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Showing posts from July, 2018

Summerland Second Edition

I loved and was frustrated with Summerland in equal measure and when a second edition was Kickstarted I was excited and immediately backed it. To be honest I didn't read the prospectus too deeply as I would have been happy with any improvement over the original rules. However now in possession of the second edition I feel that the issues I had with the game are clearly not those the author did. The game is set after human civilisation has been wiped out virtual overnight by the strange appearance of a forest over most of the land mass of the globe. It's a situation that reminiscent of sci-fi such as the Southern Reach trilogy or Roadside Picnic. From computer games then we are very much in the territory explored by *The Last of Us*. The biggest issue I have with the game is its split game system. It has one game system for most things in the game, in this case a version of the Open d6 system. It then has a specialised sub-system for handling the thing that is the core o

The Belly of the Beast

Belly of the Beast has a very unusual premise. An alien giant worm has consumed the surface of a conventional fantasy setting and now the shattered remnants of civilisation live inside the vast intestine of the creature, struggling to scavenge enough to survive from either the creature itself of the remains of its other meals. I guess you might summarise it as post-apocalyptic body horror. The Swallowed live in small communities learning to live on what they can scavenge within the complex tract of the worm and the body of the creature itself. Life inside the creature is defined not by day or not or the passing of the seasons but the structure of the creatures body, its movement and the arrival of new resources in the form of newly devoured territory. It really is new levels of "grimdark". The game is structured around "pulls" which is where the characters try and acquire what their community needs to get through another day. The communities are world-built o