to town, Mi-Go in tow, for sale.
• The sage buys the Mi-Go, and two additional Mi-Go bodies from the party for 700 GP total.
• Rest and then back to the citadel and cavern.
• The party walk back into the first proper room of the complex, and of course stumble on Mi-Go. These ones are cleaning up the mess from last time.
• A battle! 
• Nick’s character is knocked out. He’s brought back to life via the strange red goop Dion’s character possessed. 
• Richard’s character is slain, but the rest of the party is victorious.
• On the trip back to town the party stumble upon some Ulfire Men, who fled an attack by the slavers. The rest of their party was captured.
• They return to Jahar with the party.

Treasure:

• 2 laser pistols
• 700 GP from sage
• 200 GP for additional Mi-Go bodies
• 200 GP for mysterious crystal thing—if you are willing to sell it to him.
• 6 space alien dog tag like things

I came close to going the whole year without playing a single game of Mordheim, but a visiting gamer from Vancouver put the call out to see if anyone in our Mordheim league was free to play while he was in town. Of course I said yes. Another regular from the store’s Mordheim posse joined in, alongside someone who had never played a game of Mordehim before. We had planned to play 2-3 games, but we all forgot that multi player games usually take a while. We got through one, but it was a fun one.

I used my undead warband again. They are the team I feel most comfortable playing. After the last campaign my vampire leader, Lord Volchyakrov, was killed. I was tempted to try and paint a new vampire before this game, but didn’t have the time. I have to assume the necromancer Gallean the Mad helped bring the vampire back to un-life. As usual, I prioritized bodies over equipment. My warband consisted of my vampire, a necromancer, and 3 dregs, who were accompanied by 2 ghouls, 7 zombies, and a dire wolf. (Though in my case my dire wolves are dire rats.) I actually have wolf models now I should build and paint. Maybe before the next big league or campaign takes place.

We played a pretty crazy scenario, themed for the holidays. There were 6 building that contained presents for us to steal. Each building was guarded by d3 peasants armed with spears. All the units in your warband were carrying a torch they could use to set these buildings on fire, after they had fist been explored (and then number of peasants inside had been determined). The game ends when all the buildings are burned down, or the last team routs. The session had some real old-school D&D energy. It felt very violent and chaotic.

The peasants proved to be surprisingly tough. In true Mordheim fashion, one peasant held off my dreg and a zombie for basically the entire game. Another peasant single handedly held off a team of dwarven slayers. That old man was only killed when my team set his home on fire and it collapsed upon him. (Killing a few dwarfs in the process.)

I hadn’t played Mordheim in ages, but I quickly remembered how it all worked. The game has lots of little edge cases, but its core is quite simple. Our new player, who had only played 40K, really loved how evocative the game and its rules were. It really is the gold standard for narrative gaming. (Though perhaps Trench Crusade will soon carry that torch?)

Hopefully we’re manage to get another game (or more) in before the holidays season is over.

The party finally visits the merchant town to the South, Brown Man village of Jahar. These merchants were the ones who escorted the players up to Invak in the first session, when the party encountered them on the road. Because the party had gained some notoriety in the region they were able to wander and meet with the people of the town. I’m quite certain I ran this sort of things using reaction rolls. I tracked the groups renown, which I would sometimes use to modify results up or down, but not in a way that I was particularly consistent about.

You can see that once again I was laying it out pretty thick when it came to reasons to explore the Putrescent Pits of the Ameboid Gods. Don’t worry, the players wouldn’t take the bait.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Dion - Asha-Rea, Ulfire Women Fighter
• Willie Burke - Grenn, White Man Sorcerer
• Eric Boyd - Orange Julia, Orange Women Fighter
• Beloch Shrike - Renoir, Red Man Fighter

Recap:

• The party begins the session in Invak.
• The party travels south from Invak to Jahar. The trip is uneventful. They travel through the night to make it to the town in one day. They camp outside of town, but encounter nothing.
• Unlike Invak, Jahar is particularly xenophobic.
• One of the guards is aware of the Rainbow Connection, and lets the players into the town.
• Most of the people manufacturing goods in the town, along with the guards, have a fairly negative reaction to the party.
• The merchants in town have a more positive disposition.
• The party meets the person who runs the “resale items” shop, along with his children. They pick up some random knick knacks.
• They meet the sage that lives in town.
• For 10 GP he tells them two locations that he thinks feeds the water in the Castle of Decline, which could be the source of the human waste and guts that are poisoning the water
• For free he lets the party know their map of the Putrescent Pits of the Ameboid God is probably junk. The story goes that a cult worshiped the god, that lived in an impossibly deep pit to the North. They would feed the beast all the gold and jewels they could find. Another cult came and fought the god and its cultists, culminating in sealing the god underground by building the mountain range on top of it. He lets the party know that mountain ranges form over millions of years, and this story is probably nonsense.
• The party learn about a citadel to the North East, hidden out of sight. Some merchants saw it a few days back, but avoided the site. The sage will pay 10GP for information confirming its existence.
• The party ventures off in search of the site, which they find without any complications.
• It appears to be sealed from the inside. The party doesn’t want to make a noise by breaking down the front door, or a trapdoor in the roof.
• A cavern near the Castle is also found, and explored.
• The party encounters a group of 6 Mi-Go’s. They kill one and then flee. The Mi-Go’s make a half-hearted pursuit.
• The party returns to Jahar, where they let the sage know of their findings.

Treasure:

• 10 GP paid by the Sage.

Notes:

• Provide clue about next complication.

Being worried about the game being boring was a common theme it seems. Once again some planning for the next session takes place in the comments, and I share a little bit more about what the group has learned about the world. Cole suggested I write a follow up review of Carcosa, having run the game for a few months now. That review ended up focusing a lot on how I prepared to start the game, but didn’t talk much about actually run the game.

• Ramanan S (2015-03-10 17:13): Sorry for the quieter game. I owe you guys a clue for a haven complication. I’ll also update the campaign map with trade routes from Jahar. 
• Richard Hawkins (2015-03-10 17:21): Sorry that I missed out on this one, I will look forward to eating brains soon!
• Beloch Shrike (2015-03-10 18:38): Nothing to apologize for. I got to kill a Mi-Go. Lets do more of that. =D
• edchuk sockmonkey (2015-03-10 20:23): Richard Hawkins​ Lightly sauté them with garlic and a little lemon. Delicious!
• Richard Hawkins (2015-03-10 22:45): Yes… yummy!
• Richard Hawkins (2015-03-10 22:45): Beloch Shrike  a CoC MI-GO! … Yikes
• Ramanan S (2015-03-14 03:41): The merchants reveal the location of towns along their trade routes. To the south they visit: Glom (Ulfire Men village), Lesel (Brown Men Citadel), Brackdor (Bone Man Village), and Cron (Ulfire Man Village). They abandoned routes to the East decades ago because of the Slavers. They stopped trading to the West some time ago, though people can’t give you a straight answer as to why. What do people want to do?
• Beloch Shrike (2015-03-21 16:57): I wouldn’t mind returning to those caverns and exploring further.
• Eric Boyd (2015-03-21 20:03): Are there trade caravans headed anywhere interesting that need guards?
• Dion Williams (2015-03-21 21:34): Either of the option mentioned work for me. 
• Ramanan S (2015-03-21 22:33): Eric Boyd traders will leave from Jahar heading South to the town of Cron soon. The route they take is as follows: 1 week in Glom, 1 week in Brackdor, 1 week in Cron, 1 week in Brackdor & Glom, 1 week back in Jahar. (i.e. That’s where they’ll be for the next 5 sessions.) If you wait a session another group will leave for Lesel: 1 week in Glom, 1 week in Lesel, 1 week back in Jahar. I’ll figure out how to update the map or something.
• cole long (2015-03-21 22:47): Ramanan S you should do a post (or have you done one already?), having DMed several sessions, about what you find Carcosa brings to the table and what you’ve done to make it “yours?”
• cole long (2015-03-21 22:50): i feel like it is one of the rorschach-blottiest settings
• Ramanan S (2015-03-21 22:51): cole long Good idea. I’ve certainly had to do a bunch of flesh things out.
• Ramanan S (2015-03-22 01:06): From the old thread, of note: The merchants reveal the location of towns along their trade routes. To the south they visit: Glom (Ulfire Men village), Lesel (Brown Men Citadel), Brackdor (Bone Man Village), and Cron (Ulfire Man Village). They abandoned routes to the East decades ago because of the Slavers. They stopped trading to the West some time ago, though people can’t give you a straight answer as to why. 
• Ramanan S (2015-03-22 01:10): Also: the merchants won’t pay you to be guards, they have their own guards, and they don’t think your acting troupe is menacing enough. They are fine with you tagging along on any trip, however.
• Ramanan S (2015-03-22 17:52): Event is up. Can do upkeep and haven stuff there.
• Ramanan S (2015-03-28 05:54): cole long http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/review/carcosa-review-reprise/
• Ramanan S (2015-03-29 22:37): http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/masters-of-carcosa/session-6/
• Chris G (2015-03-30 03:02): This is my favorite kind of writeup. I wish I’d thought of it back when I was doing Redbox Vancouver.
• Ramanan S (2015-03-30 03:07): I did the first one as a play report for a Carcosa session Brendan ran. Certainly one of my better ideas as gaming stuff goes. http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/play-report/rescue-chauncy/

The session began with exploration and learning more about the world. This was the first time the party got lost in the wilderness, an important part of the game. My travel rules worked. The party found more caves to explore in the future, and learned of a second citadel that purportedly held a tomb of vile sorceress magic—the best kind. The party would refuse to seek it out for the remainder of the game, of course. The later half of the session was spent getting high with some stoner Carcosans. Dion joined the game this session, and was a fixture in the campaign for a long time to come, playing Ulfire Sorcerer Asha-Rea. His character used the distraction of everyone getting high off their ass to steal some Jale Lotuses to sell later. A quiet session, but they can’t all be loud.

You can contrast the recap that follows with my Carcosa-style hex descriptions.

Players:

• Dion: Asha-Rea, Ulfire Woman Sorcerer
• Beloch Shrike: Renoir, Red Man Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Woman Fighter

Recap:

• The party is in Invak, returning after vanquishing the cultists to the North.
• They elect to escort two of the bone from the the Citadel of Decline back home.
• Get lost on the way there, ending up South of Invak.
• Encounter Jale Slavers on the road. 17 in total and they look like bad asses.
• The party books it, escaping into the wilderness. They are forced to abandon a pack animal to do so.
• They spend the night in the wilderness and then head back to Invak.
• Once more, the party heads North West towards the citadel.
• The trip is uneventful, but on the way there hey find two caves to explore later.
• The citadel is as it was before. Lots of sad sack bone men and women.
• The party hears a rumour of a citadel to the south the bone men avoided when they stumbled upon this castle many years ago. This other citadel was also abandoned, but covered in sigils and markings that left everyone feeling disturbed. The scouting party who ventured within claimed to see a book of foul sorcery that so terrified them they turned and ran he moment they set their eyes upon it.
• The party rests the night and heads towards Invak, stopping at cavern on the way.
• It’s home to stoner brown men, who snort Jale lotus and receive visions.
• The characters decide to get high with the Brown Men.
• Orange Julia learns of a Sunken Temple filled with Amphibious Ones held in Stasis.
• Renoir learns of a Forlorn Citadel.
• Usha Ray sneaks some Jake Lotus while everyone is busy getting high.
• The party returns to Invak.
• The apothecary examines water from the Citadel of a Decline, and informs the party that the water is full of human filth and dead humans. He suggests they don’t drink it.

Treasure:

• 3 Jale Lotuses - 3 x 200 = 600GP

Reading the comments I see that at this point I still didn’t have a clear procedure for wilderness travel I was happy with. I suspect I was just using travel times from OD&D and winging it. Before the next session I would settle on Hazard Die based procedures, borrowing from how Brendan ran his games. Earlier that year (2014) Brendan wrote two seminal blog posts: Overload the encounter die and Proceduralism. I joke that I am part of the OSR that is obsessed with Adventure Time, but I’m also part of the OSR that is obsessed with procedures of play. It felt like everyone read Torchbearer, didn’t want to play it, but did want to add procedures and downtime to their games.

In this session the players decided to attack the Orange Man Citadel to the North. They were aware the citadel was an ally of their enemies the slavers, that they apparently ran gladiatorial games. Evan using his teleporting laser gun to teleport the Frog God away was great conclusion to the fight, as it meant the Frog God was now wandering the wilderness alongside the players. I added the Frog God to my encounter table. My encounter tables would slowly grow and change based on the actions of the players each session. Will the frog show up in a future session?

The players found a “strange metal collar with buttons and lights (Treasure #1)”. The players had to figure out what the magic items (or super science) they found did. I had a list of items so I wouldn’t forget. Treasure #1 was a truth collar the space aliens used for interrogation. Will the players figure out what it’s for?

I don’t recall if Nick named his character or not. He was killed this session. His previous character, Horace, was killed in the session 2, the previous game he played. The game was a bit of a meat grinder.

Players:

• Beloch Shrike: ???, Orange Man Fighter
• Eric Boyd: Gux, Yellow Man Fighter
• Evan: The Spangled Inquiry, Bone Man Sorcerer
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter

Recap: 

• The rainbow connection were resting in the cavernous castle, home to the Ideal of Decline and his sad group of Bone Men. They debate heading North back to the Putrescent Pits, or South in Invak to help start some sort of alliance between the two towns.
• The party suggest to the Ideal of Decline that they abandon their crazy castle and come live in Invak.
• He is wary of the idea, but sends 6 of his Bone men with the party to investigate the town and report back.
• In Invak the party meet with the Speaker of All Graces, and decide that it’s the red moon and they should save those slaves.
• The Speaker of All Graces is always down for fucking with slavers, and provides one of his best lieutenants and 40 men to help the party.
• Organina recruits another 7 Orange Men from the refugee quarter to help as well.
• The party head north to the Orange Man Citadel, home to cultists famous for feeding the winners of their gladiatorial games to their spawn god.
• The citadel seems strangely abandoned.
• The party does some scouting, and then attempts to scale the walls.
• The grappling hooks alert two Orange Men inside.
• A crazy fight breaks out—I bet Zak has some rules for mass combat in Vornheim I could have used here.
• The Orange Men have laser guns, but are about as good a shot as Cobra.
• Things are overwhelmingly going the parties way until the interior doors to the citadel are opened, and the giant spawn god, a huge feathered frog with a beak, lets out a croak that scares most everyone in the battle.
• A small number of reinforcements join the fight, but in the end they are also put down quite quickly.
• Nick’s character is eaten by the terrible toad.
• The Spangled Inquiry had been shooting at the frog with his teleportation ray for several rounds, finally hitting the beast when it was perhaps almost dead. The beast disappeared into the wilderness, and presumably ran off.
• Searching the citadel reveals a stash of valuable gems.
• The Speaker’s lieutenant gives the party the first 3 gems (100 GP, 5000 GP, 5000 GP). “The Speaker of all Graces would thank you for pushing us to finally finish these slavers off. I will do so in his stead: 100 GP a slaver to your strange troupe. The remaining treasure we split evenly. The money due to the dead will be given to our home Invak. I will keep 35 men here with me to secure the fort these slavers wasted with their idiocy. My remaining men will head south with you and he freed slaves to report to the Speaker of all Graces. Tell him to send word of what he wishes to do here.”
• 35 Bone Men and the lieutenant stay behind in the citadel, the party returns to Invak the next day.
• There was much rejoicing.

Resources of Note Used:

• Gus fired his bazooka twice.
• Evan fired the teleportation ray 4 times.

Treasure:

• 14 slaves freed.
• Contents of Citadel:
  • 60 GP
  • 19 Gems: 100 GP, 5000 GP, 5000 GP, 500 GP, 500 GP, 50 GP, 500 GP, 1000 GP, 500 GP, 500 GP, 1000 GP, 500 GP, 1000 GP, 500 GP, 1000 GP, 500 GP, 1000 GP, 500 GP, 500 GP (20150 GP)
• 2 power cells.
• 4 laser guns (unknown charges)
• Strange metal collar with buttons and lights (Treasure #1)

There are 52 people on this adventure: 368 GP each, or there about. 1100 GP for killing slavers split 4 ways is 275 GP. So each player gets 643 GP.

Monsters Defeated:

• 11 crazy Orange Man Cultists (and slavers)
• 1 Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, a huge toad

It’s funny reading all the “who will run next week” chatter. This Monday night spot was a hot commodity. You can see I didn’t have any concrete treasure rolled for the citadel, I figured things out retroactively. I was all about just in time prep, which worked until it didn’t.

• Eric Boyd (2015-01-27 05:16): Player Notes: We need to write an easy-to-sing ballad about killing slavers, so our motives are clear when we show up in situations like this. 
• Ramanan S (2015-02-02 02:36): I still owe you guys: loot, a players map of the region, and better rules for wilderness travel!
• Ramanan S (2015-02-07 20:59): Still behind on things. I asked to see if Bryan Mullins can run next weeks game as well.
• Bryan Mullins (2015-02-07 21:39): Just got out of work, sorry no quick replay Ramanan S. I’ll post an invite for that game (the 9th) tonight.
• Ramanan S (2015-02-10 05:24): [Ram figures out the treasure for the session, finally. There is lots.]
• Bryan Mullins (2015-02-10T05:38:34.431Z): Damn, thats the one I missed!
• Ramanan S (2015-02-10 05:42): They raided that orange man citadel to the north to free slaves, bolstered by a militia from Invak. My notes for that citadel were a small map and stats for the frog God, which is why I didn’t have treasure handy at the time. I wasn’t sure how to allocate it till I saw Courtney Campbell’s post about treasure types today and that seemed like the obvious thing to do.
• Eric Boyd (2015-02-10 06:41): clarifying: is the party splitting 10,100 GP of gems four ways?
• Ramanan S (2015-02-10 11:03): The party splits their 3 gems worth 1100 GP between the 4 of them. It’s like a bonus or finders free or something. For simplicity we can just assume the Speaker of all Graces in Invak can swap the gems for currency.
• Ramanan S (2015-02-10 12:04): My current thinking is that “gold” is ancient super hardy metal coinage from some bygone era. So it all looks pristine and new, and most Carcosans don’t have the tech to mint new coins or mess with the old ones. So they are a good hard to counterfeit common currency. Thoughts?
• Ramanan S (2015-02-11 04:55): Bryan Mullins Am I running stuff on the 23rd (normally when my next slot would be), or this Monday (normally your spot, but you covered for me so I don’t know if you need / want a break or not). Let me knows.
• Bryan Mullins (2015-02-11 05:05): Um…lets say that I just did you a favor so you could get up to speed? Ultimately, I’d like to see Richard come into the rotation so that I can rest my Monday game more often. Sorry, side track. I’ll be ready and running for Monday the 16th, and you’ll be back on for the 23rd. Sound okay?
• Ramanan S (2015-02-11 05:06): Yeah, perfect!

The party had been told rumours that there were healers to the south that could heal Gus’s character of his terrible mutations. (You may recall that was his first character’s fate in our first session of the game.) The party ignored those rumours last session, but decided to pursue them this time. Bryan’s character came out of my random generator with a tattooed map on his skin: a map to the mega-dungeon I had imagined I would run, whose name appears in Hex 1109 of Carcosa: On the northern slopes of the mounds are the yawning pits that lead down to the infamous and deadly Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods.

I would occasionally seed more rumours in the alternate future restocking tables I would create after each session, as part of my recaps. For example, in the recap for this session I wanted to let the players know that another group as aware of the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods and would explore it even if they did not:

A caravan makes its way North. The men and women ride lumbering lizards and have several days worth of supplies. They have a map leading to the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods.

When I would post the invites to the games on Google+ I would try and include these open threads and rumours so the players had some rough ideas for things they could do. There was no overarching “plot” for the campaign, I was curious where the players would take play. It turned out, not to the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods, so I’m glad I only ever drafted the first level.

This session the party learned a little more about the Jale Slavers, stumbling upon some escaped slaves. I created specific encounter tables for the rough regions I had imagined the hexes could be grouped into. Because this area was home to the Jale Slavers, there were entries tied to them. The first session the players had rolled to encounter some slavers after after they had sold off their slaves. This session the rolled and encountered some escaped slaves. They wouldn’t find the slaver’s base till the tail end of the campaign.

The men on standing upon the giant plinths come from the Carcosa book. A couple sentences describe the scene, which I extrapolated from. I love the short pithy hex descriptions of Carcosa. From these men Gus learned his character could be cured by heading far to the North. I had imagined this might lead the characters out of this region, but Gus didn’t even like the character they were trying to cure, so that thread was left alone.

The party discovered The Castle of Decline, home to a group of sad-sack Bone Men. One of the first groups outside of Invak the party would end up befriending. If I recall correctly, they eventually convince the Bone Men to abandon their home and join them in Invak. (Easy enough, since their home sucked.)

The session ended with the briefest exploration of the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods. They might have explored a handful of rooms before us having to end the session. They would never return!

You can contrast this recap with my Carcosa style one.

Players:

• Eric Boyd: Orange Julia, Orange Woman Fighter
• Gus: Mr. Smyth, White Man Fighter
• Brendan: Missave Rage, Yellow Women Fighter 
• Beloch Shrike: Orange Man Fighter
• Bryan Mullins: Gloss-o-lalia (Lalia),  Dolm Woman Sorcerer

Recap:

• The party ventures south west in search of healers for Mr. Smyth
• Just before dusk they encounter some escaped slaves, orange men who have fled the slaver city.
• They reveal the slaves that aren’t taken to be sold are poorly chained up outside the citadel, beaten and kept in a weakened state, and guarded by men and women who ride dinosaurs.
• No one else in town is escaped from the Jale Men’s citadel, so this is a pretty remarkable situation
• The party sends them on their way with food and continues south west.
• They see a tall pillar reaching out toward the sky. As they get closer they can see a smaller 40’ pillar of smooth poured stone next to the matching larger one. On top of this pillar is a Jale man. The party speaks with him briefly, and he sends them East where a White Man is supposed to be.
• Continuing they encounter a Black Man who they speak to briefly. They learn a little bit about his life via Brendan’s character’s ESP. 
• They ignore all other pillars till the teach the White man. The party pretends Mr. Smyth is a mute, for the fear his mind will be controlled by the mystic.
• The mystic can’t cure Mr Smyth’s mutation, but can offer up prophetic visions via dreams.
• The party sleeps for the night, and Mr Smyth learns of a dungeon to the North where his cure might be found. He sees the entrance to a dungeon, choked with dead bodies, beyond which lies a Serpent Man.
• Fuck travelling to the North for a character Gus doesn’t even like. The party heads back to Invak, and plans to head North to the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods.
• Along the way they avoid a group of White Men marching away to the East, along a river to the North.
• The party heads West and finds a strange citadel full of Bone Men.
• The Bone Men seem to be having a shitty time: some of them have recently died due to some issue with their water supply, others from a strange cyborg to the West, and some from capture by the slavers.
• The party heads to the Putrescent Pits of the Amoeboid Gods, but only explores it briefly.
• They fight a Spawn of Shub-Niggurath  and call it a day.

Tressure:

• Spawn Guts (to be claimed for reward in Invak)

Monsters Killed:

 - Spawn of Shub-Niggurath

At the time I thought the session might have been boring, but reading the recap and thinking back on everything the players managed to do, I have no idea why I thought that was the case. There is some more logistics around who will run something next. I realize now it was Bryan and I trading turns running because Brendan and Nick wanted a break. (Brendan was running his dungeon & rule set The Final Castle, which remains unpublished to this day!) Chris was a new player, who would join our games for a little while, on and off.

• Ramanan S (2014-12-24 - 02:09): Sorry if that session turned out boring. My plan is to get organized over the break. I realize now that my biggest road block to being a successful DM is not a lack of rules mastery, but being really boring and/or bad at describing things. I’m having fun anyway. Hah! Brendan S You can run all my Monday games till you are busy again. So the next one (29th) is yours. (Maybe that’ll be the only one you have a chance to run again?)
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-24 02:10): My character is Orange Julia — she hails from Fuudkaht.
• Gus L (2014-12-24 2:12): Nah it was a great session, the stylites seemed mildly terrifying.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-24 02:15): I learned a new word. They are medium tough, but there are 5 of you …. I realize that all these “tough” solo monsters are actually rarely a serious threat due overwhelming numbers on the players side. I don’t think any of the spawn for example have given you much trouble except for that plant one the sorcerer released last session.
• Bryan Mullins (2014-12-24 02:42): I feel like 5 to 7 first level characters can do a lot vs pretty nasty monsters. If you account for some attrition… Also. I’m enjoying the game because the feel is that we’re all finding out what’s happening as a group. That’s a feature, not a bug … at least for me.
• Brendan S (2014-12-25 22:03): For the 29th, if people are interested I would be down with running The Final Castle rules. Magic would be W&W. Probably some other dungeon though, because The Final Castle main dungeon needs more work.
• Chris G (2014-12-31 05:44): When is the next session? I love the hex-key-as-session reports.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-31 12:47): Thanks. This coming Monday is Brian’s game, probably. I’ll be the Monday after that. Unless Brendan is running something again. He may be less busy at the start of the term.
• Ramanan S (2015-01-03 05:38): Brendan S do you want to run something again on the 12th?
• Brendan S (2015-01-03 06:21): The 12th I actually have some other commitments. I might still be able to play, but it is uncertain, so I shouldn’t run that day.

My first session of Masters of Carcosa only included 2 players, Gus and Eric. I was a little worried the game wouldn’t catch on, but the next session included 6 people! This was basically the Pahvelorn crew, along with the lovely Bryan Mullins. Players would change from sessions to session. A true open table! These were all the rage in the early 2010s. The parties home base was the town of Invak, and they were expected to end sessions somewhere safe. This typically ended up being Invak, as its leader and his bounties was one of the few sources of gold in the game.

This session sees the introduction of the parties primary antagonists for the entire campaign, the Jale Slavers. There were lots of factions playing around in the background, but I was far too coy with them in hindsight. I wrote about this a long time ago, inspired by some writing from Vincent Baker: Have Them Act. I had intended to do something different than XP-for-Gold with this game, as in my mind Carcosa wasn’t a setting that fit that adventure framing. What ended up happening was I never figured out a new scheme, the leader of Invak would pay for the heads of Jale Slavers, and so the game because all about hunting the slavers and chopping of their heads. Blood Meridian, but in Carcosa. (Except the party would actually kill slavers, not any old person.) A few sessions latter the party would liberate the settlement mentioned in the note they found on the first slavers they killed. I would try and litter clues about wider world whenever I could. With a hex crawl you want to give people reasons to explore the setting.

The second half of the session saw the players exploring a little dungeon I created, looking for supplies for their towns alchemist. I made several small dungeons to litter the environment with, and I’m pretty sure I just followed to see which weird cave system they encountered.

In the session Evan’s character is shot by a ray gun and disappears. I didn’t tell him his character wasn’t vaporized till the start of the next round of combat, when he found himself on the surface, shot by a teleport gun. The sorcerer that shot him would eventually retreat to the surface as well, ending up dead at Evan’s character’s hands. I originally thought my rules for eating sorcerer brains to gain power predated Evan’s character eating some sorcerer brains, but it was the other way around. He figured a weird bone man sorcerer would eat his enemies brains for power, so I made some rules for what would happen after the fact. House rules from play: that’s the juice.

Eric’s first character was killed this session, to be replaced by the infamous Orange Julia. She would survive till the campaign ended.

You can contrast these notes with the Carcosa style recap I wrote.

Players:

• Brendan: Missave Rage, Yellow Women Fighter 
• Bryan: Gloss-o-lalia (Lalia), Dolm Woman Sorcerer
• Nick: Horace, Blue Man Fighter
• Gus: Normangina, Yellow Woman Fighter
• Evan: The Spangled Inquiry, Bone Man Sorcerer
• Eric: Gux, Yellow Man Fighter

Recap:

• The Rainbow Connection, now joined by some new friends from the town on Invak, decide to make some cash exploring the region for Desert Lotuses, which the apothecary The Falling Flower will happily buy. 
• 2 hours out of town, to the North East, the party encounters a band of 5 over-confidant Jale Slavers while looking for Desert Lotus filled caverns.
• They initially parlay, but then realizing that slavers without slaves are probably carrying currency decide to attack.
• They make reasonably quick work of the slavers, with minimal injuries. They find manifest for 14 sold slaves and 700 GP in the Citadel of ???? to the North.
• For their efforts they are rewarded by The Swift and Silent Beginning, the leader of Invak, with an additional 500 GP for each dead slaver and 100 GP for recovering this manifest.
• The rest for the day—for no mechanical benefit, harsh Ram—and head out again in search of caverns.
• Heading South West they come across a small opening that leads into a bigger cavern. It’s damp and dewy, and seems like a prime candidate for being filled with weird flowers that don’t need light to grow because they are so magical of course.
• Venturing South they find an empty camp site, that seems to have been recently used. 
• To the West they stumble upon an obvious pit trap. Exploring the cavern below they find what they thought were flowers, but turned out to be some strange plant that would knock out those who lingered too long.
• Resting in the room with the pit trap after all this exertion, some strange insectoid beasts ambled down off the ceiling.
• The party retreated to the North, the creatures uninterested in pursuit.
• Heading west the party finds their first Lotus, a blue flower.
• Further West still they stumble upon Purple Men cultists, dragging an Orange couple.
• There is some arguing, cut short by a blast from a Bazooka.
• A purple man sorcerer enters the fray from a room to the West. He shoots Evan’s character with a ray, and he is teleported to the surface.
• As the tide turns the sorcerer retreats into back into his room. He frees a giant plant Spawn and then shoots himself with his ray.
• The purple men turn to flee. Two manage to escape.
• On the surface, Evan’s character and the sorcerer grapple, but Evan’s character is victorious. He feasts on the brain of his foe.
• The battle is long and hard, Horace is cut down by a Purple Man, Gux is killed by a strange plant Spawn.
• The party explore the sorcerers abode, and find strange alchemical supplies and a ladder and hatch that lead to the surface.
• They return back to town!

Treasure:

• 5 whips (how many did you guys keep?)
• 5 swords (ditto)
• 5 pieces of armour (10 x 5 = 50 GP)
• 700 GP from slavers
• 600 GP reward for killing them
• Blue Lotus - 100 GP
• 6 White Lotus - 100 x 6 = 600 GP  
• Dead Spawn Guts - 100 GP
• Alchemical Supplies - ???
• Reptilean Armour - Looks badass, and grants 16 AC
• Teleportation Ray   
  • Unknown number of charges remain, if any.   
  • Unclear if the ray sends someone to the same place, or some fixed distance.

Monsters Killed:

• 5 Jale Slavers
• 7 Purple Men Cultists
• 1 Purple Man Sorcerer
• 1 Spawn

I’m not sure I’ll always include the comments from the session recaps, but in this case you can see us discussing rules, world building, etc.

• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 05:47 UTC): So glad to play with you all. If you have ideas for what I should be doing differently let me know. I’m still trying to figure stuff out. Let me know your characters names, or if there is anything of note I missed in the recap. I will let you guys know what’s on the map Bryan Mullins’s character started with. And I’ll give you the name of the citadel the manifest mentioned. You are all aware of the place: “A castle of Orange Men to the North run a gladiatorial arena of sorts: there are no prizes and the winners of the games are fed to the Spawn of Shub-Niggurath the Orange Men worship as a god.”
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-02 05:47 UTC): My dead character was Gux, a ST17 IN7 Yellow Man. New character is Orange Julia, WI17 CO16 and Cell Adjustment. No pic yet.
• Beloch Shrike (2014-12-02 06:01 UTC): My new character’s name is Alfred.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 06:05 UTC): The apothecary will pay 200 for the alchemical supplies, though he already has everything he needs to work with these plants.
• Bryan Mullins (2014-12-02 07:34 UTC): Gloss-o-lalia. or Lalia
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-02 08:07 UTC): I DECLARE THAT ORANGE PEOPLE ARE OVERSIZED OOMPA LOOMPAS.
• Bryan Mullins (2014-12-02 08:25 UTC): Lalia kept a whip, she likes the reach as an option. Still, she was obsessed with her battle axe this session.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 14:37 UTC): I think a few people have whips. Anyway, they are probably a few GP each so they aren’t going to have a big effect on how much XP/GP you end up with.
• Gus L (2014-12-02 17:32 UTC): I kept a obsidian sword as a backup weapon.
• Gus L (2014-12-02 17:34 UTC): As a possible rules tweak have you considered weapon traits? To differentiate them? Cleave for axes, armor pen for maces etc? It doesn’t really matter, but is an idea.
• Mike Davison (2014-12-02 19:52 UTC): Are you open to new players Ramanan S ?
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 19:53 UTC): Yeah, though the people we normally play with would have preference. I’m basically just filling in DM duties while Beloch Shrike and Brendan take a break. Bryan Mullins is doing the other week.
• Beloch Shrike (2014-12-02 19:56 UTC): Despite the deluge of players we had last night, attendance on Monday night has been flagging for awhile. We could use a new player or two in the group.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 19:58 UTC): Not too keen about adding too much in terms of additional rules. I don’t mind if people have weird weapons that are mechanically identical, honestly. One of the things I like about OD&D. Though, could steal rules from 5e about that. (Could also just run 5e really, but I thought it’d be good to run something turbo simple to start.)
• Gus L (2014-12-02 20:28 UTC): Yeah totally get that, the question I have though is how does this interact with fumble as weapon breakage?  If a broken weapon is functionally the same as a good one how does the fumble work?
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 22:07 UTC): Yes, good point. I mean, in this game Brendan’s weapon just shattered and that was that. Need to think of clearer rules. Was thinking of just stealing from Dark Sun, where some materials cost more and do less or more damage, and are less or more likely to break. Though doing things based on costs seems to scale poorly, people end up with cash quickly. So could probably have things balance against each other. (Bone is +1 to hit, but more prone to break or something.) Need to think more about money in general. Should maybe switch to XP for CP recovered, and keep costs besides room and board the same GP values. So most stuff is rare and very expensive. Not sure if that actually makes sense or would be playable.
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-02 22:44 UTC): XP for copper ceramic pieces worked for Dark Sun. You do need a nice big price list with plenty of cheaper items on it.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 22:48 UTC): Yeah, that’s what i’m thinking. I need to figure out what the rules we are playing with actually are. Then it’s go time! Hah.
• Bryan Mullins (2014-12-02 22:55 UTC): I have the same feeling, for the Blackmash game…I’d never used LotFP…but it looks simple. I think by the end, I’ll be running some other system because the LotFP is going to get hacked up pretty bad.
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-02 23:23 UTC): We’re all pretty adept at swapping between systems at this point; DMs, please don’t feel a need to cast the rules in stone.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-02 23:25 UTC): Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I think we are all used to playing something vaguely “D&D”. It certainly makes DMing much simpler.
• Gus L (2014-12-03 01:39 UTC): You could do something like the upkeep rules and carousing I’ve been using.  Like basic upkeep is near free and spending more get session only bonuses (rerolls, extra HP, etc) it eats the money of the cautious.
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-03 02:32 UTC): I really like Gus’ Apollyon upkeep rule. It scales nicely with level: the 15gp for +1 HP options are awesome at 1st, not so much at 3rd or 4th.
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-03 02:38 UTC): [a bunch of math splitting all the gold for XP]
• Brendan S (2014-12-03 03:13 UTC): By “stumble upon” I think you mean cleverly find.
• Brendan S (2014-12-03 03:15 UTC): For a rainbow connection there’s a lot of yellow going on. I think we need to buy recruit some followers to up our diversity before we are found out as frauds.
• Brendan S (2014-12-03 03:18 UTC): I think dCarcosa would overwhelm any mundane weapon differentiation so why bother? Also we will soon all have space alien ray guns. Right?
• Brendan S (2014-12-03 03:20 UTC): Thanks for the XP summary Eric Boyd (also: note to self, XP incorporated).
• Eric Boyd (2014-12-03 03:50 UTC): Count’s Dolm, Bone, 2x Yellow, 2x Orange after battle casualties. Also I’ve got Telsa the Yellow Woman and Bolgo the Black Man from the funnel still, and Gus has one more surviving funnel dude I think.
• Gus L (2014-12-03 04:30 UTC): Yeah Mr. Smyth, the greedy radiation poxed white man in carved wooden demon armor.
• Evan Webber (2014-12-09 04:12 UTC): My bone man sorcerer is named The Spangled Inquiry, and I’m wearing that snake armour now, and I didn’t tell anyone about the ray gun though I assume someone would have noticed. And I consumed the brain of the Purple sorcerer and I’m assuming that yields great benefits but you can let me know, Ramanan.
• Evan Webber (2014-12-09 04:15 UTC): But since I’m travelling and need to miss the next session someone can borrow the ray gun.
• Ramanan S (2014-12-09 04:16 UTC): The teleportation ray? Yeah, i’d assumed people would know it was on the guys person when he died. I’ll think about the benefits of eating sorcerer brains.
• Gus L (2014-12-09 04:34 UTC): Have you considered? http://www.lastgaspgrimoire.com/lets-see-whats-been-on-your-mind/

When I was running my Carcosa campaign, I would post session recaps on my blog in the form of hex descriptions written as if they came straight from the book. Each session had additional descriptions for each hex the characters explored, and I also included a random ‘restocking’ table. Three of the entries in the table would present alternative endings to the session the players just played, with the forth being the true ending. This was all very cute, but I also kept traditional notes of what happened so myself and the players could refer back to them later. These were posted to G+, where you can still read them today.

Oh wait.

I’ve been meaning to repost these session reports for a while. Nick downloaded my Carcosa community before G+ imploded, and the export has been sitting on my computer for ages as XML & JSON I never had the time to turn into Markdown. But now computers can do a so-so job programming for you, so I have text that’s pretty close to cleaned up Markdown. I’ll take it.

This is the first session of my Carcosa crossed with He-Man campaign. I ran it for a little over a year, playing every other week, give or take. The rules were OD&D, and we all were figuring out how to run a hex crawl as we went. It was a lot of fun. Perhaps the most fun I’ve had running a game?

This was my first time DM’ing since I was a teenager. I was certainly nervous. Brendan took a break from running Pahvelorn, and I took over the spot every other week. (I think Nick might have been running the other week.) Pahvelorn was certainly a hard act to follow. Brendan’s megadungeon campaign was incredible, and really inspired how I ran this campaign.

Carcosa is a hex crawl, and my expectation was players would wander the wilderness session to session. This happened for the most part, but party didn’t stray too far from their home base. The party were called the Rainbow Connection, a travelling acting troupe. (This was rolled up using my crowdsourced “why are we together” table.) During the first session the players explored a dungeon I created, an abandoned space alien outpost. They released one of the main antagonists of the game, a Bone-Man sorcerer. He would get more and more powerful while they were distracted by the faction they would come to hate the most, the dirtbag Jale Slavers.

You can contrast these notes with the Carcosa style recap I wrote.

Players:

• Gus L 
• Eric Boyd 

Recap:

• The Rainbow Connection, a travelling acting troupe, were attacked and captured by a strange spherical robot while travelling through the wastes of Carcosa. They awake outside an alien outpost surrounded by bodies in various states of decay and mutation. Behind them lays a mysterious alien outpost, in front of them more nondescript wastes.
• They feel woozy and lethargic.  Searching the area they find random knickknacks, but also quickly realize everyone now dead is horribly mutated in some way.
• Lacking proper supplies for an aimless overland trip they venture into the outpost.
• Opening some large garage doors the party comes face to face with their captor. The robot rests in what looks like a bay of some sort, ignoring them. They back away and leave the robot alone. The second door into the base takes them into a small room.
• The base is quiet, and seemingly empty.
• There is still something powering it: the hallways are lit, and random computer screens flash strange inscrutable messages.
• Venturing further into the base the party finds a large open work area that looks to be unused.
• The party quietly explore. A room that looks to be another entry way to the complex contains nice warm furs for everyone to wear, but is otherwise bare.
• The next door the group opens reveals a room full of rock specimens: some look to be quiet valuable. They are all stored behind glass, that feels a bit warm to the touch. The greedy Mr. Smith opens up the glass to get a closer look, and suffers a terrible mutation for his trouble: he now stinks thanks to some newly grown boils on his body.
• The next room the party discovers is filled with crates, but also a strange Spawn—a blue hexapod with a gaping circular maw. They make quick work of it, and end up with a Bazooka of some sorts for their efforts.
• The party avoided one Jale Slime and killed another with fire.
• The party released a seemingly mad Bone Man into the wild. He was apparently imprisoned by the other Bone Men, though the party does not know why. He looked to have been left to die: he smelled terrible and was starving when discovered.
• The Green Man Greenox was killed trying to grab a weapon from the weapons cache. The room filled with poison gas. Mr. Smith quick closed the door to the room, so the rest of the party was safe.
• The alarm that was triggered startled the Bone Men that lived in the basement of this outpost.
• the Illustrious Prince of the Bone is the leader of the Bone Men, who decided to spare the party if they put on a show.
• The party promised to never reveal the location of the outpost, or ever return.
• the Queen of Autumn leads the party from the outpost towards Invak.
• a merchant caravan takes party the rest of the way, grudgingly. The party gives them a wide berth, and follows at a distance.
• They arrive in the town on Invak late at night.

Treasure:

• 6 large furs: they are very warm (you can sell each for 15 GP to the traders currently in town).
• Bazooka: you don’t know how many charges it has, or what it does, but its clear it still works. 

Monsters Killed:

• Spawn of Shub-Niggurath (300 XP)
• Jale Slime (100 XP)

People Entertained:

• 25 Bone Men and their children

I am usually in and out of London to see my brother. In past years I’ve returned to Toronto disappointed to learn if I had planned my trip a little bit better I would have been in the city for Dragonmeet. So this year I planned better: I booked a trip around the weekend Dragonmeet was taking place.

Dragonmeet is one of the big RPG conventions that takes place in London. Smaller and more indie that the bigger UK Game Expo. I was in attendance for the first Dragonmeet at its new home, the totally soulless Excel convention centre. Past attendees told me they missed tight narrow hallways of the hotel in Hammersmith that used to be the conventions home. Breakout in Toronto feels like it might be a bigger convention, but Dragonmeet has a far bigger OSR presence. I got to see all my G+ bros!

Dragonmeet has far more vendors that Breakout. Apparently it was twice as big as past years. They had two big rooms of the Excel centre filled with stands. The vast majority of vendors in attendance were indie. It was nice being able to wander around and see people I know in attendance. I was excited to finally meet the infamous Grey Wizard. Paolo and Eric were sharing space together, the first people I saw when I arrived. Just a little past them was Zach from Soul Muppet Games. I got to see their cowboy game in the flesh, and am now wondering I made the wrong call not grabbing a copy. The book was gigantic and looked cool. Daniel was working the Igloo Tree & Melsonia Arts Council, which was where I also finally met Luke Gearing. We discussed the whacky world of Over/Under.

I was mostly hanging out with my Warhammer World posse of Chris and Patrick, wandering the convention with the two of them, watching people muscle Patrick out of the way to tell Chris Bastionland changed their lives. James Young was there with some of his gamer crew, and we would stop and chat whenever we saw him again. David Black arrived a little after lunch with his wife, and joined us for a short while. I stumbled upon Johan Nohr. Next to him was Chris Bissette! I saw so many people I’m already starting to forget them all. The whole convention was the fun experience of wandering a little bit and seeing someone you know.

Would love to come back for Dragonmeet again, certainly a good reason to find yourself in London. Salute in April is the other convention that seems exciting, and is conveniently in the Spring. Paolo’s LasagnaCon in August is probably the most tempting—if only for the food.

Space Gits an odd duck of a game by the man himself Mike Hutchinson. Mike asks the question, “can you model a game around drunk-ass orks being drunk asses?” I would have to say the answer is a resounding yes: this game is inspired.

Before we get to the game, let’s talk about the rule book. This was another book waiting for me in my brother’s flat. A small A5 hardcover I’ll be able to smuggle back to Canada with whatever I end up grabbing at Dragonmeet. Mike did the layout himself and it’s impressive. The book is neat and tidy, easy to read, but with lots of flourishes that give the impression of drunken ork messiness: crumpled paper backgrounds, edges and borders that are almost always some sort of torn paper effect, etc. The miniatures and their photography by Tyler Russo (Billion Dollar Clown Farm) are fantastic, as one would expect if you’ve seen his YouTube channel. He did a great job converting minis for this game. Till Förster’s illustrations complete the package. Absolutely frenetic art. I’m happy I grabbed the book.

Mike opens the rule book with a discussion about what he was going for with the game. He does something similar with Hobgoblin, though the discussion comes at the back. I suspect he appreciates his audience is likely a non-trivial number of indie gaming nerds who want to know how the sausage gets made. You can read the rest of the rule book with their goals in mind. Perhaps the clearest form of expectation setting. (I am reminded of Apocalypse World and its progeny that love to make the point of the game particularly explicit.)

Players take turn alternatively activating models. Each model can scoot, shoot or boot. The games central conceit is centred around dice moving dexterity. Your orks will build a tower of dice when they activate or take hits. When you move your orks around you must move their dice tower along with them. Knock over their tower, the ork has fallen on their ass and their activation ends. Opponents can steal bottle caps from fallen orks, the games currency and how you score to win. This is the boot action. Bottle caps are scattered over the board when you start the game. Scooting is how you move. It will involve dexterity as well, though more likely luck. You roll your orks movement dice into the play area. The ork will move the number of inches indicated on the dice, directly towards the dice. Movement neatly models the drunken meandering motion of the orks. If you bump into a bottle cap you will pick it up. If you bump into an orc you will fight. Shooting is a similar sort of action. You roll dice into the play area, and your ork will fire their gun in the direction of the dice, but this time the distance their bullets travel are dictated by the weapon they use. The die’s value needs to beat the target’s toughness to score a big hit, otherwise the target takes a weak hit. Hits cause an ork to gain more dice for their dice tower.

After 30 minutes to police show up to break up the party. Players create a siren dice pool that starts with 2 dice. Before players activate they’ll add a dice to the pool and roll all them all. If they roll triples the game ends immediately. (The game will certainly end after 13 activations, as it’s impossible not to roll a triple after that point.) You can pour yourself another beer and play again.

