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...

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...

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...