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The Spires of Altdorf
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So far this book is really failing to impress. Admittedly I bought it as a guide to Altdorf rather than as a scenario but impressively it is so far managing to work as neither.
While I've had a lot of success using Blogger I've decided to move away from integrating everything on Google products. In the era of GPlus everything worked together nicely but now there's always a feeling that you're one product manager away from everything being cancelled while at the same time your content is being ingested and reprocessed to create new things like generative AI that you never really were asked about. I've decided to start writing on a new blog that is part of the Fediverse and which I think has a nicer interface for writing and reading. The first post there is a writeup of the storygame Scene Thieves which is about a travelling troupe of actors who bring drama and do crime.
Exarch is a game of medieval scifi where the inhabitants of a small continent discover they are living in an ecology dome adrift in a shifting sea of mysterious abandoned rooms and empty corridors of some unknowably vast metropolis they call the Steel City. Expeditions go off in search of useful salvage or information before the city arranges and the prospect of returning home fades as the locations move ever further away from home. It's an interesting twist on the idea of dungeon crawling, there and back adventures and magic as science. It's also philosophically interesting in terms of the way that the perceived and actual realities are played with. The Exarch of the zine title is a kind of cybernetic weirdo that stalks the Steel City looking for prey. There doesn't seem to be any other significance to it. It's not even a strong motif in the rest of the setting. The zine contains rules for creating random areas within the city and uses a mechanism of ...
An OSR-style take on Bushido with a Legend of the Five Rings vibe on top. Aesthetically it's Akira Kurosawa and similar film makers takes on Tokugawa-era Japan. It deliberately states that it is not attempting to achieve a historical recreation of the period and instead wants a broader more inclusive version of a notoriously chauvinistic society. The game is distributed as three zines: Characters, Chroniclers and Adventure. The Characters book explains the basic rules but mostly offers a lot of tables to quickly create a character. The mechanics use a d100 versus stats that are based on the elements (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) which map onto various aspects of the world. It is explicitly derived by the Sledgehammer/Brighthammer games and therefore mechanically is almost identical. The Chroniclers booklet explains how to run sessions of Kanabo in the default mode which is that the wandering characters encounter a settlement that has a problem and they get caught up ...
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