Space Gits is such a unique and unusual game. I can’t think of another skirmish game I own that attempts anything like this. I won’t pretend to have been interested in a dexterity based skirmish game, and likely wouldn’t have picked it up if not for the fact it was made by Mike Hutchinson. Everything he’s produced seems particularly interesting. I’ll need to write about Hobgoblin at some point. A game I’ve actually played! As it stands I was at a pub drinking an ale and reading this book, so this is the review you get.

I mail a lot of books to my brother in the UK. There were a few books waiting for me when I arrived in London this morning. One of those books was Chris McDowall’s latest war-game, MAC ATTACK. This is a 6mm scale sci-fi war-game, essentially Chris’s take on the venerable mech game. These sorts of games are typically quite crunchy, so it’s interesting to see how Chris distills battling mechs to its true essence. I had expected the book to be bigger. It’s a cute little thing. An A5 perfect bound softcover. You can pack this in your backpack without breaking a sweat.

The rules for MAC ATTACK are captured over four pages that open the book. The first introduces some core concepts of the game, in particular motion and heat, two attributes of each mech. (Or should I say MAC? I won’t, but these things are called MACs.) Motion tracks the sort of movement the mech has made: faster movement makes you harder to hit, but also makes it harder for you to hit other mechs. Heat tracks how hot your mech is getting. If it hits 6 you overheat! The second page explains how battlefields and terrain work. The third and forth page are effectively the rules for the whole game. He’s done it again!

A turn in MAC ATTACK is broken up in to 4 phases. An initiative deck is created with each unit being assigned a card. Draw cards to see who gets to activate. During the move phase you’ll move your mechs, and in the process assign them their motion dice. Depending on the sort of movement action they take, they might gain some heat. The movement phase is followed by the attack phase. The initiative deck is shuffled and the players once again draw cards to see which unit will activate and fight. To fight you will roll a number of attack dice dictated by your mech’s weapon. The target number to be rolled on each dice is determined by summing both units motion dice. The roll can be modified if the target is crashed, in cover, or inside a building. A 1 is always a miss, a 6 is always a hit. Hits are assigned to the various modules that make a mech, which will destroy them over the course of the game. Hits that would hit a destroyed module instead cause internal damage to the mech. This feels like a pretty elegant combat system. Once all the mechs have had a chance to activate in the attack phase, you will destroy any mechs who have taken more internal damage than their class. You’ll learn what a mech’s class is by turning the page and reading the rules for making MACs. Dealing with damage in this way means you’ll never have your mechs blown off the board before they have a chance to cause some damage themselves. The turn closes with a cooldown phase. The mechs all lower their heat score based on their mech’s class, modified by whether they have radiator or coolant modules, or are sitting in water. And that is that! The book concludes with pages and pages of advanced rules, variant ways to play, etc, if you want to expand on this simple base.

The next few pages cover building your mechs, buying the weapons and hardware that will make each unique. There are several factions described in the book. The lore for the setting is basically a couple pull quotes per faction, their example units, and the (amazing) art from Amanda Lee Franck. It’s impressive how you can get across within those tight constraints. Like the Doomed, the expectation is you’re kit bashing your mechs, taking Battletech minis and mixing them with junk you have laying about your house. The game also has rules for taking your little epic scale infantry and tanks, perfect if you’ve picked up Legion Imperialis like myself.

Rather than bespoke scenarios, Chris has a scenario generator like War Cry, where you will generate your deployment, victory conditions (for each side) and a twist. You could use the generator, and the advanced rules at the back of the book, to come up with interesting narrative scenarios.

I’ll need to figure out the simplest way to get this game to the table. Maybe I can find some mechs in the used bins at the Sword and Board? Maybe I can use some Tyranids as Kaiju? I’ll have to report back once I’ve played the game. (It does have solo rules, so you don’t even have to play with any other dorks.) This is the first mech game I’ve read that feels compelling enough to play. Most feel way too fussy. I think that’s the mouth feel most people want with these sorts of games, but this feels like it might be a good compromise. You have a lot of granularity still, but seemingly without a lot of the complexity. Will have to play and see if that is how it all pans out.

Zedeck Siew has finished his RPG about the background characters you find in the world of Warhammer 40,000. Your characters live in servitude to five Space Marines aboard the Warmask of Gloriana, where your characters are tasked to ferry them to their next engagement. Chapter Serfs is exactly the sort of RPG I love: to the point and focused. There are just enough words and no more. The setting of this ship is brought to life via a couple sentences afforded to each of the possible backgrounds for your characters, the rules themselves and what they tell you about the world, the leaders of the various factions aboard the ship and the tasks they will ask you to perform, etc. The ship is mapped out for the players to explore. This is all a self contained game, ready to be played. My friend Tim shared his thoughts about it as well for Wargamer.

I finally took my posse of Heretic Legion models and played a game of Trench Crusade with Raff at the Sword and Board. Trench Crusade was created by Mike Franchina, the main artist for the game. The rules were designed by the legend himself, Tuomas Pirinen, of Mordheim fame. There is so much to love about this game, where to begin?

Trench Crusade takes place in an alternate version of earth where rogue Knight Templars open a gate to hell and the the next 800 years or so are all about people fighting demons and that sort of nonsense. The game’s present day is 1914, the start of our WWI, just another day in this worlds never-ending war. Mike Franchina’s artwork helps bring the setting to life, elevating it beyond just another Weird World War sort of game.

The rules for the game are nice and simple. There is a single resolution mechanic: roll 2d6 and try to score above a 7. A 12 is a critical success. The number of dice you roll can be modified based on a model’s profile, equipment, situational rules, etc. In such cases you’ll add additional dice to your dice pool. The rules refer to this as +DICE and -DICE. A +1 DICE and a -1 DICE cancel each other out, so you’ll end up with a pool that contains 0 or more +1 DICE or -1 DICE. This then works like advantage or disadvantage in D&D: you will roll all your dice and take the highest two, or the lowest two, depending on the make up of your dice pool. This is the roll you’ll make to shoot or attack. You’ll also make a roll like this when taking ‘risky actions’, like trying to climb a wall or make a diving charge. If you shooting or melee attack is successful, you will make a similar roll on an injury table. Rolling a 9+ takes a model out of action. A 7-8 will knock the model down. A 2-8 will also cause the model to gain a blood token. These can be spent to modify die roles. The opposing player can spend them to make your unit less effective in combat, or make their own units more effective when targeting that model. All in all it’s a nice and tidy system: it’s fast to play.

There is almost no looking anything up, no complicated tables, etc. There is far less rolling lots of dice to accomplish nothing, a common feature of Mordheim. You don’t have to track wounds, as there is no hit points. Tougher units will have an armour score that reduces the results of the injury die, making them more likely to survive. The blood tokens act a little like wound markers, as a unit with blood tokens will be easier to kill in subsequent attacks, but it’s dynamic and not a sure thing. In our game we I was constantly spending the tokens I had inflicted on Raff’s elite demon monsters to make them less effective in combat, trying hard to keep my little heretic troopers alive. I also managed to get some lucky rolls, resulting in one of troopers almost killing Raff’s super-demon. That model is Tough, so when it would be taken out of action the first time it’s simply knocked down. It got back up and demolished that little trooper on its next turn.

We played a one-shot, but as soon as it was done I wanted to start a campaign. The rules look very similar to Mordheim. The models in your warband can get injured, explore, level up, buy new equipment, etc. I’ll need to dig into all of that later. The book also has a healthy set of scenarios that look quite good. The default assumption is players will play 12 games in a sort of escalation league, the last game being the final free for all conclusion to the campaign. You start the campaign with a 700 ducats spending limit, and a limit of 10 models on your team. You end the campaign with a limit of 1800 and 22 models. You could field quite the platoon.

The rules are available online for free—fantastic. The digital rule book takes advantage of the format, with hyperlinks to help you navigate through the document with ease. There is way finding in the left side margin of each page, to help orient your place in the book, but which also serve as hyperlink navigation through the book. The layout and design is lovely. The rules are well written and clear. There is a simple presentation of the rules that takes up about 8 pages and explains the whole game. This is followed up by a longer presentation of the rules which goes into a little more detail, providing additional clarity and examples. The simple rules are likely all you’ll need to read to play if you’re familiar with war-games, or need to refresh yourself on how the game works. Seeing a rulebook like this from a small indie company makes Games Workshop’s “we only sell you overpriced hardcover books that are out of date when you buy them” stance extra annoying.

I currently have enough models to do about 800 points. Evan kitbashed a Commando for me, which I’ll need to prime and paint. I want to try and kitbash more troops as well. Get to a point I could field a bigger posse for a bigger game.

I’m hopefully we will start a campaign in the city, and I can experience the fuller game. This game certainly is meant to be experienced as a long running campaign. That said, as it stands the rules work well for a fast standalone game. This is a solid skirmish game. Well worth checking out. I mean, it’s free!

I jokingly described the game to friends as follows: [Over/Under] was basically a giant free form LARP, where everyone was gay for each other. And then deep in the background … a war-game—way, way deep. Obviously there was lots going on, but it’s wild just how much the game seems to have gotten away from its creator’s original vision. I picture myself as the player Sam likely imagined: I would check in a few minutes a day; vote when I needed to vote on the bosses initiatives; post random in-game messages here and there. There wasn’t really anything to do if you weren’t a boss. The players that dominated the game went a completly different route. They filled the giant void left by Sam with so much stuff. There were gambling dens, bars, tabloids, cage fights, new unofficial factions, Ponzi schemes … and lots and lots of doomed romance. The mod announcements as the game progressed were mostly about the doomed romance.

It’s kind of incredible this game worked at all. Lots of cooperation from lots of people to essentially not break Kayfabe. Early in the game someone set one of the bars on fire. One of the few times I was around to help with something happening in the game. Except, you couldn’t actually set a bar on fire in the game, restrain or injure another player, etc. Everyone just had to agree, this is what’s happening, let’s see how it all plays out.

Despite morphing into this free-form RPG LARP thing, it does feel like there is something essentially OSR about this whole affair: the void left by the rules was the game. I am curious if the game would have worked if Sam had tried to provide mechanical incentives for the plebeians on the side-lines, versus just the bosses. I don’t think you get the magic of this game without the rules void. Is Over/Under the best argument for System Doesn’t Matter™? Someone else can make that case!

My friends were over to kitbash minis and play Warcry to celebrate our friend Richard’s birthday. There was a small posse of us, so Richard came up with a simple and ingenious way to play mutli-player co-op Warcry that matches the random spirit of the game. We wanted to play a 3 vs 3 game. Each of us took our warbands and split them up into the Dagger, Hammer, Shield groups as usual. We then randomly assigned each group to each player, so each player would bring one of the groups for their team. (For a 2 vs 2 game, you could just one player from each team bring two of their groups, rather than one.) In our game the ways things shook out ended up giving a slight advantage to our opponents, they had a few more points than us, but I don’t think it skewed things thast much. You could grant the underdog team bonus wild dice based on the point differential, though how many is left as an exercise for the reader. Since by the rules you must make your groups with as even a split of minis as possible, and with this format you don’t know which group you’ll take, it likely will lead to fairly even splits anyway. Playing this way means you don’t need to mess with any other rules or the balance of the game. Each team had about 1000 points of minis, would roll initiative dice for their team as usual, etc.

This is what some people might call fake news.

Stuff coming out of the Forge movement either interested me or repelled me. But at least it was novel! Polaris might not have landed for me but Dust Devils sure as shit did. Dogs in the Vineyard was great and Carolina Death Crawl was upsetting. And the new ideas just kept coming. A solid decade-plus of envelope-pushing. … I can’t tell you the last truly new, engaging idea that hit me out of game design. … Looking forward at the next 20ish years of play and it’s all gonna be pretty much the same? Not a great feeling.

Maybe it’s cliche that OSR fans aren’t that obsessed with rulesets, but I’m not that obsessed with rulesets. I have so many variations of D&D, and will honestly buy more before I die. I like whisky, and have so many different bottles in my pantry. They are all unique, interesting in their own ways, enjoyable to drink. I don’t need stuff to be wildly different. I enjoy subtle refinement. But Paul’s point is a good one: where are people doing wildly different stuff right now? Jay Dragon is one person that comes to mind. Who are the other people trying to do something novel?

The “you don’t need to play to review” folks are just wrong if you want anything deeper.

I don’t think Paul is wrong here, you will certainly be able to tell a more complete story about a game or adventure after you’ve run it. I make more of an effort now to play the games I write about before I write about them, but the net result of doing that is I write less reviews. Some games and adventures do benefit from my having sat down and played them. My Night Witches review after having played the game is far better than the one I wrote before playing. But what I wrote about Another Bug Hunt before I played it isn’t so far off from how I felt after I played it. And I still haven’t gone back to write about Another Bug Hunt. I try and write when I have the energy and thoughts to write, not when I think what I’ll produce is perfect. This is a blog, not A Survey of Game and Adventure Design, 2020-2025 from MIT Press. There is a lot of good criticism and writing of games that comes from solely from people reading things carefully and thinking deeply.

If your hit points drop below or are equal to zero make a Save vs. Death Ray and Poison: success indicates your character is merely unconscious, completely incapacitated until they can get a full week of rest; failure indicates your character is oh-so dead. If you roll a natural 20 on your saving throw roll, your character not only survives, but is invigorated by his near death. In this case your character re-rolls their HP for the session—the “hulkamaniac” rule.

This is easily generalized for any system with saves and hit points. Mothership and DCC RPG have similar rules for death and dying.

I normally re-roll hit points per session, something I picked up from Brendan. (I would say this is an atypical reading of how OD&D explains hit dice, but one I am a fan of—poor rolls for your HP seem less punishing. Carcosa did something similar and more bananas with HP/HD as well for that matter, but I ignored those rules.) If this isn’t how you play, I would return people who roll a natural 20 on their save back to the game with their max HP.

If you want to also include the possibility of permanent scars and dismemberment I would make a table keyed on how much you made your death save by. But I don’t usually play with those sorts of tables. I prefer the simplicity of you’re dead or you’re not.

Sucks Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) turned out to be such a dick.

Wait, what? The year zooms by and I’m always caught on the back foot. Even with the warning I didn’t really have time to get any of my thoughts down until … well right now. This post wasn’t written before the Ennies began, it will show up some time in the middle of their show. Oh well. I don’t really care about what the Ennies have to say one way or the other, and you shouldn’t either, but I won’t fault someone for loving the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry. Someone had to fill that void, why not ENworld? So much voting!

At the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in gaming there is only one voter: me! There is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2024. I had to think a little bit hard about these rules this year, as my copies of Swyvers and Gardens of Ynn arrived safe and sound at my brother’s door in the UK. I’ll see those books in a couple weeks, and so they will be in the running next year. Till then …

Best Game: Break!! by Reynaldo Madriñan and Carlo Tartaglia

I waited, along with many friends, many years for this book. And then it finally arrived. I wasn’t always sure it would. But Rey and Carlo took their time and made something special. In the time between me first seeing Rey and GreyWiz working on Break!! to its eventual release it became a big chonky game. It’s not really the sort of game I play anymore. Character creation is 200 pages of this book! Come on, man. Of course, that also doubles as a lot of world building. Break!! has such an imaginative setting, a natural extension of Reynaldo’s Baroviania game. Reading the book it draws you it. Drew me in. I am prepping an inevitable game. Break!! feels well suited to eat 5Es lunch. The character creation is so detailed, there are lots of options and abilities and all that. Lots of ways to customize characters and gear to your liking. The vibes for the game are so perfect. Kitchen sink fantasy that feels very much its own. Carlo’s art is incredible. I would watch the Break!! Saturday morning cartoon. Perhaps one day we will get one.

Best Setting: Gackling Moon by Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp

Some motherfucking OSR nonsense from the man himself Patrick Stuart. Gackling Moon began its life on Patrick’s blog. For those not familiar, the book describes the Moonlands, a bizarre place for adventure. The book features art by Tom Kemp and feels like you are reading an in world artifact you would pick up at a museum exhibit about the region. This feels like Patrick’s take on the 2e Gazetteer as literary fiction. In many ways this is probably stretching the limits of what counts as a gaming book. There is so much creativity jammed into Gackling Moon, but actually turning that into an adventure to play is left as an exercise for the reader. Maps, stats, everything is absent. That the book features random tables is really the only explicit nod to gaming. But I disagree with those who would argue this isn’t a gaming book: everything was clearly written with an eye to how it would play on a table. This approach feels like less of a stretch—a gazetteer for a fantasy world—than the stat-less monster manual that was Fire on the Velvet Horizon. (That book is amazing, by the way.) There is clear precedent for this style of fiction. Tom Kemp’s art is such a perfect match for the book, and contributes to the feeling this is the companion book to some gallery or museum exhibit. Gackling Moon is maximally creative. Often quite funny. More people should check it out.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2024: The Mothership Boxed Set by Sean McCoy & Friends.

A weird pick: Mothership has already won this coveted spot, but this boxed set is actually really fucking good. The game has matured in that time, lots of tweaks here and there. I’m less interested in those changes and more interested in what I would consider the centrepiece of this boxed set, it’s Warden’s Manual. I love this book! Mothership’s Warden’s Manual is exactly what I want from a “DMG”: practical concrete advice on getting the game you bought to the table. How do you prep? What do you do in your first session? Etc. It’s all the juice. This boxed set made me want to run the game again. And I did! The box conveniently includes an adventure, Another Bug Hunt, which I enjoyed running for my friends. Mothership has grown into a real behemoth since I first wrote about it. This game is probably someone’s first RPG, the Kickstarter raised so much money and had so many backers. What a lucky person.

Honourable Mentions

I say this every year, but this year was a particularly competitive one. We had another beautiful boxed set with Wulfwald by Lee Reynoldson, Owe My Soul to the Company Store by Luther Gutekunst & R. Devlin, Knave 2e by Ben Milton & Peter Mullen, the nazi killing romp that is EAT THE RIECH by Grant Howitt & Will Kirkby and my new favourite rank & flank war-game, Hobgoblin by Mike Hutchinson. I am a big fan of the first entrants to Troika 1:5 series, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse by Andrew Walter and The Hand of God by Mike Knee and Andrew Walter. I’m really looking forward to the adventures to follow.

The Kickstarter for Wandering Blades is coming to a close. Wandering Blades is a new game from Daniel Kwan—who is notable for Ross Rifles, the Asians Represent Podcast, and living down the road from me. It’s an OSR game that swaps out your typical medieval-fantasy out for some wuxia vibes.

I wrote about Daniel’s previous game Ross Rifle’s back when I played it during BreakoutCon. The game is an interesting (and educational!) Powered by the Apocalypse game about the First World War. Daniel has also done a lot of freelance work, mostly in the PbtA or 5e space. Wandering Blades is interesting because you can see him bring those influences and experiences to the design of an OSR game. It’s interesting to see ouroboros of influences at play. Daniel mentions being influenced by games I would consider to have borrowed or been inspired by PbtA games. It’s all a bit of a circle.

The game has all the trappings of a D&D-like: attributes, hit points, character classes, levels, etc. There are some different names, but if you have played anything vaguely D&D-ish you’ll figure it out. The game has two core related mechanics: checks and saves. You try and beat a difficulty score on a d20 when making a check or a save. A save is reactive, you roll it to avoid a bad outcome. Daniel suggests some sample DCs so you don’t have to think too hard about setting them, the main thing I dislike about DCs. Where the game really branches out is when it comes to combat.

A lot of OSR games focus on problem solving. You will often hear this maxim that combat is a failure state. The rules for many OSR games often often produce grotty nobodies trying to survive long enough to become the sorts of powerful heroes you read about it books. (But I ask you, what campaign ever lasts that long!) Wandering Blades is trying to capture the mood of a very different sort of genre. The characters aren’t usually grotty nobodies, they are capable bad-asses. They might get hurt or die, but they are certainly taking a lot of people with them if that’s the case. The game does a lot of work mechanically to try and capture what makes a fight in those sorts of stories feel dynamic and interesting. This part of the game reminds me of 4th or 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, where the designers tried to go further than “roll a d6 for damage”.

The two core character classes in the game are Youxia (wandering hero) and the Outlaw. The Youxia belongs to a martial arts sect, and has access to a variety of martial arts techniques to use in combat. Daniel describes a few different techniques, each with a very different mood. Outlaws gain skills as they level, but also have access to a small set of combat techniques. Players manage an additional resource, Qi Points, to perform their combat techniques. There are actions and reactions you can perform on your turn in combat. You might parry a blow, or counter attack if an enemy misses you. There is a lot more detail to the rules compared to a lot of OSR games I typically play. I was reminded a lot of Break!!, which also feels influenced by 5e and more “trad” games.

Wandering Blades feels like a good bridge game, something that you could probably use to pull in players who prefer games like D&D 5e. The characters you create have a bit more detail and mechanical weight to them. The rule set isn’t too far off from the core of D&D. The vibes aren’t particularly dark and grotty. I suspect the game won’t be a big leap for most 5e fans. If you’re an OSR fan that gets annoyed at games that aren’t doing any heavy lifting when it comes to mechanics and design, you may enjoy what Daniel has tried to do.

You have 24 hours (after I post this) to go back the thing. Go do it! Gotta support Canadian content.

I finally managed to play a game of Xenos Rampant—two games in fact, it proved to be quick and easy to play. Xenos Rampant is written by Daniel Mersey and Richard Cowen, a wargame that takes Mersey’s Lion Rampant and brings it into the world of science fiction.

Xenos Rampant is a minis agnostic platoon sized game. A ‘standard’ game will probably be 4-6 units, but there is a lot of latitude. You will build your units from some core archetypes and a lot of customization. You can make fairly flavourful approximations of the sorts of units you would field in 40K. Units are typically 5 strength points, with each strength point typically referring to a single model in the unit. But the game lets you model things in a mix of ways, so a 5 strength point unit might be 5 Sisters of Battle, or a single Canoness who would track her strength points with a dice. One issue to me was that it’s easy for everything to feel a bit too similar. I ran Sisters of Battle and Evan, my wargaming compatriot, ran his weird kit-bashed AdMech / Imperial Guard minis. I built my Sisters Repentia, the chainsword wielding maniacs of the Sisters of Battle, as Berserk Infantry, with High Powered Blades, *Unarmed (no guns), and Fanatical Discipline as customizations of that unit type. There are lots of 40K units that might also be modelled exactly like this, even if you’d like them to feel more distinct. I imagine this game would work nicely as an alternative ruleset to the Horus Heresy, with Space Marines fighting Space Marines.

The game is very easy to play. Players take turns moving all their units, with a catch: you roll to activate units, and keep activating units till you fail or have activated them all. When that happens your opponent till take their turn, going through the same process. (This is similar to one of the greatest games ever, A Song of Blades and Heroes.) There are three actions a unit can take: Move, Shoot, or Attack (move into combat). In Xenos Rampant each unit has one action they can do without having to roll. After playing 2 games of Xenos Rampant I’m not sure I like the rule, the extra reliability felt overly impactful in our admittedly small sample size of games.

There is only one dice roll to resolve combat, whether you are shooting or fighting up close. You roll 10d6 if you’re at full strength, 5d6 if you’re less than half, and need to beat a target number. You need a number of successes equal the opposing units armour score to remove a strength point. There is no additional rolling or faffing about. A simple example: rolling 10 dice and getting 7 successes into a unit with 3 armour would remove 2 models (if that’s how you’re tracking strength points), the last success having no effect. Like Warcry and other games with simple resolution systems, this makes the game play super quick.

We didn’t dig into all the extra rules and advice for running the game in various settings. They have sample rules and advice for running games like Weird World War, Star Trek, etc. Between these extra rules and all the other customization, it really does feel like you could express any game or setting you wanted within this generic ruleset.

If I have one criticism it’s that the rules writing and organization of the rule book isn’t as clear or concise as I think it could be. The rule set turned out to be so simple and elegant, but I had put off playing for so long because I thought the game would be more fussy than it turned out to be. (By a long shot!) Rules sometimes don’t live where you would expect them to. The rules summary at the back of the book is missing details you would want. I plan to write up my own cheat sheet. (Maybe the act of doing so will humble me.)

Xenos Rampant is great. Evan mentioned that the Goonhammer review was so positive he didn’t think the game could live up to its hype, and yet it did! A game we will definitely return to. And yet, there is still something compelling about all that jank in actual 40K. A topic for another day.

Ben is interested in getting people blogging about Mothership. People are good, so of course it wasn’t long before someone shared something: Hazards In Space! Adapting the Hazard Die For Mothership. Funny enough, this is something I had also done when running Gradient Descent a few years ago, and probably should have carried forward when I was running Another Bug Hunt.

Mothership’s play loop is pretty free-form and loose, like a lot of OSR games: describe a situation and have a conversation with your players till the situation is resolved. This loop is illustrated on page 27-28 of the Warden Manual in a neat and tidy spread. I like to run games this way as well, but I find left to my own devices my games drift towards some all vibes no rules FKR-ish nonsense.¹ Forcing some structure on myself is helpful.

When I ran Gradient Descent using 0e Mothership, and Another Bug Hunt using the current rules, I never felt like I was really taking advantage of the stress and panic system. I don’t call for rolls that much, so there is less chance for people to gain stress through failure. I also don’t have a good habit for just doling stress out because it makes fictional sense.² Folding gaining stress into the act of exploration seems like a reasonable approach for play. Here is a small update to my earlier attempt at moving the Hazard Die to Mothership:

Hazard Die

When exploring a dangerous environment roll a d10 each time the players perform a notable action (i.e. move between locations, carefully search a space, attempt to hack a computer, etc).

1: Encounter
2-4: Environment
5-6: Exhaustion
7-8: Expiration
9-10: Easement

Encounter: roll on a random encounter table. Gain 1 stress.
Environment: something about the players immediate surroundings change: lights go out, gravity fails, doors lock, etc. Perhaps there are hints of a future encounter. Gain 1 stress.
Exhaustion: the characters are hungry or fatigued. They must rest or gain 1 stress.
Expiration: batteries die, oxygen runs dangerously low, etc. Easement: a moment of calm, the players may lose 1 stress, but never reducing it below the value they started the session with.

Mothership has real Alien vibes. In a horror games it feels like the general mood should always be “it’s quiet, too quiet.” Mothership’s typical 10% chance of a random encounter seems inline with that, so I left it alone. I merged what Brendan calls Percept & Locality into a single entry named Environment. I think the general intention is the same: hints at future badness. The big change from my previous table is that Encounter and Environment results tick up a players stress. As players explore a location they will slowly accrue stress.

The other results are unchanged from my previous iteration. Exhaustion forces players to pause unless they accept 1 stress. This result is only meaningful if strict time records are being kept. In Another Bug Hunt infected characters will eventually turn into bugs after enough time has passed: make sure you track that shit! If characters are being chased, this is another result that will likely result in them gaining stress as they can’t stop to chill out. In Mothership you don’t have torches, but there are lots of electronics that have a chance to break down. Expiration is the place for those failures to happen. Since we are doling out stress I thought there should be a chance for players to lose some of the exploration based stress they have earned.

Is this good? I’d have to play and see. With these sorts of rules you want to get the mouth feel just right. Maybe a violent encounter should result in d5 stress. Maybe this is way too much stress and your characters become broken husks without also tweaking the stress relief rules. I will report back.

I reject the premise of his query: the OSR is and always has been experimental! That’s the whole point. The “R” stands for Renaissance. Of course I complained, like a maniac, and Thomas followed up his thinking on the matter:

The term OSR has a kind of nostalgic or backwards-looking bent to it. While that never applied to all individuals, it applied to some/enough. I think it’s natural for folks who break from that orientation to use different terms.

I reject that premise even more! To quote myself: ”The OSR is a gaming movement focused on player agency, problem solving, and simple open-ended rule sets inspired by old editions of D&D and games from that period of time.”

I agree that the OSR began with retroclones and people trying to reproduce the original D&D games, but that’s certainly the least interesting part of the OSR at this point.¹ People quickly moved on from Retroclones. LotFP is 15 years old. DCC RPG is over a decade old. Troika is going to celebrate its 10th birthday this year. All games directly inspired by something older, pushed in new directions.

Old School Hack came out at the same time as LotFP. If it came out today people would call it “Post-OSR”, but it was released into the maelstrom because the OSR has always been more than just retroclones. Many of the replies to Thomas’s inquiry pointed him to Into the Odd, an important and influential game. Also one that’s a decade old and came out of the OSR scene on G+. Maze Rats is another example of an old influential OSR game that moves well past the world of 3D6 down the line. These games would go on to inspire games like the superlative Mausritter.

OSR modules have almost always been fresh and interesting, where a lot of the excitement in the scene has lived. Deep Carbon Observatory is over a decade old now. Brilliant writing, art, and fun to play! LotFP’s modules (boo, hiss, I know) didn’t attempt to ape TSR trade dress or vibes: they charted their own unique course. Think about how good Scenic Dunnsmouth is! On the flipside, DCC RPG modules prove you can do what TSR was doing, but better in every single way. In the Woods is ten years old now and remains one of the most beautiful games/adventures to come out of the OSR. Another example of something people would call Post-OSR if it came out today.

Reynaldo and Grey Wizard worked on Break!! for what must be a decade. A game that came out of the OSR scene, and certainly has OSR sensibilities, but feels innovative and fresh. Luke Gearing’s Swyvers is another game in this same vein. Its system feels decidedly retro, but somehow the whole game feels new—I guess because it is.

This is a lot of words to not actually answer Thomas’s question about “what’s new” and I have to apologize for that. I feel irrationally compelled to correct people when I see them parrot a definition of the OSR that I could imagine coming from the lips of the most reprobate members of this scene. Probably because it erases me, my friends, and our experience. The OSR didn’t begin and end with AD&D.

I met up with Emiel and Ava shortly after they arrived in Toronto for Breakout Con. I love to see my D&D friends in real life: that’s what it’s all about. (Our meetup also included Jon, the Retired Adventurer, who lives so close to me it’s embarrassing I only see him when Ava is in town.) I managed to see them a few times before they left, ending my convention crashing a game Ava ran of The Electrum Archive. We played through an adventure that was intended to be part of the second zine, but which was cut for space—the zine was already massive. The adventure was a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to its release. In The Electrum Archive the typical dungeons are the crashed spaceships of an ancient people. Our characters were sent to find a missing posse of soldiers who were exploring one such ship. We would discover they had all been murdered like something out of Alien. The adventure included: someone gaining telepathy; the rest of the party not clueing into how that happened, and instead gaining random crap mutations; a giant mech suit that ended the session just hulk smashing stuff; lots of sphincters; blood, guts and gore. So, all the good stuff.

Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:

The power station on the moon Bodhisattva 2a is failing; without it, the inhabitants of Siddhartha’s Peace, the small Neo-Buddhist colony established there, will freeze to death. Abbot Benz-Shiroyuki requests aid. Print a new power converter at the Manufactory and as payment, receive salvage rights to the decommissioned Terraforming Tower at the top of the moon’s space elevator.

In his briefing, the abbot neglects to mention the tower’s AI has come to believe itself a manifestation of the deity Bishamonten. Pushed by Straylight LLC and the dire conditions in Siddhartha’s Peace, the AI is set on taking extreme measures to protect the colony, even if it requires feeding it to the flames of revolution.

I recall being sorely tempted by this book’s Kickstarter, the cover image is so bold and eye-catching. As usual, shipping was too expensive so I moved on with my life. This weekend I attended Breakout Con, where I saw the zine for sale in real life. Beautiful. When I went to pay, the lady working the stall said, “no pressure, but this also comes in a fancy box.” There is no world where I don’t buy the box.

The first party modules for Mothership are excellent and provide a strong template to follow when it comes to organizing your ideas for an adventure. Nirvana on Fire takes those lessons to heart. The module opens with a lot of information to help orient the GM to what’s going on in the scenario. The opening spread is a timeline of how the the colony on Bodhisattva 2a came to exist, how its problems have manifested. The following spread explains how you might use the module. David tells you how you could kick things off, and what “win” conditions might be. This is followed by an overview of the factions at play and the colony itself.

The graphic design of this module is top tier stuff: they should have put Eric Hill’s name on the cover. I didn’t recognize Hill’s name at first, but he’s the fellow that did the layout for Hull Breach. Of course this thing is going to look hot. Jéromê Berthier art is bold. Lots of reds and blacks. Thick lines. Together the pair take the book to another level.

There are two main adventuring sites in the initial version of this adventure. The first is the colony, Siddhartha’s Peace. It’s described in a single spread, with short descriptions for each of its 10 locations. The GM will roll on a corresponding random table as players move from location to location, which often make the locations a more dynamic. There is a revolution fomenting in the town. Some of the townspeople have become adherents of the AI Bishmamoten. A few encounters involve this tension. The last encounter on the table is “the revolution begins …”.

The “dungeon” in this module is a tower that sits atop the colony’s space elevator, the centre of their terraforming activities until the AI took over. This is 10 rooms, described over two spreads. I would have preferred if the map of the tower was less abstract: it is a simple flow chart, basically. Using the illustration of the exterior of the tower by Jéromê will help you picture the space in your head. As before, a random table provides encounters and colour as players move from location to location. The last encounter on this table is the sole monster that stalks the halls of the terraforming tower, the Spear of Bishmamonten. I was reminded of The God That Crawls or Deep Carbon Observatory, other adventures with a singular powerful monster hunting the party.

Two additional adventuring locations are included in this extended edition. They add more depth to the module. The shorter of two is an addition to the colony, written by Roy Leahy. Players can explore an abandoned Starlight facility, where the company was spying on the citizens and conducting creepy experiments. This location has a nice map. Once again the encounters table elevates the quiet space into something dynamic. The other adventuring location is Facility D-U8K81, written by Noora Masyk. This location reminded me of some of the first party adventures: descriptions are longer, keyed with bullet points. Unlike the other adventuring sites in this module, all the “monsters” to be encountered are described within the location keys. (In this adventure the random encounters table adds some colour.) Both adventuring sites are nice additions to what was already a solid module.

Nirvana on Fire has an amazing cover, and it’s honestly what got me to buy the book. But, contrary to popular belief, you usually can judge a book by its cover. This book is great: I would love to get it to the table. The boxed set comes with a pad of themed character sheets, a GM screen, some patches, and dice. I have zero regrets with my purchase, it’s honestly amazing, but it’s very decadent and certainly unnecessary. That said, these dice are great.

I picked up Constant Downpour Remastered when I spotted it for sale over on Ratti Incantatti¹. Constant Downpour is a survival hex-crawl for Mothership. The players crash land on Venus 3 during a routine mission. Unbeknownst to them someone had planned this crash as a hit. The players need to make it off the planet, before they go crazy or get beaten to death by the Venusians. The adventure was written by Marco Serano, and is inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story The Long Rain. David Simons is the main artist for the adventure.

There is a lot to love about this adventure. Exploring the wilderness is taxing. Marco links hex exploration to the Mothership rules for stress, to help capture the unrelenting nature of the rain, lack of sunlight, etc. There is a posse of mercenaries who crashed before the players, who will pursue them if they drag their feet. Giant Venusians who will try and kill them for being interlopers on their planet. There is the company the players are working for, who have secretly facilitated the crash, and a cabal within the company trying to bring it down from the inside. There are 17 keyed hexes, and some small dungeons. There is a lot happening on the world to draw the players in. The vibes are great.

There are clear procedures for play, something that if often lacking when it comes to running hex crawls. Characters gain stress for every two hexes they move through, forcing engagement with the panic system of Mothership. I like how simple and unrelenting the rules are. I had similar thoughts after I finished running Gradient Descent. There are additional procedures for crossing rivers, adding more depth to the activity.

There are four main factions. Potamo Major are the group that hired the party, and organized the crash. Poto Minor is a rebel group operating with Potamo Major trying to take them down. Crew 612 are another group sent to die on Venus 3—they are effectively a rival adventuring party. Finally there are the Venusians, the group indigenous to the planet. Each faction is detailed briefly, with key locations listed and the groups recent successes. There are descriptions of important NPCs following these descriptions. The Venusians or Crew 612 can be used to force the players into action when they get complacent or overly cautious.

There are 91 hexes in this adventure that have no descriptions. The GM will generate the descriptions for these hexes by rolling on random tables. For a jungle hex you roll a d10 to determine the type of jungle setting the players have encountered (dense foliage, natural walkways, complete darkness), and then another d10 for a random description of that location. There are 24 entries between those three tables. There are two d10 tables for descriptions of clearings, with 20 entries between them. Both types of wilderness have sounds and smells tables to add to their descriptions. Four rolls on various tables gives me: “A lattice of thick vines loop in the air. The vines look fleshier and bumpier than vines previously seen. The slap of large leaves echo in the thick sulfurous air. The vines ahead cross in near perfect plus signs.” I love these vibes, but this is more rolling than I want to do to generate what is effectively an empty hex.²

These tables could simply be used as inspiration, forgetting about all the rolling. Random tables are often used to communicate the nature of the world, even if you might only use one entry from the table in a game. Such tables encourages an open-ended view of the game world: there is nothing canonical. A prevalence of random tables is often a defining characteristic of OSR games and adventures. I worry people feel the need to include them where they don’t make much sense, or should be designed in a different way.³

One of the themes of the module is this idea of repetition, getting lost in the sameness of the world. In that way you could argue this approach to describing the wilderness reinforces that aspect of the adventure. If you roll up these descriptions you’ll see traces of what has come before. In Marco’s own words, “Weaponizing deja vu and melding grays work to reinforce the feeling of becoming lost to the environment.”

Travelling through these hexes in this game serves a purpose: they are a tax. Players gain stress as they move from hex to hex, and will always face an encounter. Marco has done a great job of using the mechanics of Mothership to feed into how the adventure works. There is always some amount of tension coming from each move through the wilderness the players make.

Marco’s suggestion for how to use these randomly generated hexes in play is also poor advice in my opinion:

When describing what is in front of players, it is beneficial to give two distinct descriptions. Example:

Warden: You finally see light as you break out of the complete darkness. Ahead is a clearing. The grass stands upright unaffected by the wind. It creates a mathematical curve .To the left the jungle continues and you see thousands of white orbs dangle from the branch extremities. Suddenly, the fruits fall, exploding on impact, hurling pebble sized seeds across the jungle floor. Which direction do you want to go?

It doesn’t actually matter which way you go! These are two random descriptions, and it’s likely you’ll move into a new hex with two random descriptions. Marco does a great job of placing clues, in-game maps, and geographic features throughout this module that will help the players put some thought into where they will explore in the game. This will make wandering the wilderness more meaningful. The advice given above undercuts the work he’s done.

If running this module I would generate all the hex descriptions and their encounters up front. I think seeing the encounters fixed in place might help create more connections between hexes. Where the players choose to go will be informed by what they’ve learned of the world so far. There is no need to roll two descriptions per hex. Marco has also included a lot of digital material that will help ease running a game. Every illustration is included by itself, making it easy to share with players as they encounter a Venusian Tank or a giant man-eating plant. There are six player facing ‘fog of war’ maps, and they can also be given to the players as the discover them through play. (By reaching certain locations or finding actual maps in the game.) There are even some recording you can play for your players, to make your game a little bit more immersive.

On the whole Constant Downpour Remastered is a solid adventure, and my gripes are minor compared to everything the adventure brings to the table. Constant Downpour takes some big swings. I didn’t even comment on the weird page numbering scheme or how cool the keyed hexes are! As I said at the start, there is a lot to love.

It is easy to feel like a topic has already been discussed, that it’s common knowledge. But common to who? My ideas about gaming are informed by the books and blogs I have read, the games I’ve played, and the friends I have made along the way. I talked to people on Google+ a long time ago and left with a sense of what I want from RPGs. There are lots of new blogs that are clearly great, but that I don’t find that interesting because they feel like they talk about topics I’m done with. But so what! Not everything needs to be for everyone. There is always someone new who will come along and not know what’s up. Maybe they find some obscure Goblin Punch post from a decade ago. More likely they read stuff being shared right now.

Clayton won the Bloggies with his post on puzzle monsters. He dubbed this idea the 1HP monster, riffing off an older forum post from stras. This is one of my favourite parts about an active blog scene. People taking ideas and running with them, learning from one and other. Clayton’s post also introduces stras’s decade old post to a new generation of gamers.

Reading the Elusive Shift left me with a strong sense that we are re-learning all the lessons of the 70s when it comes to RPGs. People have done this all before, and will do it all again. That’s part of the fun of this hobby. Maybe you’ll discover that playing to find out what happens is what it’s all about, and share that with your friends. I’m sure the Bakers would be happy for you.

This blog is full of all sorts of posts of varying quality, and of varying interest to other people. I have a blog post about converting all the to-hit and AC scores in OD&D from descending to ascending AC, not because I thought it was revelatory, but because I didn’t want to have to work it out again. Sharing is caring, but the post was for me. There are lots of reasons to put stuff online. Perhaps the best is writing for yourself.

Download the Bloggie 2024 OPML file

There is an expanded edition of Skorne, which came out some time ago, but I only noticed recently. Skorne is a very simple OSR/FKR game, available as a PDF, which I printed out like a booklet. Skorne was created by Samuel James, who writes the blog Dreaming Dragonslayer. I have discussed Skorne on the blog, in passing, some time ago. The game deserves more than a passing glance.

Skorne looks to take inspiration from games like Into the Odd and Maze Rats. Skorne is a simple rule set tied to a simple campaign conceit. You are a band of renegades, there are evil tyrants ruling the world, led by the devil prince Skorne. The game begins with the player characters awakening in the ruins of a village destroyed by a warband of Skorne. Like Mork Borg there is a bit of a ticking clock, where the world marches towards ruin as time passes. Classic. If only Final Fantasy games still managed to keep things so tight.

The rules for the game fit on a handful of pages, but ostensibly boil down to opposed 2d6 rolls. Characters have 3 stats: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower. Creating a character will take moments. You roll for your attribute bonuses, and roll for a starting set of equipment, attributes (like a missing eye) or magic spells. Characters have 10 inventory slots. Some situations may cause a player’s character to be fatigued. Like Mausritter, this is tracked by consuming an inventory slot. When a character has ten points of fatigue they die.

Borrowing from Into the Odd, there is no dice rolling to hit in combat damage. Players start the game with 3 HP, each hit doing one point of damage. If players or enemies have a good position, for whatever reason, they may be able to do more hits of damage, or negate some incoming damage. When a character reaches zero hit points they must make a Strength save to avoid death. The combat rules reminded me of one of my favourites, [Pits and Peril][pp], which is also minimal, and expects a lot of adjudication to come from “the fiction”. In that game, as with this one, you will jockey for position and advantage to succeed in combat.¹

The later half of the book is random tables and advice for running the game. Good random tables help sign post what a game is about, and Skorne has good random tables. The advice for running the game is clear, actionable, and to the point. There is a short bestiary, which will help illustrate how to make monsters a game where stats and numbers aren’t really that important. The game concludes with a short page about the history of the setting: loose and open ended to do with as you wish. When I first wrote about the game I commented on how it sort of jumps right to it, assuming the reader will know what’s up. A lot of the additions to the game help frame things more explicitly.

Skorne is a really well executed rules light game. It’s a great example to learn from for people looking to make something minimal. What rules and writing are here all funnel you towards a particular sort of game. It’s a quick read, and one you could get to the table quickly: just my sort of thing.

G+ died in slow motion. There were redesigns people hated. Tweaks and changes throughout its life, as Google tried to make it work the way they wanted. The site was shuttered in April 2019. The social network was never the hit Google wanted, but it was a weirdly popular RPG space—certainly the epicentre of the best parts of the OSR for a period of time. People never stopped posting, right up until the end.

I remember seeing pictures of Mörk Borg in the dying days of G+ and knowing I wanted it despite not knowing what it even was. Despite it being written in Swedish.

There is lots of love about Mörk Borg, but I believe a large part of its success is due to the bananas art and graphic design of Johan Nohr. Clayton Notestine has written at length about what makes Mörk Borg’s graphic design so fantastic, so I don’t have to. I get annoyed when people are dismissive of Mörk Borg’s graphic design. You can flip to the back of the book and see the adventure Johan laid out: neat, tidy and functional. Clearly he could have made the whole book like that if he wanted to. The excitement on the page is a choice. I digress.

Johan has produced a lot of art for the RPG scene since my first encounters with his work. He did the graphic design and art for Into the Odd’s fancy edition, showing the world he isn’t a one trick pony. He did the graphic design for CY_BORG, showing the world he can make something that feels cohesive with Mörk Borg, while managing to be its own thing. He’s painted countless covers, pictures of dogs, pictures on cardboard. The man keeps himself busy.

Art by Nohr is a chonky coffee table art book, collecting work from 2006 to 2023. The book was published via one of those kickstarters I backed without really thinking about any of the costs. I paid so much money to ship this book to my actual house. A heart breaking amount. If you know me you know I don’t ship fucking nothing to my house, shipping makes me crazy. I have books waiting for me across the globe, one day I’ll see them. But this book I was too hyped for.

The book is massive and beautiful. The sort of book you want to lay flat on your dining table and flip through slowly. As I write this post it’s sitting next to me, but I find I don’t actually have anything interesting to say. I love the intensity of Johan’s art. It’s interesting to see 20 years of work in one place. What else is worth talking about? The book is sitting on a shelf next to art books for Anders Zorn, Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll, and Denyse Thomasos. He keeps them good company.

I love Johan’s art. Maybe you to do? If so, it’s time to blow some money.

One of my goals for 2024 was to buy fewer minis, and paint more of the minis I already owned. I made a big spreadsheet of all the warhammer that litters my house: some real “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” energy. That saying is a bit dubious, but I do think there was value in seeing what my pile of shame looked like concretely. I would move units up and down my list, trying to plan out a rough order for painting.

It’s interesting to look at these numbers now. January was my most productive month, and the first half of the year much better for output than the second. You can guess when I went back to work by looking at how many minis I painted each month. A final push in December was made possible my the holidays.

Looking at the models I painted, it’s clear the best motivator for myself when it comes to painting is getting models on the table for gaming. At the start of the year I was playing a lot of 40K, and was painting units to add some variety to my Necron army. A Horus Heresy tournament in April got me painting models for my Sons of Horus army. A return to Mordheim in spring had me wrapping up the undead minis from Cursed City. A Necromunda campaign in the summer got me to repaint my Escher gang, and add a few extra models into the mix. If you’re trying to paint more, play more.

