The New Flesh

Grant Howitt's Patreon powers a series of one or two page games. In the latest batch I found Unfinished Business and The Beast interesting. Unfinished Business is one of the relatively large pool of revenge beyond the grave games, mostly inspired by The Crow . This is slightly different as the game isn't just a single character looking for revenge but a group. Also rather than being returned to life with supernatural powers the ghosts have an object they are linked to that allows them to possess those who touch the object. Once possessed most of the rules are for how the ghost can retain control of their host and use them to enact their revenge. It seems an interesting take on the genre. The Beast is a horror game set in 18th century Eastern Europe, a group of retainers must defeat an ancient and powerful monster or suffer for their failure. The mechanics are fairly typical for the series with a d10 rolled against an opposition die. Abilities, skills and challeng...

This mini-adventure is by the By Crom! author, Shel Kahn , so the first thing worth saying is it benefits from visual design and is beautifully illustrated and physically satisfying to own. It is a classical fantasy roleplaying adventure with the premise being that you as a group are interested in acquiring some rare magical crystals and have journeyed to the only place that produces them. Once there you discover that the town is in crisis as the crystals have ceased to appear where they are normally collected. The nearby island is a taboo place but it also seems connected to the problems with the crystals as a local has gone missing while investigating it. Having presumably tricked their way onto the island the game then shifts to a clever hex-crawler with the island interior being the hex map and then you roll and place cutout hexes onto the map. As you move around the previous hexes are not fixed and therefore you may double back to find that the landscape has changed. The goa...

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...

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...

Ruma is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about a Roman Empire that is facing off against supernatural threats summoned by it barbarian neighbours. Players take the role of characters who are confronting those threats. The rules introduce Latin-flavoured playbooks that reflect various roles in historical Roman society and within the Legions. Irritatingly Ruma introduces some alternative names and spellings for the various countries and peoples of its world. It tries to put some fictional distance from history but not in a way that adds to the historical roots. While flawed as a narrative campaign Hunters of Alexandria did a better job of blending the historic and supernatural fantasy of its world. Apocalypse World, as a ruleset, seems appropriate to the environment, the Empire is powerful but besieged by threats that seek to overthrow it. Characters will win big eventually but the costs will be high. Ruma's fundamental problem for me is that I'm not sure why this isn...

Clink ( Kickstarter campaign ) is the game of Drifters who have come together for some specific purpose. It's meant for short games that test the resolve of the characters and see whether they will remain true to their purpose and achieve their goals or give up in the face of the obstacles they face and the weight of past failures. The system is custom to the game and relatively straight-forward. It works on coin flips with heads being a "mostly succeeds" result and tails being "the situation gets worse". The characters have rules that allow them to flip another coin in the hope of getting a complete success in the form of double heads. The special rules are elegant and drive the story. The central one being the Creed of the group, the reason and motivation why the group are together. When characters act towards their Creed they gain a coin. In addition the characters have Triggers, behaviours that are deeply ingrained but unhelpful. They feel more like bad habi...

By a strange coincidence I've just read two takes on the teen detective genre (think things like Veronica Mars and Riverdale) and they are both interesting in their own way and both improvements over Bubblegumshoe . Teen Detective is by Richard Williams (who I do the Across the Table podcast with) and Best of Fiends which is a work in progress from Stuart Chaplin (and which is currently unavailable generally as far as I know, I asked Stuart whether I could take his notes, which is how I got a copy). Teen Detective builds off Cthulhu Dark but I think I'm going to have to read my latest copy of the rules again because it doesn't feel like it has that much in common with it anymore. The closest intersection is around destroying evidence in an investigation. Instead Teen Detective uses a system of gaining Edges over people by investigating the mystery. You also have a pool of points that allow you to get through moments of failure of imagination or inspiration. Yo...

Cthulhu City is simultaneously a brilliant idea and a coffee table book that is too long, detailed and boring. What's great about it is the idea of characters being pulled into a strange city, with the traces of the Mythos everywhere while the population studious ignores it. The city is hard to leave and even when one escapes it supernaturally sucks the characters back in. It's like the best paranoid novels written about cities from the birth of the metropolises. What's boring about it is the level of detail that is piled onto of this core. There is a description of the city, it's different parts, its politics and history, the secret societies and all the in-jokes of Cthulhu as the various New England locations become parts of the sprawling metropolis. It all feels like a berserk preparatory research for a novel I'm not going to read. It's clearly aimed at people who are engaged with roleplaying culture but aren't necessarily going to be playing gam...

This is a collection of scenarios for the Cthulhu Hack that focus on the influence of the Wendigo or The Evil That Devours. The foreword has the interesting anecdote that the collection was conceived at Dragonmeet 2016 and released for Dragonmeet 2017. Pretty good going! The three scenarios are: Wolves in the Mountain , Lonely, Dark and Deep and Tainted Meat . Of the three Tainted Meat is the most substantial and satisfying. Lonely, Dark and Deep is a short piece about a hunting party in the woods that encounters and essentially fights the Wendigo. The thing is does well is use pre-generated characters to create reasons why the characters are going to tarry too long in the woods until the fateful encounter and also the tensions between them. Wolves in the Mountain is one of those scenarios where cultists are both deranged in their behaviour but also capable of forming and executing long-term plans with patience, co-ordination and cooperation. The PCs are lured into the m...

I picked this up at Dragonmeet 2017. It's an alternative setting for Into the Odd . If you not familiar with that game then it's default setting is a city-state called Bastion, there's an alternative steampunky setting called Electric Bastionland that still seems to be in playtest. Bastion Ein Sof is set in aftermath of the destruction of "Electric" Bastion whic h is refers to as Old Bastionland. If indie rpg lore isn't your bag then more simply this is a setting where a huge steampunk city has been destroyed by spirit beings known as Angels. The only survivors exist (literally) in the shadow of equally immaterial beings known as Giants. The players take on the role of adventurers seeking to steal the blood of Angels to appease the Giants and acquire treasure and wealth for themselves. One of the interesting things the setting does is to create an incentive to adventure is an idea called the Giant's Debt whereby at the end of every session the party must s...

Macchiato Monsters  is another descendant of the Black Hack system. Unlike some of its peers though I feel it offers greater freedom with less complicated rules. The basic mechanics are 5th edition D&D, a d20 roll under your statistics with advantage or disadvantage being handle by rolling two dice and taking the higher or the lower value. Risk dice are pretty much from Black Hack making low rolls bad and stepping down the die and high rolls lucky. This means introducing a personal frustration of mine where the reading of the dice is different depending on the type of roll you are making. The remainder of the rules are all some of the simplest and flexible in this family or rulesets that I've seen. Characters have levels but essentially each level up allows you to use the same rules as character generation to expand the character. Spells are particularly satisfying because they don't come from a spell list. You do have to pitch your spell to the GM and the GM is ...

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...

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 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...

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...