The New Flesh

Wield is the game of powerful objects trying to achieve their dreams and destiny via the medium of those who wield them. It's Elric told from the perspective of Stormbringer and Mournblade ; its Lords of the Rings as told by the One Ring; Harry Potter as an epic struggle between the wands. And if you're not into the indie angst and darkness its Doctor Who as seen by the Tardis and Star Wars as the adventures of the Millenium Falcon. The game is GM'd with the GM taking a role as Fate with a rather unusual mix of responsibilities. The players will take on dual roles in the game, an object of power and a wielder of one the other player's objects. Both the objects and the wielders have their own objectives and Fate is responsible for creating the wielders so their characters and objectives should be challenging those of the the objects. Apart from that Fate seems to be there just to play the other characters and generate situations to explore the conflict that should em...

Robin Laws, talented games designer though he may be, is the Doctor Frankenstein of game design. Stitching elements of traditional gaming and story games together into a resulting rules system that seems to please enough people to make it worthwhile continuing to produce them but not enough to have people praise them. The Gaean Reach is on the surface is a game I could love: classic sci-fi pulp with a story of revenge; a motley crew of the wronged lining up against a powerful interstellar villain, the head of a powerful criminal organisation. It's basically Guardians of the Galaxy . However it is also a revivification of Laws early games Dying Earth and Gumshoe ; incredibly retaining some of the worst parts of both systems in a worst of both worlds combination. It has Gumshoe's split-skill system and the dual-mode of game operation, it has Dying Earth's random taglines and character package generation. It has you-go, i-go combat and it has a GM who creates scenarios ...

With contributions from Jason Morningstar and Filamena Young, both of whom contribute system hacks rather than pure settings this book might be described as the indie take on FATE. However in truth the bulk of the book is made of more conventional settings. Morningstar's contribution Fight Fire  is the one I found most interesting personally. It involves a stripping back of the Fate system to focus on firefighting grounded in the modern world. Characters are described in terms of their abilities to combat fire and also a few personality details. Fire and Smoke are described in game terms rather like monsters and the Fate region-based tactical maps are repurposed here to describe critical locations within burning buildings where the fire must be stopped and people rescued. The description of building a fire crew and the sample incidents are great but the rules for creating your own fires are sketchy and its not clear what principles, if any underpin the sample fires. The closed ...

Era is quite an interesting game from the same people who brought you Duty & Honour. A two or three player game about a single hero and their optional sidekick performing some epic quest. Playsets are being funded via Patreon and I find it weird that James Bond style playset was not an automatic choice for the printed rulebook. Instead there is an Arabian Nights style set, think Sinbad or Aladdin. There are five game elements that represent aspects of knowledge, force and charm. Characters are made up of layered traits matching these elements with different size dice assigned to them. The characters have a base score but then have items and relationships that also have dice assigned to them. The gameplay then revolves around the elements as well with each scene creating a challenge around one of the elements. This strict scene structure means each session or adventure is closed and discrete. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Era and it looks less demanding...

Vincent Baker's Midsummer Wood (to differentiate it from the many faerie-based, wood-located midsummer games that are around) is a game for a single human protagonist and four to five faerie players who seek to either make the human fall in love with them or humiliate one of their fellow Faeries. The game is very short (one playsheet for the human and one for the Fae) and has some really interesting mechanics about asking for help and being denied it. The faerie characters have few responsibilities but if the human is denied then they will discover the blade that will make them the King of Faerie. The rest of the game is about manoeuvring to either uncover the human interloper, play tricks on other fae or win favours from other characters and then use them in interesting ways. The game is played to a fixed number of turns so the pressure is on the players to achieve their character's goals and the consequences of the system seem subtle but interlocking. Use the link to ...

The Comics Code is an interesting take on the superhero genre. Its designed to be a low-prep, fast playing game. In this goal it looks like a total success with sensible streamlining of conventional superhero mechanics on powers and fighting. With one tiny exception the mechanics seem to drive the action forward and there are some interesting rules about when a hero can use their superpowers. Where the game seems to have tackled its objectives less well is the promise to deliver the flip side of superhero comics, the relationships and moral dilemmas that drive most superhero plots. Apart from a small but useful collaborative sub-plot generation system for a scenario most of that responsibility is devolved to the GM. One of the less attractive mechanics is to have the GM judge whether a character's actions are heroic or not and whether that heroism is exception or not. It would have been far better to have the player declare the character's morality and then have the GM test...