I’ve been playing Age of Sigmar Spearhead recently, when I can find the time, using a partially painted crew of Stormcast Eternals. I hate playing with unpainted minis. I was trying hard to finish them before the clock ticked over to 2025. I’m so close! They’ll be my first minis for 2025.

The other goal for all this tracking was to minimize how much of a consumer I was in 2025: I wanted to buy less minis. I didn’t track the dates I bought new minis, but if I did, you could also guess when I went back to work based on when those purchases happened. As I have mentioned before, I find when I’m most busy and stressed is when I’m buying the most gaming material. Instead of playing, the hobby just becomes an act of consumption.

I’m not sure tracking anything led to the two outcomes I wanted. Regardless, it’s nice to see what I accomplished over the year. I love painting. I need to make the time to do it.

If we imagine a dungeon where every room is roughly the same — e.g. each room has an Orc or some other 1 HD enemy, and 50 gp — we can say that the dungeon is “balanced” (for the sake of this example). But it has very little texture. The game might still be fun — how much gold can you collect before you overreach and snuff it? — but it’s fairly monotonous. The choice of room you go into matters very little — you could go through the dungeon in any direction, and it wouldn’t really matter. Just leave after you’ve pushed your luck far enough, and that’s the only choice to be made, really. Over the long term, you’d get bored of play rather quickly; it has fairly little depth.

But if there are some rooms that are huge scores, and some that are total deathtraps, which should be avoided, now the dungeon has a lot more surprise, tension, and variability. Suddenly it really matters which way you go and which rooms you explore, and in what order. You start worrying about how to, if possible, look ahead, scout, do some reconnaissance, etc.

There is more variability, more tension and excitement, and much more difference in terms of how the game can go and what comes of it. You could step into the dungeon and walk into a deathtrap, finding nothing, and losing many men. Or you could bypass that room and find the treasure and walk out victorious. The gamble is heightened, the tension is through the roof, and players really have to think (and their cleverness is rewarded a lot more). It adds new dimensions to the game.

You can imagine this applying to larger areas of the dungeon — groups of rooms, themed areas, or levels. The upper caves are dangerous but not profitable; the crypt is a well of wealth. Once the players learn this, they can take advantage of it, so it becomes a question of how and when they can manage to figure it out (hopefully before they die!).

Now we scale this even higher, and apply it to dungeons. This gives texture to the whole campaign, overall. Aesthetically, thematically, etc — e.g. the premise of your campaign is that there are Dwarven tombs around, and those are full of wealth, but goblin-holes also exist, and they rarely have much in them but death and offal.

Of course, it does matter a great deal what your social contract is and what kind of timescale you’re playing on. Old-school D&D has the potential to be played at variable depth, and can become an incredibly deep game — but at the cost of increased commitment, patience, and so on.

If I’m doing a one-shot for some friends, I’d never pull out an anti-dungeon. But if we have a larger campaign setting, long scale, and other priorities [as you would find in a West Marches campaign], it might be a great tradeoff for the group if there was a lot of texture in this sense, on a larger scale.

I don’t know many people who are currently using anti-dungeons (except for horror-themed one-shots), but I do know a similar example: Eero, in his campaign, has a rule, which is that any adventure hook has a 1 in 6 chance of being a fake, a lie, or a trap. When he generates adventure hooks, he rolls a die for each. If it’s a 1, it is something like this. The “treasure map” actually leads you into a dead end canyon, where you’ll be surrounded and robbed by bandits. The “missing princess” is long dead, and you’ll be press-ganged into working in the mines, instead. And so on. If you were just playing for one night, and you rolled a 1, that would likely be frustrating and unsatisfying for most people (although there are many/some who really enjoy this kind of thing, as well, whether sincerely or perversely).However, add that to a sandbox campaign setting, and dynamics emerge.

When you know that every adventure has an expected payout perfectly relative to its difficulty, like the rooms in the dungeon, it almost doesn’t matter what you choose. The GM gives you an adventure hook, you strap on your armour and you go in. But if some rooms are jackpots and others are deathtraps… and the same goes for dungeons or adventures, then suddenly you have to get a lot more discerning and more clever. The game takes on new dimensions. You might learn you need to investigate an adventure hook, find clever ways to pursue it without putting yourself in danger, do proper reconaissance or background research, and come up with new ways to approach any apparent problem. There’s an added layer of richness there. Where before your game was all, “hey, there’s a Dwarven mine under the mountain? Ok, let’s go loot it, boys”, now instead it becomes something more like, “well, shit. What do we know about Dwarven mines? Where is this information coming from? Do we know anything about the history of the region? Who else knows about it? Can we interview people who live in the area? Were Dwarves known for hoarding gold, by any chance?” Etc. You have to evaluate and strategize at a higher level; the game takes on a different kind of depth.

This has effects on the kinds of campaigns and settings you might be able to come up with or play in, as well. It can allow you to have a much more anti-ludic orientation in developing your setting or campaign, as well as the kinds of things that happen within it.

Let’s say you know there’s a farm out by the forest, and the farmer is under a curse; anyone who stays in his home turns into an undead, mindless, ravenous creature. Over the years, he has dug a pit under his farmstead, where he keeps all the ravenous undead. If something happened to him or the enclosure, it could endanger the whole area.

If your game presumes that all adventures have payoffs, you can’t even include this in your game; you’d have to finagle some reason why there’s an appropriate amount of gold there, as well (or whatever your game demands). The players can see a rumour of a missing person and zombies and go, “ok, cool, sounds like an adventure, let’s do it!”

But if you like the idea of a living, breathing, more real, more textured, anti-ludic setting and game, you totally can place this cursed farmstead in it: there is nothing to be gained by visiting this place, but it can exist in your setting, and that can lead to a more interesting and variable setting.

After all, you don’t know where the game will go - as Brendan says, every trap is also a weapon. Perhaps the PCs will become the foes of a local band of brigands, and they can lure them onto the farmstead and unleash the undead. Or one is a budding necromancer, and can learn to control them and make them into his own army. Or whatever; the possibilities open up a lot.

[So there is one reason for anti-dungeons.] The game expands and takes on new dimensions; many more and many different outcomes are possible. Some of your play might be unrewarding to the PCs or unsatisfying or dangerous, and players have to be more careful, but now all kinds of things might happen which wouldn’t in your “correct” setting where each adventure has a guaranteed payoff.

Playing four sessions of Thor Olavsrud & Luke Crane’s Torchbearer had me thinking about how we engage with the rules of the games we play. Torchbearer is a machine that produces a story of grotty dungeon exploration. Its rules are highly procedural. Torchbearer’s mechanics will push the story of your session towards death and dismemberment. Smart players will work together to avoid this grimdark fate. There is no playing this game without understanding its rules, and there is no playing the game effectively without understanding them deeply. This isn’t a game where you can just ‘wing it’—both as players or as the game master. Torchbearer stands in contrast to the games I normally play: games so rules-lite you might describe them as rules-optional.

Torchbearer is a modern ruleset for playing a very old-school sort of game: dungeon crawling adventures most commonly associated with Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). That’s what originally drew me to the game. I’ve been playing RPGs on and off since the 90s, but since returning the hobby a little over a decade ago now I have been most drawn to the games coming out of the Old School Renaissance (OSR). The OSR is a gaming movement focused on player agency, problem solving, and simple open-ended rule sets inspired by old editions of D&D and games from that period of time. Torchbearer is a very different take on a genre I love, it’s a game that is far more baroque and that feels more purposeful. I’d argue the messy games you may remember from your youth are purposeful in their own way.

My favourite edition of D&D is the original version of the game published in 1974 (OD&D). In OD&D, players start the game with a single d6 of hit points, and weapons in the game typically do a single d6 of damage. Hopefully you can see that your heroes won’t be long for this world if you end up in a fight and simply start rolling dice: your dungeon delving adventure will trend towards death and disappointment as your character is cut down by goblins, kobolds, and orcs. The odds aren’t in the player’s favour, so play becomes about fictional positioning to avoid leaving things to chance. Clever play is all about stacking the odds in your favour, and your best odds occur when you aren’t rolling any dice.

This style of play will only work if there is a shared understanding between the players that the person running the game will do so in a fair and impartial manner. In Torchbearer the rules force this impartiality: players will push and bend them to create the advantage they need to succeed. In an OSR game this is usually accomplished diegetically: there are no mechanics for dropping chandeliers on your enemies, tripping colossal monsters, etc. The players need to convince the game master their actions are meaningful, and collectively decide what the benefits should be. In both cases the savvy player is trying to manufacture certainty.¹ While you might be able to get far in an OSR game being completely oblivious to its rules, you won’t get far if you don’t attempt to play smart. Your games will likely feel boring or flat as your character is cut down again and again.

Games like Torchbearer have rules and mechanics that drive the action of the game. They are active participants in producing a story through play. The rules of OSR games can feel more passive in this regard. It’s easier than you think to play sessions of D&D where you don’t roll any dice. The rules found in OSR games are often focused on modeling failure states. In other words, they come into play when you fuck up.

In this way, OSR play feels like it’s about engaging with the negative space of the rules. The rules layout the guardrails for play: “this is a game about exploration and adventure.” You might need to Save vs. Magic, it’s written on your character sheet. You might need to fight a monster, you have hit points and to-hit bonuses. The game tells you what it’s about, where you need to worry, and play then is about trying not to worry. OSR play isn’t simply playing pretend because the game frames what your pretend looks like—like all good role playing games.

Games that work well provide support for play through their rules, GM advice, player advice, etc. This is true regardless of the model of play as described above. When making a game, especially a rules lite game, you should think about how players will approach the rules of play, and if there is enough there to encourage forward movement and interest. It’s easy to look at a game like D&D, realize you always ignore encumbrance rules, and drop them. And in that way keep stripping things back till you’re left with a system that is some variation of “just roll high on a d20”. Or conversely build a game up with the bare minimum you need to play, not realizing it all works because of the years of context sitting in your head. If you inadvertently create a game missing key rules needed for play, or leave these rules as an exercise for the reader, you veer into the world of Fuck You Design.²

Many OSR games work because they rely on their players having internalized all the norms and tropes of the game. Torchbearer tries to encode those tropes into the games rules, producing a game that is far heavier, but more self contained. I often play games with people who don’t know the rules of the game we’re playing. When they need to roll dice someone else will let them know. This works because on some level they do understand the goals of the game, and are navigating its edges. The games I enjoy are simpler, for me. If they fall flat for you, i’m sure there are several blog posts you can read, movies you can watch, doorstop-fantasy books you can consume, and new friends you can make to help get you up to speed. It’s simple.

This is the 10th year for the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming. While these awards improve like a good scotch, the Ennies continue to be … well, the Ennies. There is nothing wrong with being the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry, of course. Someone’s got to do it! I just want something different. Maybe you do too.

As always, there is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2023. As I noted last year:

… while Trophy, which arrived at my home in January, should clinch some awards at the Ennies this year, it will need to wait till next year to fight for its spot as The Ramanan Sivaranjan Award for Excellence in Gaming winner. If I had backed it digitally, I’d have included it for contention this year. Simple, right?

In the business, we call this foreshadowing. I hope you enjoy my picks.

Best Gaming Supplement: Hull Breach , brought to life by Ian Yusem.

Hull Breach is a fantastic anthology of material for Mothership: adventures, monsters, advice, etc. With its fanciful layout and polish, its closest analog might be the popular zine, Knock, from The Merry Mushmen. Hull Breach goes a little further in its approach to anthology. Ian has tried to tie various articles together to suggest their use for campaign play. Everything is neatly indexed and cross referenced. You can see he wanted this to be the companion to Mothership 1e: unfurl the mission accomplished banner.

Best Necromunda RPG: Gangs of Titan City by Nick Spence, Ben Brown, and Zachary Cox.

Gangs of Titan City is the Necromunda RPG no one was asking for, but clearly should exist. Like Zach’s other works it is an odd amalgam of RPG ideas. You can see the influence of powered by the apocalypse games and the OSR to produce something new. This game feels so weird and niche I would love to see it find a wider audience. There is a strong emphasis on tools for the GM to use to make a session of gaming go. Some of that story game influence, I suppose. The only thing this book is missing is advice on playing with your Necromunda minis. A real missed opportunity. Finally, Dai Sugars did the layout so you know this book is hot and good.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2023: Trophy Gold by Jesse Ross.

I have already enumerated the ways I think Trophy Gold is amazing. Everything I picked up during the rest of 2023 was really in a battle to unseat this champion of a game. It was all my friends and I would chat about when it came to RPGs for a good while. Jesse Ross has made something compelling with Trophy Gold. The game really manages to be this impressive amalgam of OSR and Story Gaming. It doesn’t feel like it should work, but does! The book itself is beautiful. The Gauntlet, aka Jason Cordova, did an amazing job turning the small digital zines that were Trophy from the Gauntlet Codex into something special. The three Trophy Books: Dark, Gold and Loom are some of the nicest RPG books I own. Jesse did the art and layout as well as the writing: the triple threat! ¹

Honourable Mentions

Keeping this list of shout outs short this year was a challenge: there was a lot I loved, and a few games here were real contenders for awards. Much love to Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova, Sword Weirdos by Casey Garske, The Doomed by Chris McDowall, The Black Sword Hack by Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette, CY_BORG by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr, NooFutra by Scrap Princess, Barkeep on the Borderlands by Prismatic Wasteland, and Warped Beyond Recognition by Quadra. I am annoyed at myself for not having played Brindlewood Bay yet: what did I even do with my time off? Be better than me, check this game out, and give it a go!

My copy of the Mothership Starter set arrived on the weekend. I love it. The box is dense, packed with all sorts of good stuff. What I was excited about was the new adventure, Another Bug Hunt. This will be the first adventure people new to Mothership will encounter. It’s quite possible this will be the first adventure someone new to gaming may run, period. The Mothership Kickstarter was wildly successful: I have to believe there are a non-trivial number of people for whom Mothership will be their first RPG. I assume the brainiacs at Mothership HQ realized how important this module would be, because there is a lot of talent tied up in its creation. It’s amazing to read such a fully realized introductory adventure.

Another Bug Hunt is split into four scenarios, the first a classic of the genre: players find themselves exploring an “abandoned” base, trying to piece together what happened to its MIA staff. The base is a small complex, a 10 room “dungeon”. There are two entrances to the base, the one around back leading straight to the big-bad monster. I love that you could start the adventure stumbling upon the encounter that feels like the end. This is the OSR nonsense I am here for.

Advice for running this adventure, and running games in general, is scattered throughout Another Bug Hunt. The adventure pairs well with the (wonderful) Warden’s Guide. A short prologue to the scenarios has the players make a fear save. The adventure explains the purpose of the save, when to make them, and how you might give players bonuses on the roll based on what they say their character is doing to cope with what is going on. This is an important part of Mothership, so it makes sense to have it be the players first interaction with the game. The fist scenario contains the most advice, and feels the most introductory. A lot of effort has gone it trying to highlight the invisibile assumptions of OSR play. (Of course, being seeped in this stuff, perhaps i’m not the best person to comment on whether they’ve succeeded or not.)

The next scenario in Another Bug Hunt involves working with three factions, each with their own plan for how to best deal with what is happening on the planet. One group wants to get the fuck out here—why wouldn’t you? The next wants to retrieve all the research they have done on the weird alien monsters they’ve encountered. The last wants to save their friends and make sure they have power to weather an incoming dangerous storm. There are three missions to tackle, but a twist after the first one will make the subsequent missions far trickier to deal with. Each also provides important information or benefits, so it will all play out differently depending on the choices players make. It’s a nice dynamic set up.

The third scenario in Another Bug Hunt is when the characters in the movie say the name of the movie. The players explore an alien mothership, in search of more of the missing crew and a better understanding of what’s happening on this world. This is a very deadly dungeon. Or could be, if players are incautious or overly bold. The third scenario reminded me of Gradient Descent, with complex rooms that are more alien. It provides a nice contrast to the first dungeon.

The adventure ends with players trying to get off the planet. Players earlier choices will factor into how easy or hard escape will be. This is another scenario that feels it’s a classic of this genre: escaping hordes of aliens. This scenario is very open ended. There is a timeline, some rough rules for how things will play out, but what the players do could be all over the place.

Another Bug Hunt looks to be another fantastic adventure from the Mothership crew. I am hoping I will be able to run it soon. I am very curious to see how it plays. Each adventure has advice for running it as a one shot, though they seem best suited to be run as a single campaign. Running through this zine will probably take several sessions. That feels like a good way to kick off your new career as a Mothership Warden.

It’s often the case when playing D&D using “theatre of the mind” that characters simply move from monster to monster, fire their ranged weapons from anywhere to anywhere, etc. It’s hard to keep track of where everyone is, what the complex state of the game world looks like. To mitigate this I will sometimes sketch on paper (or on the screen) when playing to help players better understand their circumstances, what they can and can’t do. I am just as likely to simply eat the messy abstraction: it makes combat play much faster. When I was playing 4th Edition D&D a single combat might be the bulk of a gaming session!

Approaching running a skirmish style RPG by looking directly at indie narrative skirmish wargames might be interesting and fruitful as well. Games to checkout include: Forbiden Psalms (based on Mork Borg) and it’s many variations, Brawl Arcane 28, A Song of Blades and Heroes, and Sword Weirdoes. These games feel like they could form the basis for playing an RPG in and of themselves.

I recently attended a Horus Heresy tournament organized by local gaming group Hogtown 40K. This was a full day of gaming, the most warhammer I have played in quite some time. (My last epic adventure in Warhammer was playing a never ending game of 40K in Lexington, with my friend’s husband before their wedding.) I have been painting my Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness boxed set in slow motion since it was released, so playing in this tournament felt like a nice conclusion to that hobby project.

For those unfamiliar, the Horus Heresy is the galactic civil war that sets up many of the important elements of the 40K setting as we know it: a probably dead emperor of mankind on a golden throne, chaos space marines, demons, etc. The Horus Heresy takes place 10,000 years before the time period of 40K. The game Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness is essentially Games Workshops’ take on Napoleonics. There is an emphasis on treating the game like any other historical, except the history of this game is 100% made up. People will paint armies appropriate for particular time periods of the war. They will make sure their colour schemes are consistent and correct.¹ Compared to larger Warhammer 40,000 scene, there is a greater emphasis on the narrative side of the game.

Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness feels like a modern take on retro rulesets. If you played Warhammer 40K prior to its 8th edition, Horus Heresy will feel familiar. You’ll see universal special rules, vehicle facing, blast templates, etc. There are lots of niche rules, which makes for a very flavourful game, but also one that is a bit tricky to keep entirely in your head. You will need at least two (giant) rulebooks to play, with rules for your units spread between both. The game would have felt impossible to play if I didn’t create my army list on New Recruit, which collects all the rules for your units together in one place.

Most of Games Workshop’s games share a lot of DNA, and this game is no exception. You use d6s throughout. You roll to hit, then to wound, then make armour saves. Like all GW games, you often roll a fuck-ton of dice to accomplish very little. There are lots of small differences between Horus Heresy and modern 40K. Armour Piercing isn’t a modifier, you either ignore armour saves or you don’t. When a unit loses a combat, there is a chance they will rout and just be cut down by the opposing side. Similarly a unit that is routing can be killed outright by any unit that manages to charge into it. These changes will lead to faster game play: you just lift models. Some changes slow the game down, but make for fun situations. Melee combat happens in initiative order, like Mordheim: you might be able to kill a few dudes carrying massive thunder hammers before they 100% blow you up. Like most Games Workshop games, Horus Heresy’s turn structure is “I go, you go”. They have introduced a pool of reactions you can make during each phase of the opposing players turn, making the games feel a bit more dynamic, and ensuring both players are engaged throughout each turn. You might shoot back when shot, fire overwatch when being charged, etc. The number of reactions you can make is small and intuitive. It’s a nice addition to the game.

The format for the tournament was cute: each player made a list of 1250 points, a little under half of what is recommended for a full game of Horus Heresy (3000 points); players were paired up and played as a team against their opponents. I was encouraged to sign up for the tournament, even though I had never played a game of Horus Heresy before, because the format of the tournament lends itself to teaching and learning the game. My first partner was someone with a lot of experience playing the game.² That ended up being the case in subsequent games as well.³ Games that would have been a slog to get through if I was playing alone flew by with ease.

I honestly had no good reason to pick up the Age of Darkness boxed set, but i’m glad I did. Getting into Heresy has been a fun hobby project these last months and years. Getting ready for this tournament, painting my last few minies, was particularly fun. I always find it motivating painting for an event or game, trying to get a unit done under the wire. Up next is getting my Sons of Horus army up to 3000 points.

I’m enjoying the latest iteration of Warhammer 40,000. With the release of its 10th Edition, the designers created a smaller scale game mode they dubbed Combat Patrol. The armies you play are all built from the models in the start collecting boxes they sell. There is no list building. The units (sometimes) have simpler rules than the corresponding unit in the full game. Most armies only have 5 or so units in their list. This all comes together to produce a game that is simple to play. I’ve played many games of Combat Patrol at this point. If you are trying to learn the game, I can’t recommend this format enough: it’s really well done.

What if you want some variety? Warhammer 40K is a game that’s designed with bigger games in mind, so simply making smaller lists can lead to weird situations. Play on Tabletop, a Canadian Warhammer YouTube Channel, has been running a tournament where they pit 500 point lists against one another. To try and avoid some unfortunate pairings have added a small set of additional restrictions when building lists for these 500 point games:

1. You must have at least one character.
2. You cannot include any epic heroes.
3. The maximum toughness of any unit is 9.
4. You must have two units with the infantry keyword, excluding characters.

They are playing a tournament, and the additional caveat for their games is the winner keeps playing their list till they are beaten. This feels like another, more organic, approach to balance. Challengers will know what they are facing, and try and build a list with that in mind. They also need to keep in mind their list will be frozen in amber if they win.

I’m a big fan of smaller scale games of 40K. I’m curious what other attempts at playing 40K in sub-1000 point lists might look like.

Update 2024-05-10: Play on Tabletop are running a few King of the Colosseum tournaments, and have shared their rules online.

Since I last wrote about Mordheim I have played through two 10-game campaigns. The first was with the Undead warband feature in my last post about the game, Volchyakrov’s Wolves. The second campaign was set in Games Workshop’s Lustria setting, their take on Amazon adventures. I played a Pirate warband, the Motley Crew. After playing several games of Mordheim I can now see its appeal. Mordheim does narrative war gaming incredible well. It is the model and inspiration for so many games that follow.

Mordheim is meant to be played as a campaign, and those campaigns begin with the creation of a warband. You start with a leader and recruit a few heroes and henchmen to join them. In most cases, your starting crew will feel underpowered. The dregs in my undead warband were incredibly crap out of the gate, as were the cabin boys of my pirates. The expectation of the game is your crew’s power will grow over the course of a campaign. (Though injury and death is a very real threat.) You’ll want as many heroes as you can take, as they can explore Mordheim after each game in search of treasure. You should round out your warband with henchmen only after recruiting a full compliment of heroes. I would prioritize bodies over equipment for your first games. Mordheim is a game that rewards ganging up on your foes.

The rules of the game are old-school: roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save, roll to determine injury, etc, etc. Like a lot of Games Workshop games, there is often a lot of rolling to accomplish nothing. The saving grace of Mordheim is you are generally rolling 1-2 dice, rather than 10-20. Once you’re familiar with your warband the game will play fairly quickly. The core rules of the game aren’t that long: and there are some good cheat sheets out there. The rules aren’t always as clearly written as one would hope, but in the year 2024 we have 25 years of discussion to help us fill in any gaps.

Games are split into a recovery phase, movement phase, a shooting phase, and a hand-to-hand combat phase. You need to set up all your charges and reposition all your models before getting into the nitty gritty of combat. Shooting can be effective, but this feels like a game where your crews are meant to get stuck into one another. Most models have one wound. When they lose that wound, you’ll roll to see if you’ve knocked them down, stunned them, or taken them out of action. You don’t need to roll to hit a knocked down model, and if you attack a stunned model it’s automatically taken out of action. Ganging up is the name of the game. My (pretty useless) zombies ended up being surprisingly effective in that first campaign. My pirate crew consisted of a lot of mediocre men, but would often get the kill through teamwork. Most games will end with a warband routing. When you lose 25% of your team you’ll need to make rout tests, rolling under your leader’s leadership skill. You can also choose to voluntarily concede at this point. You want to avoid making injury rolls, so taking the loss may still put you ahead in the grand scheme of a campaign.

After a game you run through a post-game sequence, the beating heart of Mordheim. To start, you will check if downed models are dead, injured, or totally fine. There is a lot of flavour in the injury tables for heroes. Your out of action model might end up in a pit fight, sold to slavers, or other such nonsense. My vampire lost an inch of movement and can’t run because of leg injuries. Your models will gain experience, and in turn gain levels. The initially useless cabin boys in my pirate warband were quite effective by the end of the game. Your heroes can explore Mordheim, rolling on big tables to figure out if they discover anything exciting beyond the Wyrdstone that’s central to the game. Finally you will use the income you’ve earned to buy new equipment for your crew, recruit more models, and get ready for your next game.

The mechanics and gameplay are a small part of what makes the game really compelling. John Blanche did all the art. The various warbands are all very flavourful. This is a seriously vibes-forward game. The game lends itself to maximum creativity. There are lots of beautiful warbands and fan art out there if you go looking.

I am just about to start another campaign at the Sword and Board. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this one plays, now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the game. Mordheim is an incredible game. The 25th Anniversary of the games release is happening this year. There is no better time to give the game a try if you haven’t played before, or jump back in for old times

The Mythic Bastionland Kickstarter is wrapping up today. For those unfamiliar this is the Arthurian take on Chris’s games Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. I’ve been excited about this game since he first started talking about it, as it ties into my interests in this genre. (You may recall my aborted attempt to create a vaguely Arthurian / Dark Souls setting many months ago now: The Misericorde.) Chris is working with Alec Sorensen, and the art they have shared so far looks really incredible. My friend Alex was running the playtest version of this game when it was first announced, and we had a fun time questing around the hexcrawl he created. The game works well, and I assume knowing Chris it’s only been tightened up and improved upon since first announced. He’s one of my favourite game designers. This will be great.

Patrick turned his blog into a giant bible sized book: Speak, False Machine. I have the more modest PDF, which I have been reading on my iPad here and there. When Patrick told me he wanted to make this book I thought him a bit mad: “who wants an absolutely beastly book of blog posts?” I thought. The scope of this thing is kind of incredible. Reading it now, though, I can see the appeal of this format: it’s a much nicer way to read his writing. There is some slight rearangement of texts to form more of a cohesive narrative of sorts through his posts. I had forgotten some of his earlier posts, like his gaming with “the teenagers”. The new art work he commissioned for the book is great! There is no reason not to grab the PDF, and if you love False Machine the big book looks amazing.

Now that Speak, False Machine is shipping, he has moved on to getting his Wodlands setting turned into a proper book. Once again he’s found a great artist to work with. This project is looking great, and so obviously good I don’t really understand why it isn’t more wildly successful. (Well, probably because Patrick refuses or fails to do all the things people do when running Kickstarters, I suppose.) The original Wodlands posts are on his blog, for those who want to read them before throwing your money at the computer screen. I am looking forward to this book a lot.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming exist to highlight truly standout RPG books. They sit in contrast to the Ennies, the teen choice awards of the RPG industry. In this way I am the Pepsi to the Ennies Coke-a-Cola, since they never talk about me, but I always talk about them. But honestly, we all know who the real thing is when it comes to matters of taste.

The books in contention arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2022. That’s a long while ago now, I know, but that’s really my only rule with these awards and I will stick with it. So, while Trophy, which arrived at my home in January, should clinch some awards at the Ennies this year, it will need to wait till next year to fight for its spot as Ramanan Sivaranjan Award for Excellence in Gaming winner. If I had backed it digitally, I’d have included it for contention this year. Simple, right?

Anyway, what are we fucking around for: you want to know who won.

Best Gaming Supplement: Gig Economy by Colin Sproule

I love this unassuming booklet. Gig Economy is 200 weird little NPCs to people your world with: retainers, rival adventures, townsfolk. There are no wasted words: everything is short and to the point. You can pick a random person and read what their deal is in seconds: great if you need someone mid-session. Each NPC has personality, some equipment, and a name. What else do you need? Nothing, that’s what.

Best Attempt at Distilling 800 Blog Posts into a Game: Errant by Ava Islam

Errant is chonky book, the sort of book I would normally ignore because it’s so chonky. Ava Islam has tried to jam all of the OSR into one game. There is advice and rules for almost anything you can imagine happening in a game of D&D. Ava has documented her journey through the OSR, from a novice game master to one with plenty of experience and advice to share. I think for people who find the OSR opaque, confusing, or off-putting, Errant might be the game they are looking for: something that tries to be far more self-contained.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2022: Into the Odd Remastered by Chris McDowall, with art and graphic design by Johan Nohr.

Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd feels like a real masterpiece. In the years since its release Into the Odd feels like it’s become an impactful and influential game, a classic of the OSR. You can see the games influences in many modern OSR games. I had ignored this game when it first came out, more obsessed with OD&D and LotFP. I’m glad we all have a second chance to revisit and enjoy this game. Into the Odd Remastered is a beautiful book. Johan Nohr is a champion of graphic design, and this book highlights his versatility. (Of course, anyone paying attention to MORK BORG should have been able to see he’s a man of talent.) The collage art found throughout the book captures the weird aesthetic of Into the Odd perfectly. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Honourable Mentions

It feels like everyone is sleeping on Demon Bone Sarcophagus, the latest adventure from Patrick and Scrap Princess. I loved reading the book, and am disappointed I haven’t found the time to get it to the table yet. I also loved &&&&&&&& Treasure by Luke Gearing, ANNA-X66: Redux by Slade Stolar, The Book of Gaub by Charlie Ferguson-Avery, Evoro, The Furtive Goblin, Ivy H, John “Unlawful Games” Gregory, Rowan A. and Paolo Greco, Downtime in Zyan by Ben Laurence, Fermentvm Nigrvm Dei Sepvlti by Gord Cellar, The Frost Spire by Jacob Hurst and Joshua Alvarado, Skorne by Sam Doebler, Where the Wheat Grows Tall by Camilla Greer & Evlyn Moreau, and Wanderhome by Jay Dragon.

My current obsession is the 2021 edition of Kill Team. This game is probably most famous for using shapes to represent distances, but not having those distances have anything to do with the shapes used. How many inches do you think a square represents? If you said 4" you’d be wrong, it’s 3". You might be asking yourself, why wouldn’t you use a triangle for 3". Well, they had already used the triangle to represent 1". For reals. Anyway, this is a big tangent, because the game is actually loads of fun when you give it a chance. I’ve been playing it over the last month or so at the other local game store, Negative Zone Comics, and been having a really great time. It’s more complicated than Warcry, but feels like it’ll be manageable once you have more games under your belt. The core of the game feels fresh and interesting, rather than simply re-skinning 40K. Fighting in close combat is a simple dice game of trading blows or parrying. Shooting is complicated by marking models as concealed versus engaged. The various Kill Teams have really flavourful rules. I’m hoping to play a short campaign with Evan, and will write up more thoughts once that’s done.

When your character is healthy and unhurt, you don’t have a Hit Point total, just your Hit Dice. When you get attacked, hit, wounded, or otherwise in danger of dying, roll your Hit Dice. Keep the best result. That’s your HP total, from which you subtract the damage taken. So, a character only has an HP total when they are wounded. When you heal again, erase your HP total. Next time you get hurt, that’s when you’ll roll your Hit Dice again.

Some people in my game call this “quantum hit points”. Getting hit is always scary - you never really know how many hit points you have! And it evens out over time, so characters are never effectively crippled by starting the game with a really bad HP roll (Imagine being that 2nd level Fighter who rolled a ‘1’ at first level, and again at second level! Ouch!).

You get a new Hit Die every level. (Roughly speaking; there are some exceptions.) Following the old idea of the Hero and the Superhero (from Chainmail, and/or Arneson), at level 4 you get to keep two Hit Dice (you’re now a Hero!), and at level 8, you get to keep three Hit Dice (you’re a Superhero!).

But we can also do some fun things, like a long-term crippling injury: this means you lose a Hit Die for good. I’ve used this for “gambling away parts of your soul”, as well, when I adapted the “ghost” in the Tower of the Stargazer to something more to my liking than pausing D&D to play Chess for an hour. — Paul T, July 5th, 2023

Games Workshop has painted itself into a corner over the years, as they have made the Space Marines the heroes of their setting. That doesn’t make any sense if the Imperium of Man is meant to be a cautionary tale about facism. It’s hard to beleive this is their intention when most everything they produce undercuts this message, the Black Library novels being the biggest and most obvious culprit here.

“Everything is bad” is an inherently conservative worldview and as such provides endless, consequence-free opportunities for authors to avoid discussing exactly why things are bad in the first place, who is responsible for them being bad, and what can be done about it.

Tim points out that “everything is bad in 40K” is a weak defense of the setting, but I do think it’s a viable way forward if they fully commited. To paraphrase Rick Priestley, Warhammer 40,000 doesn’t need to be serious business. The setting exists so people can pretend to blow each other up with guns and tanks and monsters. They don’t need to dress that up, but they do need to make sure that in ’not-dressing it up’ they don’t endorse the reprehensible.

Tim ends the essay with a warning about the neo-nazis that will be cheering the new Warhammer TV shows alongside you. This is another area of the essay I don’t think quite lands: there is no controlling other people’s interests. Even if Games Workshop does an amazing job cleaning up its house, Warhammer is still a fun hobby. It’ll attract all sorts of people. Obviously no one wants to support a company that is actively courting a terrible fan base, but if being a part of the OSR has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes really crap people will like the same stuff as you.

I have Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, so I’m going to play a Warhammer 40,000 game.

Necrons awaken to find their tomb ship amalgamated into a Space Hulk, now adrift in the warp. The Sons of Horus have been fighting aboard this ship for weeks, months, years and millennia, all at the same time. The two groups are jockeying for control of a safe haven within the hulk.

I set up a spaceship board with a room in the centre. I had objectives in each corner and one in the middle. The game would end when one side controlled the central objective and two other objectives for two turns in a row, or one side was wiped out.

I needed a few additional house rules for this scenario to work:

• Opening or closing a hatch door costs one Order Dice. If the OV of the Order Dice is 4+ you can also move 3" before or after opening or closing the hatch.
• Claiming an objective costs one Order Dice. Objectives remain under a warband’s controls until claimed by the other warband.

Here are some highlights from the game:

• On the first turn I rolled that no additional Terminators would fill up the 2-man Terminator squad, while one of the Tactical Marines squad had all its units arrive as reinforcements.
• On the Necrons turn I rolled a 1 again for reinforcements: the Overlord would be alone the entire game.
• On one side of the board a Sergeant and his Tactical Marines were in a firefight with a Royal Warden and their Necron Warriors. The game is quite deadly: if someone shoots at you it’s hard to avoid losing a unit. With reaction dice letting you fire overwatch as a unit moves out to shoot at you, there was a lot of picking off each sides squads. In the end, over a couple turns, the marines came out on top.
• In the middle of the board, the Prateor and Terminator were up against a Necron Overlord. The Overlord used a reaction dice to take out the Terminator moving up to try and engage him. The Royal Warden moved up and opened a hatch, shooting and killing the Praetor. He was then killed by the Tactical Squad.
• The marines had the central objective and the two on their side of the board. There was on another squad of Necrons, untouched this battle, but they couldn’t get into the fray fast enough. The Space Marines won the game.

The active player has 4 order dice they can spend to perform actions with a squad, the other player gets 2 they can use to react to the active players moves. I would usually focus most of my orders on a single unit, as you can’t move that far if you’re only moving d6 inches. You also need to manage the negative status effects you collect as you move and shoot, which also takes an order. In practice the game felt like it was using alternating activations. The pace and flow of the game is quick. The action moves between the players at a real clip.

It’s very easy to kill units: perhaps too easy. I probably need a board with more cover. Though, perhaps all the death better simulates the closer quarter combat of my Kill Team Space Hulk board.

This is a very early draft of the game. I am curious where it will end up. I’m not even sure Chris will pick this game up again any time soon, he has so many other games on the go. Till then, we have a fun skeleton of a game to play.

I was looking for minis at the Sword and Board when I spotted a copy of CY_BORG sitting on a shelf. I’ve been waiting for this book to show up locally since it was first announced: I hate paying for shipping. I’m honestly not that interested in Cyberpunk as a genre, but I am very interested in most everything Johan Nohr is involved in. Mork Borg has some of the best art and graphic design you’ll see in an RPG book. Paired up with Christian Sahlén, the duo have created quite the book.

Like Mork Borg the world of CY_BORG is shared as short vignettes. There is detail and flavour to jump off from, but it’s far from overwhelming and very open ended. You can take the world in your own direction.

Borrowing from Mork Borg there is also a campaign calamity mechanic where things progressively get worse as the game moves along, ending with a world ending event. In CY_BORG we have news headlines instead of omens.

Like Mork Borg the default is simple characters who will mostly be defined by their gear. You also have optional classes if you want more specificity (and mechanics). I like this approach. I also like all the pink.

A good bestiary will double as world building. The creatures shared in this book tell a story about the world. Most creatures note how much it costs to bribe them, for example.

Adventures are a great thing to include in your game: they help tell the reader what the game is all about in a way that’s useful and practical. You can read about the sorts of games one might play with these rules. The included adventure has the players helping an indebted neighbourhood. They must break into a casino and destroy the records of their debt, stored in an “offline database”. Like Mork Borg, the layout of the adventures shifts to something far more utilitarian and practical, while still having some style.

My friend Emmy wrote a much longer, better, review of this book, if you want to read something with some more substance. I found the Ben Milton looked at the book as well: you can watch him flip through the whole book. I had similar feelings to the two of them when reading this game’s rule 0: “Player Characters cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corps, the cops, or the capitalist system. They might find themselves reluctantly forced to do missions for them or their minions. But make no mistake—they are the enemy.” There’s nothing to disagree with here, but these sorts of declarations always feel a bit dorky. If you as a player aren’t making this choice, it’s kind of a meaingless action on everyone’s part. More so, you could probably play an interesting game, one where you learn something about the world and the dark nature of capitalism, playing dirtbag cops, corporate goons, etc. All of that said, the sorts of people that will get overly upset about this rule are probably the sorts of people you want keep out of a healthy gaming community, and in that way this rule is doing the work it needs to.

I really enjoyed reading CY_BORG. I am keen to get this to the table. The art and writing really pull you in. It feels like an easy game to get into: the rules will be familiar, and there is a lot in the book to help get you going with your game.

This was originally a series of tweets, but Twitter isn’t long for this world. I thought it best to post something more permanent over here.

A million years ago Rey started talking about a game he was working on called Break!!, I suppose building on top of the ideas began in his OSR setting Baroviania. Back in 2017 Grey or Rey sent me an early draft of the game, but it was so full of stuff I honestly thought the games release was imminent. Honestly i’m sure they did too. But no! The years ticked by and I was worried this game would never happen, as Rey improved the rules or Grey improved the layout and art. This game is such a creative vision of what an RPG can be. Everything i’ve seen over the years is so beautiful and feels so fully realized. I’ve been hyped for this game for years now. Many of us have. Now they are ready to take your fucking money. The game’s already funded. It happened in minutes, apparently. And why not? This game is going to be amazing.

I picked up Luke Gearing’s adventure for the Best Left Burried system, Behind Closed Doors. It was also waiting for me in my brother’s flat in London. If you were looking for something with some strong old-school Warhammer Fantasy RPG vibes look no futher. The players are given license to hunt down witches, and are set off into the world to do just that. There are some witchy things going on, but no overarching plot to this sandbox adventure. There its lots of love in this book. There is a creepy castle that feels straight out of a good LotFP adventure. There is a powder keg of a town that ends the book that would likely be a lot of fun to play through. The book looks like it’d be a bit challenging to use: I felt the urge to take notes as I was reading. There is lots going on: places to go, people to see. I’d be interested to run this with a system like Dogs in the Vineyard. This feels like it should be a more notable adventure than it seems to be. It feels like some very good OSR nonsense. I would check it out.

I had shipped several books to my brother in UK, one of those was Gangs of Titan City. I don’t think it’s unfair to say this is a Necromunda RPG with all the serial numbers filed off. The RPG is what I’d describe as OSR, but you can see the influence of games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. The game has a clear structure to play, starting with an escalation phase where you figure out what’s going on and prepare for your operation, an operation phase where you’ll play out the action of your chose mission, and finally a fallout phase where you see how your actions have changed the larger world, tally XP, etc. There its lots of support in the book itself to help you start your campaign and keep it going. The mechanics of the game are quite simple, familiar to people who have played any PbtA game: you roll 2d6 and add an attribute modifier to see if you succeed. There are no predefined moves, you’ll pick the modifier you use based on the action you’re trying to accomplish. The game looks interesting. I’d be keen to try and work in using minis as part of play.

I was in England over the last couple weeks to visit my brother. As has become somewhat of a tradition, I met up with Patrick at Warhammer World in Notthingham. This time we were also joined by Chris. He drove down from Manchester, so was able to cart us off to Bryan Ansell’s retirement project, The Foundry. Ansell turned part of his home (I think) into this storefront and museum for OldHammer style miniatures. I picked up some pirates I may try and use in the next Mordheim league. The minuatures they had on display were really quite amazing. The store is small, but very dense. There are so many metal minis, it’s kind of overwhelming.

We also did the tour of Warhammer World exhibition space. There are lots of dioramas on display that are really quite incredible. It’s well worth checking out if you’re in the UK and love Warhammer. I hadn’t been since 2017, and there were lots of new minis and dioramas for me to enjoy, and even the old ones continue to impress.

I have described the hex descriptions of Carcosa as tweet sized bites of information, descriptions you can quickly read in the midst of a game. They are both flavourful and useful. Well, sometimes. Sometimes they are too terse. Terse descriptions and bullet points can become too utilitarian, too boring. I often find it hard to read adventures written in this style because they are so dull. Silent Titans and Luke’s own Gradient Descent are both good examples of marrying beautiful writing written out in bullet points. I found both easy to run and read. (Patrick’s module is still quite wordy as that style goes, mind you.)

Of course, a lot of D&D books will never be run, simply read. I suspect this is actually the more common use case. DMs may harvest your book for ideas, a room or NPC, or simply something that will live in their brain. It’s perfectly reasonable to optimize for reading over play: sacraligous, I know.

I finished reading the rest of Demon Bone Sarcophagus this morning. This adventure is a big dungeon crawl, a tomb for the Empress of Fire, now resting in the titular Demon Bone Sarcophagus. The adventure was made by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, produced as part of a Kickstarter that concluded during the pandemic. I waited for the hardcopy to arrive before giving it a proper read.

The dungeon is a giant triangle, composed of smaller triangles. You can see the player facing map above. This layout feels a bit repetetive, because it is, but the choice is likely thematic and meant to evoke the fire triangle (ignition, oxygen, fuel). The choice also produces a dungeon that is very interconnected. There are lots of paths through the dungeon. There are tunnels made by a giant sloth running through the complex as well, which is another layer of interconnection. Players may break their way into these tunnels, or rooms may collapse into them during play. There are “glass girls”, acid golem monsters, wandering above the tomb that players can attempt to use to blast new holes into the dungeon, creating yet another layer of interconnection. The dungeon itself feels quite dynamic in this regard. I’m not sure I’ve read an adventure that expects the layout to change so much through play: can you think of any?

It’s a bit of a fun house dungeon, each set of 4 triangles that compose the larger tomb thematically linked. I’m not sure there was actually that much utiltity in reading the whole thing up front, versus quickly skimming things and playing a little bit by the seat of your pants, like god intended. I think being familiar with the factions and people that are wondering the tomb is likely more important, and they are presented up front.

The rooms descriptions are verbose. It feels like everyone nowadays copies what has become the house style for Old School Esentials, which likely originated with Courtney Campbell’s posts on writing room descriptions: terse, bullet points, information revealed in the order players will encounter it, etc. Silent Titans is written this way, and I think is a great example of how you can marry great writing with this more utilitarian style. Demon Bone Sarcophagus feels a bit old school in its presentation by comparison. That the typography and copy editing are sloppy does it no favours here either. There is lots of evocative stuff throughout this dungeon, but some rooms are hard to quickly parse.

There are some great pieces of art from Scrap in this module. I love the version of the Reductor, one of the NPCs in the book, that is featured on the back cover of the module. It manages to look backlit. If you like Scrap’s art you’ll like what we have here, if you don’t you won’t. There is a good mix of work from Scrap: simple B&W illustrations to full colour pieces.

Scrap and Patrick have a good eye for what will make for a good adventure. You can feel all the stored kinetic energy just waiting to burst on these pages. I love all the random encounter tables, each entry a monster or NPC paired with the action they are performing. Many entries feel like they might be the centre of a fun night of gaming. The opening of the adventure, like Patrick’s other adventures, opens with a bang: the players stumble upon the aftermath of a huge fight, characters from various factions lay dead and dying everywhere, while key members have fled into the tomb. Like everything this team does, it all feels quite unique, even though it’s just a dungeon crawl through a tomb.

These are just some quick thoughts after having read the module. I am keen to run this soon. It looks like it’ll be fun to play through. I’ll report back on how that all goes.

Demon Bone Sarcophagus seems a little intimidating to me. There is lots going on within this book. Lots of text to kick things off. Lots of text throughout. It all feels quite dense. Scrap mentioned that a lot of the text in the book is there to help orient the DM to what’s going on, to make it an easier adventure to run. Fair enough: let’s read this thing!

The book opens with a bunch of backstory that’s all tucked away in one place, so you can just skip past it like a true Patrick Stuart fan. The book doesn’t jump straight to the dungeon, but presents its bestiary first, like Veins of the Earth. The bestiary doubles as a nice dramatis personae for the module. Adventuring through the dungeon looks like it’ll involve a lot of mucking about with NPCs and so learning about them upfront is a good idea. Everything you need to know about the NPCs in monsters is consolidated in one place, but if there are interactions between the creatures and the dungeon, that information is repeated in the room descriptions as well. As was the case with the secend edition of Deep Carbon Observatory, this book is broken down into (mostly self contained) spreads. You should be able to run the adventure from the book without a lot of faffing about. In theory, anyway. I’ll report back once I’ve run this thing.

