Season of the Snail for Troika!

 My Troika scenario Season of the Snail is out, illustrated by the magnificent Shui Zhang! It has the characters surreptitiously protecting cofly merchant Mungis Bohn on behalf of his family while he enjoys the mirth, debauchery and exhilaration of the festival of the snail. The scenario is inspired by the great novels City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar, adding a layer of cheerful Troika! gonzoness. Want to get a snail massage, get mixed up in a snailball game or watch the snail of a thousand shells parade? Treat yourself, just be sure no never menton slugs, these vile, shameless, naked creatures ...

Print edition at the Melsonian Arts Council webshop.

 PDF at drivethrurpg.

One of the First Expanse-ish Games was Never Quite Gone

 Shadows over Sol was first published by Tab Creations in 2015, well before Mothership (2018), the Expanse RPG (2018) or Free League's Alien RPG. It was by no means the first science fiction horror RPG, but it came a little before the current wave of RPGs that are either directly inspired by Alien or indirectly by movies inspired by Alien. It feels like it was either a little to early or a little to late to receive the acolades it deserves. A second edition is being kickstarted now, with a free quickstarter as a taster, so it's a good time to have a look ...

Going by the quickstarter, the setting hasn't changed much from the first edition (which I own and have read, but never played): 200 years from now, humanity has a few footholds in the Sol system (on Mars, in the asteroid belt, on the Jupiter moons). Society is cyberpunk-ish, with corporate control and people identifying more with their online tribe than with any of the rudimentary national states. Unitech, one of the big, mean corporations is doing a lot of secret experiments to create bioweapons, which is one source of the horror element of the setting (though there's also things like mind-controlling alien microorganisms and malevolent AI). There isn't really a big, overarching mythology behind all of it, more the idea that if you're working out in the black, you'll run into something horrifying on a regular basis.

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