Havok Brigade is a game of elite humanoids invading a human city to perform dangerous stealthy missions behind enemy walls. It is massively influenced by Warhammer Fantasy in terms of its gothic, slightly silly, techno-fantasy. The game uses a shared pool of dice to both represent the alarm and suspicion of the humans but also a resource the orcs can dip into to help win challenges vital to their mission. The game is very focused and slight, the bulk of the game is the various character sheets of the Orc commandos. It's hard to understand what kind of game it is going to be and I suspect it will play better with people who understand the background material.

This Fate-powered game from Evil Hat promises Action Science!  and atomic-powered robots. It combines Evil Hat's pulp obsessions with a new universe that introduces us to scientists who approach physics as Indiana Jones approaches archaeology. The game also serves as a pretty good introduction to Fate or a way of moving from more mainstream games to a looser narrative-style game. It is lavishly illustrated with bright comic book art featuring the titular Atomic Robo himself, created by Nikola Tesla in the Twenties and therefore spanning a century of weird science. The basic rules are all Fate but there is an emphasis on the lighter styles of play and higher power levels with mega-stunts introducing invulnerabilities and immortality to allow for a wilder style of play. I'm still in the process of reading but I was surprised to see how much more interesting I found it compared to Spirit of the Century. There's a big overlap between the two but it seems to be some com...

I picked up this odd little (and quite anonymous game) at Leisure Games. It uses cards, d4s and pieces of acrylic to tell a story about someone whose body is being changed against their will. Influences seem to be Tetsubo, The Fly, Teeth and Videodrome. The game plays 1 to 3 but while the solo option is intriguing I think the full trio sounds like the best option. Looking forward to giving it a go.

Myriad Song has a great premise with a sci-fi setting inspired by 70s pop culture and a rulebook lavishly illustrated with comic book art. The mysterious Syndics of the Myriad Syndicate have disappeared without warning leaving countless other species that they used to rule over to find their own way. The players take on the role of space adventurers involved in cosmic exploration (in both the sense of mental and real space). The game fiction promises slightly surreal and alien adventure, one comic strip follows the misadventures of musicians who accidentally discover a lost chord in the Xen-Harmonic scale that allows warring alien races access to lost planets. However rather like things like Starblazer Adventures and the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games what follows a bold statement of genre fiction is not a rules system for supporting that genre fiction but instead a ridiculously detailed simulation system that realistically can never return on the investment you put into it. Each...

I've actually had this for a long time but I've been quite behind on my reading. Serpent's Tooth is concerned with symbolic patricide with one player taking the role of the King, a strong, powerful and mostly likely male character, and the other players characters in the kingdom or court who will usurp the King's power. The really interesting mechanical aspect is that the King's powers are actually the rights to control parts of the narrative. Initially all the narrative rights are with the King but if the other players successful scheme to steal the in-game emblems of the King's authority then they get to control part of the scene framing. The game ends when the emblems have all been taken from the King so there is a symmetry between the fiction and the rules structure. There are various playsets for the game, the first being the obvious literal king while the others are Amazon King (Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs), Homecoming King (American high school) and mo...

I backed Tremulus on Kickstarter so I had access to the PDF version of the game for a while, although the print copy turned up last year I've struggled to formalise my feelings on it. I didn't find the PDF that accessible and was hoping, like a lot of games, that the ideas would be easier to absorb on the written page. However it turns out that the PDF was representative of the game generally and it is not the easiest of reading. Tremulus is a horror game based on the Apocalypse World engine, it aims to create a Lovecraftian atmosphere by revisiting the sources, side-stepping the baleful gravity of Chaosium's classic interpretation of the genre. This does give the game an original spin and also means it can handle a broader range of horror themes than fishmen in the harbour or dangerous geometry. The playbooks are pretty standard for the AW family and you cannot really judge them without giving the game a go. The thing I'm finding most intriguing about the gam...

The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions is a fantastic book with a title that deserves some explanation. A Seclusium is the sanctuary of a wizard. It is where they research magic, create arcane devices, study the metaverse and relax away from the world. The book deals with the vunerable phase in the lifecycle of the sanctuary of a wizard. The point where the wizard has abandoned or been forced to leave but much of the defenses and occupants of the sanctuary are still present. Orphone of the Three Visions is a wizard who has become lost in a realm of creation that leaves her in a state of orgasmic ecstasy. In doing so she leaves her creations and failed experiments to wander her laboratories. Vincent Baker has put together an amazing hardback that consists of a scene-setting essay on the relationship between wizards and their place of study and retirement from the world.This is then followed by three wizards whose have abandoned their Seclusiums. Brilliantly each wizard ...