I’ve been reading the book on and off this weekend, making it through about half the book. Sometimes I have big plans to write about these books I like, but never get around to it because I have too much to say and the weight of figuring out what to write is too much. This time around I will share thoughts as they come to me.

BreakoutCon is this weekend. Sadly I will miss it, i’m out and about, but I did manage to meet up with some friends last night, before the convention began in earnest. It was a bit of a G+ reunion. Zzarchov drove down from middle of nowhere Ontario. Richard G drove up from Upstate New York. We rounded out the posse with some torontOSR regulars: myself, Brendan, Alex, and KYANA. What a crew! KYANA gave everyone G+ buttons she made. An advantage of meeting up with Zzarchov is you get to see what he’s been up to in the flesh. He had new reprints of several of his books, including one of my favourites, Scenic Dunnsmouth—a true classic of the OSR. The book was kickstarted as part of the Kickstarter for City of Tears. It still features Jez’s amazing art and layout. I assume you’ll be able to buy it soon. This is me giving you notice to start paying attention to Neoclassical Games wesbstore.

I’ve wanted to play Trophy Gold for an age now, since it was first released within one of the Gauntlet Codex zines. The rules are interesting and unusual, and I have been curious about how it would feel to play. Trophy Gold is a game that takes the one-shot story game Trophy Dark and tweaks it to support ongoing play with some OSR sensibilities². Both games are written by the talented Jesse Ross, who also did the art and layout for the games. What! A third book, Trophy Loom, is a sort of anti-canon setting book you could use to flesh out games of Trophy Gold or Dark, or use in any other RPG you are playing. The writing, art, and graphic design of these books is top notch. The actual physical book for Trophy Gold is quite lovely. These things also contributed to my desire to get it to the table.

Creating characters for Trophy Gold is quite simple. The introductory section of the book walks you through the process, and the layout and design here is fantastic. Trophy Gold characters are quite minimal: a name, occupation, background, and 3 pieces of equipment will define them. Some characters may begin with the ability to cast ritual magic. There are random tables for all of these things, and they are very flavourful. Your character has two numeric stats you will track. Burden is the amount of gold you need to recover to support your lifestyle. If you don’t meet your burdens you “lose” the game, your character must retire. Ruin tracks your character’s journey towards darkness and destruction. When your ruin hits 6 you are lost to the wilds of Kalduhr: your character dies, becomes a monster, an evil NPC, whatever. The (weirdly amazing) Trophy Gold character keeper on Google Sheets walks you through the whole process of making a character. You can also use my random character generator, like god intended.

The mechanics of the game are simple, and create a satisfying game play loop. To explore the world you describe what you want to do and make a Hunt Roll. In some ways this lines up with a Random Encounter Rolls in D&D, or more closely with how Brendan outlines running the game using a Hazard Die. That was how it felt in play: perform some exploratory action and see if any danger finds you. You collect a meta-game currency, called Hunt Tokens, via your Hunt Roll. You can trade these tokens in for gold or to accomplish a goal. Exploration will likely lead to risky activities, mediated with a Risk Roll, or Combat, which has its own mechanics.

At first blush, how Hunt Tokens are used in this game feels at odds with what I expect from the games I play. Courtney has written many essays on the dangers of the Quantum Ogre, and I have taken his advice to heart. What do meaningful choices look like in a game where the treasure is in this room because you decided it was in this room? Well, for starters, players are aware of what’s smoke and what’s mirrors.

I would have loved to see more detailed advice on running Trophy Gold. The GM section in the book is quite small. There is tons of information out there in the form of podcasts and actual play videos, it’s quite well supported in that regard, but that’s not my preferred way to learn how to play a game. I ended up asking a lot of questions in Trophy Discord—which is fantastic—to get a sense of what game play should look like, what the game should feel like in play, etc. (That there is so much information on Discord, and not in a more public / searchable space like a blog is a shame. If you’re going to make an OSR game, you should be required to foster the blogging culture to go with it!) I had lots on my mind prior to and during play. How many Hunt Rolls is too many? What are some examples of fleeing from combat, or trying to avoid it in the first place? How much extra Endurance should you give a group of monsters? They are often quite goofy, a well written example of play can really clarify how the rules of a game all fit together.

Adventures in Trophy are called Incursions. An adventure is described loosely, as the expectation seems to be that the details will arise through play. Trophy assumes a high level of collaboration between the GM and players. When players make Risk Rolls you’re expected to solicit ideas of what might go wrong from everyone at the table. All players can also offer up Devil’s Bargains: something bad that will happen regardless of how the roll goes in exchange for an extra dice to improve your odds of success. The GM could (and should!) turn describing spaces, rooms, NPCs, etc, over to the players. These are habits I normally don’t have when running, and something I forgot to do throughout both games I ran. If anything, this was my biggest stumbling block with the game: trying to break my own habits and approach the game on its own terms.

An incursion is broken up into a series of sets, with each set having a goal for the players to achieve. Our game began with the players making their way into the Temple of the Peerless Star via the Sept. Their goal was to gain entry to the basement. Players are aware of the goal of the set. In some ways someone could argue Trophy is all meta-gaming: a game designed to simulate the act of playing an OSR game. Its original incarnation had instructions for deconstructing your favourite modules into higher level sets that your players could explore. What are the key beats of Deep Carbon Observatory? Let’s just go on a tour of those. As written, players generally have a lot more knowledge about what’s going on in an adventure than you would find in your typical OSR game, often being told upfront what the end goal of a particular area might be, or contributing directly to the overall narrative and fiction of the world they are exploring. Alex and Brendan knew what they needed to do, and in the initial set up for the scenario, so did the characters themselves. This alignment may not always exist.

I can say that in practice, the game I ran didn’t feel far away from the sorts of games I’d run with D&D or Into the Odd or whatever else. It didn’t feel high level, or that the players were divorced from the actions of their characters. We explored unknown spaces in search of treasure. Things developed in unexpected ways. There is risk and danger and all the good stuff. If I described the beats of the game we played to someone it would probably sound like any other game I run. But how we got those beats was sometimes quite different.

The player’s accomplished their first goal diegetically, exploring the Sept, finding the trapdoor to the basement, and picking the lock to open it. The rolls to make all of this happen resulted in them being pickpocketed by another adventurer, who they ended up confronting and recruiting. She helped camouflage Alex’s character with a ritual (Blur) so that he would draw less attention to himself when trying to pick the lock to the Basement. (The pickpockets character was picked up by Paul when he joined the game late.) The second set, exploring the basement, they accomplished by trading in Hunt tokens to accomplish a goal. They didn’t finish the 3rd set, the Catacombs, though exploring it was the bulk of our second session together. By the end of the night they had managed to secure enough treasure to flee back to town, and flee they did!

While discussing the game, Brendan reminded me of two posts that he felt would help one understand where this game fits in the broader landscape of RPGs: Grognardia’s The Oracular Power of Dice and his own Reflection and Formation. Trophy Gold has the Hunt Role as a formative rules that produce play at the table, its Risk Roll sitting somewhere in the middle, and the Combat Roll more traditional and reflective. To quote James, “In old school games, the ‘story’ arises from the synthesis of design, randomness, and reaction; it isn’t something you can set out to create.” Trophy Gold would seem to fit the bill.

We had a fun time gaming with Trophy Gold. The game is this weird mix of story gaming and OSR nonsense. I think it manages to make this marriage work. The game feels unique in this regard. I am still thinking aobut this game now, and will likely have more to say about it. I’m not done with Trophy.

Trophy Gold has some optional light weight rules for journeys that have the players slowly building up a point crawl style map of the world. One thing I like about the suggested approach is that it feels very much like Dark Souls, where part of the fun will be discovering the unusual connections in the world. The game is very collaborative in nature, and there is an expectation that things develop organically through play, with input from the players alongside the GM. You could certainly run things with a more well defined game world, but it feels a bit counter to the spirit of the game.

I’m curious if these moments would feel the same, when the players all know they are produced through the luck of the dice rather than the world building of a DM. I’ll need to play to figure that out. My copies of Trophy Dark, Gold, and Loom arrived a couple weeks ago. They are incredible, and if you are lucky they will reprint and sell many more.

This winter the Sword & Board is running a Mordheim campaign. Mordheim is a beloved skirmish game made by Games Workshop many years ago. Players each control a warband exploring the ruins of the Mordheim, collecting the remnants of the meteor that destroy the city, Wrydstone. The game is famous for its John Blanche art, flavourful setting, and its rich detailed campaign system. As you play Mordheim your warband will grow in power game, end up maimed, likely both. I have wanted to play Mordheim for ages, and this league presents the perfect chance to do so.

To start, I needed a warband. I wanted to reuse as much stuff as I owned as possible, and settled on playing Undead. This gave me the chance to continue painting my minis from the Cursed City board game, and build a few extra people using kits and bits I owned. I ended up painting more minis than I need to start, but I have options depending on the direction the campaign takes my team.

Khaimpo the Wretched finds himself in the employ of the Vampire Lord Volchyakrov, exploring the ruins of Mordheim. He is joined by the mercenaries Vrouwer Koning, Humeurige Van Dame and the coward Peters Van der Peters: the dregs of proper society. Zombies, Dire Rats and degenerate Ghouls round out this decrepit warband.

I’ve played one practice game of Mordheim, which was a lot of fun. The rules are … old school: there are tables, lots of dice rolling, and rules scattered throughout the book. Warcry feels like it’s the stronger game, but people aren’t playing Mordheim for its tight game design. Mordhiem is a narrative game, and its the story of this campaign I’m looking forward to seeing unfold.

Getting ready to play Mordheim has been a lot of fun. I enjoy painting, and having the activity be focused around play makes me enjoy it all the more. It can be easy to lose steam with bigger painting projects. Skirmish games present a nice opportunity to build, paint, and play quickly. They are a great way to get into the hobby.

Mothership’s Warden’s Manual’s very first spread is a step by step breakdown of what you’ll need to do to run your first session. There isn’t any faffing about: you’ve bought this game and you want to play it, here’s what you should do to make that happen. There’s even pictures of an example notebook so you can see what sample prep (and how little you probably need to have fun) looks like. Mothership is a horror game, and so one of the first things the game master is going to have to figure out is what makes a horror game different than your typical game of D&D. Here Sean breaks things down in a very approachable way, with what he calls the TOMBS cycle. You can use Mothership to run all sorts of games, no doubt, but the Warden’s Manual helps frame the sorts of games that likely make the most sense, by walking you through prepping such games in its opening section. The advice on prepping a game also serves as an introduction to the game and genre itself.

The middle section of the book is what I think of as more typical when it comes to DMGs: what are the mechanics and logistics of actually running a game? (Here Sean also tackles what must likely be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people coming to Mothership: when should you roll the dice?) Into the Odd has great advice on running the game and I think this section from Sean is of a similar pedigree. Sean also talks more about the sorts of scenarios that are likely to come up in a Mothership game: investigations and social encounters. Again, what he’s chosen to focus on in this book helps frame what the game is about.

Finally the book concludes with how to start and run a campaign. Like the opening of the book, this section is concrete advice to get you going. Sean’s goal is to have you running a campaign quickly, not fall into the trap of prepping instead of playing.

Reading this book made me want to play Mothership again. I could do it better now! This book is likely so good because it’s written as if it was going to be someone’s first RPG. This is probably a ridiculous assumption, but the book is all the more accessible because of it. I’m a very experienced RPG player at this point in my life, but the sort of guidance Sean’s put down in this book is useful for everyone. For experienced players who are bringing their own baggage to the game, a book like this helps clear up assumptions and gets you playing all the more quickly.

As I said at the start, I think there are very few DMGs that are actually any good. LotFP’s Grindhouse Referee book was my previous high watermark for these sorts of books. Raggi wants you to play his game and its infectious. For all the edginess of the line, the Referee and Tutorial books are so weirdly welcoming. Raggi’s online persona has some real wrestling heel energy, but his books for new GMs are written from a place that feels really friendly and inclusive. He really included everything you’d need to understand what a Weird Historical Horror RPG was about. (There is even a section on how to recruit players for your game—weirdly dated in this age of online game.) Brindlewood Bay is another game that is written with such care for the player that will run the game. It goes into great detail about how to start playing the game as quickly as possible. What your first session should look like, exactly. That these are all horror games is interesting. A coincidence? Something for someone else to discuss.

If you didn’t back this Kickstarter what were you thinking? Be sure to grab this game when you can—like now.

I’ve been looking forward to Marcia’s tidied up version of OD&D. It’s a straight up retroclone: she hasn’t tried to fix the gaps in the game, the gaps are the best part. Enjoy. It’s free!

If you haven’t read OD&D you should, it’s really wild what they thought was enough for people to play a game. And really, they were right. People figured it out and made amazing things.

Just to get a little bit ahead of any exodus, here are a few places you might see me besides this blog:

• Mastadon, which honestly kind of sucks. It’s like the Linux of social media. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. But, at least we can trust it to chug along while not selling your data to advertisers. I’m on tabletop.social, but another popular choice with open registration is dice.camp.
• Cohost.org, which seems promising, but I am unsure how they plan to keep the lights on. It reminds me a bit of G+, in that you can create public (or private!) “pages” for people to follow, and you write posts with comments: no stupid threads.

At the end of the day, the OSR is about blogging, and I’m always up for more of that.

The first part of the infamous follow up to Deep Carbon Observatory is finally out, Demon Bone Sarcophagus. Time to buy while the Tories are demolishing the value of the British Pound! I’ve been reading the PDF on and off: there is so much going on it’s kind of bananas.

I had been not so patiently for my copy of Into the Odd to arrive. Chris teamed up with Johan Nohr of Mörk Borg fame to produce this new edition of the game. They have made a really incredible book together, it’s really quite beautiful. My love of this system has grown slowly over time. Paolo published Wonder and Wickedness and Into the Odd around the same time, but I next to no interest in the game. The implied setting seemed wasn’t really to my taste. Also, I was all about OD&D at the time. Over the years, perhaps with the release of Silent Titans, I have become much more aware and interested in Chris’s works. He’s one of my favourite OSR game designers now, and Into the Odd seems like one of the more important and influential works to have come out of the OSR.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming exist to highlight truly standout RPG books. Unlike previous years I had a strong sense from the start what books I’d end up picking. As usual there are some real gems in my honourable mentions, so don’t sleep on those either!

The books in contention arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2021. That’s a long while ago now, I know, but that’s really my only rule with these awards and I will stick with it. Will the categories be the same as last year? Read on to find out!

Best Adventure: Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier by Gus L

Gus continues to put out some of the best adventures in the OSR. He’s spent the last however many years really going full-on nerd when it comes to dungeon crawling, and his adventures are all the better for his deep thinking on this topic. There is much to love about Gus’s Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier. As with Prison of the Hated Pretender, an honourable mention from last year, there is the occasional editorial note for new (or old!) DMs to better understand how to go about running these sorts of adventures. I love these snippets. The book features great art, also by Gus. He also did the layout. A real renaissance man!

Best Skirmish Game: Space Weirdos by Casey Garske

If you’ve been burned by Games Workshop and their bloated and expensive rule sets then Space Weirdos will be a breath of fresh air. Space Weirdos is a nice and simple skirmish war game. I watched the game come together over the course of the pandemic, Casey sharing early drafts in my not so secret 40K discord server. I play tested it a few times over the course of the pandemic. Thanks to ZineQuest he did a very DIY print run, commissioned a cool cover, and added some solo rules. The game feels like it’s gained a lot of traction over the course of 2022, finding a nice audience of fans. If you have a handful of minis and some time you can and should be playing this game.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2021: Cartel by Mark Diaz Truman

Hold up: this isn’t an OSR game. Yeah I know, but the heart wants what the heart wants. I picked up the ashcan version of Cartel at the end of 2016. Over the following years Mark would develop the game into something really compelling. A scandalous game about the cartels and the drug war that has you playing the compromised people that make it all go: drug kingpins, petty gangsters, corrupt cops, complicit spouses, etc. The best Powered by the Apocalypse games feel like engines propelling the players forward, and I would say Cartel is one of the best Powered by the Apocalypse games. I’ve played the game several times now, and each time has left me wanting to play more. This game has likely been overshadowed by the success of Magpie’s other games, but it’s too good to ignore. I really love Cartel, and hope more people check it out.

Honourable Mentions

A special shout out to Forbidden Psalm by Kevin Rahman; Fimbria by Giuliano Roverato; The Haunted Hamlet and other Hexes by the Lazy Litch; Kriegsmesser by Gregor Vuga; Lowlife by Sam Sorensen; Rebel Crown & Serpent Oak by Michael Dunn-O’Connor & Eric Swanson; Reign in Hell by Adam Loper and Vince Venturella; and Ross Rifles by Daniel Kwan, Patrick Keenan, and Daniel Groh. Forbidden Psalm takes everything you love about MÖRK BORG, and adds minis: that’s what I’m talking about!

Gygax rightly assumes you know what a bandit is and doesn’t waste any words explaining the obvious to you. Instead he spends a lot of time explaining the fighting composition of a group of bandits.

Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are super-normal fighters, magical types or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4th-level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5th- or 6th-level fighter …

I’m not sure that’s much better. I sincerely love the OD&D monster booklet, though! It is charming. The collection of creatures hints at the world of the game, but the game itself is a bit hands off in telling you much about itself.

The treasure tables and descriptions of treasure are similarly terse, and mostly quite dry.

[Ring of] Protection: A ring which serves as +1 armor would, giving this bonus to defensive capabilities and to saving throws.

Into this fruitful void left by Gygax steps the man himself Luke Gearing. The cheekily named Volume 2: Monster & is Gearing’s take on an OD&D monster manual. Luke leans even harder into the minimalism of OD&D, giving us a book that is far more flavourful. It’s basically all flavour. His take on Cockatrice reads like a poem, likely because this is basically a book of poetry:

Featherless Bird
armoured with iron scale
and useless wings purloined from bats
stretched wide to embrace the world.

There are stats for each creature, though they are as minimal as those found in OD&D’s book of monsters. A Cockatrice is: HD 5, AC as Plate, damage 1d6, physical contact causes petrifaction. If you need Luke to tell you anything else about a Cockatrice this is probably not the book for you. If you want a picture of a Cockatrice you’ll be doubly disappointed!

Luke’s bandits are described as follows:

1d6 relatives to grieve, close enough to know who did it.

But who is in charge! Luke isn’t trying to solve that problem with this bestiary. This is a book about transmitting feeling and mood.

I believe the best game books fold worldbuilding into everything they do. As terse as this book is, you get a strong sense of the implied world these monsters fit within. The implication throughout the book is that most monsters are men who have twisted themselves in pursuit of power, or have been twisted by men into the monstrous, with some fantastic beasts to round it all out. I like this take on the creatures of OD&D. It aligns nicely with what I am trying to do in my recent Gygax 75 project.

If you enjoy this take on the dragon you’ll enjoy this book. If you think this is some total art-house nonsense—and honestly, it kind of is—you will be disappointed: avoid this book, it’ll just piss you off. I for one enjoyed this unusual take. We already have Monsters & Treasure, Monster Manual, The Fiend Folio, etc. No one needs to tell that story again.

Many months later Luke completed his take on Book 2 of OD&D, releasing &&&&&&&&& Treasure. The book opens with treasure tables with clearer names than Gygax’s Type A, B, C, etc, so that’s already a bit of a win. Then we get section after section of treasure, starting with coins:

Hoards of coins do not occur under normal conditions.
Coins are hoarded as things begin falling apart.
Hoards which are found were never claimed by their originator.

The book opens with 12 different types on coinage one might find. Luke manages to make hordes of coins interesting, an impressive feat. Then we get trade goods, artifacts, maps, and what takes up the bulk of the book, magic items. Unlike Volume 2: Monsters &, which is essentially the art-house version of the OD&D monster manual, &&&&&&&&& Treasure is all original content, its connection to the original treasure book far looser. I really enjoyed everything he’s come up with here. It’s quite inspired.

The world building and implied setting is perhaps even stronger in this second book. (Maybe because it’s also longer and wordier?) There is an undercurrent of sadness, displacement, and history that runs throughout.

Old Key: When property must be abandoned there is much to consider. Many plan on returning, and keep a key. They are passed down generations, against the day of their return. Every key is an unfulfilled promise, a rusted chain of custody. Their tales cipher maps and directions to the promised places, even if young ears and old tongues do not recognise them as such.

If stolen, pursuit is inevitable.

Worth 5sp.

A ring that lets you cast fireball is rendered like so:

The Witness: A ring made from a petrified tree, smoothed and carved. Uncomfortably chunky on the finger. The tree saw the stars fall, and could speak it into being again. Once per day, the caster may evoke the ring to cast Fireball and extinguish a star.

I find myself wanting to quote more and more of the items in this book. I feel like any random one I read is enjoyable.

What else is there to say? If you want a very simple OD&D monster manual because the original one puts you to sleep, Luke’s got you covered. But its not illustrated and very minimal! You need to be ready to use your imagination or you will be disappointed. I also think Luke should have included a table with all the monster stats, like Monsters and Treasure: that is the best part of that book! But, i’m not sure it would fit with the aesthetic of this one.

&&&&&&&&& Treasure needs no caveats: it is a well executed book of treasure. Also barely illustrated, but the writing is really what you’re here for, and it delivers. I loved this book. If you were only going to buy one of these books, the treasure one is what i’d grab. But why would you do that? They are Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure.

These notes and Arneson’s would ultimately become Dungeons & Dragons, but only by being codified could the game really be propagated and begin to gather a following. This same problem persists for designers today.

Gus has written a long essay on procedures in gaming, why they mater, and a mode of thinking about games he calls Proceduralism. One could call this tract of thinking the Pahvelorn School of Game Design. As it was for Gus, that campaign was so inspirational for me. It really shaped how I think and play games now, all these years later. I had bugged Gus to break this post up, there is so much here, and a lot of it could stand by itself, but he said “no way!” A man’s gotta have a code, I suppose.

[Regarding the phrase “D&D is always Right”,] my point has never been, so far as I can recall, about “recovering” the original, hidden meaning of D&D. I’m not sure there is one in many cases. Rather, my point was simply akin to Chesterton’s fence: don’t assume a rule you don’t understand isn’t workable. Assume it is and see where that takes you. — James Maliszewski, 2022, who sadly also has no idea what post i’m talking about.

Update: Thanks to Lucas in the comments, we stumble on this post, which is likely the one I was thinking about: The Glories of Incoherence.

I just finished playing four sessions of Torchbearer. Jesse ran the game for a small group of us. I will write more about Torchbearer later, it was a very interesting game. Today I simply wanted to write about rules and how players engage with them.

In OSR play, I think it quite common that players are doing their utmost to avoid engaging with the rules of play! They often exist to model some sort of failure state: saving throws, combat, etc. The odds are in the house’s favour, so play becomes about fictional positioning to avoid leaving things to chance. OSR games are about overcoming challenges, and clever play in this space is all about stacking the odds in your favour. Of course, the best odds are the ones where you aren’t rolling any dice.

I play with people who regularly don’t know the rules of the game we’re playing. If they need to know something the expectation is the DM will tell them. Torchbearer sits in stark contrast to all of this. You need to know the rules as a player and as a GM to play effectively. It’s an interesting game of resource management. Just like B/X, but you have even more to manage besides your food, light, time. You also have to worry about your conditions, checks, etc. Playing the game is about engaging with the rules. Clever play comes from understanding the mechanics and bending the game to your favour.

When chatting after our last session of Torchbearer I brought up some of the above and one of the player’s thought it so odd: you are just playing pretend, the game is rudderless. Players choices don’t mean anything, because nothing really means anything. A fair assessment, for sure. But I suppose how I have described things above isn’t the whole story.

OSR play feels like it’s about engaging with the negative space of the rules. The rules layout the guardrails for play. This is a game about exploration and adventure. You might need to Save vs. Magic, it’s written on your character sheet. You might need to fight a monster, you have hit points and to hit bonuses. The game tells you what it’s about, and where you need to worry, and play then is about trying not to worry. OSR play isn’t simply playing pretend because the game frames what your pretend looks like—like all role playing games.

Games that work well provide support for play through their rules, GM advice, player advice, etc. This is true regardless of the model of play as described above. When making a game, especially a rules lite game, you should think about how players will approach the rules of play, and if there is enough there to encourage forward movement and interest.

Choosing Left or Right

​In any game, there are important decisions to be made, which push things forward to move us towards escalation and resolution. Part of player skill in these endeavours is a) being able to identify which decisions are important, which are arbitrary, and which are both, and then b) making them so the game can move forward.

In an OSR game, very often that’s “do we go left or right here?” Good players know when it’s a meaningful decision and when it’s an arbitrary one (so you can just flip a coin or whatever), and play accordingly. Move the game forward—it doesn’t go anywhere unless you choose a corridor, bub.

In a dramatic game, though, those spatial decisions often/generally don’t have any weight or importance. What really matters is morality, theme, and character drive. That’s where the game doesn’t do anything if the players don’t move. Especially if we’re trying to play on a short time frame (as happens if you play a handful of 2 hour sessions online: it’s basically an extended one-shot). So it’s important to identify those crucial points, and make a strong move on them. Strong means dramatic, important, or resonant.

In an OSR game, failing to choose left or right when there’s no real info to go on will just stall the game. In a dramatic game, similarly failure to decide whether you hate your mother or whether you want to poison or sleep with your rival will stall the game. The GM has tools to push things along, but the game doesn’t really “go” until the players take strong positions on those things.

And often, like left or right (especially in a short-form game), they are arbitrary, so you can go with your gut. However, it’s important to pick one, make it strong, and make your choice quickly.

There are two main ways this happens in dramatic games:

1. The player thinks about the story as an author, picking something that excites them or the people around them.
2. We set up a pregnant situation, usually with the player heavily involved and bought in emotionally, and then in play the player can think as the character and react passionately and instinctively. Follow your gut and react powerfully from the mindset of the character.

You know when you’re playing a character and suddenly you just know that they hate this new person who appeared? You don’t even know why, it’s just clear as day to you? That’s the feeling. The second way is generally more exciting (for me, anyway) because it’s visceral, but it requires some setup. You build a situation with that potential energy in it already, get excited about it, and then dive into character and play from the gut. This means driven, passionate characters, and a situation which puts pressure on them.

This is very exciting in play! A form of unconscious authoring which is both powerful and moving. However, when the conditions for it do not exist (as often happens in more short-term play), you have to make a choice: help the game move ahead by making the first move.

A good player in this style often makes bold moves like this. It can be complex or nuanced, or it can be simple, like announcing that you feel a certain way when an NPC is introduced (“Oh, a noble! I hate all nobles, and, by extension, hate this guy with a totally irrational passion”). It’s like playing White in Chess - there’s no battle yet, but you’ve got to advance a pawn and start one.

Next time you see a movie or TV show, note how the writers do this. Why’s Batman so angry? A criminal killed his parents.

In our Cartel game, I was happy when Sofia and Alvaro took a strong stance and made a move by choosing to kill her husband and his boss in order to take over the family. That’s what allowed us to reach a sense of conclusion and forward motion. Nice!

That’s an angle on it, anyway. Questions, comments, criticism are all welcome if anyone wants to discuss! — Paul T, March 24th, 2022

I bought two games that feel like they exist in sharp contrast to one another. The first was Skorne, an OSR/FKR game. It was a $3 PDF I printed at home and folded into a zine. The second is probably the most famous Belonging Outside Belonging game at this point, Wanderhome, which arrived at my door in its fancy coffee table book form.

One player is SKORNE the devil prince: commander of demon rulers and their armies. The other players are renegades, part of mankind’s insurrection against the darkness that reigns. Overthrow the evil Tyrants. Free chained captives. Fight to the last man.

That’s all Skorne has to say about what kind of game you’ll be playing. What else is there to say, I suppose? I already know what I’ll do with this game. Anything else the author has to say is wasted words.

To be honest, it feels rare that an OSR game tells you explicitly what it’s even about. LotFP’s Rules and Magic opens like so:

Roll 3d6 for each ability score (Charisma, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, Wisdom), in order, and record them on your character sheet.

The book jumps right into the action.¹ Of course, I never struggled trying to understand what I was going to do when I picked up that rule book. I knew, somewhere deep in my brain.

Wanderhome, though. What the hell even is this game? I asked my friends:

So is the source of conflict in Wanderhome dealing with nature and the traits of the people you meet? Am I thinking about this all wrong? Like some totally different paradigm I need to get my head around.

A friend replied to tell me the obvious: it’s a game about going places and meeting people. Whether there is conflict or tension is besides the point. The funny thing is, Wanderhome tells you as much right from the start. Again and again, really. The introduction is long and poetic and detailed. The art is beautiful and evocative. You can picture the Miyazaki movie unfurl in your head.² Still, I found myself thinking, “but why?”, in a way I never do with D&D-a-likes because I have so deeply internalized what those games want you to do. Someone reading Wanderhome without any of the baggage of playing other RPGs will likely intuit what it’s about with ease.

The easy thing to do when you come across a game outside your comfort zone is to dismiss it out of hand: “how is this even a game?” Personal preference turns into condemnation. I try and make an effort to understand where games are coming from. The experience of playing games further afield from my tastes has at times been revelatory. Approaching a game on its own terms with an open mind doesn’t mean you’ll end up liking it. There are many games I read and bounce right off. That’s fine, not all games need to be for me, not should they.

I’m looking forward to playing both of this games. I’m sure i’ll have much more to say.

In 1975 Gary Gygax wrote an article describing a simple approach to creating a campaign world over 5 weeks, which you could then expand upon through play: like God intended. Ray Otus took this article and expanded on its ideas to create a structured work book with concrete steps for each week and his own example of creating a small campaign setting. Recently Dungeon Possum posted about his plans to go through this process. This got me interested in doing the same. I am keen to create a basic-ass fantasy setting. I normally gravitate towards Gonzo He-Man nonsense. Playing Dark Souls and Demon Souls over the last year has me interested in Arthurian fantasy—by way of a confused Japanese man. And so that’s what I will go with. We’ll call it Misericorde for now, until I figure out the names for things in this setting.

Follow along on my blog, of course: Gygax ‘75: Misericorde.

The red dragon Vlaurung lives in a palace in space and is the consort of Tiamat.

One of my favourite parts of Dark Sun was that there was a singular Dragon: it made the monster more mythic in my mind. Sean felt the same way about making monsters unique:

I feel like almost any game could be made better by taking the monster manual and just writing The before every monster.

And then Brendan reminded us that he figured this all out many years ago: Sui Generia.

Some creatures feel like they maybe aren’t as nice a fit for this treatment, your D&D mooks: kobolds, orcs, goblins, etc. Alex suggested “the Goblins being a single band of six (6) named assholes is as good as if not better than a monolithic Goblin.” Chris followed up, “I feel like you could have The Kobold, but still have a Kobold society that he’s built down in the mines with stolen children or whatever and the kids all paint themselves blue and make shitty traps or whatever else kobolds do.” I love it.

This feels like such a simple and compelling way to create a unique setting from a collection of very common elements. You could pick 10 of your favourite monsters and create a unique world for you and your friends. These conversations always have me thinking about running OD&D again.

I didn’t want this conversation to disappear into the ether that is random peple on a random discord, so here we are. Blogs are for remembering.

Scrap Princess’ illustrations contribute to the overall tone of the book. I find her work is so frenzied and terrifying. Maybe that’s not the right word, but there is something about how she draws that I find really visceral. I don’t know anyone else that draws like her.

All these years later, I still don’t know anyone who draws like her. How does she even draw?

My pinned tweet on Twitter is this picture by Scrap Princess, from the Kickstarter for Deep Carbon Observatory Remastered. I like it because it manages to be both funny and creepy simultaneously.

A few years later she would draw another favourite picture of mine, a picture of madness from Veins of the Earth. (Such an incredible book.) The picture feels like an evolution of the giant. I asked Scrap if that was her intention and she said, “Nope. (Other than its horrible and in a cave?)”

People will often denigrate Scrap’s art as scribbles. Which, on the one hand, sure, but there is clearly more going on. I don’t scribble this good. These eyes are piercing. The line work of her drawings feels frantic. It has an energy that feels charged. On Twitter, Warren D summed things up nicely: “I always emotionally respond to Scrap’s art before I finish consciously visually processing it; ‘feel’ it before I ‘see’ it. Most WotC art I see quickly and feel nothing.”

Fire on the Velvet Horizon is likely peak scribbling Scrap, but maybe also highlights what you can capture in such minimalist drawings. The history of that project is interesting. While Vein of the Earth was stuck in the miasma of layout and production, Scrap and Patrick worked on this monster book. Scrap mailed Patrick drawings and sketches, and he would turn them into monsters.

The thing about Velvet Horizon that gets overlooked, constantly, is that I chose a wide range of drawings to send to Patrick, and that variety included extremely loose sketches, more developed drawings, stuff I thought was bad, stuff I thought was good. Then whatever he responded to , he responded to, and that drawing would then go into the book. However there’s like a few entries where what he responded to was such a bizarrely small and brief drawing that I chose to draw a new drawing to go on that page, but I believe in every case the responded-to drawing is also on there too. There’s a few where the drawing responded to was something in the margins or on the back of another drawing, and I hadn’t even expected those scribbles to be up for consideration. That was all part of the experiment of that book.

I asked Scrap if she was like Picasso and could draw perfectly but decided that was boring. She laughed in my face. (Well, virtually.) She then went on to say:

Trying to get the hang of basics does inform my scribble style. It’s been an ongoing process of trying to draw conventionally or at least do the basics, turning out bad ugly drawings, but in the process of improving that skill, my gestural style improves as well.

Why does she draw the way she does? We can just ask her:

What has made my drawing looking like how it does is that I really struggle with the basics, especially anything informed by methodicalness and close observation. At some point in high school me and a friend were drawing our own illustrations on a print out of fairly broken fighting game rpg someone had downloaded from the early internet. I was trying to draw conventionally and it was turning out bad, and he was just going for it doing these crazy scribbles and they turned out amazing. Even when they didn’t look like what they were meant to , they still were hilarious. It was at that point that I realized if I just cut loose and scribbled and then tried to turn it into something , it would have much better results.

Veins on the Earth and her later books feature a bigger variety of types of art, but everything she does is always more abstract and impressionistic than your typical RPG drawing. The Blink Dogs and the Anitpheonix from that book are a couple of my favourite examples of her not-scribbling style.

Scrap isn’t active on social media, but that doesn’t mean we should Forget about D.R.E. This post mostly exists to share some of her art, and maybe introduce her to people who weren’t around on G+ when she was more active in “the scene”. To get back to where we started, enjoy this picture from their latest Kickstarter.

Patrick and Scrap are currently running a Kickstarter for the follow-up adventure to Deep Carbon Observatory, Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, so now seems as good a time as any to talk about their work. This is easy to do, as I’m planning on running Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered) tomorrow, it made its way from the UK to me via my brother after a good long while. When I first reviewed DCO it was simply from having read it. I have more thoughts now as I prepare to run the module and talk to other people about their experiences doing so.

Deep Carbon Observatory came out in 2014. It featured a layout that be called serviceable at best. My friend Alex ran the module a couple years later, using that original version of the game. He wrote about the inaugural session on his blog. Our conversation about how to run the game transitioned into one about the game more broadly.

From a “usability” standpoint [the original DCO] is middling to poor. The maps are hard to read, the info design is unambitious. But Patrick knows that good storytelling is a way of organizing information by sheer virtue of being interesting enough to remember. Honestly I think it’s a shot across the bow of most conventional wisdom on module writing. — Alex Chalk

I have written about how Patrick reveals information to the reader seemingly at the same pace it would end up being revealed to the player, something I think makes his books as engaging to read as to play. It’s a very unusual approach to module writing, one I don’t think anyone else follows. The remastered edition of DCO does more work to help orient the reader, but for the most part you are thrown right into the deep end.

Patrick instructs you to read the whole god damn book before you run the adventure. Maybe this is actually a really obvious thing to do with a book, but I think a lot of thinking around information design in modules is rooted in the ideas coming out of the one-page dungeon contest: you should be able to look at a particular spread and have all the information you need to get the job done. The remastered edition brings this sort of thinking to DCO, but like Silent Titans, there are key facets of the module that won’t reveal themselves to you till you get to the end of the book. In DCO Patrick coyly describes the backstory for the module with the sub-heading, “in case of Speak with Dead, use this.” This timeline is exactly the sort of thing that you’d find in the introduction to a typical OSR module.

Patrick wants you to approach understanding a module the way he does: by reading the whole thing. You’ll need to read it all at some point anyway: why not at the start? And so I did, and then felt some panic about how I would even run all of this. There is so much going on in DCO: there are the Crows, the Witch, a cannibal cult¹, so many NPCs, the dam and its golem guardians, the actual Deep Carbon Observatory, etc, etc. Jesse Abelman told me to chill out: he ran the module straight from the book!²

The layout of the [new] book was great, I could easily find anything I needed so I barely did any prep between sessions. That said, I’m not surprised it was easier to run from the first edition than expected. I had the same experience with Silent Titans. I think Patrick is so good at creating juicy gameable situations and encounters that everything else almost doesn’t matter. Whatever difficulty there may be in stitching those things together because of how the book is designed is balanced by the actual content. — Jesse Abelman

Jesse’s experience mirrors my own using Silent Titans. DCO feels like there is a bit more going on across the whole module, so I’m curious to see how it plays tonight. With Silent Titans I would lean on Patrick’s writing a lot to describe the scenes, sometimes reading his prose straight to the player. (Some real OSR blasphemy, I know.) Alex mentioned doing the same to me when he was running DCO: “Another thing I’ll say about DCO is I often struggle to improvise description, but I felt I was able to tune into its voice and channel that in describing situations.”

Patrick and Scrap’s books are sometimes maligned for being more art project than gaming artifact.³ I asked Patrick about this and he felt while Scrap and him can sometimes be quite out there and imaginative, they are both keenly aware that what they are making is for a game. If one of them forgets, the other will remind them. Reading their works you can see they are fixated on the game, in a way I sometimes feel other OSR writers forget: things are gonzo, but in the service of nothing.

Judging by my own bookshelf, a lot of adventures are written, read, and never played. As someone writing modules, it’s likely important to appreciate this fact, and try and make something that manages to be compelling even if it only ever sits on a shelf. But there is more going on here: solid adventures inject their ideas into your head as if they were your own. DCO is easier to run because its elements are so compelling. The writing is not simply fanciful or an attempt at post-modern storytelling: it’s all in service of the game.

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Certainly. Luke’s latest work for Tuesday Knight Games is Gradient Descent, a megadungeon written for the sci-fi horror game Mothership. The braintrust at Mothership HQ asks the question, “can you fit a megadungeon in a small zine?” Yes, apparently you can.

I may have been the first person to run the module who didn’t help play test. It has a compelling premise: a giant space station, an evil AI, Bladerunner nonsense, etc: all the good stuff. I read it and was enthralled. Brendan and Evan played a game I ran online, starting in media res, trying to flee the space station with an artifact they found “off camera”. It was a fun game. Months later I picked the module up again and started a longer campaign, which has been running for several months now. As it winds down I have lots of thoughts about this adventure.

Gradient Descent is a 64 page full colour zine: it’s a very dense 64 pages. Like all good OSR books it opens suggesting how you might use this adventure, from the basis of a campaign to something to simply hoover up ideas from. Luke explains some basic procedures of play and how the module works and then we jump right into things. There is an AI, Monarch, that controls a massive space station called The Deep. This is a huge factory complex, abandoned by its corporate overlords. Next we learn about what orbits the Deep. My Mothership campaign had the players begin in The Bell, a small retrofitted thruster that serves as a safe haven for people exploring the station. There they met a small coterie of NPCs who can help kick things off. As part of a larger campaign I would have had them try and cross a blockade to reach the station, and perhaps make friends with Commander Kilroy, another NPC with goals they might help achieve. Along with some “monsters”, these are the things outlined first. Then we move onto the “dungeon” itself, which makes up the bulk of the adventure. The Deep is huge. There are several floors, many sections, and a web of interconnections. It’s a complex and interesting dungeon. In a twisted way you can almost picture what the factory would have been like in the past. Finally the book concludes with a table of random artifacts, some super science. The back cover of the module is an “I search the body” table.

The art by Nick Tofani is wonderfully moody, often creepy. A perfect fit for this module. I would share it with my players often. Jarret Crader, the man behind all your favorite RPG books, did development editing. With a module such as this, I suspect no easy feat. Finally, Sean McCoy did the layout, and it’s a real chef kiss emoji.

The book continues a long tradition of really strong graphic and information design that feels like the most standout feature of the Mothership line. I see a lot of the design cues from one page dungeons at play here. The adventure is laid out with the two page spreads of the zine in mind. You can likely run each section of the dungeon with minimal page flipping. When I was running the adventure, from a PDF, I would normally only need to jump to the sections about the androids, ghosts in the machine, or monarch. If I had the zine in my hands I’d put some post it notes there and that would be that.¹ There is so much information this book is trying to get across, and it does a remarkable job at doing just that.

The descriptions in this dungeon are terse. On the whole I think this is a positive, and is what allowed me to run my games straight out of the book. It takes you seconds to read what’s going on in any room the players have walked into. For example:

The square in the title indicates this is a large industrial scale space: you should imagine a large factory or warehouse. In my head when I read this I pictured something akin to rows of corn. To avoid being licked would take some dexterity or creativity. The scene is both horrific and cold: there heads on stakes, but everything is artificial.

What now? Again this is a huge room, but I found it harder to imagine what its deal might be, where the loop of glass was going, and what it might be for. I know you might use sand for cleaning or scouring in a factory, perhaps for making glass, but I couldn’t quite picture what Luke wanted me to take away from this scene. I do like the phrase, “a whisper magnified to a roar,” though. In a space where you maybe expect to hear the clanking and crashing of a factory, this suggests a different sort of noisy space.

Most of the time there is enough for you to improvise on top of, especially for you pro-star GMs. I’m not sure i’m quite there, so I found myself describing rooms as “large industrial spaces” a lot, or falling back on analogies of Toyota factories. I should have watched some old films and made some dungeon dressing tables. I think if there was more space that would be a nice addition to the book: examples of what these alien industrial spaces might look like. A small table of ideas might be all it takes to help cement a space in your head. I would not want to see the descriptions of the rooms themselves expanded: improvising poorly is better than discovering well into play you forgot something important buried deep in some multi paragraph description of a space. I suppose the module is really trying to get straight to the point with everything it presents. We don’t have pages and pages of backstory about The Deep. If you read the module you’ll have a good sense of what’s up, with enough space for you to inject what you want. The module is flavourful: it paints a real picture of this strange alien space, certainly at the macro level.

Gradient Descent declares itself a sprawling sci-fi megadungeon. “But Ram, what does that even mean?” I would have shrugged my shoulders, but thankfully many years ago Gus wrote a blog post musing about what makes a megadungeon both mega and good. I regret not re-reading this blog post before running my games because I think it would have informed my GMing and improved the campaign.

The Deep is split up into 11 discrete interconnected sections. This doesn’t feel like a dungeon where the intention is to fight your way through it, so level 6 isn’t more ‘difficult’ than level 1, just different. The levels vary in size, but playing online most of the meatier ones took a few sessions each to explore. I initially tried to runs the game like a traditional dungeon crawl. I was going to think about rations and light and all that nonsense. I drafted up some houserules for overloading encounter rolls to track more aspects of play, but in the end I dropped it all.  I found it awkward. I am not sure that you can simply map that D&D style of play straight onto Mothership. Stress seems to be the resource you want to worry about in the game. Occasionally room descriptions in Gradient Descent will suggest players gain stress or make stress saves, but I think something more systematic that encompasses the whole module would have been a good addition. Dungeon exploration rules that tie into the stress mechanics of Mothership would be excellent. This is certainly something I will think much more about the next time I run the game.

The Bell is presented as an obvious home base. When I ran my Carcosa campaign the players generally ended each session back in the safety of a town. This way we could rotate new players in if needed week to week, which is generally what happened. The tone of this Gradient Descent campaign would have felt different if I also required the players end each session retreating back to safety—to the Bell or some particular sections of the Deep. This feels more in line with the ethos of a megadungeon campaign, as Gus outlines. You push into the space as far as you can until you must finally fall back. You are hunting for short cuts, trying to understand the geography, making friends with factions to find new safe havens, etc. With the short online sessions I was running I didn’t think this would work. The lack of a clear resource management side to the game also has some impact here: there isn’t a need to return if you don’t really need to resupply. The sessions we played ended up primarily being about exploring the weird space. We would pick up where we left off each session. And that’s perfectly fine, to be honest. There is enough there for it to be a fun experience, but you can do that and much more!

If I could go back I would have certainly prepped more! I am out of practice running games. This module is so well put together it fools you into thinking you can pick it up and just play. (And to be clear, you can, as I have just noted. Ha!) I just think I could have run a more compelling campaign if I had put in a bit more effort. I can picture something stronger! Mind you, no one is or was complaining: the players seemed to enjoy themselves and I certainly did. But maybe there are some lessons for you to do better than me:

• I kept the antagonist AI Monarch in the background for much of the campaign. I figured a creature such as it would see the players as ants, and largely ignore them. Which is all well and good if it was behaving like a god. But I didn’t really do much there, so they didn’t face much conflict from the game’s primary antagonist. I could have made its presence more known, indirectly in keeping with my original vision. Ominous messages, security androids giving the players cut-eye, and all that.
• There is a whole element of “am I a human or am I a robot” that I didn’t lean into. If you are running the game I would have some coterie of regular rival NPCs who are also exploring The Deep, and who may or may not be the mysterious infiltrator androids. I had NPCs I had drafted—and then didn’t really use! But why?
• There is a lot you can layer on top of the dungeon and its contents. NPC parties and factions are a big part of megadungeon play, and to get the most out of this module, I really recommend you think about these things up front, and as the players encounter the various factions of the dungeon. Luke has several factions called out explicitly who are adversarial with one another, like the Android groups on the second floor. There are a few other big groups that aren’t called out as factions, but could be treated as ones. (Off the top of my head the Androids hidden away in the Dis/Assembly floor.)

