The New Flesh

Issue 9 of The Undercroft ( buy digitally here ) marks a step change for the zine, moving to a larger A5 booklet format and switching from its characteristic red covers to black. Cedric Plante contributes an amazing cover in an etched style white on black. Overall the impression is of something more substantial and professional than a regular photocopied zine. The content isn't markedly different, a collection of monsters (including a penis monster, a giant penis you can fight), rule variations for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and a few historic research pieces, this time the subject is the occult properties of those executed by hanging. At a quick glance the interesting pieces look like the Skinned Moon Daughter  class, drawn from a campaign that looks like it is heavily influenced by Arctic Circle cultures and Nine Summits and the Matter of Birth , an adventure that seems to be a fantasy recasting of the Dutch and English exploration of the South China Sea with added a...

Blade of the Iron Thone is a Kickstarted successor to the Riddle of Steel . I haven't played either Riddle of Steel or Blade of the Iron Throne and I'm not sure I ever will. Primarily I was interested in Blade to have access to its mechanics as I never picked up Riddle of Steel. The basis of the system is a dice pool builder of d12s that are aiming for a target number of 7 to be considered a success. The systems mainly aim to manipulate either the number of successes required to complete a task and the number of dice that are added to the pool. The basic concept is pretty sound, this after all is basic the World of Darkness  system with a dice that is easier to roll. Unsurprisingly there is a substantial focus on combat and simulating small melee battles, there are even different hit location charts for different kinds of attacks. Interestingly there is more abstraction than I was expecting and more emphasis on a fictional conceit of looking at discrete units of interes...

Beyond the Wall aims to re-create the classic "first adventure" story of both classic fantasy stories and D&D games. A group of young and inexperienced people venture into the unknown and are tested and changed by the experience. It's looking to recreate that level 1 or level 0 experience in a rules system that is similar to AD&D 1st edition or RedBox D&D . However in an acknowledgement of more modern designs it also aims to be zero prep. There is a collection of playbooks providing tables to roll up a background with attendant stat changes on top of the basic class templates. Scenario packs build on top of this by providing a basic scenario structure with random elements to keep it fresh but within the theme chosen for the pack. These are quite neat structures for OSR play. Beyond the Wall aims to deliver a low-key fantasy experience where the fantastic awes with both fear and astonishment. It roots the adventure experience in the character's lif...

The Curse of the Yellow Sign is a triptych of scenarios around the theme of Carcosa and Hastur written by John Wick and funded via Kickstarter . The first scenario is somewhat ho-hum, Nazis in the Congo discovering a door during an archaeological dig. There's nothing particularly interesting around the set up and while the characters are strong they are also caricatures that don't really make a lot of sense. They are pulp characters rather than people. The second scenario is a bit of classic for the King in Yellow, a group gets together to rehearse the play; but the play comes to life! The basic outline of which reminded me a lot of Tatterdemalion from Fatal Experiments . There are a few interesting touches such as using a Shining-esque derelict hotel as a rehearsal space and having some of the actors expecting a simulated serial killing to occur during the rehearsal to lull suspicions. The biggest problem with these scenarios though is the motivations for performing the pla...

I bought the ashcan version of Cartel which means that this is an early opinion of an early release. On the other hand it also means the book is much more readable than the usual Apocalypse World inspired game with its indigestible chunks of playbooks. The natural form of a PbtA game is not meant to be a book but is better as a collection of PDFs that can be printed out as needed. You can find the playbooks on the Magpie Games site . Cartel is an attempt to write a Mexican-American game which makes it feel a bit depressing as it is about drug manufacturing and smuggling in Durango. I was drawn in by the references to Breaking Bad and The Wire and it will be interesting to see if the downward spiral mechanics match the fiction that inspired the game. Given my lack of knowledge about living in a narcostate I initially found the game a little hard to get into. I worried about authenticity and a lack of handholds to get into the right mindset. Then I kind of realised that I had to trust ...

This was a welcome surprise, I can't remember backing it but I am actually quite interested in the RPGs that try and mechanically model a common enterprise where players need to balance their character's self-interest with the good of the group that character belongs to. Scavengers has its tongue firmly stuck in its cheek with its background Galatic War filled with Cold War stereotypes being exploited by a scavenging society that pastiches the ideas of Ayn Rand. The scavengers warp into the aftermath of battles between the other groups looking to loot salvage and ransom survivors of the battle. The ultimate goal of the game is get rich or die trying. Mechanically its a fairly straight-forward generate a pool and generate successes on a 5 or 6. Most of the addition systems are about the metagame surrounding the individual runs. A salvage run can be relatively low prep but still requires a GM to tie the random elements together and present them in an interesting way to the ot...