Monster of the Week is a game that can I only really think of as being Monsterhearts without the sex and angst. That undersells what it offers and tries to achieve. Whereas both games have deep roots in the Buffy series, Monsterhearts takes the sexual angst of the TV show and makes it explicit via teen horror films. MotW on the other hand focuses on the action and literal monster-fighting throwing in similar shows ranging from Dr. Who to X-Files. The result is less shocking, enticing and transgressive but perhaps much more flexible and varied to play. It might also be more appealing to people who find Monsterhearts too full on. For the most part the game has little new to offer, there are playsheets that do a good job of representing the various archetypes of Buffy with enough variety to encapsulate a wide range of TV shows. The GM Moves, Agenda and Principles are sound but for the most part because they have been thoroughly road-tested in Apocalypse World itself a...

I played the Amber diceless RPG as a student and I was fond of the system and it was definitely ahead of its time. Lords of Gossamer and Shadow is a revival of the system shorn of the Amber setting and with a new background that is meant to be a better playground for demi-gods of the system. It is a good looking book and I went for an attractive print-on-demand hardback version. The revamped setting with its interpretation of order and chaos and many worlds connected by an infinite staircase and divided by Shadow feels are more appropriate to cosmic dimension-hopping and the emphasis on magic is baked deeper into the setting now. However a lot of the issues with the previous game are still present. The attribute auction is fun but makes less sense now that characters are not necessarily a generation of celestial lords and means that you essentially need the same group of players for all the sessions for it to be much fun. Houses of the Blooded dealt with the circle of equals better...

My Kickstarter edition of Becoming has arrived and it's very exciting. It's a game for one protagonist and the forces that are arranged against them with a fixed story structure and a victory token system to determine which of the forces have dominated the outcome. The system seems to be an attrition against the hero with only a few ways for the hero to recover. It's not really the hero's journey game I thought it was going to be but the Blair Witch influenced scenario looks pretty interesting.

You wait for one A7 game and then you get deluged by them. Following on from Vast and Starlit are Meg Baker's Valiant Girls and Marshall Miller's Nanoworld . Valiant Girls has the players taking on the role of Ethopian girls and the perils they overcome. As a game that is pro-people and anti-game nerd the setting feels more intimidating to play for me than the typical genre games since making stuff up about Ethopian girls feels a lot harder and more culturally loaded than pretending to be an orc or a robot. NanoWorld, by comparison, is safer ground with the players taken on the roles of clones who are just about to have their dystopian world shaken by unusual events. It is an Apocalypse World hack and is unusual in that each player's character is identical and when one player discovers a limitation or ability to the clone line all the characters gain the same trait.

I finally got round to reading my physical copy of Murderous Ghosts , the game of an urban explorer discovering more than they can handle in an abandoned factory. The game comes in a DVD case, echoing The Ring  movies with its haunted video tape. Inside are two books and a CD with the electronic files. A game for two people each player takes a book which consist of numbered entries. Play then revolves around each player reading an entry, playing out the requirements of the entry and then sending the other player to a new entry. It's a neat way of heavily codifying the gameplay and structure but one that makes for poor reading and a need to actually play the game.

Vast and Starlit is a nano-game from Epidiah Ravachol and comes on four small full-colour cards that can be folded in half to create the game and its three supplements. The base game is essentially a riff on Blake's 7. The players take the roles of prison escapees and mysterious rogue ship that allows the misfits to run and hide from those who pursue them. Each player takes a turn to frame a scene and select who is in focus on that scene. Conflict resolution is really simple and involves either selecting a player to tell you the consequences of the action or alternatively having all the other players collaborate on the consequences. There is a clever provocative questions system for creating alien encounters and the three supplements have detailed sub-systems for love and conflict, travel and technology. These use a twist on the core system of player-driven consequences, introducing tracks and a system of "achieve this before this to succeed". The only thing tha...

Gygax magazine is a new publication that deliberately harks back to the classic Dragon look and feel. It has a painted vignette as the cover with minimal cover text. The interior doesn't feel as lush with more of a print on demand feel than a high quality magazine finish. The articles are eclectic mix of stuff that feels like it really wants to be OSR and nostalgia but includes some modern stuff in recognition that you can't get a broad gaming audience by being niche. Some of the tropes of gaming magazines past are present and correct in the form of an "ecology" article. There is a market for a good quality gaming magazine and there is nostalgia for both Dragon and pre-100 White Dwarf but as magazines like GM showed, making it work in a diverse market is tremendously hard. Gygax does have what it takes at the moment but it will be interesting to see if it has enough to build on and find a sustainable audience.