The New Flesh

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 ...

This slim hardbacked book provides a realm for the game Troika! , it introduces the reader to the Thousand Sultanates and the Wastes that surround them. It's a post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting that leans more to the science fiction end of the spectrum. The bulk of the book is taken up with new character classes and creatures with a few pages of descriptions and a few tables and bullet points about what you might do with the content. It's a beautiful book. I'm not sure I've seen something as striking since Mork Borg. As a teenager I loved the worlds that were conjured up by the artists in magazines like White Dwarf. I think the art direction here has the same potential to do the same for someone reading this now. It's coherent in terms of style, palette and feeling. It illustrates and amplifies the text and it feels necessary. It opens a door onto a strange world of possibility. It is the most coherent and interesting realm I've read for Troika!. I'm ...