Juggernaut is the latest Jason Morningstar game (Durance, Fiasco) and is a card-driven American freeform in the style of Out of Dodge . Juggernaut is a sealed room game about the predictions of the eponymous 1950s supercomputer. Designed to break cyphers before they have been created Juggernaut instead starts to make predictions not just about the future of the nation but specifically about the Juggernaut team and what will happen on the day of the trial. The players take on the roles of the team members trying to run the first trials of Juggernaut. The play is generally freeform but the requirement on the players is to find out how Juggernaut's predictions become true. Everything that is required to play the game is in the print on demand card deck (with a free optional downloadable audio file that represents the punch card analysis of Juggernaut).

The Dark Forest is a re-imagining of Quiet Year to try and remove perceived colonialism from the game and to focus on humanising the other. I'm not sure that what definition of colonisation is being used here and there is definitely some confused thinking in the author notes about the destruction of the Native Americans and decolonisation. There are some fascinating games to be made about this latter topic but this one doesn't deal with the issue from my understanding of the issue. Essentially this is a skin of the Quiet Year with the community being a collection of monsters who have lived through an occupation by humans. The humans have left or been forced out and now the community has a quiet year to build a new society for themselves and deal with the fallout of the occupation. I liked the Quiet Year and the new perspective seems more interesting than the old game with the addition of a difficult legacy at the start of the game rather than a struggle for survival. The no...

Apocalypse World hacks are kind of hard to read since the bulk of the content are the playsets and its really hard to understand what the game will be like just by reading through them. I also kind of wish that the playsets were broken out of the main game text since you need to copy or print them out anyway to play and they don't really intersect with the principles of play that guide the MC. The Hood is a hack that adapts AW to the world of crime. The players take on the roles of minor criminals (neither petty criminals nor involved in major organised crime). Rather than lurching towards the apocalypse the characters are trying to walk the line between crime gangs and the law. Each failure dragging their friends and family into danger and reprisals. It seems fine in principal but I don't really get what the emotional heart of the game is. Inverse World on the other hand is more of a skin of DungeonWorld that tries to strip away the D&D conventions from the original game...

I thought Class Warfare was going to be a rules-lite approach to creating classes for DungeonWorld, rather along the lines of the variant rules for races in Dark Heart of the Dreamer. This was my preconception of the book and I'm not going to hold it against it that Class Warfare is something subtly different. It is a toolkit for deconstructing the existing classes into components that can be used together to create new playbooks and also a rich source of new moves. The technical analysis of how DungeonWorld's class playbooks work is excellent and worth a read for anyone interested in game design (particularly of DungeonWorld playbooks) and the relative merits and flaws of DungeonWorld in particular. With that done the book then moves onto an example new playset and illustrates how the book is to be used to construct new character classes. The bulk of the book is made of various classes that are tighter in scope that the ones in the main rulebook. Most of the main book classes ...

Carcass is Jim Pinto's game of leadership and danger. The design goals are to take complete narrative control away from players and create situations where their characters are trying to deal with situations beyond their control. The philosophical aim is to examine the nature of leadership in groups and perhaps as a consequence look at the impact of authority. So how does it do those things? The core mechanic is one of scene-framing and looking for conflict in situations that are then resolved via a dice mechanic. The difference here is that control of the outcomes lies with the player to the left, the Foil of the player controlling the character. The dice determine the nature of the outcome but interpretation is left to the Foil. The nature of the interpretation colours the darkness of the game. To balance out the PvP aspect the characters are all elements of the same tribe, struggling to survive. Making things worse for the character makes things worse for the group. The leader...

Showdown is a game for two players that uses a split set of scenes that are played out simultaneously. The main frame for the game is a duel between two characters. The duel is somewhat abstract, in that it might be two aviators clashing above the trenches or simply a literal duel with swords, the key point is that only one of them is going to survive the duel. The secondary frame are flashbacks into the characters' history to discover what brought them to this mortal conflict. The flashbacks also feature conflict but in the sense of the characters testing and trying to manipulate one another. Showdown continues to use the two-track theme in the round resolution, where players dice off via the selection of limited hand of cards representing a range of sizes of dice. The highest roll wins but there are two rolls to resolve, the one for the fight and the other for the flashback. The person winning the duel gets to eliminate the other players attack card, forcing them out of optio...

Questlandia feels like a mix of familiar elements: the quest structure and map building of Intrepid, the community focus and key characters concept of Kingdom and the heroes journey of games like Becoming. The game is designed to be zero-prep, discover through playing with resolution in a single session. Players create a kingdom or land through a mixture drawing cards that represent the troubles the kingdom faces and free play. One interesting part of the shared creative responsibility is that as aspects of the world come up they are assigned to players. The players then have complete creative authority over that aspect of the game world, answering questions from the others as to how it works. With the world established then the players create characters trying to achieve goals within the world, which might be orthogonal to the problems or directly inspired by them. Characters go through three rounds of play to discover whether they will achieve their goals or not. The rounds...

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.