The New Flesh

This slim hardbacked book provides a realm for the game Troika! , it introduces the reader to the Thousand Sultanates and the Wastes that surround them. It's a post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting that leans more to the science fiction end of the spectrum. The bulk of the book is taken up with new character classes and creatures with a few pages of descriptions and a few tables and bullet points about what you might do with the content. It's a beautiful book. I'm not sure I've seen something as striking since Mork Borg. As a teenager I loved the worlds that were conjured up by the artists in magazines like White Dwarf. I think the art direction here has the same potential to do the same for someone reading this now. It's coherent in terms of style, palette and feeling. It illustrates and amplifies the text and it feels necessary. It opens a door onto a strange world of possibility. It is the most coherent and interesting realm I've read for Troika!. I'm

Best left buried is a rules-light fantasy heartbreaker that seems to want to be the sidekick of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It makes a big deal about how going into dungeons is a terrible idea and how nothing but death awaits those foolish enough to do it. Okay, these are interesting points, but the game relies on characters wanting to do it, there's literally nothing else in the rules system. What happens if in the first session the characters get to the entrance of the deep and dangerous caves and then do turn back? What the game lacks is the motivation as to why the adventurers enter the dungeon despite the danger. You're expected to find dungeoneering compelling despite it clearly not being any kind of long term proposition. Into the Odd , for example, deals with this a bit better by making the rewards, in the form of magical items, concomitant with the risks. The copy-editing of the book is poor with repeated sections and grammatical errors. I'm not especially

Tunnel Goons  is a very small and rules-lite game that seems pitched somewhere between whimsical fantasy and traditional fantasy dungeon crawlers. The basic rules system is very simple: rolling 2d6 and trying to beat a target number. Stats, equipment and so on add to the number. The referee determines the difficulty number and fills in all the other rules. There are three stats that are essentially Physical, Criminal and Education. There is no magic system, no races and no classes. Progression exists and is based on the metagame of the number of sessions played. There is a tiny amount of background in the form of three tables for creating your character. The amount of flavour that jumps out of making the third table imply that most adults have been involved in some kind of world spanning war was quite exciting. Tunnel Goons is very simple and kind of gives a streamlined fantasy PbtA experience. Its subtitle, "An analog adventure for nice people" kind of points to a less viole

Warlock is a modern rules-light take on British fantasy roleplaying games like Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy . The stats and skills are a lot like Advanced Fighting Fantasy while the careers system is modelled after Warhammer Roleplay 1st edition while the inventory, world and monsters echo Warhammer Fantasy Battle 1st edition. With all these influences the modern flavour sometimes feels like the use of a d20 in skill checks. Clever things Each career offers two random tables that offer details about your characters background if this is their starting career. The core skill of a career is simply named after the career and covers the breadth of what the career is about. In addition stamina (or hit points) is linked to increasing your career skill which provides a double-incentive to focus on the core of your character. The combat system keeps the idea of being fine while you have stamina (hit points) but then taking critical hits once you are at zero. Weapons are categorised into

The King Machine has some interesting premises: it is part of the author's infinite planescape (called Soft Horizon ), its characters are non-human primates and the author rejects violence as being the primary or only way of injecting or resolving tension into a roleplaying game. Background The world consists of countless floating pieces of land and trees, varying in size and height. Height is prestige and those forced to live on the ground are in exile enduring a dark, freezing world where death can be staved off but is inevitable. A mysterious artefact called the King Machine appoints the perfect king for the world, appointing the person that the world needs at this moment. Unfortunately the machine is malfunctioning and has anointed a false king whose abilities and interests are not what is needed now and who will in fact stir trouble and strife throughout the land. Even if the false king is deposed or killed then the King Machine will appoint a new, equally wrong king until

The Enclave is a game about an isolated community separating itself from and external threat (real or imagined). Of course the community has stresses and tensions within itself that threaten the community and allow the threat to seep in a corrupt everything. The game tone is going to massively vary within this fixed frame. A cult with a charismatic leader trying to seal out the rest of the world is going to be significantly different to a medieval town trying to quarantine itself from the plague. You can also extend the basic idea to cover children on the summer vacation hiding from neighbourhood bullies in a treehouse or even the Siege of Troy. The group chooses a type of Enclave from a table of suggestions (or they can make their own). They mutually sketch out a drawing or map of the physical domain of the Enclave. Then each player creates a character, they roll to discover how loyal the character is to the community and how they view those outside the community. The rolls also dete

The Sword and the Loves is a game of chivalric romance and Arthurian legend that uses the Archipelago system. The basic structure of the game is pure Archipelago with the ritual phrases, fate deck, story card resolution and a map that is drawn during the game. Some of the bespoke elements come from the obvious customisation of the fate deck and a bespoke story card and a minimal map outline of Southern England featuring Camelot and Avalon.  The more subtle parts are the determination of a fixed set of aspects for the game as well as character archetypes for the characters. Instead of the relatively blank slate of Archipelago you are creating characters that are designed to fit in the framework of knights and ladies, love and duty. The rules imply that there are a fixed number of elements: . I think that in practice you are going to have to assign other elements as per regular Archipelago due to the GM-less nature of the game, however I'm willing to give this a go and see what happ