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Showing posts from February, 2017

The Golden Sea

The Golden Sea is a short game by Grant Howitt . It's about a great civilisation that has been smothered by sand, leaving roving scavengers sailing on the sands and looking for treasures thrust up to the surface. This is one of Grant's handwritten and manually laid out games (follow the link to see what it looks like). Like a lot of these small games the setup is traditional with a GM and players with each player holding a single character that they generate themselves. The game is whole mish-mash of ideas, you have an initial map drawing phase that creates the world. The basic mechanism is a d20 roll plus modifiers versus a fixed target number. You have archtypes and associated abilities like Lady Blackbird. The GM gets lots of random tables to help create a scenario. Advancement is a "please the GM" style affair. The real appeal though is in the background of wandering agents in a sand skimmer, given a license to wander and embody the cultural values of you

Troika!

Most OSR community is based around Dungeons and Dragons, however like a lot of Europeans my first encounter with roleplaying or fantasy gaming was not through D&D itself by through reflections of those who had read a copy or heard of the idea and created their own. Like a lot of early British roleplayers my nostalgia is really for Fighting Fantasy, a formative experience that was notable different in tone from American fantasy while being composed of much the same tropes. Troika! is an attempt to create a retro-clone that brings together Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy into a simple rules system that bakes weird fantasy into core of character creation in the same way that the Ratcatcher career did in the 1980s. The basic mechanics are pretty simple. Mainly 2d6 are used and the basic characteristics are Skill , Stamina and Luck . If you are attempting something against the environment you try to roll under your Skill on two dice, if contested you roll and add, aiming for t

Cabal

Cabal is a game about sinister conspiracies trying to seize power through a corporation or organisation. Mechanically it feels weirdly like a game where a group of players share a single Runequest character and try and make them a Rune Lord. The company has various attributes that are rated on 0 to 100 scale with points being spent at generation time and then the players going on missions to try and raise the value of the attributes by between 1 and 5. The target value is also used to set the difficulty and provide the mechanisms of opposition. The game uses a GM to manage the opposition and provide the colour to the missions. Something that feels like a design cop-out. The game does make some interesting use of the fact that the players take on the role of individuals in the company and therefore you get to play very different characters and the risk of them dying is lessened by the meta-reward to the organisation. However it also has an experience mechanism that makes chara