This sort of advice would have been good to include in the procedures of play that open the book. I think a much longer section on how to use the book most effectively would be great for new DMs, and honestly old ones like me. I’m not sure running a megadungeon is quite the same as running a normal dungeon, and so a few words discussing how you might approach things differently would have been great.

Overall my gripes are far outweighed by the creativity on display. In these Covid-times I had lost my energy when it came to playing RPGs, but reading this adventure really grabbed me and got my excited about gaming again. Most importantly it did what it said on the box: I ran this giant dungeon crawl for several months with the most half-assed of prep. This is the stuff dreams are made of: truly wondrous.

[ed. This review originally appeared in my friends’ review blog Bones of Contention.]

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming are here to make sure we stop and take notice of those books that were published so long ago you might ask yourself, “Why is Ramanan talking about them now?” Each year I create my short list of contenders, the books I think stood out over the entirety of the previous calendar year. Then I argue with the selection committee for months about which 3 books are those most notable in a field where there are many notable books. There aren’t many rules for these awards, but if there is one, it’s that there can only be 3 books.

Best Game: Electric Bastionland by Chris McDowall and Alec Sorenson.

“Players don’t need to read the rules if they don’t want to. They are simple enough to be learned during play.” Chris McDowall gets right to the heart of it with his followup to Into the Odd. Electric Bastionland is minimalist and terse. D&D stripped to the bone. The game is described in a handful of pages. The rest of the book is setting by way of backgrounds. They are funny and flavourful. The book concludes with advice for running the game: equally well done. The sort of gaming advice you can pick up and take with you elsewhere. Direct and to the point. Pragmatic. It’s quite impressive. The book like the game is beautiful. Alec Sorenson has done an incredible job bringing the setting to life.

Best Setting Book: Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City by Luka Rejec.

I was a member of Luka’s Patreon at its inception. He would post his art on G+ and I liked looking at all his drawings so it seemed like a natural thing to do. He would mail out updates to his setting, which I might skim, but would mostly file away to read later. Except that later never came until the book arrived at my door. What a wonderful and imaginative setting. I feel like you can flip to any random page and be presented with some amazing science-fantasy. Like all good OSR visionaries, Luka did all the writing, art and design for the book. Incredible, right?

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2020: Gradient Descent by Luke Gearing, Nick Tofanni, Jarrett Crader, and Sean McCoy.

I am in the middle of writing a review of this adventure. I ran it the moment it came out, and again as part of a longer campaign. In a year when I was so demotivated when it came to tabletop gaming, Gradient Descent got me out of my rut, excited to play, and then facilitated my playing by making an adventure that was so simple to run. The braintrust at Mothership HQ asks the question, “Can you fit a megadungeon in a small zine?” Yes, apparently you can. Luke Gearing has delivered the goods. Sean McCoy has done a fantastic job of presenting such a complex space in a way that you can run straight from the zine. Really strong graphic and information design continues to be the most standout feature of the Mothership line. Jarrett Crader did the editing on the book, I assume no small feat given how dense the book is. Finally Nick Tofani’s art is wonderfully moody, often creepy. A perfect fit for this module, I would share it with my players often. Gradient Descent is the good stuff.

Honourable Mentions

Lots of love to Prison of the Hated Pretender by Gus L; Pound of Flesh by Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud, and Luke Gearing; Ordure Fantasy by Michael Raston; Acid Death Fantasy also by Luke Gearing (WTF); Stygian Library Remastered by Emmy Allen; Sunken by Mike Martens; and Lorn Song of the Bachelor by Zedeck Siew. Prison of the Hated Pretender is the best introductory adventure to OSR play, and I was happy to see it revised and updated. Gus has been releasing modules at a real tear in 2021, and I’m excited to see what he puts out next.

Kingdom Death is a game where you can be playing spectacularly, and then roll a 1 on a random table and lose your star survivor. Frustrating, certainly, it’s happened to me! But, it can also be memorable and fun. I remember with much amusement Evan losing our best survivor to a bad roll on the Dark Dentist settlement event during our first campaign. Coming at the game with the mindset of an RPG player I find the randomness of the game’s story events enjoyable. When it works well, it brings the setting to life. But, if you are coming at this game with the perspective of a more serious board game player, these events are likely going to frustrate or feel half-baked.

A lot of the meta-game in Kingdom Death seems tied to mitigating and minimizing how the randomness of the game might effect you. The more you play your meta-knowledge about the game increases. You know what weapons to bring on a particular hunt that will work well against a particular monster. You know which survivors you’ll need to bring because they might be effective against some nemesis you’re facing. People learn what settlement events exist and groom survivors to handle them or take the fall as need be. You know what story events are coming up and what you might need to prepare to avoid dire results. Kingdom Death becomes a game of minimizing risk divorced from any ‘story’ that might be emerging through play.

In the past I’d have argued approaching the game with this mindset feels like it’s missing the point. The random death and destruction all feeds into the aesthetics of the game. The game is bleak. Your characters all end up maimed or dead. There is a steady level of attrition and death the game wants you to experience: and it is trying very hard to make sure you experience it!

The thing is, Kingdom Death is really hard. There is a real tension between the RPG side of the game and the tactical board game side. To really succeed in the game you do need to meta-game. You fight each monsters several times, and while the fights will generally be quiet different, you will always learn something useful to help you next time you face them. Beyond that, you need to be so careful with how you spend your resources as you only have so many Lantern Years to build up your settlement and survivors before tougher Nemesis monsters show up to try and take you down a peg. There is no winning this game without a lot of really serious strategizing. You certainly won’t make it far if you aren’t trying to make the optimal choice each step of the way. The game design feels like it encourages this behaviour. Some of the final fights are so tough if you haven’t been on the ball the entire time you’ll likely lose.

I have been playing my recent solo campaigns with a real eye to win. But I will still lose a survivor on the hunt and shake my fists and message my friends to lament their death. It’s still fun! It all shapes the story of my settlement. But, I know not everyone agrees here. When people criticize this game from a game design and mechanics perspective, this feels like the area they hone in on: “The hunt table is too random and stupid.”

But if you don’t mind being eaten by a giant worm once in a while, I think this game is pretty great.

I am wondering if I should set up Kingdom Death and play a campaign. I just can’t imagine running all four characters. On the other hand this seems like the ideal time to play. - Me, March 28th, 2020.

Almost exactly a year prior my friends and I met and started a new campaign. I hadn’t opened the box since, having other things to occupy myself and my time. But now it was March and everyone was trapped at home. I was trapped with an expensive-as-all-hell board game designed so it could be played solo. This was my time! Two weeks later I laid out the game on the floor of my office and started playing.

The previous campaign my friends and I played ended in tragedy during Lantern Year 11, the few survivors of Lion’s Fall succumbing (ironically) to a White Lion. We played that campaign over 2 years, give or take, meeting every few weeks and then months. 11 sessions over the course of 2 years is a very leisurely pace. In April I was playing daily, making it to Lantern Year 20 in about two weeks! This was frantic!

My pace slowed down slightly. I beat the previous big boss of the game, the Watcher in May. I beat the final version of The Butcher, one of the tougher nemesis monsters shortly after. And then I paused and went outside. It was the summer. (I mean, I also played a ton of GRIMLITE, honestly.)

But I wasn’t done. In October the weather was getting colder, and the siren song of this game returned. My settlement was quite decimated after facing the Watcher and the Butcher. I had a handful of survivors, old and battered, and a handful of survivors too young and fresh faced to face the monsters I needed to fight. Each fight was now hours of careful strategy, usually ending in death. My settlement was marching to its end. I messaged some friends:

Lantern Year 27: A plague infects the settlement and we need to fight the Level 3 Kingsman. So this is likely the end of the road for this group. What a journey!

I had one survivor left. She was killed on the first turn: 5 hits, 3 to her body. Rough.

I am in the middle of a new campaign now. I added some of the expansions I picked up during the Kickstarter. Some extra variety and new monsters too face seemed like it would be fun. In hindsight I regret not picking up more expansions during the Kickstarter. I had avoided the Gorm, another monster you can fight in your first lantern year, and so a good alternative to the White Lion, because I thought the model looked so goofy. A mistake! That content would have been so useful now, as I find myself playing so much of this game.

Kingdom Death takes up a comical amount of space. Playing on the floor is back breaking, and i’m not sure why I’ve not just moved things down to a table ages ago. (I suppose being able to leave things set up if I like is nice) I started off with paper character sheets and a settlement record, as usual, but quickly found the setup unwieldy. Enter Scribe stage right, an electronic record keeper for the game. I don’t think I’d have been able to play as much as I did without it. I use Scribe plus physical gear grids to play and things work relatively well. Playing the game alone is still a challenge. It’s hard to keep track of everything each survivor can do, for example, but overall things work well.

One thing you lose playing alone is the having no one to commiserate with over terrible dice rolls, or cheer with when you manage to pull of something epic. The game is so swingy and punishing, its fun to experience that with others. Playing alone has felt more like playing a fancy board game than playing my earlier campaign with a group, that felt like a mix of game and RPG. In our first campaign we lost Evan’s character, our best surivour, to the dark dentist due to a bad dice roll. It was really funny, his character’s skull became a helmet we would wear for the rest of the campaign. A good moment, but not sound strategy!

Since I wrote my last review Kingdom Death has only gotten even more difficult to purchase. A shame. Though it sounds like a big re-print is coming in 2021. To quote myself once more:

It seems obnoxious to recommend people go buy a game famous for both being very expensive and also always out of stock. That said, you should find this game. I suspect if you like the junk I like—D&D, Dark Souls, fun, etc—then you’ll like this game.

I feel this even more acutely now. This board game is very expensive, an honest to god money hole. But, I think it’s worth that money if you are into these sorts of tactical boardgames. It’s such an interesting and compelling game, one that still feels fresh as I ready myself for my 58th game.

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Perhaps. Luke’s latest book for the Melesonnia Art Council is Acid Death Fantasy, and it’s kind of hot. A setting book for the award winning Troika. Luke asks the question, “can you distill a setting down to a list of backgrounds, a list of monsters, and a really boss cover?” Let’s find out!

This book describes a fantasy world reminiscent of Dune, Dark Sun, Carcosa, or your other favourite fantasy desert pastiche. A short introduction, a little over a page of text, sketches the world for the reader. It’s enough to give you a sense of what’s going on: there is an opulent mega-city, smaller sultanates orbiting it, water is rare, nomads stalk the desert, there is a jungle full of sentient apes, lizard men, rotting giant mecha, basically all the good stuff.

All the Troika backgrounds help shape the world. Some are brief moments of specificity, like the Coated Man, a knight of sorts, doomed to an early death while covered in a sheet of plastic armour. Others hint at the nature of world, like the Refugee of the Past, a person waking up in this post-apocalypse. Many will help shape your particular game or campaign, like the Deposed Sultan, whose possessions included an adversary, and the title of one of The Thousand Sultanates. Almost all the backgrounds ask questions of the player in a way I think is both simple and useful when starting an open ended game.

In the monster’s section we learn of a world where Freshwater Grub’s plot grand schemes and criminal enterprise, giant worms like in Dune travel the desert, Warflock stalk the desert committing banditry with laser guns, and the husks of great ruined mecha mark the land. Once again the world is detailed in broad strokes, sometimes with strange specifics, sometimes with elements that are very open ended.

But then it all ends! A small list of things to do with this setting and a simple sultanate generator and we are done. I would have liked to have seen the map of the setting described more, like the hex map of Carcosa. More random tables to flesh out hte setting, perhaps. But the approach he took is clearly purposeful, mirroring that of Troika itself.

David Hoskins’ art in this book is really great. I wish like Troika proper all the backgrounds were illustrated! I would would have loved to see art for a Coated Man, Dune Rider, or Narrowman Nomad, to name a few. The same can be said of the monsters. This is a terse book, so more art would help flesh out some of the details of the setting, though perhaps that would calcify things that were meant to be up to the GM to think about.

This book was £26 to my door—that’s like a million Canadian dollars. Honestly, for 36 Monsters and 36 Backgrounds it feels like a lot of cash. Right? But, it’s a full colour hardback book. And it’s good—hard to put a price on that. I mean, at this point I would get anything Luke makes. He’s a safe bet. I enjoyed reading this book. Now I have got to play!

Played a game of Song of Blades and Heroes today because the D&D Encounters game I was expecting to play wasn’t starting till next week. It was the first war game I’ve played since high school. (And high school was a very long time ago now.) Skirmish games are fun. Tempted to get some miniatures. - Me, 25th October 2012, on G+ (RIP)

Many years ago I would attend D&D Encounters on the same night the Toronto Historical Wargaming Club would host their meet-ups. I would hang out and chat with the club members before and after my D&D games. On one such occasion I ended up playing A Song of Blades and Heroes, which was such a charming game I went out and grabbed the PDF. I never played again, but liked it so much I also bought the book in print a few years later. Fast forward a million years and I am stuck at home with a pretty healthy collection of painted minis. So, I decided to make war bands out of my Warhammer Underworld miniatures and play games: Ram vs. Ram.

A Song of Blades and Heroes by Andrea Sfiligoi is a dead simple skirmish game. You play battles between war bands comprised of about 5-15 miniatures. The game can be played quickly, something I never managed to accomplish playing Kill Team with Evan.

Units have two attributes: Quality and Combat. They may optionally have a few special traits that impact the rules, like “flying” or “savage”. Everything about a character is abstracted into these two attributes and these traits. Even different weapons are undifferentiated. People who like a lot of customization may find it a bit disappointing. I find it refreshing. Making your own units is easy. There is a simple point calculator online so you can make your own units that are balanced against everything in the book and everything else you might make. It’s remarkably easy to make units that feel the way you want them to feel.

The game has an unusual turn structure. On your turn you need to ‘activate’ a model to use it by rolling up to 3 dice. Each roll equal to or greater than the unit’s quality is a success, otherwise it’s a failure. Each success lets you perform an action with the unit: move, fight, etc. If you roll 2 failures you don’t get to activate any additional models and play flips to your opponent. You can obviously play it safe and only roll 1 dice, but you won’t accomplish much. It’s satisfying rolling 3 dice and getting those 3 successes; surprising when you roll snake eyes with your high quality unit.

This is (basically) all there is to the game: that simplicity!

Andrea has built many games on top of this chasis. There is a slightly more advanced version of a Song of Blades and Heroes, with a name you can likely guess, and then a million variations with names you likely can’t. His catalogue of games is all over the place. He’s an impressive and prolific game designer.

I love this game and I can’t recommend it enough, but I would be remiss if I didn’t spend a small amount of time moaning about the books frumpy layout and information design: it’s frumpy. I feel like a good editor and graphic design person could turn this book into something superlative. As it stands, it gets the job done.

Anyway, I am reviewing the game not the book. The game is fucking great. If you are interested in miniature war games this is the one to grab.

I’m not sure how I stumbled on the OSR scene in Brazil, but it’s there and it feels like it’s having a moment. I think I started following the artist and designer Diogo on Twitter first. He’s made several games and will share his work in progress artwork. He also shares the works of other people in the scene, and slowly I have found more artists and designers working out of Brazil making games, or doing graphic design and art.

I picked up Pacts and Blades first, by Lucas Romlin. A minimalist RPG for you to play Moorcockian inspired fantasy stories. I don’t think I need more RPGs, but this one has stunning graphic design, and makes effective use of public domain art and paintings. Lucas tweeted about his friend Guilherme Gontijo’s game Into the Bronze. Gontijo was the graphic designer for Pacts and Blades, and this game shared its sharp design. I saw he was using Hex Kit to make funky maps and was obviously intrigued. Into the Bronze is a complete reimagining of Into the Odd as a game for playing Sumerian’s during the Bronze Age He has lots of games that look interesting, but I must pace myself!

The next thing I picked up was Escape from Station 52, a solo card game, by Emanoel Melo. I don’t think my printer is nice enough to print the cards, but it looked cool. Again, I’m not sure who shared the game with me, but I shared it joking I could get far just tweeting about Brazilian games. Emanoel tagged their friends in a reply, and I learned of the artist’s Bakto and Alex Damaceno. Alex is redoing Keep on the Bordlands, one page at a time, and the results look amazing.

Alex shared the work their friend Victor Amorim was doing, calling it Hollow Knight crossed with Into the Odd. I love Hollow Knight, and know many other gamers that enjoy that video game, so I let them know this game called Carapace exists. A friend replied, “Carapace has the most direct built in RPG goal I’ve ever seen (without being something like Lady Blackbird): you are getting Marble to build a cannon to shoot a Marble Titan.” It’s true!

Who knows what I am missing. I don’t speak Portuguese. There is likely a whole world of Brazilian gaming I haven’t seen or found yet. Still, it is interesting for me in Toronto to have this small window into what’s happening far from my home. Hopefully for you too.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming exist to highlight truly standout RPG books. Each year it is a battle to whittle down my long list of books to a short list, and that short list down to the 3 books that will claim the accolades and fame. These choices are never easy. The arguments I have with myself are fierce. Still, this work must be done, because for reasons I can’t remember anymore I decided I’d only call out 3 books each year.

The books in contention arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2019. Before the Pandemic. A life time ago! Other than that it’s really the Wild West with these awards. Will the categories be the same as last year? Read on to find out!

Best One Page Dungeons Collected into a Fancy Book: Trilemma Adventure Compendium by Michael Prescott.

Is it appropriate to give an award to someone I play D&D with here in Toronto? Of course it is: this book is great.¹ Michael has collected all the one page dungeons he has made over the years—the ones with the cool isometric maps—redone the layout to make them all the more wonderful, and thrown in a bunch of extra tables and setting material and monsters and so much more to round out what would already have been an excellent book. This thing is dense and full of adventure. Great for campaigns or gaming emergencies!

Best Settings and Adventure: Patrick Stuart and Dirk Detweiler Leichty for Silent Titans (with layout by Christian Kessler and editing by Fiona Maeve Geist)

Silent Titans is really quite incredible. Patrick’s writing, Dirk’s art, and Christian jamming the art and writing together have resulted in a really stunning book: pretty enough for a coffee table! The world Patrick describes and Dirk illustrates in his abstract style is so thoroughly weird and unique. I was worried it was perhaps too weird: how do you even run this thing? But no, that was a foolish concern! I’ve been running this adventure straight from the book! It’s worked out great. The world we were promised.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2019: Zombie World by Brendan Conway and Mark Diaz Truman

It had to be Zombie World. I love this game! I’ve been obsessed with it for ages now. Zombie World is not really a book, I suppose. Like a game from days of yore, it came in a box with cards and markers and play mats. No matter! Zombie World is such a simple and well executed game. At its core it’s just another Powered by the Apocalypse game, but somehow all the bits and bobs that make the game come together so perfectly. It’s the most OSR Powered by the Apocalypse game. You heard it here first! I’ve ran it a handful of times and it was so effortless and enjoyable. Zombie World is the game you should all be playing. Yes, you!

Honourable Mentions

All my love to Mork Borg by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr; Girl Underground by Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross; Dirk’s Mystery Zine (that would became Super Blood Harvest) by Dirk Detweiler Leichty; The Demon Collective Volume 1 by David Shugars, Camilla Greer, Comrade Pollux, and Mabel Harper and Fungi of the Far Realms Alex Clements and Shuyi Zhang. Mork Borg has a special place in my heart for being such a wonderful OSR throwback, but with some fucking blinding and beautiful graphic design.

I fought the urge to give all the awards to Warcry. Games Workshop didn’t disappoint. Chef’s Kiss Emoji. Painting miniatures is keeping me sane while the world implodes.

In 2019 a lot of people were expecting (hoping?) Games Workshop would release a skirmish game in the vein of Mordheim, to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Instead, Games Workshop announced Warcry, and I don’t think people were too upset because it was looking pretty hot. Warcry feels like a throw back to the old Realms of Chaos books: it’s a game about Chaos cultists killing each other. Warcry will look familiar to people who have been paying attention to what Games Workshop has been doing recently, but I think this might be their best game yet. (Maybe that’s a low bar, because a lot of their games aren’t actually very good? Ha!)

Becca Scott can teach you how to play in 9 minutes. You can go and watch that video now, I can wait.

Warcry feels like it strips away everything I find aggravating about traditional Warhammer games. So, if you also dislike the things I find annoying about Warhammer 40K or Kill Team this might be the game for you! Let’s dig in.

Warcry is a skirmish game. This means its model count is low. Fantastic. The number of units each faction can field is also quite small. Each unit is described by a card, and that is the end of that story. There are no data sheets with a bunch of options and upgrades and all that nonsense. A unit has some stats and one or two weapons. This makes list building pretty simple. You might have 6-10 different units available, and you would mix and match to units to end up with 3-15 models, with one leader, all costing under 1000 points.

The starter set comes with 4 decks of cards that are meant to help you kick off a game. For those of you who have used the Open War cards for Warhammer 40K, it’s very much in the same vein. A terrain card tells you how to set up the board, a deployment card tells you how to deploy troops, a victory card tells you how you will win the game, and a twist card adds a special rule to the battle. Deployment in Warcry is a bit unusual. Each deployment card has 3 symbols: a Dagger, Shield, and Hammer. You must split your models up into three groups that correspond to these symbols. You might have games where you and your opponent’s Dagger units start the game right next to each other. In other games you might be on the opposite sides of the board. Some deployment cards will indicate you deploy your troops in subsequent rounds. Your Hammer may show up in the 3rd round, turning the tide of the battle. This makes for interesting and unique games.¹

The game play itself is also simpler. You move your movement score in inches, any which way you like. If you want to climb a wall go nuts. If you want to jump a gap, just jump. The game feels very dynamic. Attacking is also much more straightforward. You roll a number of d6s depending on your weapon, try to beat a target score based on your weapon’s strength and the target’s toughness (which should be familiar to any warhammer player), and finally if you score hits you do a fixed amount of damage. (If you scored a 6 that’s roll is a critical hit and do more damage.) That’s the end of that story. There is no rolling to wound, no rolling for armour saves, etc, etc. They’ve basically moved all of that dice rolling into the damage and hit point scores of the various units.

Perhaps the last notable thing about Warcry is its abilities system. You start a round by rolling 6 dice for initiative. You set aside doubles, tripples and quads. The number of singles you have is your initiative, the higher number goes first. The other dice you’ve set aside can be used during the round to use special abilities each faction posesses. These are listed on a small card. There aren’t pages and pages of strategems to worry about. Some abilities can only be used by particular units. Maybe that’s the most complicated thing about them. Abilities help differentiate the various armies, and introduce some more twists into the game, without adding a lot of complexity.

I haven’t gotten to play Warcry much: just one game with Patrick while I was in the UK. One day, when this pandemic is over, I hope to play it again. Maybe run its weird-ass campaign strucuture—a topic for another blog post.

This is our life now: stay home and save lives.

One Page Rules makes a set of games seemingly designed to give you a (far) simpler alternative ruleset to play wargames using your fancy Warhammer miniatures.¹ They have two main games, Age of Fantasy, which could be used as an alternative to Age of Sigmar, and Grimdark Future, an alternative to Warhammer 40,000. There are two matching skirmish games, and for those of you who miss Warhammer Fantasy Battle they also have one page rules for that style of game. Impressive!

Compared to the other games Games Workshop puts out Warcry is a pretty simple game, but Age of Fantasy Skirmish manages to be even simpler. Units are defined by: two stats (quality and defence), the weapons they may have, and in some cases a few special abilities. Weapon profiles themselves are also quite simple: a weapon tells you how many dice to roll when attacking, and if the has any special attributes—there aren’t that many to worry about. Here’s an example of the leader of one of my warbands:

Golem Dominator: Quality 3+ / Defence 3+
+ Great Weapon A3, AP2
+ Hero, Tough(3)

This character needs to roll 3 or higher to both attack and defend. His Great Weapon rolls 3 dice to attack (A3). You score a hit by beating your quality score on a d6. This is a quality test. You defend hits by rolling a d6 for each hit and trying to beat your defense score. In this case defenders will have a penalty of 2 when rolling for defense because of the weapon’s Armour Peircing score of 2 (AP2). This unit is a hero, so regular units within 12" of this model can use its quality score when rolling for morale. Tough(3) means he can take 3 wounds before he needs to start rolling to see if he’s taken out of action.

The game uses alternating activation: each player alternates activating a single unit. Units can move, shoot, or charge into melee on their turn. When your army is at half size you roll for morale. There honestly isn’t much more to the game than this. The extra abilities help differentiate units and keep things interesting.

The various One Page Rules games all play fairly similarly, so if you learn one you’ll probably have learned them all. The rules fit on a sheet of paper, you can just read them and see if they sound interesting.

The following day I set up the game again and played two games against my daughter. I was helping her with the rules, but for the most part she picked things up quickly and by the end understood the important bits and bobs of the game. I think something like Warcry or honest-to-god Age of Sigmar would be a bridge too far for her.

I plan to give Grimdark Future a go next. Will report back with how that goes.

Evan and I finished our initial Kill Team campaign. His Anthrodact Vat Guard came out ahead against the invading Skitarii Dravidian. I would say things weren’t even close! It was a fun experience, and perhaps a good example of where both of us are at when it comes to war games: disorganized, laid back, and narratively focused.

We played 6 games in total. We decided to end on 6 because our pace of gaming was so slow we needed to call it at some point so we could try something else. In hindsight we likely should have settled on a different structure for our campaign, one with a fixed number of games. If we knew we would only play 6 games, we could have thought through what those 6 games should be. We had a grander and more open ended outline for a campaign structure, which worked well when we remembered the rules we added to Kill Team, but was maybe a bit too ambitious for us. Our games were a mix of pulling stuff from the core rule book and tweaking things a little, or coming up with brand new scenarios specific to our campaign. Our original goal was to be completely bespoke with our scenarios, but we were often figuring things out at the last minute before meeting up. We had good intentions.

The enjoyment of a campaign comes from the small moments that slowly give your minis some character. Some characters were prone to early deaths, constantly missing, etc. My leader, Onthu-Prime turned things around in one of our middle games, becoming a real killing machine. He felt more powerful from then on. In contrast to Onthu-Prime we have Nils 02 of House Shen, the man with a Meltagun. Every game he would die before hitting anyone with it. Finally in the very last game he survived long enough to kill Onthu-Prime! Evan and I both had snipers that would inevitbly end up in these sniper vs sniper shootouts. They would regularly take the other out of action each game.

For the curious, the notes and rules for our entire campaign are available online: The War of the Intolerable Question. They are very rough. One day we will clean them up, i’m sure.

Kill Team was fun, but maybe not quite what Evan and I were looking for? At first blush with its lower model count it felt simpler than Warhammer 40K, but I am not sure this is true. With specialisms and stratagems and other army specific rules the game can get a bit complicated. We would almost always forget the rules for morale. I would regularly forget most of the things the units in my army could do. There are so many rounds of dice rolling when it comes to wounding models. (Warcry simplifies this immensely by giving units bigger wounds totals to differentiate who should survive longer or not.) Once a model had a flesh wouund we’d forget what that impacts or doesn’t. The list goes one. On the other hand, it’s far more rational and straightforward than Necromunda. In that way it’s likely a good middle ground between a game that’s too minimalist, and one that’s overly rules heavy and complicated.

There are a few other games I’ve discovered since we started playing Kill Team that I’m interested in playing.

• Starbreach is a miniatures agnostic ruleset, available for free, that has an interesting activation scheme. (I believe it’s borrowed from Bolt Action, which might also be the proginator of Troika’s initiative system as well.)
• Grimdark Future: Firefight is a skirmish game published by One Page Rules, who make a collection of games that fit on a double sided sheet of paper.
• Using Frostgrave to run a game of Inquisitor seems doable.

Evan and I have been talking about getting back to regular Warhammer 40,000 this year, perhaps slowly building up larger armies than we have played with in the past. I’ve started painting some Sisters of Battle, to expand my hodgepodge of Imperial troops. Who knows what the year will bring.

Just when I think the Ennies are getting their shit together they go and nominate Dirk for best cartography, but not for best art? And then both Troika (Best Game of 2018) and Silent Titans (short-listed for 2019) don’t win anything? Come on! I do see more names I know getting the recognition they deserve, but the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry will never truly provide what I am looking for.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming continue to be a beacon of shining light in the darkness that is the table-top role playing game scene. The judges have deliberated at length about the merits and artistic achievement of each book, agonizing discussions that run for months on end. No votes or pandering: voting gets you Trump and Brexit.

The books in contention were all bought by myself in 2018, or fulfilled as Kickstarter rewards or pre-orders that year. Basically, if I didn’t have it in 2018 then it’s not on my long list for these awards. That’s basically it. I know what you’re saying: “Ram, 2018 was so fucking long ago.” Look man, I don’t make up the rules. (Actually, what you’re probably wondering is why the 2019 awards are for books I grabbed in 2018. Now that’s a good question.)

Best Game: David Black for the Black Hack 2e

David Black’s simple rules for playing D&D, the eponymous Black Hack, felt like a real part of the zeitgeist with its initial release. People have always been hacking up their games of D&D, but now all of a sudden those hacks became This Hack or That Hack. The second edition of the Black Hack takes everything that made the first edition so great and refines it neatly. The game is still clear and concise, but with some refinements that makes the game stand out a bit on its own. The new book is a lovely hardback, with enough tables to keep you gaming for some time. This is the good stuff.

Best Setting Book: Jason Sholtis for Operation Unfathomable (with layout by Jez Gordon)

I was, to put it lightly, maximum hyped for the release of Operation Unfathomable. Jason Sholtis would share all his illustrations on G+, presumably as he wrapped them up, and I would +1 those posts so hard. It felt like he was drawing for ages and ages. And then there was a Kickstarter and finally a book. True joy. In many ways this book exists in contrast to the Veins of the Earth (Best Setting of 2018). Both books present the horrors of the Underdark, but Operation Unfathomable has a sort of goofy cartoon charm that I love. There is time travel and laser guns and bug monsters: all the good stuff. That we have two glorious visions of the Mythical Underworld, each bizarre and unique in their execution, is a testament to the creativity within the OSR. Jason’s adventure is a good introduction to what could be a longer jaunt in the underworld. (His players apparently said no thank you to the terrors of the deep, forcing him to develop the next overland adventure he plans to publish.)

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2018: Mothership & Dead Planet by Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud, and Fiona Maeve Geist

Technically, these are two different books. I don’t give no fucks. I got both zines at the same time, I read them at the same time, and I fell in love with them at the same time. With Dead Planet and Mothership we are given a sufficiently creepy scenario to freak your players out with, and the rules you’d need to run a sufficiently creepy science-fiction horror game. They are both short zines: an excellent format for games. Both books really stand out because of their graphic design. Sean has said he took his inspiration from magazines rather than books, and I think the approach works well. Mother Ship and Dead Planet are so visually engaging as you flip through them. Dead Planet in particular is a very colourful affair, but that colour is used to great effect. Mothership reminds me of Alien, while Dead Planet reminds me a bit more of that crossed with Warhammer 40,000. What’s not to love?

Honourable Mentions

Lots of love to Trophy by Jesse Ross (found in the Gauntlet Codex Dark 2), The Dolorous Stroke by Emmy Allen, Knave by Men Milton, and Through Ulthans Door by Ben Laurence. Trophy has been slowly growing with each issue of the Gauntlet’s Codex zines, and I’m really curious to see what it becomes.

My love of Warhammer continues unabated, and I would be remiss if I didn’t give Kill Team a shout out. So much of my last year has been spent playing games of Kill Team or building and painting miniatures in preparation for those games. Warhammer has helped keep me sane. Warcry is out right now, so 2019 RPG authors you are once again on notice.

I have a giant farmhouse-style dining table. It came from a café my brother-in-law’s ex-girlfirend ran. It was too big for that space, so they replaced it with a bunch of smaller tables. It’s a really big table … but not big enough for Kingdom Death!

Kingdom Death is a boutique horror board game, most notable for being really expensive. Or for its overly grotesque and elaborate miniatures.

To play the game you need to build four starting survivors, the characters the players will play, and the White Lion, a terrible monster that is trying to kill the players. The game asks a lot from you to get going, but compared to playing Warhammer the ask is quite modest. I built the initial set of minis over the course of a few days after the game arrived. Games Workshop minis look to be engineered and sculpted with an understanding someone is eventually going to have to glue all this plastic together: seams are usually well hidden, there aren’t a billion fiddly bits to fit, most parts fit cleanly and don’t require you to take a knife to them, etc. The same can’t be said of the Kingdom Death minis I’ve built so far. Each has been a bit of a slog. That’s not to say the challenge of building them hasn’t been fun, or that the final products aren’t great. I love the Screaming Antelope, even if I’m going to have to learn how modelling putty works to finish it up. Kingdom Death has a stellar style and artistic vision.

The game is complicated, but not overly complex. The bulk of the game is the showdown, where your characters fight a monster. On your turn you can move your survivor and attack. You roll to hit, draw hit location cards for the monster you’re fighting, roll to wound each location, and repeat the process till the monster is dead or all the characters are. Hit Location cards might have extra rules about what happens if you score a critical hit at that location, or if you fail to wound the monster, etc. Monsters are controlled by an AI deck, cards that explain what they will attempt to do. This deck is also the monster’s hit points. As you wound the monster they lose cards from their AI deck: their tactics will dwindle as the fight progresses. This is really quite ingenious, and probably one of the most compelling parts of the game. A lot of the complexity in Kingdom Death has been moved to the various cards that come with the game. You don’t need to learn a lot of rules, because for the most part everything you need to know is written on a card. The game can have lots of interesting edge cases and rule tweaks throughout because you generally don’t need to flip through a rule book (that much). Using random decks also makes each fight a little unique. The lions you fight will all be a little bit different. (And as they are injured, the way they fight will change in uniquely as well.)

The rule book opens with an excellent tutorial that walks you through the important details of the game and runs you through a typical showdown. They’ve done a great job distilling a reasonably complicated game down to something quite digestible. I met up with Evan and we played through this tutorial game. It was a lot of fun, and we managed to kill the White Lion on our first try, though it cost us one of the survivors. I don’t think it took particularly long for us to get comfortable with the game and its rules.

My cousin Jana joined us just as the fight was wrapping up, and we all played through another aspect of the game, managing your settlement. After the tutorial fight your characters will find a lantern horde and a group of survivors living around it. The foundation for the whole game is this settlement phase. You need to manage your settlement, creating a society that can survive in this dark world. During the settlement phase you’ll learn new skills and craft gear to help you fight more monsters (to earn more resources to build more gear to fight more monsters, etc). This phase doesn’t take particularly long to move through.1 We discussed what gear we should build with the resources we earned in our first fight. Once that was settled we decided we’d hunt another lion.

The last aspect of the game I haven’t discussed is the hunt. Your characters march down a small board towards the monster you are hunting. There are hunt cards on each square that you need to deal with as you move forward. Some cards will push the creature up towards you or away from you, shortening or lengthening the hunt. Each monster has their own hunt cards, and there is a big table of general events you will likely roll on as well. In our game one generic event featured a giant worm bursting from the ground and almost eating us all. We had to each spend a survival point (a resource each survivor has) or our character would die. That’s what the game is like: you can more or less randomly instantly die.

Our second fight with a White Lion actually felt smoother than our first. We had some lucky critical wounds that helped weaken the lion early in the fight. We made it out more or less unscathed. It feels like we’re in a good place to continue our adventure.

The game is played over a series of “lantern years”. In this way the game is more like D&D than a traditional board game. You have characters that can grow and die. Your settlement improves or dwindles over time. There are story events in the game that flesh out the world and add some substance to all the fighting and dying. There is a loose narrative structure to the game and its campaign. There is also all the implied story that comes from all the random elements of the game: the details from your fights, the hunts, and the events that happen in your settlement.

The game is expensive as fuck. I don’t think you can really sugar coat that. It’s the most expensive board game I own, by far. That said, it’s well worth the money if you are into miniatures. The amount of plastic you get is crazy. After seeing how much Games Workshop charges for stuff Kingdom Death starts to feel like a steal. (I am guessing the Phoenix that comes with Kingdom Death would likely be a $100+ miniature if sold by Games Workshop.) Of course, none of that changes the fact the game is expensive as fuck.

Is this a review? It seems obnoxious to recommend people go buy a game famous for both being very expensive and also always out of stock. That said, you should find this game. I suspect if you like the junk I like—D&D, Dark Souls, fun, etc—then you’ll like this game.

I wrote most of this review in 2017, and then sat on it because that’s something I do. We finished our campaign at the end of 2018. Of course, we lost. We made it to Lantern Year 11 before the last of our surivors died. Our town was full of murderers, so when the monsters didn’t get us, our fellow survivors would. It was a fun campaign and we learned a lot. I decided to post this review because we just started playing again this past weekend.

The last survivors of Lion’s Fall, Murderess, Hope, and Lucky, set off on a hunt hoping to stumble upon a man … so they can hopefully make some babies. Sadly, that’s not how things worked out. They kill a White Lion cub while out and are set upon by its enraged mother. Murderess is the first to die, dying of shock when when her arms are torn off while simultaneously being decapitated. Lucky suffered an intestinal prolapse and was hamstrung before bleeding. The final survivor, Hope, was disembowelled (3 times!) and suffered a collapsed lung from vicious attacks to her body. With her last breath she speaks some words of bravery for no one to hear.

And that’s Kingdom Death!

— A summary of the last game of our first campaign of Kingdom Death, from a post on Google+ (RIP)

[ed. I fucked up and accidently deleted this post. This is it mostly recovered. One day maybe i’ll fix all the links. God damn it. — Me, July 18th 2019 ]

Do you feel like one of your things with your adventures is not really explaining what’s up till the end? And even then maybe not really. — Me!

I have been reading Silent Titans. I am so hyped for the physical book, but I have the PDF right here right now and I’m not made of stone. I love Patrick’s work. He has made some of my favourite RPG books. So, I started reading. I have so much I want to say about this book, so I’ll start with something simple.

Patrick’s books all have this element of the mysterious to them. One thing I found particularly interesting about Deep Carbon Observatory is that it just begins with a bang. There isn’t any attempt to orient the reader with the larger picture. There is no overview of the adventure. There isn’t even an introduction! You are in Carrowmore and everything is shitty. As you read the adventure you learn more about what’s going on. The adventure reveals itself to the reader in a way that mirrors how it reveals itself to the players. The very end of Deep Carbon Observatory has the closet thing you’ll find to an overview of the module.

Silent Titans is very similar. The book’s opening is as dramatic as that of Deep Carbon Observatory. The players and the reader are both dropped right into the action. What the fuck is even happening? If you are the player, you play to find out. If you’re the GM, you read. There isn’t a summary or a quick start guide. There is just this book full of Patrick’s writing. Terse—for a change—but still evocative.

The book moves on to describe a town, what will likely be the PCs home base. Then some different locations and people the PCs might encounter. And then he’s talking about a Titan. I know it’s a Titan because the book is called Silent Titans. But that’s really it. There isn’t some detour to discuss Titans, the history of Titans, nothing. You are now on a Titan and it’s go time.

You must read this book carefully. It’s so terse it feels incredibly dense. So much is packed into each sentence. It’s an engaging read because as the reader you don’t know what’s coming. (And because Patrick writes well, of course.) There is a mystery to everything that’s going on, and just like the players the reader can enjoy discovering that mystery as well.

Patrick manages to make books that are engaging on and off the table.

Is this the best way to make a module? It can’t be, right? I feel like common wisdom is overviews and repeating information and cheat sheets and this and that. This book is so intense and takes real effort to process compared to other modules I’ve bought.

But it’s also intensely creative and interesting. Would the book lose some of that if Patrick had a big flow chart at the front of the book mapping everything out?

Probably.

I like to introduce stuff at the same rate that players find it out. Really that’s all the DM needs to know anyway. — Patrick!

[ed. I fucked up and accidently deleted this post. This is it mostly recovered. One day maybe i’ll fix all the links. God damn it. — Me, July 18th 2019 ]

Games like Rad Hack felt like they were coming out every week. Everyone seemed to be making a “Hack”. Just like the early days of the OSR where people were all publishing their own character classes for Basic D&D, you also saw a lot of people publishing new classes for the Black Hack. I asked David what he thought made the game so compelling to the rules hackers out there. There are so many rules lite OSR games, what made this one standout so much? He had two thoughts. First, the rules were short and to the point. The core game was 24 A5 pages long, and these pages are far from dense tracts of text. Second, Bruno Bord converted the game to plain text and put the results of his efforts online as the Black Hack SRD. The barrier for entry when it came to making your own tweaked hack of the game was certainly low. The game feels like a true viral hit.

The Black Hack is on my mind because I helped Kickstart a new edition of the game. You can now get the second edition of The Black Hack as a dope-ass hard cover book, one that marries the simplicity and terseness of the original rules with pages and pages of tables and advice on running an old school fantasy game. A smaller booklet version of the rules still exists, clocking in at 20 pages. So, anyone worried David was going to bloat up his game should relax. This second edition feels like a gentle refinement of the earlier edition of the game. I suspect only the most ardent of Black Hack fans will notice the changes that have been made. (What did he do to armour! That crazy man.)

Black Hack is a mechanically simple game. Players have 6 attributes recognizable from D&D. To accomplish any task you must roll under the appropriate stat. Almost all rolls are done by the player. You roll under your STR to attack with a sword, and you’d probably roll under your DEX to dodge a dragon’s fire breathing, for example. I want to say that’s basically it, because that’s basically it. There are small rules included that make sense for a game designed with the game play of D&D in mind: a simple encumbrance system, rules for exhausting your supplies, etc. It’s all very well done and intuitive.

Compared to the first edition of the game, the second feels rounded out with an eye to helping new players to D&D get oriented. It begins with a page about role playing games and how this game works, followed by an example of play. The rules for the game then follow, those that both players and GMs will care about. A lot of what is often left unsaid in various versions of D&D is made a bit more explicit in this version of the Black Hack. David talks about the structure of the various phases of a D&D game (in the dungeon, exploring the wilderness, being in town, etc) and tries to break that all down into a common structure of play with a common language to describe what the players and dungeon masters are up to.

For old-hands of the OSR the Black Hack feels like it has a lot to offer. The rules are simple and get out of the way. They are easy to hack and tweak as needed. Some bespoke classes and new equipment lists you’ve taken your art-house D&D setting to the next level! The larger hard cover book is also packed to the brim with all sorts of little tables and advice useful when running a D&D game. Poison! Panic & Light! Rival Heroes! Drugs! What’s on the Corpse! Etc! If you can conceive of it coming up in a D&D game it’s likely David has made a page about it in the book. There’s a sample wilderness, dungeon, and tavern, so you likely could get quite far with this book alone.

Something else new with this edition is the inclusion of a small bestiary. Mechanically a monster is some HD and a bullet point or two about how they might attack the characters. It’s funny how small the entries are for these creatures compared to something like the entries from the Second Edition Monster Compediums. Each entry features some random tables that cover what the monster is up to when the party encounters them. (These things aren’t just standing around waiting to fight.) This bestiary isn’t exhaustive, but is likely good enough to get you going. It’s also instructive to see how simple it is to make a monster.

I normally run LotFP when I’m not running OD&D. The Black Hack feels like a nice alternative to both games, being simpler and a bit more of a blank slate than LotFP. I think if I was to pick up my Carcosa game again I’d run it using the Black Hack. (Maybe write up my own Carcosa Hack, borrowing from the Black Hack and the Rad Hack.²)

Hopefully it goes without saying you should buy this game. It’s available as a PDF if your means are modest. You can grab the box, dungeon screen, booklets, folders, and hardcover book from SquareHex. I regret not getting the box. Don’t make the same mistake as me when you’re doing your shopping.

I have lots more to say about this game, but I think i’d like to play it a bit more first.

[ed. I fucked up and accidently deleted this post. This is it mostly recovered. One day maybe i’ll fix all the links. God damn it. — Me, July 18th 2019 ]

People: this is what I am here for.¹

I’ve never played a Call of Cthulhu game. Lovecraft’s fiction wasn’t something I grew up on, so those sorts of games were never on my mind. But, I do love a lot of other pulp fiction, jazz music, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and other things that all felt adjacent to the setting of Chris Spivey’s game Harlem Unbound. I also love the idea of a game where everyone goes insane and dies at the end.² I saw Chris was running a game at Breakout Con and signed right up.

In a strange inversion of my typical reviews I will write about a game I have played, but whose rulebook I haven’t read. So, maybe this is me just telling you about a game I played this one time that was fun.

Harlem Unbound was kickstarted quite successfully in 2017. Chris’s game then spent 2018 winning awards, as far as I can tell. Last Gen Con Chaosium announced they would publish the second edition of the game. Nicely done.

The mechanics of the game were very straightforward. Chris explained them quite quickly before our session got going. Your characters have some percentile attributes, similar to those found in D&D, and some percentile skills. To accomplish tasks you roll under those stats on a d100. If a task is hard, you need to roll under half that stat or skill. There are also advantage/disadvantage mechanics similar to D&D 5e where you roll two Tens dice and pick the best or worst result. All characters have a Luck skill they can use to succeed on rolls in certain situations, but you lose some each time you do so. Finally there is the infamous SAN score for your sanity. When you encounter eldritch horrors you need to roll under your sanity. You’ll take some ‘damage’ to your fragile psyche, which will be a lot or little depending on if you fail or succeed. If you take more than 5 sanity damage at a time, you roll on a special table that tells you what terrible fate befalls you. No one hit 0 sanity—I assume you explode or some such thing. The game we were playing was “pulpier” so our characters had more hit points than your typical Call of Cthulhu character, though we didn’t look to be invincible.

Call of Cthulhu is a game about investigation. There is a mystery the players are trying to solve. In this game we were hired to find out who killed a teenage boy we were all connected to in some way. He was run over by a car in a part of town he shouldn’t have been anywhere near. His sister was a famous singer at a local Harlem nightclub. There were shoot outs, other mysterious deaths, ties to local gangland drama, the mysterious past of our benefactor, and a whole host of other leads that took us around Harlem. As the game progressed we quickly realized things were weirder than they first appeared. The game culminated in the death of the women who had hired us to find her brother’s killer, a few people having nervous break downs, and a terrible spider demon being unleashed on the world. It felt like a very on-brand game of Call of Cthulhu.

