Lover's Gaze for Cloud Empress published

 I did it - I set up a drivethru publisher's account, and just like that, Acephalous Creations is born - and its first rpg scenario published!

Lover's Gaze is a 3rd party scenario for the ecological science Fantasy RPG Cloud Empress by watt. Cloud Empress is a Nausicaä-tinged vision of continual ecological and social injustice and continual hope. It also features weird bugs, fungi, maddened cryosleepers, dimensional rifts and mutations.

Reading Cloud Empress made Lover's Gaze finally come together. It has existed as a novella idea in my head for about 15 years and both a Numenera and Troika! scenario in the years after that, but the world of Cloud Empress came with exactly the elements I needed to make this adventure tie into the setting on a more fundamental level.

Featuring some heavy themes - failing to communicate your troubles to someone you love, letting go, hope in the face of terminal illness -, it is probably the closest to my heart of all the adventures I've ever written. That's why I strove to keep the writing style matter-of-factly and concentrate on finding a structure that will help you to run the scenario as open-ended as it demands to be. Basically, it consists of a backstory, a mission, a good dozen NPCs and three major locations.

Lover's Gaze features the amazing art of Juri Wende. Apart from that, it's visually simple: I did the layout with LibreOffice, so it will not impress anyone - but it prints well. Basically, I know how to write and I know people who know how to draw, and that's where it ends, and it has to be enough.

I would be honored if you decide to check Lover's Gaze out and leave some feedback here or on drivethru! 

Here's the link to it on drivethru.

Marvels and Prodigies

(I've already posted a slightly different version of this review on the product page on drivethru rpg. I don't really have time to do the in-depth review of all things Marvels and Prodigies I'd love to do now, so I'm re-posting my review here. Let's just say it struck a note with me!)

I thought I'd never touch another RPG going to the Lovecraft. Well, I made an exception for Marvels and Prodigies, which, I'd dare say - is it really possible? - makes Lovecraftian Horror feel fresh again. It is not simply another "take" on the same endlessly regurgigated Mythos tropes "(It's Cthulhu, but this time with aether-powered biplanes!"); it is an unassuming RPG that has a point of view on cosmic horror that is subtly, but significantly different from "RPG mainstream Yog-Sothothry"; and it has me as excited as back then when I first laid my hands on "Call of Cthulhu" by Chaosium, which was just as slim and unassuming and clearly knowing what it was doing.

Some More Everywhen Awesome

So, with about 35 years as a gamer under my belt, I certainly don't have to read to GM tips in an RPG book before reading it? After all, what could they tell me that I don't already know?

Well, there actually is one thing or another, so I need to amend my review of Everywhen: The chapter on game mastering is awesome. It's only 10 pages, but they are packed. There's some system-specific stuff about setting difficulties first, but that already features some good general advice for most RPG genres: Look where the players have put their build points and consider that that's where they want to shine - so make sure that they get the opportunity to do so in your adventure. It also re-iterates an important idea that has been stated before in Everywhen: A failure doesn't necessarily mean that a hero has failed due to ineptitude; always err towards assuming that circumstances beyond their control thwarted them.

Reading Everywhen

 

I've played a little Barbarians of Lemuria here and there, always found it easy-going, but never got really invested in it. However, in my perpetual search for the right system for my setting heartbreaker, I remembered that with Everywhen, there is a generic rules-set for the engine, so I dug that one out again, and lo and behold: I really like it. Let's see why:

Metegorgos Gives Us Her Milk

 Evey Lockhart's Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos is a small Troika!/BX scenario of abject beauty that the author probably needed to write to cleanse the adorable positivity of her very own Very Pretty Paleozoic Pals setting away. It weighs on your soul, far out of proportion for a slim book of 29 pages. It should start with about two pages of trigger warnings, but really, if you're in doubt, just read the product description at Melsonian Arts Council and you'll know whether this is for you. DON'T play it with anyone without proper warning.

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS ALSO TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS REVIEW: BIRTH AND ASSOCIATED TRAUMAS. ABJECTIFICATION OF WOMEN.

NAMEDROPS: JULIA KRISTEVA, JACQUES LACAN

Mindjammer Press is Back with Lair of the Leopard Empresses

Yay, one of my favourite authors and publishers is back on the scene - and doesn't disappoint!

Sarah Newton's Lair of the Leopard Empresses is based on the Monsters! Monsters! rules, which are based on Tunnels & Trolls, which means that they are from a family of RPGs I've only ever had the most fleeting contact with. My takeaway after reading most of the rules chapters of LotLE is that it's a system where the players have to start thinking out of the box, and quickly, if they find themselves outmatched. Your randomizers are usually 2,3 or 4d6, added to stats than can, even at the beginning, reach values like 30 or 50, so even a stellar dice-roll might often not allow you to come close to what a superior opposition has in store. I've decided to consider this a feature and not a bug, because at the very least, it is interesting and new (to me), and it really leans heavily into a "rulings, not rules" philosophy.

AGE Catching Up With Me

With a second edition of Green Ronin's FantasyAGE RPG and the AGE-based Fifth Season RPG coming up (the latter being an adaptation of N.K. Jemisin's excellent postapocalyptic sfnal fantasy trilogy), I've been drawn back to this very nice and simple system. Year's ago, I used FantasyAGE for a lot of one-shots at the open gaming nights in our bookshop and came away from it kind of ambivalent. The pros outhweighed the cons, but I could never get my regular gaming table invested in it, and it kind of faded into the background of my gaming interests for quite some time; but right now, I feel like dusting off my (limited) expertise on all things AGE.