A common complaint I have read (and now witnessed) with Call of Cthulhu is that investigation is such a key part of the game, but failing rolls may stymie your progress. The solution here seems to be creating scenarios where there is such a web of relationships between all the action that players will eventually make their way to centre of the mystery, though their route may be quite roundabout. (This actually feels like it may help set up stories that are quite over the top and pulpy: the librarian is also dating the mobster who is also a cultist, etc.) I thought it was fun trying to figure out what was going on. We tracked all our leads on a sheet of paper in the middle of the table, so we wouldn’t forget avenues we might want to explore later. My understanding is in Gumshoe you always are making forward progress: that you can’t “fail” a roll and be blocked in your investigation. I can see the appeal there as well, though the Call of Cthulhu approach does appeal to the OSR part of my brain. Sometimes you just don’t succeed! I liked that there was the occasional dead end.

There are lots of essays about the racism of H.P. Lovecraft. So many that trying to find writing about cosmic horror as an analogy for racism are harder to find. But that writing must exist: it feels so on the nose. Setting a Cthulhu game in 1920s Harlem feels like something someone should have done already. You have gangs, prohibition, jazz bars, and all that excitement. You marry that with the experience of being Black in America at that time³ and I think you have something really compelling.

There is a new edition of Harlem Unbound due soon, and I’ll likely grab it when it comes out. I feel stupid for not backing the Kickstarter at the time, though that was likely the responsible thing to do. The current edition is still available as a PDF, and also includes the rules for running games using the Gumshoe system. If you’re a Call of Cthulhu fan buying this thing feels like a safe bet.

Last year Magpie games kickstarted their new Powered by the Apocalypse game Zombie World, a game by Brendan Conway and Mark Diaz Truman. This weekend at Breakout Con I managed to run the game for some friends—new and old. I ran Zombie World twice, both off the books “hallway” games. I mentioned to Mark Diaz Truman I was going to print and play with the PDF (which went out to Kickstarter backers a while ago) and he sent me a demo copy they had on hand.¹ I hadn’t a run a game in almost two years, and I’ve never run a PbtA game before. I was nervous!

I didn’t prep for either game, and both games worked fine being played totally off the cuff. The dream! I ended up flipping over the illustrated population cards when I needed to come up with a new NPC. (I’ll try and make an online generator for spitting out zombie world NPCs in the future: that would be handy.) When things were meant to get worse, I would usually sit on the move till I had a good sense of when or where to mess with the players. I am not that familiar with how people normally run these games, what the cadence is for calling for moves versus just letting players accomplish things, etc. I found myself often asking players if they agreed with my choices, or if I was being a dick. Ha. I had fun running both games, and I learned a bit in both.

The first game was set in a prison. I had one player who was always ready to draw from the Bite deck when the need arose.² So the group’s simple mission to search for food and some supplies turned into a series of unfortunate events that ended with my cousin bitten by a zombie, who later later turned and killed bit another player, leaving a third player to kill them both, while the forth fled away in the darkness. The two surviving players returned to the prison to find it fallen to infighting, which is where we ended things. The flow of the game felt quite natural. The pace of success and failure worked really well.

The second game was set in a hospital. Michael, who played in the first game, reprised his character. We decided he arrived at this hospital with the survivors of the prison. This game started with the group being told there might be a zombie on the loose in the floors of the hospital above them. I escalated things from there because of some failed moves. The characters were quickly on a mission to purge their hospital of zombies. I felt I got a bit more tripped up on who would draw for what in certain situations in this game.³ I hate reading rule books mid game, so just went with what I thought made the most sense, and that worked out well enough. This game ended with the players trying to flee up onto the roof while running from a swarm of zombies—no one died! After the game one of the players, Stephanie, made what felt like a really helpful suggestion that likely would have made the game flow a bit better. She thought I didn’t include enough downtime between the moments of tension or action. This would have given the players more of an opportunity to interact with one another and with the NPCs.⁴ If I had simply had some of the NPCs in their enclave push back against their plan it might have shifted how the game played out. In this game the players didn’t get a chance to reveal their traumas or past, nor play up their various relationships. The way I was running the games was maybe too close to how I’d have run a D&D game. I should watch some zombie films or replay Last of Us to remember that the real monsters in the zombie genre are other people!

I love the rules and structure of this game. I suspect people will hack it or remix it for other genres. I can imagine someone doing a “Grotty D&D” version, where you replace the bite deck with an ignoble death deck and call it a day.

Character creation was super fast and produced these really interesting people (eg. crotchety priest turned enforcer, a psychotic prize fighter turned xenophobic cult leader). Character creation is quick because you are just dealing out some cards. The slowest part is people talking about the relationships they might have—you deal cards between players to facilitate that. If characters die it’d take seconds to get them back in the game because you wouldn’t do that step again. Death is always on the table in this game, you are fighting zombies after all. I might declare this game to be the most OSR of all the PbtA games. It feels like its in that same headspace, anyway.⁵

The 2d6 dice rolls of your typical PbtA game are turned into a deck of cards: 6 Misses, 3 Edges, an Opportunity, and a Triumph. (This spread is a bit ’tougher’ than the 2d6 distribution would yield.) The cards also work well because there are moves (like helping/hindering another player, going on point, foraging, etc) that involve drawing additional cards from that deck. You know how many cards of each type are in the deck, so can think through how helpful or not that will be. Drawing from the deck felt a bit like a ritual. There was a bit of a pause and some tension while people picked their cards and flipped them over for everyone to see.

There is a separate deck for seeing who gets bitten by a zombie. Unlike the “2d6” deck this one isn’t reshuffled. You draw a card and see if you are safe, threats escalate, or you are bitten. Players know there is one bite card. Each player that avoids it is making it more likely for the next player to draw.⁶ Everyone knows that card is coming, soon. A good source of tension.

I really liked Zombie World. I haven’t run a game in ages, and this felt incredibly easy to run. I took it out of my bag Friday afternoon, we made characters quickly, and just started playing. That it’s all cards really feels like it changes the whole dynamic of the game. This feels like the sort of game you could trick people into playing RPGs with. It sounds like my real copy should arrive in June, which is when I expect the game to go on sale. Keep your eyes open.

This is the hotness.

One day I will make a zine for my Carcosa game, and when I do it’ll open with these quotes.

I have always been reticent about answering questions about Carcosa. There is no Single Ideal Carcosa to which other referees’ Carcosas must conform. I tried with Carcosa to lightly sketch (but in lurid colors) a weird world of nightmare. I want to awaken feelings of the weird and of horror and of awe with Carcosa, such that the referee can then use Carcosa to satisfy within himself and his players the deep desire for darkness and the weird.

I shudder to think of rules lawyers or canon lawyers playing their tricks with my books. The books are meant for the opposite use, the use of creative and imaginative referees who basically say when reading my books, “Ah, I see what you’re trying to do here. Let me finish all your sentences for you.” I never want to effectively tell a referee to sit down and shut up. — Geoffrey McKinney on ODD74

Of course anyone can do anything he likes with Carcosa. There is no One True Wayism about Carcosa, nor is there an “Official” Carcosa. My attitude towards my creations is that of Gary towards D&D in 1974, not Gary towards AD&D in 1982. — Geoffrey McKinney on Dragonsfoot

My words do not even pretend to be Official Carcosa. There is no such thing as “Official” Carcosa. There is only YOUR Carcosa. Do with it as you will, and may the Old Ones mutate your thoughts into an indescribable campaign. — Geoffrey McKinney on Dragonsfoot

One of the more interesting 40K games Evan and I played was with my cousin using a mission Evan cooked up: his Navigator Scribeguard (Imperial Guard) against a mix of the recently awoken Blood Mormont Primaris Space Marine chapter and Adeptus Custodes. He ended up winning, managing to get a unit off the board to spread heresy!

That was a proper game of 40K, but many of the games Evan and I have played have been with model counts far closer to skirmish games. I was excited when Games Workshop first announced Kill Team, official skirmish rules for 40K. The game sounded like exactly the sort of thing I was looking for: a bigger focus on narrative gaming with rules that are straightforward and modern.

I picked up the Kill Team boxed set a few days after it launched. My original plan was to get the rule book, but I am a sucker for these boxed sets. The game comes with a lot of terrain and sprues for two kitbash friendly units I have been interested in: Genestealer Cult Neophyte Hybrids and Skitarii Rangers/Vanguard. I have wanted that cultist box for a while. It seems like the base for a lot of interesting modelling projects.

We played one game of Kill Team to test out the rules, playing a simple mission that continued on from the 40K mission mentioned earlier. I made a small Space Marine list from the miniatures I had on hand for our first game and made up a mission that picked up where our last 40K game left off. The mission tweaked the ambush mission from the core Kill Team rule book.

After that game there was a big gap in our gaming. I started building a new Kill Team mixing the sprue that came in the boxed set together, dubbing the models the Skitarii Dravidian. (The Skitarii Rangers in the squad are all named after Tamil numerals.) Evan started work building new Imperial Guardsmen out of some sprues our friend Gus sent him some time ago. These two forces served as the inspiration for a narrative campaign we are trying to get going: The War of the Intolerable Question

Like a glittering toxic icicle, Shentech’s manufactorum needle hangs above the infamous hive world of Necromunda, just outside the jurisdiction of Lord Helmawr. No one goes there, and no one leaves–but the manufactorum isn’t idle.

Once a year, a single, battered, yellow canister grav-chutes to a disused landing pad in the spires of Hive Primus. Marked with the Shentech seal, the canister is claimed as salvage, assayed by Helmawr’s inspectors as pharmaceutical compounds, then sold to the waiting Shen agent for a tidy profit. What happens then, precisely how this compound is employed, is a secret of the Navigator House. Or it was until recently, when a report from an Astartes Kill Team on Salmagundi showed the same Shentech canisters present on the planet of the Blbliarchs. The compound was being used somehow in their hypno-savant training.

It was yet another link between Salmagundi and their recidivist employers, the Navigators of House Shen. For the Custodes, the revelation of the compound offered a tantalizing opportunity to smash one of House Shen’s few verifiable assets–and destroy or damage the capacities of their legal team in the process.

The Custodes mobilized one of their many assets on Necromunda: a zealous and crudely innovative local church of the God-Machine. Well-equipped and motivated to learn the secrets of the Needle and stamp out any techno-heresy they might find there, the ops team was shuttled to orbit for the assault.

Debris and dust filling the landing bays showed the station had been inviolate for centuries. Beyond the airlock were dignitaries of the Needle’s degenerate laborii tribes, long-limbed and twisted parodies of their dutiful, hive-dwelling counterparts, planetside. The language was barely comprehensible but the invaders knew instantly that their smash-and-grab mission was going to be more challenging than they’d thought: the laborii were many; and might cling impudently to life. What was worse–the station possessed its own dedicated security detail–somewhere deep in the needle, a force of vat-spawned guardians were rising from their dormant state. The worshippers of the machine god made camp as the sour notes of an ancient klaxon wailed.

There are two forces in play to start, Evan’s vat grown soldiers tasked with defending the manufactorum and my rag-tag Skitarii elimination clade who have invaded. Perhaps in later games we will introduce other units or factions—if we build anything interesting or someone else ends up joining our games. We know there is one weird faction on the station itself to start, the Labourii. Evan came up with 6 regions in the station, and I helped expand them all so they each had 2 areas you can interact with if you win the mission. These provide some additional hooks for the game. We also press-ganged our online friends into helping us come up with a d66 table of events to have happen after each mission.

We have played 2 missions so far, a little bit hodgepodge as we settle into the game and try and figure out how to best run a campaign. It’s been fun to build and paint something with a concrete goal and purpose in mind. I’m thinking about other models that would fit in with the theme of this campaign to build as well.

Kill Team is a fun system. It’s quite simple: if you are familiar with 8th Edition Warhammer 40K you’ll understand most of what’s going on. The turn structure mirrors 40K, but besides the movement phase, all other actions are done in an “I go, you go” fashion. List building is much simpler, as the set of models available for you to use is so small. The game seems like a good introduction to Warhammer 40K, which I assume is quite purposeful on Games Workshop’s part.

I have been digging into Necromunda to get ideas for our campaign. Necromunda offers up a slightly more complex skirmish ruleset, but one that I think suffers from its mix of old and new style rules. With Kill Team there is no arguing about whether a unit is hit by an explosion’s template or not, for example. Necromunda’s advantage is a much richer campaign system, more interesting lists of weapons for your units, more complex rules for injuries and experience, etc.

I’m hopeful Evan and I can get something interesting going with this Kill Team game. Let’s see.

• It’s 100% not worth whatever they are charging for it where you live. It’s probably a smarter move to pay the extra $50 and get the Rogue Trader boxed set that comes with all those crazy minis—but doesn’t have all these new rules.
• No matter, because there are hardly any new rules of note: the rule book is basically a codex of commander units for all the original Kill Team factions. You can probably imagine what rules for fielding a command might look like, and they’d be close to what Games Workshop has published in this expansion.
• So, if you are bored of regular Kill Team and want some new units to muck around with, there are a bunch of them fleshed out for you.
• There is a lot of recycled artwork. Perhaps all of it?
• Commanders can pick up new specialisms unique to them, which are flavourful. If you give no fucks about balance you can use them in your narrative campaign with your random fancy kit bashed miniatures.
• There are 12 new missions, which I am always a fan of. (Though, they are mostly commander friendly variants of the missions in the original book.)
• It comes in a surprisingly nice box. I assume this is what you are paying for. The box fits the new rule book along with the original one.

If you’re wondering why I reviewed this expansion before reviewing Kill Team proper, i’m wondering the same thing. I love Kill Team and have too much to say about it, I suppose. Now that’s a boxed set worth buying.

1. Download the OSR OPML file to your computer, and remember where you put it.
2. Go to feedly.com.
3. Click on the grey “import OPML” button.
4. It’ll ask you to make an account. You can simply use Facebook, Google, or Twitter to log in, or make your own Feedly account.
5. You will see a box where you can drag and drop an OPML file. That’s the file you downloaded earlier! Drag that thing over!
6. That will upload it to Feedly.
7. That’s all the OSR blogs people have collected so far, and now you can read them all aggregated together and it’s wonderful.

A feed reader will check for updates from your blogs, grab them all, and display them as one long stream of posts. It’s very convenient.

I’ll update the file daily or something, as people add more blogs to that Google Doc. If you are already using Feedly or some other feed reader they are normally smart enough that you can import an OPML file and it’ll figure out what’s a duplicate. I’ve re-imported this file a few times to test and it seems to work out fine. If you want your blog or another blog to be part of this giant OPML file, simply add it to the original Google Doc: my scripts will eventually find the change and update the OPML file.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, the code that makes this all go lives on Github. I also have the same information available as JSON. I’m sure someone can think of something creative to do with that.

I have a few miniatures from Kingdom Death that might work in this sort of setting. I could likely make a neat Dark Souls inspired knightly retinue. The game has a really lovely implied setting—which I will now ignore for the rest of this post. I have a ton of Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, and I’d really like to use them with these rules.

Emmy provides a ton of advice in her game about how to make your characters. For each stat she outlines what reasonable numbers should be. She provides various examples for different types of characters so you can get a sense of what a scholar knight or a monk or an acrobat might be. Using a model’s stats from 40K as a guide it shouldn’t be too difficult to use the rules of The Dolorous Stroke to play games set in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future.

In 40K we have the following stats for a character: Movement, Weapon Skill, Ballistics Skill, Strength, Toughness, Attacks, Wounds, Saves, Leadership. We can use these as a guide to creating characters for The Dolorous Stroke, whose attributes are: Speed, Accuracy, Prowess, Strength, Toughness, Wits, and Education.

Movement maps to Speed and we can more or less use the value as written. 6” movement in 40K is quite common, but in Emmy’s game it seems like 5” is closer to the norm. You should probably subtract 1” from most 40K characters Movement attribute to get your new Speed score. (Note that this may make some characters—like Plague Marines—particularly slow.)

Ballistics Skill maps to Accuracy and Weapons Skill to Prowess. In Warhammer you roll over your skills on a d6. A Ballistics Skill of 3+ (like that of a Space Marine) would be equivalent, more or less, to an Accuracy of 6. Here we use Emmy’s advice that you are usually trying to roll low on a d8. The way you roll with your Prowess stat in combat differs from how your Weapons Skill is used in 40K, but I think it’s reasonable to map scores the same way.

Strength and Toughness serve the same purpose in both 40K and The Dolorous Stroke, though the way the numbers are used differ. Emmy suggests you use the value of 4 or 5 for a typical human. In 40K most human characters have a Strength and Toughness of 3. Space Marines have a toughness of 4. Plague Marines a toughness of 5. Numbers of 6 or higher are usually reserved for giant robots, tanks, dreadnoughts, etc. I think I would map things as follows:

Characters that have multiple attacks in 40k (an Attacks score greater than 1) should be given combat abilities in The Dolorous Stroke that highlight the fact they are proficient fighters. Characters with high Leadership scores may also deserve some skills to highlight that—like the aptly named Leadership skill for example.

A characters Saves attribute in 40K is usually an indication of how good their armour is, or some hint at their natural resilience. Space Marines generally have a score of 3+, with Terminator Armoured characters or heroes being given 2+ saves. The lighter armour of a Guardsmen is usually a 5+ save. These numbers can be used as a guide when deciding the bonuses of the armour in The Dolorous Stroke. I would treat a Guardsmen as having +1 armour (Light Armour) while a Space Marine would be +3 (Heavy Armour and a Helment).

The last two attributes in The Dolorous Stroke, Wit and Education, don’t map to anything in 40K. You should likely use your judgement here, based on how you imagine your particular character.

All characters in The Dolorous Stroke can take at most 7 hits before they die (as you lose 2 Blood cards per hit). You will likely die sooner because of injuries or other circumstances. To represent characters who have more wounds in 40K, you may want to give them skills that limit the ways they lose blood or take injuries.

I would treat Psyker’s in 40K as Magic-Users in The Dolorous Stroke. You can re-skin existing spells or make up new ones as required. In 40K a Psyker risks danger when they manifest powers from the Warp. I would tweak spell casting in Dolorous Strike so that drawing an Ace or a King results in possible peril from the warp. The most straight forward thing to do is have the Psyker lose some number of Blood cards. If the Psyker dies you should have the units around them affected by the turmoil of the Warp. Maybe they explode. Maybe a demon erupts from their body.

I would simply re-skin existing weapons in The Dolorous Stroke for your 40K characters, using their existing Weapon Profiles from 40K as a guide. You can represent weapons that do more damage in 40K by having them result in the loss of more Blood cards. The Dolorous Stroke is straightforward enough that coming up with bespoke weapons should be easy enough.

I haven’t actually tried using any of these suggestions in a game. I haven’t even played The Dolorous Stroke yet! At first glance it looks to be a very cool game, and I suspect a lot of people will be talking about it sooner rather than later. I’ll report back if these ideas work out or not. (Or, maybe you can tell me if they worked for you.)

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming are my answer to the Ennies. They are a reflection of my singular tastes. Are my tastes good? Yes. Yes they are, obviously. (Why else are you reading this dumb blog post?) These are all books I love for inscrutable reasons that are mine alone. Maybe you will like them too.

To be considered for an award a book must have been purchased by me in the previous calendar year. The books mentioned are all from 2017. Maybe you’ve blocked that year out. It was a pretty shitty one. Anyway, that’s basically the only rule here. Most everything else is made up as I go.

Best Game: Daniel Sell and Jeremy Duncan for Troika

There is something captivating about Troika. Daniel has managed to capture the weirdness of 80s UK fantasy in this love letter to Advanced Fighting Fantasy. Troika is a simple game with delightful art by Jeremy Duncan. Much of the book is filled with backgrounds for characters, and this is where the weird British fantasy is at its strongest. If you just want to play D&D, you can steal these backgrounds along with Troika’s superlative initiative rules and take your game to the next level.

Best Setting Book: Patrick Stuart & Scrap Princess for Veins of the Earth (with layout by Jez Gordon)

The most expensive book I own, perhaps. One of the most beautiful. It’s comically thick. Scrap Princess’s art falls on almost every page, which has been typeset with care by Jez Gordon. Patrick’s writing is excellent, as usual. This is best book Patrick and Scrap have done. It’s such an imaginative retelling of one of the most common parts of D&D: the mythic underworld. Everything in this book feels new and fresh. Patrick’s Olm and Knotsmen should become as iconic as the Drow and Ithilids of D&D. This book includes some of Scrap’s best artwork. She manages to hint at the horror that exists in the darkness of Patrick’s underworld. There is so much going on in this book it can be overwhelming. It’s a delight to read and re-read. Patrick is such a fountain of creativity I look forward to what he will produce next.

Best God Damn Book of 2017: Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, Evan Peterson and Donnie Garcia for The Dark of Hot Springs Island

The Dark of Hot Springs Island is exactly the sort of book I love: it’s well written, well laid out, the art is great, and the book itself is pretty fucking fancy. The Dark of Hot Springs Island is a refreshing take on how you write and publish a hex crawl, and perhaps adventures in general. Many recent hex crawls look to take a lot of inspiration from Carcosa (itself taking inspiration from old Judges Guild modules). They are terse and compact. You are expected to divine a lot about the world by reading the descriptions and making connections between them.² In contrast to something like Carcosa, Hurst presents his world with far more clarity and verbosity. Jacob has thought hard about what work a DM would need to do to run his adventure, and figured out how to make that task easier. There are tables and useful locations and advice throughout the book. It’s very clear how to use the book to run the setting presented, something many books don’t do well. This is what I found most compelling about the book, and why I ended up picking it over Veins of the Earth.³ This book is engineered to encourage the sort of emergent story telling people enjoy about OSR games.⁴

Honourable Mentions

All my love to Adam Poots for making Kingdom Death Monster, Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing, Maze Rats by Ben Milton, Fleshscape by Emanuele Galletto, Bluebeards Bride by Whitney Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and the Chromatic Soup zines by Evlyn Moreau. Fever Swamp in particular was on the cusp of taking one of the top spots. It’s a lovely dense little adventure that looks like a weird children’s book. But, like the Highlander, there can be only three.

I also have to give an extra special shout out to Games Workshop for their Dark Imperium boxed set. Warhammer 40K has me enraptured. I was tempted to pivot these awards so they were just selections of the best miniatures of 2017. RPG nerds of 2018: you are in competition with Necromunda and Kill Team. Don’t fuck it up.

I bought the new edition of Necromunda, Game Workshops miniatures skirmish game about gangs in the 41st millennium. How did I even get here?

I don’t imagine anyone else I know buying any of this stuffs, so I might just treat this starter set like a (god damn expensive) board game and leave it at that. I think there are enough people in Toronto I can scam into playing with me. (Evan being the most obvious.) When I asked my wife if she’d play Warhammer 40K if I bought the boxed set she said “no”, but the way she said it was, “no—you fucking idiot of course I won’t play it.” My cousin lives down the road and is a gamer nerd. Will report back on just how dumb a purchase this was in a few months.

These were my thoughts after opening the box to Warhammer 40,000: Dark Imperium, the new boxed set for the Warhammer 40K game. This was a year ago, give or take. It was a gift to myself for having to deal with a crazy client upgrade at work. I don’t really remember why I was so fixated on this particular boxed set. I had seen it the week before, and in a moment of stress went off to buy my own copy.

I don’t imagine anyone else I know buying any of this stuffs …

I was wrong. Warhammer is like smoking. You never really quit.

Evan helped me get started with painting, and then quickly fell back into the game. He still had a Tau army, which we played our first game of this new edition with. He then sold it off for store credit at the shop so he could start a new Adeptus Mechanicus & Imperial Guard army. (His units are all kit bashed and crazy—really quite amazing.) We would meet to play games of 40K every few months, depending on our schedules.

What’s funny is that people who don’t live near me also got sucked back into Warhammer, likely due to my incessant posting in my secret Warhammer 40K G+ thread. I chat with Patrick (from False Machine) often about Warhammer 40K, and in the time we started talking he went from sitting on the side lines to buying and painting up a cool Rainbow Warriors Space Marine army. I’m not sure if I should feel good or bad about that. A few other G+ gamers will chime in to talk about Warhammer. 8th Edition looks to have helped get a lot of people back into the game.

… I might just treat this starter set like an (god damn expensive) board game and leave it at that …

I was wrong. Warhammer is a giant money hole.

Between Dark Imperium and Necromunda there has been a lot of minis. I ended up enjoying the building and painting part of the hobby much more than I thought I would. So, I quickly started spending money so I would have more things to paint. (And eventually started spending money when I had things half painted. Like some sort of idiot.)

… Will report back on just how dumb a purchase this was in a few months.

I mean, Warhammer is expensive, so in that regards it was stupid to decide to get into the hobby. On the other hand, I do build and paint and play with the miniatures. Warhammer more or less supplanted much of the gaming I did in 2017 and thus far in 2018. It has become my nerdy hobby of note. I have come to love Warhammer a lot. So, a year later I’m going to say this wasn’t a dumb purchase.

I’ve written up several play reports now of the games Evan and I have played at the Sword and Board, from our modest skirmish sized battles to a big 3-person game with my wife’s friend Devlin. 8th Edition is an excellent version of the game. It’s quite straight forward compared to what I remember playing when I was a kid—though I might just not remember Warhammer Fantasy very well. I have heard complaints the game is too random and not strategic enough, which is likely fair, but I wouldn’t say that’s had much impact on how much fun i’ve had playing. There have been so many fun and funny moments in the games I’ve played so far.

Now I need to organize a Necromunda campaign.

Evan and I managed to get together again after quite some time to continue playing some Warhammer. In a change of pace, he designed the narrative mission we would play ahead of time. In the past, I’ve tried to inject a narrative on top of the Open War missions we would randomly generate and play. What he came up with was a lot of fun, and also a lot more narratively interesting.

He tweaked the rules for the Ambush mission described in the core rulebook, adding a lot of narrative flare. Briefly, the Scribeguard (Imperial Guard) had spoke a great heresy against the Emperor of Mankind, and would now have to face the agents of his wrath. The Anti-Heretic Shield Company His Light From Holy Terra (Adeptus Custodes) and the newly awoken Primaris Space Marine Chapter the Blood Marmots were sent to ambush these blasphemers and make sure none would live to speak again. Evan would win outright if he could get half his infantry off the board, and it would be a draw if even one of these blasphemous units managed to escape. The Custodes would win if they could kill all the Scribeguard infantry outright.

My cousin was in charge of playing the Space Marines, so Evan added a twist to the whole battle. Every time the Space Marines fought the infantry of the Scribeguard, they ran the risk of being turned to their side. As Evan descirbed it, “Every time any Blood Marmot unit participates in a fight phase with a Scribeguard unit, roll a dice for each Blood Marmot unit at the end of the phase to test the the Marines’ loyalty. On 5+ their Blood Marmots hear all the proof they need that the Emperor is perhaps actually maybe dead and they turn against the Custodes.”

Evan’s Army had grown since we last played. He now had two tanks and a whack of newly painted and kitbashed models. My army was as follows:

• Shield Captain
• Vesilus Praetor
• 4-Man Custodian Guard Squad
• Captain in Gravis Armour
• Primaris Ancient
• 5-Man Intercessor Squad
• 5-Man Hellblaster Squad

Captain Styx of the Blood Marmots gave the order that began the attack. Missiles pummelled the ground from an orbital strike. The sounds of bolter fire filled the air. The Hellblaster squad to his right let loose arcs of molten plasma from their weapons. The tank they hit answered back, obliterating the unit.

After the first round Jana and I were worried this game was going to be a cake walk for Evan. His tanks made quick work of what we had hoped would be our tank-killing unit, the Hellblasters. Evan’s infantry were quick footed and began their sprint towards the end of the board. We were lucky that the orbital strike Jana called in hit both of Evan’s commanders (though no one else!) which meant he couldn’t give any orders to his units that first turn. My Custodian Guards were a bit out of the way initially, as I wanted them out of the view of the tank. I probably could have been more aggressive with their placement.

The Custodian Guard surged forward, tearing through some helpless Scribeguard infantry on their way to the tank that had moments earlier killed their comrades. Their power weapons quickly turned the weapon to scraps. Their rage would not be satiated till all these traitorous heretics lay dead.

Then it felt like things were flipping. My custodian guard charged forward and managed to kill the infantry Evan had sent forward to block their path. They consolidated towards the tank, and were able to kill it the following round. This continued from round to round. They removed a lot of models from the board. The Captain in Gravis armour also made his way towards the infantry and started cutting them up with his power sword. Evan’s army was crumbling, but he still managed to get a couple models past us: a single infantry, and a commander.

Evan also had one more tank, which managed to kill off two of my Custodian Guard. His Augmented Ogryn Bodyguard killed the last one. And just like that things and turned once more. Jana and I really needed that unit alive to shoot the two models that were fleeing. At the back of the board we still had a lot of heavy hitters: Jana’s Captain in Gravis Armour, my Shield Captain, and my Vesilus Praetor. (These 3 units were a little over half the points of Evan’s entire army!) Unfortunately, those units were all either out of range or didn’t have line of sight to the models fleeing.

The last round was full of funny dice rolls. Jana need a 3 to make a charge and failed by rolling snake eyes. Evan’s sole model in one of his units killed himself while shooting overwatch as part of that very charge. Evan almost lost his unit closest to the board because he rolled a 6 when making a morale check. (He used a command point to re-roll, his last one) This same unit then failed to flee because Evan only rolled a 1 when rolling to advance. He ended up getting a draw by having his commander command himself to “move! move! move!”—this let him take two move actions, and allowed him to clear the board.

This was a really fun game of Warhammer. Perhaps the most fun I’ve had since we’ve started playing.

For these walking demigods failure was an impossibility. Shield Captain Casius reflected on this briefly as he watched a commander of the Scribeguard scurry away. If failure was impossible than this must be the will of their long silent master: he wanted them to burn this heretical house to the ground.

One thing that falls outside the usual discussions of gaming style is the amount of distance any given group or player has towards the game in question—which I think is a shame because I think a giant part of the fun is the distance and, one way or another, I feel like the design of, say, Vampire, D&D-as-marketed-to-adults, D&D-as-marketed-to-kids, Rifts, and Dogs In the Vineyard all imply different levels of distance. Or, perhaps more accurately, the way they’re talked about implies different levels of distance.

…

I suspect that when a lot of people say they don’t purposefully want to inject heavy “relevant” themes into their games it’s not necessarily because they play to escape reality, but because—like me—when they play they never escape reality, and so any “theme” always remains at a distance. Injecting a theme which one was genuinely conflicted about into this style of play would be, in some way—for this kind of player—trivializing it. — Zak Smith—from a 7 year old blog post¹

As I mentioned in my post about Cartel, “These Apocalypse World games are at their best when they help the players navigate what might be unfamiliar territory for them.” These games also seem at their most challenging when they push into areas you don’t expect games to go. To my surprise, I found Night Witches—a game about sexism, death, hopelessness and sometimes hope during WWII—really compelling. It’s not the sort of game I normally play. More so, when I first picked it up it struck me as an odd subject to turn into a game. Acting out the lives of women in this hopeless situation seemed like it could be disrespectful.

Playing Night Witches made me rethink some of my thoughts around these “serious” games. Night Witches seems engineered to push the stories it tells in a particular direction.² This can help keep serious matters serious. As I mentioned in my review, it’s quite likely your campaign of Night Witches will feel unrelenting and nihilistic, punctuated by brief moments of joy when you shoot down some Nazis. The gears of the game turn a certain way. The game feels respectful of the story it is helping you tell.

Velvet Glove is an Apocalypse World hack where you and your friends play a group of racialized teenage girls living in 1970s segregated small-city America—phew. (I picked it up because it sounded interesting and had a cool cover. I have fast become a fan of these overly specific Apocalypse World hacks.³) I’d say it has some thematic overlap with Night Witches. When I first saw Velvet Glove I had the same sort of knee-jerk reaction I did to Night Witches: should I be playing this game? I’ve played plenty of women in my D&D games⁴, but in the sorts of games I end up playing in the fact you are a playing man or a women is often immaterial. Or, at the very least, I usually play the same sort of genderless adventure person. Not that i’m adverse to playing a game where I’m asked to take on the role of a racialized women, but can I do that experience justice.

Night Witches feels like the safer game to play because we are so far removed from the experiences of a WWII Russian fighter pilot. You can invest a lot into the people you play in that game and feel safe knowing you probably won’t be called out for “doing it wrong”. There is a distance between you and the women you’re playing. Velvet Glove hits a lot closer to home. The racism and sexism it’s talking about are very much alive today. It’s likely you know people who deal with the problems Velvet Glove touches upon. As such, playing the characters in Velvet Glove feels like it could be more fraught or difficult. The challenge for game designers making these sorts of games is trying to introduce enough structure to the game that you gently nudge the emergent story in a particular direction. (It’s one way to try and understand and criticize these games.)

This subject and these games are all on my mind again because the kickstarter for Cartel is happening right now.

Velvet Glove and Cartel feel like they come from a similar headspace. They both seem to be a way to talk about how people make hard choices when put in positions where they have limited options. (And perhaps more obviously they both feature protagonists that aren’t White.) Of course, the games diverge in some obvious ways as well. The crimes and delinquency of your teenage girl gang will pale in comparison to the crimes of the cartels. It’s a totally different world. It’s easier to sympathize and empathize with the characters in Velvet Glove. Mark Diaz Truman likely wants us to feel the same way about the characters of Cartel, but for most people that will be a much bigger leap. Mark could have chosen many different topics to tell his story about Mexicans, but he settled on the drug war. (It’s interesting, complex, and exciting, after all.) He outlines both the struggle and ambition of the game he wants to make in an interview he did recently with Brie Sheldon:

Cartel issues a fundamental challenge to the gaming industry through its mere existence: it forces a mostly white audience to consider what it means to be Mexican, without the distance of metaphor or time. In many ways, my game design has been an effort to live up to that challenge, to take seriously the idea that white folks who might not have close relationships with Mexican people might sit down and play through a few days in their lives, not as a joke or a farce… but as a compelling drama.

When I saw this interview with Mark this passage caught my eye. (It’s what prompted this post.) Games can lean on the distance of time or the distance of metaphor to help make players feel comfortable playing roles that they might otherwise be uncomfortable playing. (For example, Night Witches uses time, and Monster Hearts uses metaphor.) It feels like Mark is touching on something similar to Zak’s comment above. Half the D&D games I play are filled with amoral murder machines straight out of a Jack Vance novel. These games don’t often feel edgy or complicated because you are so far removed from the characters you are playing.

You can’t mention Cartel without someone else jumping in to tell you glamourizing the Mexican cartels is despicable.⁵ This looks to be the most common complaint about the game. The archetypes the playbooks of the game represent aren’t distant or fantastic: they are grounded in reality.⁶ Mark could tell his story about the Mexican drug trade using allegory (the cartel are the dark elves or some such nonsense), or he could push his story backwards or forwards in time (Cartel: 2120). As players you might be able to avoid dwelling too much on the reality of what you’re playing. But this seems contrary to everything Mark wants to do with his game. His goal—as he notes often—is to push people to play roles that might be uncomfortable for them. He wants people playing Mexicans.

When talking about his game Mark often talks about the Wire. One of my favourite characters on that show is Bodie, a real fan favourite. The thing is, that dude shot Wallace in the first season! It’s one of the most heart breaking scenes in the show. The Wire isn’t glamourizing anything about the drug trade. I’m not sure Mark can produce the Wire of Powered by the Apocalypse World hacks—that’s a high bar to reach!—but it’s not inconceivable that you can produce something very good about violence and drugs and all that bad stuff. There is value in understanding the systems that produce the situation in Mexico today. To pretend it’s all bad people being bad is stupid and simple. There are all sorts of ways to tell that story. Mark chose to make a game.

A fellow gamer had the following to say in a discussion about this game:

“You play members of the cartel” may actually be sufficient to make some folks sick to their stomach, no matter what Mark has done to make it clear these characters aren’t good guys. That’s a legit critique.

So … I don’t think that’s a legit critique.

The fact anyone is making a game about the cartels is going to offend some people on principle. If you don’t want to play that game that seems like a totally reasonable response. I can imagine a lot of games I wouldn’t want to play. You probably can too. While I am sure Mark can convince people their understanding of his game is incorrect, no one obligated to engage with Mark to understand where he’s coming from. It’s perfectly fine to think a game is gross and leave it at that. Games aren’t for everyone and this game is likely no exception. But your distaste for a game isn’t a critique: that’s just a personal preference.

All of the games I’ve mentioned in this post could be offensive to people. Sometimes you might agree with what the person finds offensive. Other times not so much. (Some people are moaning about sex fluid elves right now when talking about 5e, after all.)

An argument can be made that no game can do this particular subject justice. And an argument can be made that this particular game isn’t doing its subject justice. But someone needs to make those arguments. My random thoughts above are one way to talk about games like these. There are probably other, better ways, as well. (I mean, what do I know? I play D&D!)

All of these games exist because people didn’t pick up and go home for fear of offending someone. This is likely true of most compelling art.

Many weeks ago I asked the nerds on Google+ how they’d run such a game of crap sack adventuring in the Underdark. Since that time I have done fuck all with their useful advice. Rather than sit on it, I think it’s better to share it with the world.

To start, Hans M. and Ian B. suggested a route I had considered myself: peppering the veins with the occasional friendly town equivalent—a gnomen village for example. This would let you run the game like you might any other overland wilderness adventure. My main issue with this approach is that it seems like I’d want people exploring the Underdark to venture further and further into the darkness. I struggled to get people to explore in my Carcosa game because much of the action was centred around their home town. Ian suggested having players being involved in setting up supply caches and building these safe places in the Underdark. That might work, though I think i’d prefer something weirder for my Veins of the Earth game.

The always epic Daniel Dean offered up some straight up Veins of the Earth:

Tiny hands grip you and carry you in the night and leave something in your stead, sometimes another person they have taken sometimes a valuable or inscrutable token, like a trade rat. When and if you are returned it is in similar circumstances, you are here but something is gone, and you have no memory of the time between then and now.

Joshua B’s suggestion reminds me of the above, though its execution is different:

In the grim darkness of the Veins there is only survival. Sometimes people get separated, and wander the darkness, silent and cold, until finally regaining light and companionship.

In a similar vein Dan D. suggests the party travels with a “pack mule”:

Your pack mule is a giant spider that wraps people up in silk cocoons for transit and sometimes forgets to let them out.

This could be fun: you could make the giant spider part of the game proper or something more meta. Perhaps the party needs to protect the creature at all times, or it’s simply something that shows up at the end of each session to gobble the players up.

These ideas could be turned into something gamier, which Brendan suggests:

If regular settlement areas kills the bleak vibe too much, maybe figure out some sort of symbolic save point thing akin to Dark Souls bonfires with just enough fictional logic to not be distracting. Something like pure springs.

Patrick chimes in and expands on Brendan’s idea with a suggestion I like, and might be what I end up using in my game:

A particular kind of dark is ‘safe’ for the Party, maybe they have a contract or agreement with that particular quality of dark so people in it can find each other or rest safely, expeditions are between patches or volumes of that kind of dark. Other darks may be enemies and could be dark-elemental politics.

You could probably mix and match these suggestions nicely as well. Players would be venturing towards the next safe darkness. If they make, great. If they fail, they are gobbled up by a spider or snatched up by the tiny hands, and will need to deal with the complications that come from that.

There are more suggestions in the original thread, but these are my favourite. I think they highlight the general approaches one can take: from reproducing the overland in the underworld to something more “gamey”.

Zak’s writing in all his books is what I would describe as evocative and terse. (Terse being the real key to his style, I think.) This wilderness crawl is a good example of his style. Zak is able to jam the descriptions of the wilderness on the map of the wilderness itself because he keeps things short. What you sacrifice in a dope looking map, you get back in one that is more functional while playing.¹

When organizing the Gygaxian Democracy Hex Crawls (Hexenbraken, Kraal, etc), Zak forced everyone to follow some rules about how to write the hex descriptions:

1. 2 sentences per hex.
2. References to other hexes make a hex map good. Do that when possible.
3. You don’t have to prove you’re Grant Morrison in every hex, just make a usable map. It can say “Small inn. Well is empty.”

These constraints force you to be creative with what you write. You end up distilling your ideas to their core components. You’re forced to drop anything tangential, pushed to hint at your ideas through a liberal use of adjectives and open ended descriptions. Linking hexes together to tell a story about what’s going on is another way to build up an evocative setting while still keeping your individual descriptions short.

From Frostbitten & Mutilated:

Five crates rest on a cliff edge high above the sled that pulled them. One contains salted cod, one contains 650sp worth of aquavit, one contains an occult text with the names of 4 drowning demons and a map to the entrance to the Dim Fortress, one contains a sleeping snow leopard, one contains beets and Ribboned Jenny the champion rat. Her swarm is nearby

There is so much going on in this brief paragraph. How did the sled topple of the cliff? Was it the swarm of rats trying to retrieve Ribboned Jenny? What’ll they do when the players enter the scene. As the DM you can decide if the party come upon this scene from above, next to the crates, or from below, next to the toppled sled. Knowing the names for Drowning Demons might save your ass later, and of importance to this module, the location of the Dim Fortress is hard to come by.

This rat, Ribboned Jenny, is mentioned in the first wilderness description:

Tumbledown inn overrun by wharf rats in search of Ribboned Jenny, a fancy-rat from Rottingkroner (see H5).

A simpler wilderness blurb, but there is enough here for adventure and excitement. Will the party help the rats, be harried by them, etc. Tumbledown Inn itself is notable for being the only inn mentioned when describing this winter wasteland.

Both descriptions can be read in a few seconds. When playing the game you don’t need to root around trying to understand what’s going on in the hex. There are trade offs with having descriptions that are this short, but I much prefer short descriptions to long ones when running a game.

Frost Bitten & Mutilated is a good example of a simple functional wilderness adventure. Zak has learned the good lessons from Carcosa—easy to grok evocative description—and skipped over the bad lessons—easy to grok super boring descriptions. LotFP has a big stable of solid wilderness adventures at this point: World of the Lost, Qelong, Carcosa, and now this one.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

On Friday I played it safe and signed up for two games I had some experience with: Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Apocalypse World. I began my day with Fraser Simons and his friend Yoshi. I had missed Fraser last year, so we made it a point to try and actually meet up: it worked. A beer and an overpriced meal down I was off to play LotFP.

When I saw Sarah Richardson was running a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess I quickly signed up. Her RPG Bluebeards Bride is really dark and full of horror, so I assumed she’d be a natural fit for running an LotFP game. She dubbed the adventure she ran “Blood Spattered Bride”: it was a D&D take on her Storygame. We played the former wives of Bluebeard who had escaped from his home and returned to exact our revenge. It all felt like a good grindhouse movie, bouncing between creepy and ultraviolent. She’s an excellent dungeon master. The game was a great way to start the convention.

With no delay I moved on to my next game, Apocalypse World. I was joined by my cousin Jana, Yoshi (the dude I met earlier in the day), and another guy named Matt. A really great group. My cousin is always the rogue that robs the party when he plays D&D, so was happy to discover that PvP is a big part of Apocalypse World. He was playing the brainer, and ended up with puppet string holds over most everyone in our base by the end of the game. (This came in handy when Yoshi and an NPC were fighting over control of our holding.) The game came to a pretty satisfying conclusion, but there were so many weird mysteries we didn’t get to wrap up. It was one of those games I wish we had another session to play. So shout out to our MC, Lauren!

I ended up swapping out of a second Apocalypse World game I signed up for to play a new game, Ross Rifles. The session I was a part of was run by one its creators, Daniel Kwan. It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game set during the First World War. The players are all soldiers in the Canadian army. I really liked the game, and have lots more to say about—which I put in another post!

I didn’t have enough time to play a second game: I had to leave for the ballet in a few hours. Instead I spent my time loitering around and chatting with people. I had lunch with Fraser and John Wilson, who I had met the previous year. I had a beer with Catherine Ramen, who I learned is the author of the game Red Carnations on a Black Grave. I bumped into Michael, his friend, and his son, and we wandered around and I spent some money. We then found my cousin and Yoshi and all talked about Kickstarters and printing books and other RPG nonsense. I ended my con chatting with Jana and Yoshi before heading off to meet my wife to watch a ballet. It was a nice few hours.

BreakoutCon is the best. You should check it out next year if you didn’t this year. It’s likely the biggest gaming convention in Toronto: big, but not too big.

The quick start rules of the game are available now, but the game is very much still in development. The version I played at BreakoutCon has diverged a little bit from the game described in the quick start booklet, and I as I write this Daniel is play testing some new morale rules. They hope to have the game ready to be kickstarted at the tail end of the year. Still, the quick start rules capture the core of the game, which I suspect won’t change much over the coming months.

Ross Rifles is an apocalypse world hack. The quick start is a bit rough: I think it might not be easy to follow if you haven’t actually played the game. The booklet could likely be reorganized to better explain the game and how the various changes to Apocalypse World work. A brief overview of how the game plays and moves from phase to phase would be helpful. With Apocalypse World games you have your agenda and principles and all that noise. I think it’d be good to put some of that down on the page for people who want to run a game of Ross Rifles themselves.¹ That said, the game’s rules are quite straight forward, and it doesn’t drift far from the core of Apocalypse World, so playbooks in hand I suspect most groups will manage fine.

Ross Rifles was fun. It plays like a good war movie. We began with our arrival to the front line. Players can play Sergeants, Corporals, and Privates, each described in their own playbook. The game will look similar to anyone who has played a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Some changes of note: characters have a harm track and a fatigue track, with 4 harm indicating death, and 4 fatigue indicating shell shock (which impacts your ability to things)²; each character can gain vigilance points they can spend to do particular actions or impact the fiction of the game (like call throw a grenade, call in artillery, etc); each character can gain ground that represents their forward position on the battlefield. Gaining Ground and moves you trigger by spending your Vigilance points are generally how you succeed at the missions your soldiers are assigned.

After settling in we were greeted by our commanding officer Stan Ho and tasked with searching for and retrieving the camera from a downed German spy plane which crashed in the No Man’s Land. This mission required a majority of our group to gain 3 ground, and that one of the players triggered the Fall Back vigilance move. We spent some time trying to get organized: cleaning our guns, studying maps, surveying the region from the ‘safety’ of our trench. There are moves you trigger while in this phase that might grant bonuses for the later phases. In our case, we mostly flubbed rolls and accumulated shock/fatigue.

Flubbing rolls also meant Daniel collected Threat tokens, which he could later spend to fuck with us, basically. This was one of my favourite parts of the game. It’s like the inverse of mission points in Night Witches. When a player rolled low they would sometimes be presented with the option of succeeding anyway if the DM gets a threat token. As he slowly collected tokens the tension around whether we should eat the set backs from our rolls ratcheted up.

We were ready for action and ventured out into No Man’s Land.³ The moves here are all about making your way forward unseen through all the muck and craters and barbed wire that pock marked the front. Our brawniest private began things by crawling over to cut through some barb wire blocking our path—and rolled snake eyes. So he was stuck under the wire, which remained uncut, and could hear the approach of two German stormtroopers. The rest of us tried to lay low and get in a good position to shoot the troops. (This time we rolled well.) We waited for an artillery strike to provide some noise and light and took out the troops. Our private managed to cut through the wire and we began our advance. My character managed to make it to the camera first. Success! Or so we thought: it was a trap.

We were now under fire, the third phase of the game.⁴ Here the game shifts to charging forward, trying to circumvent craters, barbed wire, and other obstacles, shooting at your enemies (as they shoot at you), and getting up close and personal with whatever weapons you have on hand. This part of the game was exciting and fun. It’s where the rest of our team managed to make all their ground as they ran to save me from the German machine gunners that had me pinned down and some storm troopers that were making their way to the crater of a plane I was hiding behind. A few of us took some wounds as we were shot and beaten, but in the end we prevailed. I was rescued and we fell back (and so succeeded at our mission).

We played through another short mission and called it a day.⁵ It was a fun session. I found it all really interesting, as well. I have to wonder if they’ll be able to some how transplant all that knowledge of its creators into the eventual game book itself. I don’t know much about the First World War, so the game felt compelling just from an educational standpoint. The game is very fast to get going. Unlike a lot of other Apocalypse World hacks, you don’t spend a lot of time up front building out the game world or the relationships between all your characters. The setting is set and your relationships are what come out of play. Daniel runs the game with children, and I suspect a lot of how it was designed is to make playing and running the game as straight forward as possible. I think they’ve succeeded quite well in that regard. I’m looking forward to where they end up going with this game.

You’ve got your hands on the ashcan of the full game, a preview of Cartel that’s got everything you need to sample the game before it’s released next year. — Mark Diaz Truman, Cartel “Ashcan Edition”, 2015.

Well, it took him a bit more than a year. The kickstarter for Cartel is today, so it seems like as good a time as any to write about the game.¹ I picked up an early “ashcan” version of the game a couple years ago from 401 Games here in Toronto. Since then the author Mark Diaz Truman released an updated set of quick start rules with some nice art and much better graphic design. This game has been a long time coming.

Cartel is like D&D, but everyone is a drug trafficking Mexican gangster. The game is an engine to produce the sorts of stories you see in Breaking Bad and Narcos. Like other Apocalypse World games the mechanics look to push you towards eventual calamity. I suspect like Breaking Bad you would play a game where your hijinks are funny till they’re not.

The game doesn’t drift too far from the general the core of Apocalypse World’s rules, so for most players familiar with the rule set it should be easy to jump into. The genre the game emulates is a lot more accessible than some of the other (particularly niche) Powered by the Apocalypse games I’ve picked up. I think it’ll be an easy game to get into. You’ll recognize the archetypes the playbooks describe: the dirty cop, the naive spouse, the “cook”, etc. The most notable changes to the rules (that I picked up on, and really, what do I know?) is around how you gain experience and advance your character. I am a fan of the change: each playbook has thematic options for how you advance that encourage you to play your role. (And, when you get bored of your experience objective you can move in the opposite direction to cancel it out and pick a new one.)

When I first picked up the game my friend Gus brought up something that’s always on my mind with these Powered by the Apocalypse games: are they making light of a serious topics?

I’m not sure how I feel about a game that romanticizes the Mexican Drug War. Though I want to be a cleric of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte when we play. … I find Latin American and American pulp narco-fiction to be pretty damn creepy and exploitative (El Marginal and Sicaro both, and also yeah Netflix’s Narcos) already, and I wonder how beer and pretzels tabletop can do better. This is sort of why I like my fantasy games and moral play to be a bit more removed - give me Carcossan cannibals, not Los Zetas. — Gus, 2016.

Moments after Gus asked the question fellow Torontonian and BreakoutCon organize Rob chimed in with a link to an old Gaunlet podcast episode where Mark discusses this very topic with Jason Cordova. Jason is a lawyer and had previously worked with people affected by Mexican drug trade. His initial feelings about this game were pretty strong (and negative). (This interview takes place a year after he first encountered the game, so his views had cooled a fair bit.) Their conversation on this podcast is really fantastic. It’s probably one of the best episodes. (So rare!) I’ve been looking forward to the game since listening to this interview.

These Apocalypse World games are at their best when they help the players navigate what might be unfamiliar territory for them. You can see in the playbooks and the writing and everything that orbits the game thus far that Mark’s really put a lot (of himself!) into this game: exactly what I want from my games that are “like D&D, but …”.²

My wife’s friend Devlin has been collecting and painting Warhammer miniatures for ages. So naturally we had to meet up to play a game. I let him know I could field just shy of a 1000 points of Death Guard (by using everything I own), and he made two possible armies to face me out of the models in his collection: one of Imperial Guards, one of Blood Angels. Evan let me know he could meet up as well, bringing as many Imperial Guard units as he had kit-bashed and painted thus far. This worked out neatly: Devlin wanted to play using his Blood Angels, so Evan could pad out his army with the extra units Devlin brought with him to The Sword and Board.

The last game Evan and I played had about 1000 points of units on the table. With this game we were each fielding 1000 point armies, so we had 3000 points of units in play. It was such a huge jump from what we had been doing thus far.

My army consisted of all my Death Guard units:

• Causarius, Lord of Contagion (Warlord with the Living Plague Warlord Trait)
• Putidus, Malignant Plaguecaster
• The Noxious Blightbringer
• The Tallyman
• 5x Blightlord Terminators
• 7x Plague Marines
• 20x Pox Walkers
• Foetid Bloat-Drone

This was a full battalion, so I got 3 extra command points—which I mostly forgot to use while playing.

We were a bit confused about how a 3 player game would work. The rulebook doesn’t have much to say about how to set up a game with an odd number of players. We decided we would roll the dice each round (after the first) to decide the turn order. Otherwise we left the game more or less as-is. I picked what I thought would be a fun objective: there is one marker; units can pick the marker up and carry it around the board; they drop the marker if they are destroyed, the winner is the person whose unit is holding the marker at the end of the game. I thought this would encourage a free for all where we would end up attacking each other as we fought over the objective. (It didn’t quite work out that way.)

Devlin went first, fanning his troops out towards Evan and I. Devlin Death Company moved towards me and shot up my Malignant Plaguecaster, who managed to survive through some good luck for me and bad luck for Devlin. He moved a big Redemptor towards Evan’s troops and also rolled surprisingly bad, killing a handful of units. A unit of his Death Company dropped into the battlefield as close as they could get to the objective, which was set up on top of a floating island. The island wasn’t big enough for another unit to do the same thing, so he took control of the objective (more or less) to start.

I started moving my Death Guard towards the warp gate that would take them up to the objective—the trip would take my slow moving troops several rounds. I pulled one group of pox walkers away from the mass, sending them towards Devlin’s approaching Death Company and my Plaguecaster. With no other pyskers on the board my Plaguecaster could use his abilities without being contested. I made quick work of a few of Devilin’s space marines this way.

Evan began his turn by teaching us the true power of tanks. The punisher canon on one of the Lemun Russ’s decimated a Death Company unit advancing towards him. A posse of guard with anti-tank guns then proceeded to make short work of the Redemptor, leaving it heavily damaged with two wounds.

Devlin was worried he’d be tabled before he got to deep strike more units onto the board, but luckily rolled high and got to go first when we began our second round. (It probably took us over an hour to get to this point!) He deployed his remaining units onto the board—a Sanguinary Guard and The Sanguinor—behind my line of Death Guard. No one wanted to fuss with the tanks. He killed my Plaguecaster (damn it!), most of the unit of Pox Walkers who were nearby, and a few Plague Marines, but I still felt like I was in good shape over all.

On my turn I teleported in my Blightord Terminators and started my retaliation, wearing Devlin down more. I forgot that I also had a Lord of Contagion—the warlord of my army!—that I could have also teleported in at this time. I moved it closer to the table so that I wouldn’t forget it next time, and then promptly forgot about it again.

Evan advanced his troops and took out more of Devlin’s army with his tanks and heavily armed guardsmen. My Bloatdrone took another barrage of fire and was reduced to 4 wounds. Evan also managed to drop a unit near the objective as Devlin had lost the troops that were up there to my army.

We started our third round and tried to race through it quickly to see where things would go: Evan needed to run. By this point we’d been playing for at least 3 hours!

My terminators moved up on to the floating island and killed Evan’s guard, putting them closest to the objective. Devlin’s remaining units were tied up fighting the remainder of my army, and it would be impossible for them to make it up to the objective even if they could miraculously kill everything in their path. Evan’s army was still quite healthy, but he was also too far from the objective now that he had no more troops he could grav-chute in. So like the last game, I won more or less by default.

In hindsight we might have wanted to do turn sequence differently, perhaps some scheme where we alternated activating individual units. A three way game is quite odd: Evan described it like playing a game while also watching a game. The gaps between your turns can be quite long. I’m hoping we can all get together again.

I did get into war gaming in a big way, starting with Warhammer in the summer and ending with Kingdom Death by the end of the year. These two games have kept me happy and entertained over the last 6 months. I expect that both Warhammer and Kingdom Death will remain regular fixtures in my life this year—if only because I’ve spent so much money on them both. I’ve found it much easier to meet and play both games, as neither requires anyone prep anything. (Well, besides all that modeling and painting, I suppose.) I still want to figure out how to mix up my Warhammer games with my RPG elements.

My RPG purchasing is still dominated by OSR books. This year many of those books came from individuals new to publishing, or whose imprints are quite small. I’m continually impressed by what people manage to produce. Daniel Sell went from making small zines to publishing two (really nice) hard cover books. Jacob Hurst also transitioned from zines to fancy books with the release of the two books that describe the Hot Spring Isles. LotFP only produced one new book, but what a book it was: we got Veins of the Earth! The indie scene puts the big publishers to shame with what they manage to accomplish.

If you were curious what books are in the running for The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming for 2017, here you go.

Evan managed to kit bash another weird mini before we met to play a couple weekends ago. His army was now power level 25 (500ish points), which meant I had many more options in what I could bring to the table. It’s like we’re playing some sort of escalation league, but the escalation is based solely on whether Evan is in the city or not and has a cool idea for a mini he wants to build out of the garbage he buys at the Sword and Board.

I had 3 different ideas for armies I could run, but ended up settling on an army very similar to the original list I used when we played our first game of Warhammer 40K:

• Causarius, Lord of Contagion
• Noxious Blightbringer
• 7 Plague Marines, including a Plague Champion
• 10 Poxwalkers

Evan’s army consisted of the following units:

• Two Kastelan Robots and a Cybernetica Datasmith.
• 4 Crusaders
• Some number of Imperial Guard
• A commander that had this crazy sword
• Probably some other units I’ve forgotten

Once again we used the Open War cards to set up our game. This time our objective was to kill as many units as possible, scoring points for the power level of the unit killed. (You got twice as many points for characters, vehicles, and monsters) The game’s twist was that all units could move an extra 2”, and advance an extra 1”. This was a huge boost for my incredibly slow Death Guard. Because Evan’s army was slightly more powerful than mine I also got to draw a ruse. (The one I drew let me redeploy one of my units anywhere on the board, so long as I was 9” away from any enemy unit.) I don’t think I could have asked for a better set up.¹

The Plague Marines emerged from the warp and found themselves floating on an island of rock. The warp had left this land twisted. Below them stood the Navigator Endogaurd, but no sign of the robot they had been sent to retrieve. They opened fire all the same.

I decided to go first—having fewer units than Evan meant I got to make the choice. I began the game moving my Pox Walkers, and the Noxious Blightbringer travelling with them, up and around a large floating island in the middle of game board. I teleported my Lord of Contagion in behind Evan’s Crusaders, hoping he’d be able to charge them, and deployed my Plague Marines using the Outflank ruse mentioned previously on top of the floating Island in the middle of the table. This meant they could start firing right away. They managed to take out a few of Evan’s guard doing so. My Lord of Contagion failed to charge, and that was my turn.

Evan decided sticking around on the ground waiting for my Pox Walkers and Lord of Contagion to show up was a bad idea, so his crusaders and guardsmen made a bee line for the warp gate that led to the level my Plague Marines were on. His command squad shot up at my marines, killing one.

Causarius shook back into existence, the teleportatium sending him into the heart of the fight. He was covered in the gore of the Navigator Endoguard’s command squad when the Kastelan robots opened fire.

My Lord of Contagion advanced towards command squad Evan had left behind and then charged: they didn’t survive my turn. The Plague Marines were unable to kill any of the Crusaders with their guns, though did a little bit better in melee.

Evan’s Robot’s were now in murder mode and proceeded to decimate my Lord of Contagion. This put Evan up 14 points, as my Lord of Contagion is my most expensive model at 7 points, and scored him double as it’s a character. His Crusaders resurrected a model using their Act of Faith ability and proceeded to kill another one of my marines.

The Pox Walkers poured through the warp gate and fell upon the guardsmen. The vox caster carried the screams of the endoguard hundreds of miles away to the emotionless man who keyed in the coordinates for the orbital strike.

It was just my Pox Walkers and Blightbringer on the ground along with Evan’s murder robots. I could see how that story would end, and had that mob also run through the warp gate. We ended up with a big mess of minis on the floating Island, everyone ending up in a giant melee. My Pox Walkers net their first kills (ever), taking out 2 of Evan’s Guardsmen.

Evan’s Guardsmen all “affixed their bayonets,” which let them make melee attacks during their shooting phase, as well as during the actual fight phase. The units struggled to harm my marines, however. During the morale phase they would all run away. Evan used this opportunity and some command points to call down an orbital strike, a new stratagem from the new Imperial Guard Codex. All the units within 6” of the downed unit would have to make a save or take some mortal wounds: this included my Noxious Blightbringer, my Plague Marines, and my Pox Walkers, but also his Crusaders. By luck my units all survived, while his Crusaders were wiped out.

The commander became the vessel through which the Plague Marines poured forth their hatred for the False Emperor. His faith would not save him. It would not save any of them.

On my turn my remaining units managed to kill the commander, the last of Evan’s units on the floating island. Our armies were now split between the ground and this island. At this point I was now in the lead when it came to points, and Evan’s Robots wouldn’t be able to make it to me before the game ended. At this point we called the game: victory for the Death Guard!

The Sword and Board was busy with people playing Warhammer. Almost all their gaming tables were being used. We snagged an industrial desert themed one and started moving terrain around. We played in a 4’ x 4’ space as our unit count is still quite low. While we were setting up two more players arrived and borrowed some of our excess terrain to play a Shadow War: Armageddon game. Warhammer seems to be quiet popular since the new edition dropped. (It may always have been and I just wasn’t paying attention.)

Since we last met Evan had built and painted a cool robot to add to his Navigator Endoguard. Since most of the parts for the minis came from the Adeptus Mechanicus he decided to field them as units from that army. His armies power level was now 15, so I could field an additional Death Guard unit this game.

My army:

• Noxious Blightbringer
• 5 Plague Marines, including a Plague Champion
• 10 Poxwalkers

Evan’s army:

• A robot
• Who even knows what else?

We bought the Open War pack of cards, which is designed to randomly generate Open War missions. It’s probably more than anyone should spend on a pack of cards, but it was very convenient and generated a cool game to play. The mission we drew had us set up on opposite ends of the table, with 2’ between us. Our objective would join the battle on the 3rd turn, it’s location on the board determined by a die roll. (We used a cool robot Evan had built as the objective.) You also draw a twist with this card set. (The Open War mission in the book doesn’t feature anything like this.) We drew ‘restoratives’, which let us return d3 wounds to one of our units each round. Finally, because my army was underpowered compared to Evan’s I got to draw a secret ‘ruse’. I drew ‘Ambush’, which let me redeploy 3 units in my army anywhere on the board so long as they were 12" from any enemy unit and outside the enemy deployment zone. This let me advance my troops a whole foot up before the game began: this was really a huge boon for my slow moving army. With that we were ready to get started.

The Angarius Machina hurtled through deep space: its message was not safe for the warp. As its destination finally drew near it reflected on all the years it had passed in the silence of space. Why was it programmed to think at all? It only had one purpose, after all.

On the planet below the Plague Marines ambush was in full swing. Their presence a cruel coincidence.

Evan focused all his fire on my plague marines to start off the game. Between all his units I lost 3 of my marines.

On my turn my Poxwalkers and Noxious Blightbringer moved up and then advanced a further 6”. The Poxwalkers are a pure melee unit, so they lost nothing by advancing. The Blightbringer only had a pistol, so it needed to get closer before it could start shooting. My marines moved up and shot at Evan’s robot, accomplishing nothing.

They had been harrying the men of this planet for weeks. This ambush had been carefully orchestrated, yet they were the ones suffering all the casualties? These men had been emboldened by their victories over the Vectorium: they had the audacity to charge the Death Guard.

Evan begins by shooting my Poxwalkers with one of his units, killing 3 of them. His Rangers were within the range for their rapid fire weapons to shoot twice when attacking. They also attacked the Poxwalkers, killing all but one. My marines take another wound from his remaining units, which I assign to my Plague Champion. His units then charge my remaining Poxwalker and the Noxious Blightbringer. The last walker dies during the melee, my Noxious Blightbringer survives unscathed. (At this point I forget that my Noxious Blightbringer can now fight as well: Evan remembers when I’m fighting on my turn and lets make the rolls for the phantom fight then.)

My marines shoot the units that are sitting on some dunes away from the melee, killing one of them. They then join the Noxious Blightbringer in melee. Between them and the Blightbringer they manage to kill 3 more of models.

The warmth of the atmosphere pressed against its cold exoskeleton. The ground came upon it quickly. The silence of space replaced by the tolling of the Toscin of Misery and the screams of war.

On the third round the objective crashed into the battlefield—and lands right on top of the dunes Evan’s troops were camped on. We were all scrunched up on that corner of the board, so it was a funny bit of luck that that’s where it ended up.

Evan’s troops in melee fall back. At this point the last of my plague marines die from a mix of gun fire and flame throwers—if I recall correctly. My notes from this point on are terse or missing.

Now out of combat, my Noxious Blightbringer moves up and lobs a grenade at Evan’s troops on the dune. (To little effect, but at least I remembered my dudes had grenades this time!) I then had the unit charge up the dune and attack the troops that were stationed there.

The Blightbringer watched as the men fled from his presence. The automata that fell from the sky cowered before him. Somehow he knew it was important, but the bloodlust called him elsewhere.

Evan’s troops that were on the Dune fall back from my Noxious Blightbringer, while his other troops move up and shoot. Lucky for me they can’t score a wound. His robot is more successful, but thankfully the Noxious Blightbringer has several wounds to burn through.

On my turn I lob a blight grenade at the troops that fell back, killing 2 of the models. I then charge the robot located at the bottom of the dune. (I wanted to tie up the robot and the tech-priest-commander-thing that controlled it.) Nothing of note comes from the combat, however.

The Angarius Machina watched as these machines and men fought back the Death Guard. Truly they were worthy of its revelation.

Once again it’s too late for me to win. Evan had more units left and would be able to claim the objective. At the end of his turn he couldn’t kill my Blightbringer, which I will call a minor victory for myself.

Me:

• 5 Plague Marines, one of whom was a Plague Champion
• 10 Pox Walkers

Evan:

• Knight-Adjutant—power maul, command shield
• 4 Knight Adjutant Command Paladins–3 plasma guns and one medipack and pistol
• 5 Navigator Houseguard–one with hotshot lasgun, two with volleyguns, one with vox-caster and pistol, squire with chainsword and plasma pistol
• 5 Navigator Houseguard–one with hotshot lasgun, two with meltaguns, one with vox-caster and pistol, squire with chainsword and hotshot laspistol

I had my Pox Walkers lined up just out of range of Evan’s troop’s weapons—by accident. My marines were set up on a building in cover. Evan’s troops were set up in a similar building across from me, with one unit held in reserve once again.

The marines eyed the Navigator Endosquad hunkered down in some ruins ahead. The men had fallen back upon the arrival of the Sons of Nurgle, but clearly the objective was of some value: they weren’t quite ready to just give it up.

Evan began his turn by grav-chuting some of his Navigator Houseguard behind my line. Thankfully their weapons failed to hurt my Plague Marines. (Disgustingly Resilient has saved them so many times.)

My (incredibly slow moving) Pox Walkers advanced, while the Plague Marines behind them stood their ground and returned fire, wounding two of Evan’s troops and causing a third to flee. As starts go I was off to a good one?

The Pox Walkers continued their march, as incautious as they were hungry. There was a frenzy when they saw the men, there steps quickening, but the Navigator Housegaurd held their ground and held them back with a rain of laser fire.

Evan moved his troops up to bring more of his weapons into range, firing on both my Pox Walkers and Plague Marines. I lost one walker and assigned one wound to my Plague Champion, but survived the round largely in good shape.

On my turn I moved my pox walkers once more, and then attempted a charge with them. Lucky for Evan they failed, just an inch short of reaching his men. (Thinking about this now, I wonder if they were in range: you need to be within an inch to fight, not touching bases.) I lost another Pox Walker to overwatch fire. My Plague Marines focused their fire behind them again, but failed to kill the remaining models in the unit.

The Champion watched as the Pox Walkers were felled by the men and their guns. He eyed the chest, the prize he had sent the Pox Walkers to capture, but the sounds of the melta-guns behind him claimed his attention.

The Navigator Endoguard to the rear of my Plague Marines continued to take pot shots with their big melta-guns, but were unable to land any hits. My Pox Walkers weren’t so lucky: the rest of the unit (8 models) fell victim to laser gun fire. They never got to fight! They got in the way, I suppose.

My Plague Marines again focused their fire behind them, which in hindsight was a waste of my time. With only 5 round in this game I should have started advancing on the objective. This unit moves so slowly I should have been on the move as soon as I lost my Pox Walkers.

The loss of two of their brethren stirred the Death Guard to move. This was their true purpose, the unrelenting march.

Evan focused all his fire on my remaining Plague Marines, killing two. He had nothing else to shoot at, after all. My Plague Marines finally start to move on the objective—no time to waste! I think it was likely impossible to move all the way up to the objective without some lucky rolls.

I can’t really remember how the last round went. We were in a bit of a rush to wrap up, as Evan needed to run. I have a note that he killed another one of my marines. And I know my Plague Champion didn’t destroy his entire posse of infantry, since I lost the game.

Perhaps next time the Death Guard will find their groove soon!

There is nothing they can do but watch as the Endogaurd flee with the chest. Had the psykers who sent them here known how their story would unfold?

The soldiers they could see poking their heads over the ruins in the distance were of as little consequence to the Death Guard as the objective they had been sent to secure. Still, they marched forward, their sense of purpose unwavering.

Evan and I met once again to play some Warhammer 40,000. Since our last game he did in fact end up selling his Tau army, replacing it with his newly built “Navigator Endoguard”—a heavily kit bashed squad of Astra Militarum. The minis looked great, though he lamented no one would notice just how painstakingly put together his new models were.

He fielded the following army, which (I think) are simply different Imperial Guard units (despite the flavourful names):

• Knight-Adjutant—power maul, command shield
• 4 Knight Adjutant Command Paladins–3 plasma guns and one medipack and pistol
• 5 Navigator Houseguard–one with hotshot lasgun, two with volleyguns, one with vox-caster and pistol, squire with chainsword and plasma pistol
• 5 Navigator Houseguard–one with hotshot lasgun, two with meltaguns, one with vox-caster and pistol, squire with chainsword and hotshot laspistol

I returned with my fairly pedestrian Death Guard. I still need pick a name for their vectorium. More important, I need to figure out how best to play them. I ended up fielding two units, because I wanted to match the power level of Evan’s Army (11).

• Noxious Blightbringer
• 5 Plague Marines, one of whom was a Plague Champion (and the true champion of my army).

We set up a 4’x4’ battlefield filled with ruined buildings and walls arranged sort of like a town square. In the middle was a raised platform where we placed a treasure chest, the single objective we would fight over. We were fielding armies more suited for a skirmish game than 40K. Trying to chase and control more than one objective didn’t feel like it would work with our smaller armies.

The marines watched as the troops descended from the sky, their grav-chutes kicking in with a low hum. They quickly set up shop in an abandoned building to the Death Guard’s right and opened up fire.

The battle began with my plague marines marching toward’s Evan’s troops. My first round of shooting was completely ineffectual.

Evan deployed one of his reserve units using their grav-chutes, flanking my Plague Marines. A take aim order was issued, ultimately resulting in my marines taking 2 wounds they promptly shrugged off using their disgusting resilience power. This success was short lived: a second set of Evan’s Endoguard shot the marines, resulting in the loss of two of my Plague Marines in the first round. (And I really didn’t have that many models to lose.)

They could see the objective to their right, but the soldiers cowering in the ruins straight ahead were a far more captivating sight. The marines would have been on top of them if not for the gunfire pinning them down.

My Plague Marines advanced, but then failed to charge. (Evan’s overwatch fire was ineffectual at least.) I probably should have simply moved, shot, and perhaps risked a charge. I might have whittled down a few of his troops.

Evans troops started to move towards my marines, getting some of their fancier guns in range. My blightbriger was brought down by melta-gun fire, ending the round.

The first shots destroyed the Tocsin of Misery the Noxious Blightbringer carried upon his back, ending its incessant tolling. There was a moment of silence before the remaining shots incinerated the Death Guard.

My marines once again attempted to advance and charge, though my Plague champion would be the only model left by the time the unit reached Evan’s troops. The champion killed one solider, causing another to flee.

Evan’s soldiers fell back and wounded the champion with gunfire.

Slow and methodical murder was all the champion knew. His fists pulverizing the solider before him. He could see the terror in the men before him, one scurrying away covered in the blood and guts of his comrade.

The plague champion charged again, killing two enemies with its power fist. Still, I could see the writing on the wall. The troops that had previously flanked my marines advanced on the objective, capturing it. The rest of Evan’s troops fired on my plague champion killing it. And that was that.

The failure tasted like ash in the Plague Champion’s mouth. He could hear the guard all around him as his life slipped away. The objective was lost. His death couldn’t come soon enough.

I need to figure out more missions suited for smaller army play. The default missions in the book seem to assume armies with far more units than ours. I had started sketching out skirmish rules that built on top of the 40,000 rules, but since we were trying to learn how normal 40,000 worked we stuck with that. I suspect you could borrow parts of A Song of Blade and Heroes and cross them with parts of Warhammer 40,000 to produce a pretty cool games.

We had some time before Evan had to leave so we set up for a second game.

Causarius, Lord of Contagion, could hear the gun fire before he saw the ship. The plague marines of his vectorium had already engaged the Tau, the battle taking place around the wreckage of a downed Tau ship.

Evan and I played a low power-level game over the weekend: his battalion of Tau versus my Death Guard patrol. The goal of the game was to learn the rules for 8th Edition. I had “played” two games with Mythilli, if you could call what we do that. I had a rough sense of how the game worked. Evan had experience playing several other editions of the game, so he also had a vague sense of what a game of Warhammer should probably be like. We played at The Sword and Board, and were sandwiched between two other tables playing larger games of Warhammer than us. This was convenient: we occasionally bugged a table of Space Marine players about the rules.

My Death Guard consisted of the following units:

• Causarius, Lord of Contagion
• Putidus, the Malignant Plaguecaster
• 7 Plague Marines (one of which was a Plague Champion)
• 10 Pox Walkers

Evan fielded … an army I will list out here if he remembers what it contained.

Each of our armies had a power level of 27. This is the new system Games Workshop has devised to help you balance to armies against one another. It works well enough, assuming your troops aren’t overloaded with expensive weaponry. All the numbers involved when using power levels are smaller, and you are doing far less addition.

We played “Open War”, the first mission type described in the Warhammer 40,000 rule book. We marked out a 4 x 4 space on the table to play. Our objective was “Domination”, where you score a point at the end of each turn for each objective marker controlled. (As I would soon learn, my army was ill suited for this objective.) I deployed my plague marines on one objective. My plague caster was within close reach of a second. Evan had troops on the other two objectives. The game was set to run for 5 rounds, with Evan going first.

Causarius watched as his pox walkers collapsed before him. The Tau’s weaponry was impressive, wasted on these diseased horrors.

Evan’s drones were able to secure the objectives he controlled while his actual troops could move into positions better suited to engage my army. My pox walkers were the first victims to the Tau’s gun fire. I forgot that like my plague marines, the pox walkers were also “disgustingly resilient” granting them an additional 5+ save when taking wounds. Since their normal saves were 7+ (impossible to roll) I was simply removing them from the game as they took wounds. My pox walkers were all dead by the end of the end of the second round. I also forgot the Lord of Contagion granted a power area of effect ability to each unit in his aura, making the pox walkers even more deadly. Played properly they may have been a far more effective troop. The way I played them they were a distraction and then they died.

The plague marines laid down fire from their vantage point high above the battle field. They would hold their objective at all costs: they had nothing else to live for, after all.

I had foolishly placed one objective at the top of a building. This made it easier to reach for Evan and his Tau army (which was mostly composed of units that could fly) than my slow moving Death Guard. I deployed my Plague Marines on the objective, and there they remained for the entire game. (It would take two turns for my marines to climb down from where they were perched.)

The Malignant Plaguecaster Platidus watched as the energies of the warp ripped apart the Tau’s drones. This would provide no satisfaction: he ventured deeper into the battle.

My plague caster was a solid killer, but one unit spitting out mortal wounds wasn’t going to win this battle. The caster claimed an objective in the first turn, and held it till the 3rd. After I lost all my pox walkers it seemed clear I wasn’t going to be able to claim another objective. I decided I’d just kill Evan’s units instead. I moved the plague caster out to start dealing some death. (The problem with this strategy was that killing units didn’t actually net you victory points in the game we were playing.)

Causarius stalked the Tau leader, the giant mechanized armour staying out of the reach of his plague axe.

On his second turn Evan deployed one of his fancier Tau units behind my Lord of Contagion and Pox Walkers by using its deep strike ability. I had planned to ignore the unit and focus on taking one of Evan’s objectives, but with the death of my pox walkers, capturing the objective seemed unlikely at best. The Lord of Contagion moves so slow I spent the remainder of the battle chasing this unit down. I managed to kill its shield drone after a successful charge roll brought me into combat with the unit. In hindsight, I think I could have moved 3” around the shield drone using the pile-in rules, and then fought the model I was actually interested in killing.

The Tau secured their ship and their people. A shameful defeat for his vectorium. Thankfully Causarius had long since forgotten what shame felt like.

Evan easily won the game. Still, it was a lot of fun. 8th Edition is fairly straight forward a game. We both managed to muddle through without needed to spend much time digging through rule books. The game plays quite smoothly.

The tables at the Sword and Board are amazing. They have lots of cool looking terrain and scenery. The board we played on was some bombed out city scape. (It was much more evocative than playing on my floor with Mythilli’s toys as terrain.) They also have lots of used models and bits you can waste your money on. All in all it’s a great place to go play Warhammer.

I won’t get to fight this army again: Evan sold it all to the Sword and Board for store credit. He finds the clean lines of the Tau boring. So our next battle will be my Death Guard versus his kit bashed probably guardsmen.

Now we need to plan some sort of campaign.

This award exists in contrast to the Ennies, the RPG scene’s Teen Choice Awards. The Ennies are lovely, i’m sure, but they are very much a product of letting a bunch of randoms vote on what’s good. Sometimes they pick what you like and you think, “man, these awards are great.” Sometimes they pick something you’ve never heard of and you think, “what is even the point of this thing?”¹

To be considered for an award a book must have been purchased by me in the previous calendar year. So the books below are all from 2016. (Remember 2016? All the famous people died and Americans elected Trump for their president.) That’s basically the only rule.

Best Art: Jeremy Duncan for Towers Two

Jeremy Duncan was tasked with finishing up the art for a book originally done by Gwar’s David Brokie. That’s no easy feat. Brokie’s cover is amazing, but Duncan’s interior art ratchets everything Brokie was doing up to 11. I had previously described the art as “bright, colourful, messy, detailed, crude, psychedelic, cartoonish, gory and intense,” and reviewing the book today I feel the same way. It’s so vibrant and unique. I just picked a random image from the book for this blog post. I could have grabbed any. They are all so totally nuts.

Best Setting Book: Rafael Chandler for World of the Lost

This felt like a quiet release for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It was stretch goal for another adventure James Raggi published, No Salvation for Witches. While I liked NSWF just fine, I loved World of the Lost more in every way. It seems a shame it hasn’t garnered more attention and praise. World of the Lost is such a well engineered hex crawl. The book is so well organized. The layout is fantastic. Everything about the book is in service of a really interesting and evocative setting. It’s full of useful random tables and generators. Running an adventure from this book is easy. This is such a solid release it’s a shame its print run was so small.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Book of 2016: Patrick Stuart & Zak Smith for Maze of the Blue Medusa

I thought picking Maze of the Blue Medusa for this award would be easier than it turned out to be. There were so many great books in 2016. World of the Lost and Towers Two were both out before Maze of the Blue Medusa and both captivating in their own way. By the end of the year there were several more books that stood out, most notably Broodmother Sky Fortress. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

I love Maze of the Blue Medusa. The writing from Patrick is excellent. Like his other works it feels like a mix of game text and post-modern fiction. You can read Maze of the Blue Medusa and enjoy it as a book full of lovely writing, or use the book as it was intended to run a crazy adventure. The layout of Maze of the Blue Medusa is stellar.² Everything about how the book has been put together is designed to help orient the dungeon master in the dungeon. Zak’s map that brought the project to fruition is beautiful, and the art of the map is scattered throughout the book. Finally, the book itself feeds into my love of a well made book. Satyr Press made the nicest book I bought in 2016. Easily. Maze of the Blue Medusa is everything I love about RPGs in one place.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

Honourable Mentions

Apocalypse World 2e, The Black Hack, Blood in the Chocolate, Broodmother Sky Fortress, The Cursed Chateau, and Do not let us Die in this Cold Winter are all excellent books well worth checking out. Lamentations of the Flame Princess deserves a special mention for managing to publish so many great books in a single year. Finally I want to give a special shout out to Cecil Howe’s HexKit, which I fucking love.

Till next year. Booyaka! Booyaka!

Painting your miniatures seems to be an important part of the Warhammer scene. Tournaments often require your miniatures are painted to a particular standard. People don’t want to play someone whose minis are all grey plastic. (I suppose painting helps identify what’s what on the table.) My Warhammer minis looked amazing and cost me enough money I didn’t want to fuck them up. This was a real quandary. Conveniently, my friend Evan is an amazing painter and spent his youth as a Warhammer nerd. He offered to come over and help me get started.¹

Evan came over one Sunday with a bag full of spray paint and we got to work priming. Games Workshop has a house style that is very structured in how you go about painting minis: prime, shade, layer, layer, layer, highlight, highlight, highlight, etc. Their magazines are full of minis that are so vivid and detailed, they often look like cartoons. Evan suggested a different approach: paint as much as you can with spray paint because ain’t nobody got time to paint that 4th layer of anything.

We started with the Space Marines. They were primed with black spray paint. Once dried, we did a light coat of grey sprayed from above, and then followed that with red painted in much the same way. This left the minis looking like they were being lit by moonlight, or emerging from the shadows.² They were interesting without anyone having to take out a brush. The Death Guard followed. With the base coating done, I was left to figure out what to do with all the details.

At first, I just painted everything that was supposed to be black, black. This turned out to be easier than I thought. Emboldened I started painting parts of their armour metallic. And so on and so forth. I’d pop into The Sword and Board to pick up paints I was lacking and work on some new detail. I realize now that paint is to Warhammer what booster packs are to Magic: The Gathering—a cheap way to throw money down a hole.³

Painting a miniature is quiet and relaxing work.⁴ You need to be patient to produce a mini that looks good. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve managed to make my way through most of my Space Marine army. Some units are “done”. Others are quite close. I don’t think I’ll win any contests, but they are painted to a standard I didn’t think I’d be able to accomplish. I didn’t think I would enjoy painting, but here we are.

I hadn’t given Warhammer much thought since junior high. Back then my friend had bought a starter set and some minis for an orc and goblin army. We played elves and humans versus orcs and goblins for several weeks, but ultimately that all petered out—no one else had the money for miniatures at the time. By the end of junior high we all got into magic and that became our (somewhat cheaper) money hole of choice. All throughout high school I would joke about wanting a Blood Thirster for my single unit Chaos army, but that was the extent of my interest in Warhammer.

Last week I walked into The Sword and Board and bought the new Warhammer 40,000 starter set, Dark Inperium.¹ This is their first product that introduces the new 8th edition of the game. I saw the set the week prior and it had been on my mind since. I’m not sure why. It’s a very cool looking box, I suppose. To quote Patrick Stuart, “The thirst is real.”

Dark Imperium was expensive ($190 CAD!), but in the grand scheme of Games Workshop a good deal. The set comes with 53 miniatures that make up two armies, a Space Marine Imperium army and a Death Guard Chaos army. It also comes with everything else you need to play: the new hardcover rule book for 40K, two mini “codex” books that describe the armies that come in the set, a smaller card stock printing of the core rules, some dice and a range ruler. Everything about the set is nice and fancy.

As a beginner boxed set goes this one is crazy. You open up the box and are presented with another box. It features a cool picture of a space marine on its cover: amazing. But wait, that box is full of sprues! Like, a terrifying amount. What the shit? The rule book opens with a very short introduction to the Warhammer hobby and then it’s like 150 pages of lore: “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war,” and all that nonsense. The rules for actual Warhammer 40K are buried 2/3rds into the book. (They are a modest 12 or so pages out of this almost 300 page book.) There are instructions for how to make the models in a separate booklet, though nothing about the finer points of modelling. There isn’t any advice on painting. There isn’t any sort of quick start guide to get you going with the game. Perhaps that makes sense: there isn’t anything quick about this hobby. Probably best not to give anyone any false impressions.

I made the first model sitting on my deck, a space marine. That model, along with the other space marines, were fairly straight forward to assemble. All the models seem well thought out in how they are sculpted and disassembled for manufacture. There are little nubs all over to make fitting everything easy. The models are generally designed so that they hide seams and joints when put together. I’m curious how much the aesthetics of Warhammer are shaped by the nature of these little gaming pieces.²

It took me a week of modelling here and there to get all the minis built.³ They are sitting on a bookshelf now waiting to be painted. I’ll report back when they are painted or I’ve played a game. Hopefully that’s soon—so this purchase wasn’t entirely foolish.

Shopkins Party

Grab four Shopkins for each player in the game and put them in a bag.

The youngest players draws a Shopkin from the bag. Everyone should say, “Happy Birthday!” Today is this Shopkin’s birthday party! On a sheet of paper write down her name. Place the Shopkin on the table: she’s waiting for her friends to arrive.

The player to the right draws another Shopkin from the bag. The first guest has arrived! Write her name down and flip a coin: on heads the guest is one of the birthday girl’s best friends forever; on tails she is a mean bully. Note this down. The players now act out a scene involving the party goers. If the birthday girl stands up to a bully during a scene the bully is now one of her best friends forever.

Continue to draw guests till you have drawn half your Shopkins. The next Shopkin drawn is the birthday girl’s mom. She’s got the cake. Everyone sing Happy Birthday!

Each Shopkin drawn after this point is someone’s mom. They are here to pick up their kid. Make sure they leave with a loot bag!

Players, don’t get too attached to your characters, because the game isn’t about them—the game is about the warren. Individual rabbits are cheap and the continuity of the warren is everything. Death is explicitly on the table and will occur as the fiction demands, so breed early and often. Your kits are your legacy (and the pool from which you will probably draw your next character).

Think of the game as a generational saga rather than an heroic narrative. Although your characters may well be leaders, poets, and scofflaws, they are still at the bottom of the food chain in a world determined to kill them. Perhaps their children can finish what you so bravely started. Generational play is great fun, and having a strong connection to the warren as a living community pays great dividends over time. You’ll start to care about its health and goals, and build a mythology around the exploits of previous generations. And, despite all these lofty assurances, in the end making up a new rabbit takes only minutes. - Marshall Miller, The Warren.

The Warren is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about rabbits—picture Watership Down.¹ I’ve tried to play it a few times with my daughter, though without much success. My daughter is a scaredy cat. She doesn’t like games with conflict or danger.² Most RPGs aren’t particularly interesting without either.

The Warren is full of writing I could imagine being pulled right out of an old-school D&D book. Stories about rabbits are often stories about survival and horror. Watership Down is very much in this vein. Your rabbits struggle against the world, and many will die so others may live. One can picture running some real meat grinder games playing a by the book game of The Warren.

I’ve wanted to run a session of this game with people closer to my age for a while now. Bully Pulpit Games has published several “playsets” (basically very terse setting documents) to help kickstart games of The Warren. They’re all quite good, but sometimes it’s fun to make your own.

Of course anyone can do anything he likes with Carcosa. There is no One True Wayism about Carcosa, nor is there an “Official” Carcosa. My attitude towards my creations is that of Gary towards D&D in 1974, not Gary towards AD&D in 1982. — Geoffrey McKinney on Dragonsfoot

World of Carcosa is a playset for The Warren that is set in the doomed world of Carcosa. If you have been reading this blog you know it’s one of my favourite settings for D&D. I’m not sure what the Venn diagram is for people interested in Carcosa and people interested in a game about rabbits. Perhaps it’s very small. This is for my people!

I haven’t had a chance to run this playset yet. Buyer beware!

Download World of Carcosa.

The Cursed Chateau is a fancy book. Released by Lamentations of the Flame Princess early last year, I finally picked it up at the tail end of 2016 as part of a huge LotFP order. Written by James Maliszewski—of Grognardia fame—this version of the adventure is a new deluxe printing with layout and art by Jez Gordon.

The central conceit of the adventure is that players are magically trapped in a large haunted chateau by its former master Lord Joudain, a perpetually bored and tormented spirit. Joudain’s soul is trapped within the chateau, so he in turn traps passer bys to torment them for his entertainment. If the characters manage to be entertaining enough his otherworldly boredom will pass and he’ll be freed from his self-inflicted curse, freeing the characters as well.

This is a reasonably large adventure. The adventure site is quite big: there is a hedge maze that leads to the chateau, the grounds, and the chateau itself. There is a cast of NPCs, the former staff of the chateau, who now all haunt the place. Each is described with their backstory, a small stat block, and an illustration. (I should note here that my wife and I ended up being transformed into evil spirits by Jez: I’m the photo reference for Hervisse, my wife for Mondette.) There is a d100 random events table that helps drive the action during the adventure. As you enter rooms you’ll roll to see what weird thing is happening within, if one of the NPCs happens to be doing something within, etc.

The book opens with a discussion by James on funhouse dungeons, which one could imagine being posted on Grognardia in days gone by.

In a fun house, there’s often no way to determine what lurks behind the next door or down a nearby corridor and that fact irritates some players who value naturalism and rationality even in their fantasy. Without it, they argue, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to plan ahead or think strategically and thereby minimize the likelihood of their characters suffering some terrible fate. I’m sympathetic to this perspective and, in general, my adventure locales are fairly reasonable, even orderly places that “make sense”—which is precisely why a place like the chateau makes for a good change of pace!

I think how you feel about this adventure is going to depend on how you feel about funhouse dungeons. This adventure offers some clues about the nature of why the characters are trapped in the mansion, but it’s not particularly obvious. The means of escape isn’t really fleshed out to the characters either. I suspect most players will stumble about till they accidentally rack up enough misfortune to appease Joudain. Now, the adventure site isn’t completely arbitrary. The NPCs all have pretty clear motivations, and characters will likely learn of their various allegiances and squabbles with the other NPCs. The house is still a house, and laid out like one would expect a manor to be. Still, it’s a haunted: expect things to be creepy and confusing at times.

The interior art and layout is by Jez Gordon. I know I gush about Jez’s graphic design chops, but this book is another example of just how next-level the work he puts out is. The front end-papers feature all the maps in the module. The back of the book lists all the rooms with creatures within and reprints a few useful tables. This is a fairly text heavy adventure and it’s been laid out expertly by Jez. Everything is presented with an eye to what the two page spread will look like. Long room descriptions never spill over to the other side of a page. Some room descriptions in this module are very long, several paragraphs at times, so this is really a very impressive feat. This might be one of the best layouts i’ve seen of a D&D module, considering just how dense the text is. (Maze of the Blue Medusa, which I haven’t written about yet, is another good example of strong design and layout.) Jez’s work gets better with each adventure he puts out.

The book has a new cover by Yannick Bouchard, who has been doing a lot of work for LotFP recently. A fellow¹ sits on a sofa, clearly bored, his arm draped around a skeletal ghost. A blood stained sword leans against a blood stained wall. It’s a great cover, very evocative.

I know most everyone involved in this books creation so calling this a review seems like false advertising. I generally only write about books I like, and I like this book. It’s one of the most beautiful RPG books I own. It’s been printed with gold as an accent colour: the pages shimmer! LotFP continues to put out solid books: they have one of the most interesting and diverse catalogs of modules of any OSR publisher.

The organizers of Breakout are indie-gamers so that side of table top gaming was well represented. Lots of indie game designers and players are in attendance. If you want to play indie games this convention has you covered. There was also a really big contingent of people playing D&D 5e Adventurers League. My old DM from back when I was playing 4e public-play is a big part of that scene and was there as well so I got to catch up with him. If you were into boardgames there was an even bigger room full of people playing those. If you are the most hard core of old-school D&D nerds you might find the convention lacking: Rebecca Chenier was the only person running anything old-school. Maybe that’ll change as the convention grows.

This was the biggest gaming convention I’ve been to. Of course, I basically go to none so maybe that’s not saying much. There were lots of people and lots of games, anyway. The old-school D&D conventions in Toronto (OSRCon and OSCon) are much more modest in their scope in comparison. This convention was big, but not overwhelming and annoying the way FanExpo has become.

I ended up playing 4 games while at the convention (2 games of Night Witches, a game of Apocalypse World, and a game of Swords Without Masters), and attended one panel. I spent the rest of my time hanging out and drinking beer. My advice to anyone attending a convention is to not go overboard with the gaming. I ended up with a few gaps in my schedule and it gave me time to relax and chat with the other people there. That’s often just as much fun as gaming.

The convention was well organized and well run. People were friendly. I had a nice time at all my games, and the people playing them were are all really welcoming. You can’t ask for much more than that.

After my Apocalypse World game I went to a panel discussion about GMing advice with Robin Laws, Matt McFarland, Anna Kreider, and a dude who wasn’t Emily Care Boss (who was sick). I enjoyed the talk, it was well done. The moderator Donald Fraser did a good job making the audience questions sound like they were all carefully chosen by him. I like when people are forced to write down their questions, thereby avoiding the risk of a crazy person rambling on.) Robin Laws is funny: I should check out his podcast. I had an hour break after the panel in which to have a beer and chat with John Willson about RPGs. While we drank Corey Ried popped by to say, “hey.” He was running the next game I would play, Swords Without Masters.

Swords Without Masters was written by Epidiah Ravachol. The only thing I knew about the game was that it was published in his zine, Worlds Without Masters. I had assumed it would be some sort of indie variation on D&D—that it was most definitely not. The game is firmly in whatever genre you would place Fiasco within. (I want to say Story Games, but that name feels meaningless: this game was also nothing like Apocalypse World.) Swords Without Masters is a story telling game. There is a loose framework of rules that exists to help give your story some direction.

Our session began with us figuring out what image best represented each of our rogues: Swords Without Masters is a game about rogues in the vein of Conan the Barbarian. I picked a classic Earl Norem Masters of the Universe painting—of course. Your character is a name and handful of narrative hooks—terse when compared to traditional RPG characters. It didn’t take long to get the game started.

We began on a battlefield surrounded by our enemies. A game of Swords Without Masters is broken up into a series of phases: Perilous, Discovery, and Rogue. We began in the Perilous Phase. As the name implies, this is when the characters face danger. The DM, called the Overplayer in this game, starts by rolling a pair of dice. Each die represents a mood, jovial or glum, so you better be able to tell them apart. The higher die’s mood wins, and the Overplayer begins narrating the hardships faced by the players keeping the mood in mind.

Corey didn’t waste time trying to front load a lot of explanation on the rules for the game. He’d tell us what we needed to know to keep playing. The game is simple to teach. In our first phase he let us know we could take control of the narrative by picking up the dice. There is a back and forth: the Overplayer narrating an escalating level of danger and destruction until the players jump in and push back. When you don’t have the dice your character can do whatever they want, but they ultimately need to be failing. Once you decide you’ve had enough of losing you can pick up and roll the dice. Your higher die becomes your tone. You tell the story of what’s going on, narrating how your character overcomes their obstacles in the style of the current tone.

I found the game challenging to play because coming up with an interesting story on the spot is tricky! (I’m both boring and unimaginative.) All of the players were initially hesitant about picking up the dice. This meant the situation we were in just got more ridiculous. By the end of the session we were more comfortable interrupting the Overplayer to take control of the action.

When you roll doubles your rogue is stymied. This means that whatever you had planned to do while in control of the narrative must fail. During this initial phase one player’s character was trapped while the other characters escaped. That’s how we chose to end the phase.

Stories need not be told linearly. We played the Discovery Phase next, travelling back to a time before the fighting when we were all imprisoned together. In this phase the rogues pass the dice around, rolling immediately, and narrating some new piece of information about themselves or the world. Whenever they do so they ask the Overplayer a loaded question about this discovery. (e.g. “Why didn’t my talisman protect me from the Titans?”) The Overplayed answers, thereby revealing more about the world and the conflict at hand. The Overplayer decides when this phase ends. When we played we usually ended things after each player had a turn sharing a discovery.

Our third phase was the Rogue’s Phase you take turns passing the dice around asking the other player how their character will accomplish some particular goal. (“How did you scale the unscalable wall?”) This phase is about highlighting how awesome your character is in the tone the dice command. You can also make demands of the Overplayer to learn more about the world and its other inhabitants.

The game continued on like this. The Overplayer decides what phases are played and in what order. During the game the players will write down the motifs they find most interesting about the story being told. There are also rules for tracking mysteries and morals based on your dice rolls. These are all called threads in the game. When you hit 9 motifs it’s time to wrap up the story. The players can now choose to reincorporate a thread into the story they are telling. Once they have done so they are no longer allowed to pick up the dice and drive the narrative. After all the players have reincorporated a thread into the story the game ends. This end game mechanic is smart: your story ends up feeling coherent because the conclusion draws from various threads raised earlier in the game. (Our game ended with us destroying the Arch-witch, though it took the sacrifice of one of the players to accomplish the goal.)

I find these narrative games very demanding. With traditional RPGs the story you tell is generally grows organically from play. (Well, at least in good games!) The scope of Swords Without Masters is so grand in comparison: I often felt stuck trying to come up with something to say or do. We were all quite over the top in how we played, but in hindsight we should have mixed in more modest and quiet questions and answers. I suspect if I had played more of these story telling games I’d have done a better job at that sort of pacing.

Having to narrate your lows as well as your highs is fun. The flipping of the tone from jovial to glum also works well. Your character sheet has a good list of words associated with each tone to help you when narrating. The loose structure helps ground what would otherwise be a bunch of people talking about how awesome their characters are—though there is definitely a lot of that going on.

I grabbed the game itself while writing this review. The rules are well written and clear. For each of the phases and rules I’ve mentioned above there are lots of examples of game play. There are also “advanced” rules that extend the game if you want something slightly more complicated.

This was a fun game to play, something I likely wouldn’t have done outside of a convention setting. (I liked having a chance to play all these different games while at Breakout Con.) This game will likely feel unsatisfying if you are looking for more objective challenges in your games than “tell a compelling story”. But, if that’s what you’re looking for this game works really well. Swords Without Masters feels different and novel.

My second day of BreakoutCon began with a game of plain old Apocalypse World. There are many games built on top of the rules for this game I often forget that underneath them all there is a game about playing horny people in the post-apocalypse. Our game was based on a one shot adventure written by Baker to introduce people to the game—his Keep on the Borderlands, I guess.¹ At the start of the game we were asked if we wanted a game that was gonzo or serious. I think we were all on the fence and so ended up with something in the middle.

I wasn’t fussy at all about what class I played, so I let everyone pick their playbooks first (classes in Apocalypse World) and I picked the last one, a Skinner. My character was a hot singer whose gender was ambiguous, dressed in some haute couture whose origin and continued upkeep was unclear. You get to pick two moves when you start. I picked one that pushed my Hot stat to +3 and another move that sort of charms people who see me perform my art (singing). And then we started asking each other questions.

Apocalypse World has rules for building relationships between the characters that are great and seem like the most interesting innovation in the game. Each class has a series of questions you ask. Other players chime up to answer, granting you a history bonus with that player’s character. By the time everyone has asked their questions you have a web of interconnection between everyone at the table. Too heavy for the sorts of of OD&D games I play where I make characters in a few seconds and refuse to name them till they survive the session, but on the whole this wasn’t an onerous process at all. For games like 5e where you are likely to create characters you hope to have stick around for a while these sorts of mechanics should be stollen whole hog. (I can imagine questions for each of the classes in D&D.) This is the mechanic to steal from this game, not that 2d6 business. That’s pedestrian in comparison. Before the game had started there was already a little heat.

The set up for this one-shot involved everyone getting a letter that told them a little bit of the action and asked them to roll and see what the current deal was, a custom Apocalypse World move to start their game. These letters introduced additional backstory and adventure hooks. The hard holder failed their “love letter” roll so our game began with us trapped in our hard hold, surrounded by an enemy gang, with things looking bad for us. Also, a rival faction inside our compound split off and holed themselves up. Also, there were a bunch of spies working a against us inside the compound. Also, the mud flaps, weird fish people we were trading with, were suffering the effects of a highly contagious disease. Also, the worlds psychic maelstrom was fucking with several of the NPCs (and myself). Also, a whole other bunch of stuff was happening. I appreciate that there was lots of things for our characters to latch onto and explore, but it meant that a lot of the interpersonal adventure hooks we figured out earlier never really came into play. It was comical how zany and hectic the opening situation was. (Also, the villains name was Ambergrease, which I love.)

Unlike D&D where you usually adventure as a group, in this game all the characters were usually off doing their own thing. Everyone was running around trying to figure out how to make sure things didn’t explode. This felt a bit awkward at times: there were often long gaps between a player being called on to narrate what their character was getting up to rolling to see what was going on. We’d all listen to what the Chopper was doing, or the Angel, or the Brainer, and then wait for things to circle back to us. I personally don’t mind this: I liked being able to relax and listen to what was going on around me. There was always something going on.

The tone of the game was quite different than that of Night Witches. Failed rolls lead to more complications, but in Apocalypse World proper success would often be just that. My character began the game with a +3 Hot. This is pretty sweet, and made any actions I needed to take with my Hot stat an easy success. The starting stats in Apocalypse World (in contrast to Night Witches) produces fairly competent characters from the get go. My Skinner was amazing at being Hot. It was unlikely i’d fail if called on to roll against that stat. This encouraged me to deal with problems by using my ample hotness whenever possible. I don’t think this is that unusual: D&D and most games with stats will reinforce your character’s roles and personality by incentivizing moves that require a particular attribute. With this game those situations where we were pushed to leave our character’s comfort zone were usually more interesting, because these end up with the failures or partial successes that produce interesting plot twists. Night Witches scales everything down, and you can produce a lot of strife and conflict that’s also very quiet. With Apocalypse World to generate that same level of conflict felt like it required a whole lot of action to be going on. One thing we didn’t do in our one shot that I suspect would result in people choosing to use their less amazing stats is the rules for marking stats and advancement. The DM and the player you have the highest history with each mark one of your stats. When you roll a highlighted stat you mark experience. In this way the game can encourage you to not just use sex to get your way.

Apocalypse World looks to focused on producing narratively interesting situations. The problem solving in the game will usually require you to make one die roll, that leads to another, and another, and another. In the book they refer to this as moves snowballing. Trying to minimize how many rolls you need to make to accomplish your goals might be the approach to the game more tactically minded players take when playing. (How do I work the situation so my Skinner can seduce this person rather than threaten them with violence.) As far as I can tell you don’t give out bonuses for coming up with an amazing plan that ultimately requires you shoot someone, though perhaps the steps that lead up to you shooting someone might set things up so that you don’t need to roll to make that shot and execute them. There is a different sort of player skill at work. That said, my guess is people are playing Apocalypse World because they care more about interesting narrative than “winning”.

By the time our session was wrapping up we had maybe wrangled enough food to survive and held off the rival gang, but were likely in the midst of being overrun by infection disease and evil brain control. It was a fun game, and I’m glad I got a chance to finally play Apocalypse World.

I’ve had the book for several months now, having backed the Kickstarter. There is a lot to love about Apocalypse World even if you have zero interest in playing the game and think everything I’ve said thus far sounds dreadful. The book is worth owning for the DM advice. The book presents one of the best summations of how to run a sandbox game. (The Warren takes that advice even further) There are some OSR products I’ve seen recently that do a good job here, but I suspect many were inspired by how Apocalypse World presents its advice. The book is very practical in how it talks about running a game. The tone is conversational.² The advice is direct. You do this and then you do this and then you do this. These are things I think other game publishers could learn from.

That said, I don’t think this is a good book to learn how Apocalypse World games work. Both Night Witches and The Warren do a better job of explaining the rules to their game (and games like them) than Apocalypse World does—in my opinion. Of course, Apocalypse World is a much heavier and more complicated game. Each playbook is quite different from the next. There are lots of moving parts in the game. (You can ignore what you find complex and the game will chug along just fine. We looked to have ignored a fair bit while playing our one shot.) The second edition book I own includes advice for hacking the game, which is likely also of interest to people who are game nerds.

The book is good, but could be great if someone helped with some of the information design and layout. (Why print the character sheets in the middle of the book: it’s 2017, no one is going to photocopy them.) There is lots of great writing scattered throughout the book, but it’s sometimes hard to find. I own the hardcover which is fancy: if you can find a copy you should grab one.

Even if you’re a big D&D-head I think there is something to be said for this game. (Whether you play it or just steal from it.) I liked it.

The most amazing thing about Apocalypse World is that it talks about special sex moves on its 11th page and somehow manages to recover just fine. — Me, August 20th 2016

My first game at BreakoutCon was a session of Night Witches. Night Witches is an RPG written by Jason Morningstar. For those not familiar: in Night Witches you play Soviet fighter pilots in an all women bomber unit. The game was totally different than anything I usually play, and my first time playing a Powered by the Apocalypse World game. That first game was so captivating I ended up playing again the next day (continuing the action where things left off). I was positive about the game after reading it a couple years ago. Reading a game is miles away from playing a game. I feel I have much more to say about this game now.

Our session opened with a somewhat involved character creation process: we described our characters and answered pointed questions about their history as the DM narrated our travels to the front. (An example question is, “Why does the NKVD already have a file on you, and how did you get around that black mark to join the regiment?”) This added a small bit of colour to each character and helped differentiate what would otherwise be 4 generic Russian air women. My character was “the Raven”, which seems like the jerk archetype in Night Witches. When I play D&D my characters are usually generic adventure person until they starting doing something interesting. (At which point i’ll fold that stuff into their character.) I began this game with a rough sense of what the character might be like, which was useful since Night Witches is a game primarily about social interaction. Beginning the game with a blank character would have made playing difficult. When presented with conflict each player had a different approach they would take, coloured by the basic personality they had fleshed out during this in-game prep. As with D&D my character’s personality evolved through play: by the end of the second session my Raven was a full on Mean Girl.

As mentioned above, Night Witches is a Powered by the Apocalypse game (an Apocalypse World hack). Briefly, this means that the core mechanic of the game is rolling a 2d6 to perform certain actions. On a roll of 10+ you succeed: fantastic. On a roll of 7-9 you succeed, but some number of things will go wrong. Anything else is a failure: it’ll be bad. Night Witches plays with this formula a little bit, to great effect.

Night Witches is split into two phases. During the day you wander around base and interact with your comrades. At night you fly bombing missions against the Nazis. At first glance it might seem like the night missions are the important phase, but the bulk of your play will take place during the day. The night missions are a fairly structured mini-game: you roll to see if you find your targets and roll to see if you hit them. Complications in the mission might change this general structure.

The attack run move is a good example of how Night Witches rarely lets you “win”. Here are the list of complications when you make that move:

• The damage to the target is not significant and it is your fault.
• You fly through a storm of flak (triggers Enemy Fire).
• A plane in your Section is damaged, GM’s choice.
• You and your fellow airwoman are Marked.

On a 10+, normally a great success in Apocalypse World, you are required to choose 1 from that list. I can tell you from playing the game that all of those options suck. It’s easy to come back maimed or dead after a night mission.

The game does provide one way to help you succeed at night. During the day some of your moves will let you add points to the mission pool, which you can spend during the night to increase the results of your dice rolls. The consequences of failure during the night are so steep that trying to build up a mission pool is an important part of the game. This is what pushes you to act during the day. More so, getting these mission points is usually one option out of a few you pick on a successful roll. You will often sacrifice something to get them, which further drives conflict in the game.

A perfect example of how this works is the “Act Up” move. During the day you are going to be dealing with assholes: commanding officers, chauvinists, the secret police, etc. Your natural reaction as a player is likely to argue when someone starts an argument with you. In this game you are playing a women knee deep in a sexist society so it’s complicated. Whenever you act up you need to roll a 2d6 to see how things go:

• Make someone do what you want.
• Ensure that there are no consequences for Acting Up.
• Add one to the Mission Pool.

On a 10+ you get to chose 2, on a 7-9 you get to choose 1. So, even rolling high you are faced with a tough choice: will you make a personal sacrifice to add to the mission pool? So much of the game is structured like this. As you play you end up picking up complications with each roll, success or failure. This is what ends up making the day phase interesting. You aren’t just loitering on a base with your buddies.

When I wrote about the game last one of my concerns was with how gamey it might feel.

Action is free-form until you do something that would require you making a Move. These are the pivot points in the game. Moves are specific: you eyeball someone or act out. There are a handful of moves each character can perform. The analog to characters classes in D&D are natures in Night Witches: someone has the temperament of a hawk, or an owl. Natures grant additional moves characters can learn as they level up. In this way the game feels similar to 4th Edition, with its discrete list of powers. I’m curious if this feels as stifling as I found it with 4th edition. Are players who are good at eyeballing going to constantly try and give everyone cut eye to get their way? (Maybe I just played 4e with goofy players.)

This didn’t feel like a real issue in our game. I thought the game played fairly naturally. We would all play to our characters strengths, for the most part. I was worried this would result in weird behaviour, but in play it generally meant the mechanics pushed our personalities in certain directions. The characters with high luck were brash and insubordinate, the characters with high guts were more likely to use their feminine wiles to get their way. I thought it worked well.

This game begs to played over several sessions. You develop all these relationships—friend and enemies—over the course of play. When that first game ended I really wanted to keep playing to see what would happen next. I think as a one shot the game might feel a bit unsatisfying.

As I have noted it’s a tough game. I can’t imagine how an air women from the first session would make it all the way to end of the war. Your characters have 4 harm—hit points—and when you use all 4 up you die. That’s not that hard to do. As you rest during the game you can reduce your harm. On the other hand your character also has 12 marks, which are permanent. Certain moves will ask you to mark one off. Another way to die is to pick the “Embrace Death and Face your Final Destiny” mark. After a few sessions that last mark is going to start getting harder to avoid. (My character ended the 2nd session with 4 marks.) I wonder if the game starts to feel unrelenting and nihilistic as your run a long campaign. (Perhaps that’s the point?)

Night Witches is an excellent game. It’s well thought out and put together. Of course, you have to be interested in playing a game about soviet air women or it’s likely going to disappoint no matter how well designed it is. I thought it was a neat game when I first read it, but playing it helped me appreciate that it is in fact a fun game and not just a cool art project or stunt. If you are going to play one game about Soviet women in an all women bomber unit during WWII make it this one.

Remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts. Remember that your NPCs are just not that complicated. You’re not holding back for a big reveal. You’re not doling events out like you’re trying to make your Halloween candy last until New Years. All your threats have impulses they should act on and body parts leading them around, so for god sake, have them act! — Apocalypse World, pg 121, Vincent Baker

I am reading Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker, which seems appropriate given the current state of world affairs. Sometimes I find the way it is written annoying, while other times I appreciate its direct and casual manner. On the whole the book is great and the advice scattered throughout can and should be picked up whole hog and used in your most oldest of old school D&D games. Apocalypse World tells you how to run a sandbox game without ever calling it that. The book seems quite revelatory, while managing to not take itself so seriously.

When I was running my Carcosa game I had a lot threats in the wilderness so subtle and so slow moving my players would often not bother investigating to see what was going on, or would get bored of the investigation and move on with their lives. Their biggest enemies were the Jale Slavers, dirt bags who kept on showing up in random encounter rolls, and The Dominant Reflection, an insane Bone Man sorcerer who they had inadvertently set free in the first session, and his cult. These two groups were antagonistic. Trying to deal with them was a clear and obvious goal. After they displaced the The Dominant Reflection the sessions that followed were in an awkward place where they was really only one enemy in play: they were on good terms with most everyone else they interacted with.

In hindsight I should have been far more pushy and straight forward with all the groups I had in play during that game. My Snake-Men from the distant past never once showed up in the game directly because I thought of them as ‘boss monsters’ to be encountered later. The players would see the aftermath of their actions, or stumble upon their army of Carcosan Zombie Men wandering the wilderness, but I never really gave them enough clues to indicate what was going on. Similarly I had a cult North of where the party spent most of their time, but because the party never ventured North after the early sessions this other faction just sort of sat fallow “exploring” a megadungeon the party didn’t care about anyway.

The advice I’ve quoted above seems simple and good. There isn’t much point preparing stuff just to have it sit fallow. Your NPCs Machiavellian plots are probably quite lovely, but I suspect at the table simple and direct action is likely just as much fun to play.

Broodmother SkyFortress: Buying any other adventure is just throwing your money away

Alongside Broodmother Skyfortress, the brains at Lamentations of the Flame Princess also published Blood in the Chocolate. Rebecca Chenier did the writing, layout, and maps. The art is by Jason Thompson, notable for his Family Circus style maps of adventurers exploring infamous dungeons. The premise of the adventure is quite simple: you are a group of adventurers tasked with breaking into a mysterious chocolate factory run by a Spanish countess and absconding with details about her operation and samples of her ingredients. The most obvious inspiration for Blood in the Chocolate is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and there are nods to that story throughout the adventure.

If you have read any of Rebecca’s other adventures I would say this one is more or less exactly how I would imagine a Rebecca LotFP adventure might look like. There is violence and horror and sex, but it all comes off as fun and a little bit goofy. Also there is a hot fat woman.

I helped Rebecca play test the adventure several months ago with his regular D&D group. We met up again shortly after the book was released to play the now completed adventure with the Toronto OSR posse (#torontOSR). Both games I played involved some amount of scheming to break into the factory, followed by sneaking about in search of clues for how this countess was producing her chocolate. In the second game a few of us were poisoned (a likely outcome in the factory) and so we spent part of the adventure trying to find a way to cure our compatriots of their creepy affliction. We managed to win over one of the pygmies, who was so enamoured with us he ended up helping us explore the factory and find a possible cure. (There are rules for how to win over the pygmies presented in the adventure.) Both times playing this adventure were a real blast.

Rebecca produces well laid out adventures. This book continues that trend. Rebecca’s books are great examples of what people should be doing with the works they produce. Like The Hell House Beckons, this adventure features cheat sheets for the rest of the book. The front end papers are basically the one page dungeon version of the adventure. The back end papers feature important random tables, and stats for the monsters you’ll encounter. There is also a handy pygmy tracker you can use to keep track the 150 pygmies the adventures may kill. The book opens with an overview of the module, advice for how to run it as a one-shot versus as part of an ongoing campaign, and an overview of the main villain and her army of pygmies. This makes up roughly half of the book. The second half is the adventure proper. There are cutaways of the map scattered throughout this section. Room descriptions are bulleted lists, and generally strike the balance between being terse, but not too terse. I do have the same gripe about room descriptions as I made in my previous two reviews: occasionally they spill over to subsequent pages. If you aren’t careful you might assume a room description is complete and not flip the page to see there’s more for you to read. That said, this is a small complaint and the layout is really is well done. This book feels designed to be picked up and run straight out of the book.

I like Jason Thompson’s art. The stuff that is going on in the book could be presented in a very graphic and gross manner. Thompson’s works convey it well but manages to do so in a way I think better suits the book. Many of his pictures are gross, but also not so gross. It’s a tricky line to walk and he does a great job. The PDF of the adventure also comes with one his walk through maps, which is, as always, fantastic.

Buy this already. It’s a good book and Rebecca needs to eat. LotFP continues to kill it with their recent releases and this is really no exception. If you are bored or annoyed by some of the more avante garde adventures LotFP puts out, this is a nice solid dungeon crawl to win your heart back. Raggi is curating a solid set of adventures.

I buy a lot of RPGs, but managed to buy nothing from Wizards of the Coast. I feel like they are leaving money on the table by not catering to a wider variety of tastes with their work. They need an indie imprint.

I buy stuff when stressed and it’s clear I was stressed at the tail end of the year. I ended 2016 with far more books than I had planned to buy. My attempts to limit myself to a book a month has been one of my less successful projects.

If you were curious what books are in the running for The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming for 2016, here you go. This is going to be a really tough year to pick a winner.

The first thing you’ll notice as you flip through the book is all the amazing art. Jeremy Duncan’s work in this module is really quite inspired. (I recommend you grab the physical book because I don’t think the PDF does the art justice.) Jeremy’s art is bright, colourful, messy, detailed, crude, psychedelic, cartoonish, gory and intense. It’s in the same vein as the few pieces of art from Brokie that made it into the book, but ratcheted up. (I do love Brokie’s cover: it’s a shame we didn’t get more of his art in colour as well. Don’t do heroin. That’s probably the bigger tragedy here.)

I didn’t think I’d like Towers Two: it sounded kind of cheesy and juvenile. It is in fact both of those things, but it’s also a very well done sandbox adventure. There is no real overarching plot to push the players through, but instead plenty of factions to interact with and a couple obvious villains to harass. Wandering the region around the eponymous Towers Two will likely provide enough excitement for several gaming sessions.

The adventure is aggressively “R” rated. The super villain is an alien creature who controls people by sticking tentacle probes up their butts. Two magic items described in the module are the Death Phallus and the Cunt Whip. There is a “rape table +4”. It’s pretty easy to drop or tweak all of this stuff from the adventure and still have it be coherent, but you should probably know this stuff is there if it’s the sort of thing that will bother you.

I liked the overall structure of the adventure. It opens with a great overview of the whole adventure, describing some background information and detailing all the factions and characters the players may encounter. The information is all presented up front so when you encounter these things later in more detail you already have a sense of what’s up. The adventure is ‘wordier’ than I generally like. Some descriptions of dungeon rooms or wilderness areas are quite long, and at times repetitive. Nothing here is boring, though. It’s all pretty bonkers. I don’t think this module would be quite so easy to run as Broodmother Skyfortress, but it’s far larger in it’s scope. The book concludes with Brokie’s original draft, which is interesting to read as a gaming artifact. Jobe Bitman stayed true to Brokie’s original vision, but a lot of the truly gross or out there ideas came from Jobe not Brokie. I’m not sure if Brokie felt he had to reign his crazy in, while Jobe felt he had to let his out to live up to his idol.

Alex Mayo, who did the layout for Broodmother Skyfortress, also did the layout for Towers Two. This book also does a great job of showcasing the art within. There is art on almost every page, and everything is quite visually interesting. In this book the text is set in a smaller font and split over two columns. In an A5 book I find this sort of layout can feel a bit tight. (It was easy enough to read casually while I wasn’t playing, but perhaps would be trickier to quickly scan in the middle of a game.) I have complaints about room descriptions being split over pages, but on the whole this is a very pretty book. This book is far denser than Broodmother Skyfortress. It feels like there is far more text to read.

Towers Two is a fun book. It’s worth grabbing just for the art. The fact the adventure itself is also really well done is a nice bonus. There is lots of gaming material here, and it’s all really quite unique. It’s interesting how all over the place LotFP can be with their modules. This adventure is nothing like Broodmother Skyfortress, and nothing like Blood in the Chocolate or the Cursed Chateau, which I will write about soon.

The actual adventure takes up the first half or so of the book. It’s about giant shark elephants and their giant shark elephant broodmother that live in a floating skyfortress—hence the name. These monsters are riding through your campaign world fucking shit up. The players will presumably want to stop them: because they are invested in that world, because you’ve hidden some McGuffin in the Skyfortress, or for some other nonsense reason. The actual “adventure” portion of this book is a pretty small subset of the whole book. The Skyfortress is 20 rooms (12 above ground, 8 in tunnels underneath). It’s not a particularly complex dungeon, but there are lots of things for the players to interact with and perhaps use to stop the giants. Stopping the giants will be tricky: the giants are giants. Players will need to get creative to defeat these monsters and save the day.¹

The book is written in a conversational tone. As you read the adventure Jeff interjects with words of encouragement, advice, and humour:

There are times in the course of a good role-playing campaign when it is important as a Referee to have one’s crap together. Like, if you spring a riddling sphinx on the players then you need to have some riddles and some solutions ready. But sometimes it is important that a Referee propose a problem to the players with no preconceived idea of the solution. Your players want to get to the Skyfortress. How the heck are they going to do that? Hell if I know. Don’t worry, the players will figure something out.

There’s lots of great advice about running games throughout the whole book. The second half of Broodmother Skyfortress is full of some of the best posts from Jeff’s Game Blog. Taken together the book is probably one of the best getting started guides to running games. (Certainly for running games in an “old-school” style.) Jeff said he took inspiration here from the old basic modules In Search of the Unknown (B1) and Keep on the Borderlands (B2). This module does a far better job than both at teaching a DM how to run a game. It’s advice is far more clear and direct. (We have chapters like, “Yo Jeff! What if I don’t have a campaign?” and a whole section about what you as the DM need to work out before you play, because this adventure should be tailored to your campaign.)

This is one of the bigger LotFP books, clocking in at 160 pages. James published this softcover adventure as a big colour hardcover book—as he is known to do. The layout was done by Alex Mayo. This book feels like a high point for his work.² Outside of the room descriptions, most of the sections of the book occur in one or two page spreads with matching art. The layout does a great job of showcasing all the excellent Ian Maclean art. There is so much art in this book. In addition to being great to look at, it also helps you orient yourself in the book and find particular sections of the text. The borders are done in this Kirby-esque style that looks great. They are coloured differently between the two portions of the book, making it easy to jump to the advice section. There is lots of love here.

Broodmother Skyfortress is fantastic. It’d make a great gift for any dungeon master, certainly someone just getting started. Everyone involved has done a really great job. This book can hold you over till we get a real LotFP Dungeon Master’s Guide.

I had pitched the D&D campaign as Masters of the Universe crossed with Carcosa. Looking back at it now, i’m not sure that’s what I was ever really running. It was often goofy and light hearted, which I like, but without all the Masters of the Universe overtones I was hoping to inject. What I had been running, in hindsight, was a Western. Perhaps this is coloured by my reading a Blood Meridian, but it feels like the line between post apocalypse science fiction and the Wild West is quite fine. You have lawlessness, violence, and a collapse of societal norms and obligations in both. My players spend their time wandering a dangerous wilderness, visiting towns with their own rules of law. They go on missions escorting caravans, and hunt slavers for bounty.

Because I am so chronically underprepared, I went with XP for gold as the means of gaining levels. Rather than simply giving people XP for killing slavers directly, I gave my players gold in the form of a bounty in their home base. The end result is they travel the wastes cutting off heads to prove they have killed a vile Jale slaver. Gruesome, no doubt, but it’s all sort of abstract in the game. No one really dwells on the fact they are carting around a big bag of heads. After reading McCarthy’s book it feels far more dark and grizzly. It’s easy to project one story on top of the other.

Westerns are one of my favourite genres of film, but they aren’t what I had intended to run. When I pick up my Carcosa game again I need to think harder about what themes and tropes made Masters of the Universe the show it was. Also, I need to run a D&D game again.

The Feywild is called many things by its inhabitants: the Bright, the Truelands, the Everwood, and so on. Only mortal outsiders, and fey who have spent an great deal of time in the mortal world, call it the Feywild. Most fey look at folk who use the word like backwards country bumpkins (imagine calling the ocean the “really big puddle” or a castle the “big stone house”).

For the 100th issue of EN5ider Rebecca wrote an adventure set in the Feywild, the fairy kingdom of the Forgotten Realms. Now, that’s not really my bag, but I was curious to see what Rebecca could do in a few pages: a fair amount. The adventure opens with a brief background of the Fedwild and the adventure. Thankfully Rebecca doesn’t waste page count explaining what a magical fairy kingdom is. (You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.) Instead Rebecca answers a series of useful questions that most GMs would probably ask when picking up any adventure: “How does this adventure begin?”, “How did we get here?”, “Who is this important NPC”, etc. This is a solid way to open any adventure, really.

The adventure takes place in Hedgegrove, the topiary hedge maze town ruled by Princess Dandelion. Rebecca’s drawn a cool looking map of the site, though I’m not sure how easy it would be to use in play. (If I wrote better reviews I’d have played this adventure and told you how it worked out.) The most interesting part of the adventure comes next, the random tables: Random Fey Trade Requests, Random Shops, Fey Oddity (Mutations), and a Random Encounters table. All of these could be plucked up and placed in any campaign that contained a fairy themed site. The remainder of the adventure is spent describing some quests a party can undertake on behalf of Princess Dandelion in order to escape the Feywild.

Though the PCs’ excuses can sway Dandelion’s temperament, she invariable decides to be lenient with them—provided they can complete a grand collection of quests on her behalf.

Now this is the sort of sentence I don’t think you need to write. With most any adventure, any time you find yourself writing out that what the PC’s do doesn’t particularly matter you should just cross that right out. It’ll probably make the adventure better. That’s some free gaming advice for you! It’s also my only real complaint with this adventure.

It was interesting to see what is clearly a very Rebecca adventure in a different context. This adventure is light hearted and whimsical. Rebecca’s been writing a lot for EN5ider recently, so if you are playing 5E you might want to check it out. I’m surprised WotC isn’t doing something similar.

It feels strange writing about books from a year ago in the summer of 2016, but here we are. The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming need to follow some rules, otherwise what’s the point?

What follows are my favourite books of 2015. To qualify for contention your book must have been purchased by myself in 2015 (and ideally published in that year as well, but I honestly don’t give that many fucks about that). Winners were chosen all by myself, based on my feelings about gaming at this moment in time.¹ As you read on you might say to yourself, “Ram: these categories are totally different than last years!” Yeah, they are. If you want consistent award categories the Ennies have you covered.

Best Setting Book: David McGrogan for Yoon-Suin: The Purple Lands

Yoon-Suin: The Purple Lands takes Vornheim’s approach to world building—copious random tables—to an extreme. Rather than describe Yoon-Suin David McGrogan shows the reader how to create their own version of his world. The setting itself is comprised of several regions, each interesting and unique in their own right. Yoon-Suin could have been 4 or 5 books, but instead it is a single epic tome. The scope and vision of the book is incredible, and is as unique as the world it describes.

(I would be remiss if I didn’t call out Matthew Adams and the wonderful art he has provided for the book. One of the few complaints I have with the work is that there isn’t more art from Adams.)

Best Not D&D: Jason Lutes for The Perilous Wilds

The Perilous Wilds is Dungeon World crossed with all sorts of OSR inspiration. I love hex crawls and wilderness exploration in my D&D. This book is a nice focused look at the subject, coming at the topic from a completely different direction than i’m used to.

There is a fair bit of Basic / Expert D&D in the tone and feel of the book, and also in how the book has been laid out. B/X was very smart when it comes to presenting information, and was seemingly ignored as a design to copy. Well, people copy the trade dress while missing what actually makes it compelling. Perilous Journey’s isn’t so foolish. Almost everything in the book is a tidy spread. It’s a pleasure to flip through and use. A lot of thought has clearly gone into making it useful in a fast improvisational game.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Book of 2015: Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart for Fire on the Velvet Horizon

Fire on the Velvet Horizon is unlike any other D&D book I’ve read or seen. It is a monster book without stats, a coffee table book you can use in your D&D game, some sort of new-wave fiction. Stuart’s writing is captivating and thoroughly weird. Each of the pages in the book, produced by hand by Scrap, is a piece of art. There are some stand out examples of her “she’s just scribbling god damn it!” style. Seeing so much of her art in one place, and stuff in colour, it really nice. As I’ve said before, there is nothing else like her artwork.

This book is such a great example of two people following their own artistic vision without letting anyone else get in their way. Fire on the Velvet Horizon has the airs of something art-house, but once you dig in it is clear it was written with an eye to towards the gaming table. The book is thoroughly uncompromising in every way.²

Honourable Mentions

The Chthonic Codex, In the Woods, The Hell House Beckons, The Warren, and Ryuutama are excellent books I enjoyed. A Pernicious Pamphlet is particularly excellent, and had a ‘best zine’ award in several drafts of this blog post.³

Till next year. Booyaka! Booyaka!

The first codex is a bestiary full of monsters one may encounter in the Hypogea. The monster descriptions hint at notable figures, events, places, etc, in addition to describing the monster in question. Stats for creatures are given for Paolo’s AFG game, in addition to generic D&D. Creatures are for the most part weird, chimeric, magical sorts of beasts. This booklet hints at things revealed in the subsequent two books. Starting with the bestiary seems backwards, but I think it helps make the initial read through of all the booklets fun.

The second codex is about magic. There is a lot of good stuff in this booklet: new rules for spell casting, making potions, new spells & associated schools of magic, etc. These rules are a nice addition to the game: they give the players reasons to wander the wilderness in search of adventure. (Carcosa’s rituals are similar in that they require players go to this or that hex, or find this or that component, but who wants to cast any of those spells?) There are brief histories about the schools and the world scattered throughout this book. You can picture the sorts of magic users that belong to each of the schools. Like Wonder & Wickedness, I found the spells in this book to be an improvement to those spells presented in traditional D&D. They feel magical rather than “gamey”. You could use this booklet by itself to replace the magic in your D&D game with something a bit more exciting, even if you ignored all the bits and pieces about the game world.

The final codex is my favourite. I suspect it would have the broadest appeal. It’s a hodgepodge of all sorts of stuff, primarily collections of random tables. One of the larger sections is the CHTHONOTRON, which are a collection of tables and rules for generating a large cavernous underworld. This underworld is where adventures in the Hypogea will take place. (I learned while reading this book that hypogea is in fact another way of saying underworld: the more you know!) This Codex is the one that presents the world of the Valley of Fire the clearest, though it is still mostly described via magic items and entries in random adventure tables and the like. The final book shines because it gives the referee and players obvious ways of generating adventure. There are random tables for encounters and events. There’s a table which is subtitled “Exceptional Events and Reasons to Roam.” These are the sorts of things I’d love to see in Carcosa. I think The Cthonic Codex does a better job of being terse, while remaining useful. Carcosa is a bit of a mixed bag in this regard.

There is lots left unsaid in these booklets. As the DM you can decide how you want to use the information within: what’s rumour and gossip, what will be a true fact in your game world. In this way it is similar to Carcosa and other such setting books, with its hands off approach to what is the “official” version of the setting. I like books short and to the point. There is a lot of flavour to The Cthonic Codex, all done without an excessive word count. Commendable.

My biggest gripe with OD&D was not with its rules, writing, or art, but with its cost. The game is now a collectable, and has been for some time. The collectors edition Wizards of the Coast made last year is around $100-$200 depending on where you look.. That’s about $15-$30 per staple bound booklet. (Well, you get a nice box too.) If you want to try and track down the originals you likely can’t find them for that “cheap” unless the books themselves are in a state no collector would want. Original boxed sets are usually several hundred dollars—if you can find one that has survived this long. Forget all that: now you can just print your own!

As I have no doubt mentioned on my blog several times now, OD&D is my favourite edition of D&D. At the time it came out I really can’t imagine using these books to figure out how to play D&D. Lucky for you it’s 2016! It’s easy to back-fill any holes in the rules with rules from the Basic D&D rules produced by Holmes or Moldvay. OD&D is a fun starting point for your own variation of D&D.

I ran Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer more or less directly from the book. I think this remains one of the key things I want from any adventure. I have some modules where room descriptions are so long I could never hope to find pertinent information in their walls of poorly organized text. In contrast the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer is neatly laid out, well organized, and terse. I had no trouble quickly parsing out what each room was about while my players were exploring. I’m never going to run anything that requires me to re-write it to use it.

To help speed things up during the game I made a little monster tracker for the dungeon: for each room with a monster I had the monsters stats, and the HP of each monster encountered. I rolled up the number of monsters encountered and the HP ahead of time, for any room where these numbers were random. This is the sort of handout that seems like it should be more common than it is. I can’t imagine when it wouldn’t be useful to a GM.

I also pre-rolled all the random encounters that would happen during the game, and made a similar monster tracker for those. During the game I let players roll a d12 to see which of the pre-generated encounters they hit. (I could have just had them encounter them in sequence, but I also like some surprise at the game table.) This was actually more handy than I thought it would be. Random encounters felt as seamless as expected ones.

The Sorcerer has two apprentices (1st-level Ulfire Sorcerers) who wear chain mail and are armed with swords (and one has a short bow and a quiver of 20 arrows). Neither knows any rituals.

The above is one of the room descriptions from the dungeon. I can read this to myself quickly and not stutter when players walk into the room. Well, until they ask me what else is in here. I don’t think I realized how useful some amount of (interesting) dungeon dressing is till I came across rooms like this while running the adventure. I’m not good at coming up with this sort of thing on the spot. (Or not on the spot, for that matter.) What I ended up describing when I ran the module wasn’t particularly interesting. I think a few extra words about what some of the rooms are like would go a long way to improving this module.

Do these two apprentices like each other? Do they like their master? Are they vain? Are they insane? McKinnon leaves this all up in the air. Like the rest of Carcosa it’s up to you to decide some of the finer details of the adventure. The relationships between everyone in the dungeon isn’t fleshed out. There is a Bone Sorcerer, his two apprentices, and an alchemist all operating within this dungeon, along with a tribe of Deep Ones: what is their deal? Again, a few more words here would again go a long way at the game table.

That said, I do think the approach McKinnon took here is reasonable. There has to be a trade off made when your goal is tweet-sized room descriptions. From reading what’s he has written online, I think he is more interested in providing GMs with skeletons and frameworks for adventure rather than something more richly detailed.

I shudder to think of rules lawyers or canon lawyers playing their tricks with my books. The books are meant for the opposite use, the use of creative and imaginative referees who basically say when reading my books, “Ah, I see what you’re trying to do here. Let me finish all your sentences for you.” I never want to effectively tell a referee to sit down and shut up. — Geoffery McKinnon on ODD74

Still, it does introduce more work for the DM. I made a sheet that listed each NPC and a couple words about them, just so I wouldn’t be ad-libbing when the players encountered someone. This wasn’t much work, and helped flesh out the dungeon a little bit more.

Running a convention game was a good experience, much better than I thought it would be. I had 4 small A5 sheets of paper with some sparse notes, but that was more than enough to help me feel like I was ready for most anything. In my regular game I prep the bare minimum I can get away with and still feel like i’m ready for a game. After running this convention game I can see that just a tiny bit more effort would probably improve my games immensely, and take away a lot of the stress I feel when I run a game.

My first game was with Galen F, who ran The Idea from Space, a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure. Galen began our game by informing us we were off on a quest to save a duke, likely located on an island off the Southern tip of South America. We arrived on the island to find the wreckage of his ship. My fellow adventurer suggested we torch the boat, just in case it was filled with monsters, and then fish out any melted gold from the debris. That really set the tone for everything that would follow. We did eventually find the duke—who we killed before we realized he was the duke. We managed to save two of his entourage, who we returned to Spain—where they probably spread the terrible scourge that had afflicted them on the island. The chaotic Elf in our party called it a win, and who am I to disagree. It was fun to play.

I had skimmed through this module when it first came out, but it arrived in a box containing A Red and Pleasant Land, Death Frost Doom, and Tower of the Star Gazer, so it was kind of easy to ignore. I remember at the time thinking it was goofy. I’m sure if I had read and reviewed the adventure at that time I would have said it was dumb and you should skip it. Now having played it I can see my impressions of the module were off: it is kind of goofy, but it in a good way. The adventure features two neat factions for the players to interact with and takes place on a small island that was fun to explore. I really should make more of an effort to review things I’ve actually played or ran myself: otherwise what are you really saying?

My session after lunch went well, I think. I always feel a sense of dread and panic when I run a game, so I prepared far more for this game then I do for my regular bi-weekly game—something I should probably rectify. I had notes for all the creatures, I pre-rolled their HP, I wrote out a couple words for each NPC of note, I pre-rolled all the wandering monster encounters. In hindsight I should have printed out the map and cut it up, because it was a pain in the ass to both describe and draw. Otherwise I felt the work I did beforehand helped things run smoothly.

I ran Fungoid Garden of the Bone Sorcerer using OD&D. The hook for the session was as follows:

Your lords are all dead: a strange people from a strange land. Dirt? Or was it Earth? Whatever the name, their home sounded wonderful. Your natural Carcosan xenophobia has been cast aside for a greater purpose: to escape this wretched world.

In a rocky defile, a cool steady breeze issues from a wide crack in the earth. Within lie the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer. Why would your former leaders ever want to come here?

The players each had a rumours as to why were they were supposed to be here. Two ended up with rumours about how to find a portal back to Earth (within the Fungoid Garden), while the third received a rumour saying everything about portals is nonsense as the reason they were here was to kill the sorcerer once and for all. After the session one of the players remarked he could imagine the game like an 80s cartoon or procedural: each episode featuring the party finding another possible way back home, but always failing.

My regular Carcosa group played a test run of the adventure, which felt like it lacked some oomph. For a variety of reasons this second play through at the convention felt like it went much better. Because of the route the party took through the dungeon they ended up meeting NPCs and creatures in a useful order. Because I usually play that Bone men are indistinguishable from one another to people outside of their race, Michael Prescot’s character was able to impersonate the eponymous Bone Sorcerer twice—once before they killed him and once after. And yeah, the fact they killed him also seemed like a good way to get closure in an adventure titled Fungoid Garden of the Bone Sorcerer.

The space the convention took place in was quite nice. In previous years it was sometimes hard to play because of all the noise from the other tables. That wasn’t a problem this year thanks to the ample space. Like an idiot I only took a photo when half the tables had packed up for lunch, though.

OSCon is a great successor to OSRCon. Stephen and Boris managed to get a bunch of people out again, numbers back in line with the earlier OSRCons. With the space they had rented i’m sure they were hoping for more, but for their first go at things I thought they did an amazing job. I’m hoping they run the convention again next year. It’s probably far too much work for such a small convention, but i’m glad someone’s taking the time to do it.

The bulk of what I buy continues to be books from the OSR for use with D&D, but there were a few exceptions. I grabbed Ryuutama’s PDF when it was put up for sale, and then quickly upgraded to a hardcover. The game looks like an SNES manual, and doesn’t remind me of any other RPG I’ve played. I backed The Warren on Kickstarter because I thought Bully Pulpit’s previous game Night Witches was well done. That book arrived at the end of the year and looks to be the game about rabbits I didn’t know I wanted to play. I finally bought Dungeon World, after enjoying Perilous Wilds so much.

There are lots of cool zines and small modules being put out by individuals in the OSR now. A Pernicious Pamphlet and In the Woods are stand out examples of this sort of work. I am hoping to make a zine from bits and pieces of my Carcosa game this coming year.

I only bought one book from Wizards of the Coast. The stuff they put out isn’t really of interest to me. I wish they had an indie-imprint doing more interesting work. Out of the Abyss is an enjoyable read, but it’s also large and cumbersome, and I can’t imagine actually using the book to run a game.

If you were curious what books are in the running for The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming for 2015, here you go: