Spectral Stalkers! Ziggurat World! Lovely Mantirs!

 This book should be a Fighting Fantasy classic. It's so well-written. It makes such good use of the format. It's brimming with crazy ideas.

A bug-eyed but strangely endearing angel creature hands you the Aleph, asking you to protect it. It's not quite clear from whom or what you should do with it, but it IS quite clear that you should avoid the spectral stalkers, scary long-legged phantom creatures that arrive in short order to investigate the dead bug-eyed angel, at all cost.

The Aleph takes you on a random ride through dimensions, each of them a mini game world. You start at the library in limbo, have a talk with the dragon lady at the counter, grab some intel, and then it goes on: In short order, I ended up as a sacrifice for some cult of the undead, a literal pawn in the game of two god-like creatures in the sky, a customer on a pottery market recruited to save a master potter from his own golem, a specimen liberator aboard a space station, an unwelcome guest in a god's dream of a hunt, and several other things. I also had a memorable conversation with a scientist who tried to convince me that there's no such thing as magic.

Just as all of this starts to feel just a little bit to random, poof, I end up on the Ziggurat World, ruled over by the wizard Globus who may or may not be the big bad. I meet the mantir, very nice insect people who herd grazing insect bulls, the vaskind, lovely monstrous amphibians, and the significantly less lovely winged black shadows and ophidians and elegant and deadly silicate snakes.

Will YOU join them at the fire ...?

It's night. Next to a crackling fire, a human and an orc are talking chatting idly, holding on to their mugs of ale. two kobolds nuzzle each other, cackling. A read eye glints in the darkness as they look in you direction, teeth grin ... will you join them at the fire?

You can stumble across some such scene in the second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson. A small, atmospheric moment that smells of warm, cozy danger and that encapsulates so much of what is good about these books. Yes, orcs and kobolds are usually simplistically evil in these books. But also yes, the moment really makes you want to join them, feel the fire's heat on your face, listen to their drawling talk, to their rising laughter, and laugh along. And however evil these kobolds may be, you feel that not only to they desire warmth and companionship, they deserve it, the same as everyone deserves it.

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

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.

The Cloud Empress

 There's a crowdfunding underway for Cloud Empress, an RPG that hits all my buttons: ecological science fantasy with a bingo card of inspirations that has Miyazaki's Nausicaä, Samuel R. Delany's queer post-apocalytic fever dream Dhalgren, Frank Herbert's Dune, LeGuin's Earthsea, Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem and the art of Moebius on it:

The Comae Engine

Clarence Redd debuted his Frostbyte Books a few years ago with M-Space, a stripped-down science fiction rules set based on Mythras. I suspect that M-Space is pretty good, though due to a certain necessary blandness, it never quite clicked with me - I was never sure why I should choose it over something more flavourful like Traveller or Frontier Space.

However, M-Space brought an interesting innovation to Mythras and d-100 gaming in general: Its own extended conflict mechanism, which basically consists of a series of opposed rolls, where the winner deals damage to the loser's conflict pool (the conflict pool being based on one or two of the core characteristics).

Open-Ended Rolls Will Pierce Your Liver!

 I'm immersing myself in all things Rolemaster right now.

It's madness.

(Imagine Charlton Heston, slamming his fists into the sand.)

To be clear: I've played about three sessions of Rolemaster (the classic edition) about 30 years ago because we considered it "Advanced MERP". It was a PITA. We returned to MERP pretty fast. And I haven't played MERP in ages, I even sold off my collection about 15 years ago because I'd convinced myself that I'd never, ever again muster any interest in anything to do with MERP or RM.

How I regret that. How wrong I was.

Now, I long for the days of critical hits that describe which inner organ has been skewered.

Now I long for endless customization of characters I will never play.

I can't really say why, because by all logic, I should be interested in systems like PbtA or Savage Worlds or Fate, which are more than enough to handle for my age-addled mind.

But I want more than I can handle. I want to bite off more than I can chew.

So I've absorbed Against the Darkmaster into my system.

I keep opening up my HARP pdf, reading random passages.

I've read the Player's Guide to Shadow World (which really is not a player's guide at all, but probably a serviceable introduction for prospective GMs nevertheless).

I'm reading a third party campaign for Against the Darkmaster right now.

I'm even brainstorming a campaign setting for Against the Darkmaster on their Discord server.

And tomorrow, I'm going the buy the "Core Law" of the new edition of Rolemaster: Rolemaster Unified.

I'm beyond help. Don't try.

Reading FrontierSpace Part 2: Character Creation & Advancement (&Equipment)

What better way to review character creation than to create a character?

There's 6 character creation steps (that include equipping your character) - a FS character starts in pretty broad strokes. In game-mechanical terms s*he is defined bei 6 Abilities, 3 Skills, Species, a Moral Code an 6-8 pieces of equipment. There's a little more differentiation involved in selecting how your species impacts your stats.

I start with rolling up my six Abilities (the core characteristics), taking them in order as they come - RAW, you are allowed to allocate them or use a standard array, but since I have no idea where I'm going, I'll start out as random as possible. Abilitier are rolled with 2D10, using a table that will mostly generate results between 45 and 65, with the minimum and maximum values being 35 and 70.

Reading FrontierSpace Part 1

FrontierSpace is very loosely inspired by TSRs old space opera RPG StarFrontiers, which I actually played back in the day - though just a little. From the looks of it, it assumes the classical setup of a starship crew for hire, though the PCs probably won't start with a starship. True to its title, FrontierSpace also assumes that you'll operate in regions of space where the rule of law can mean the rule of the bigger blaster. It would probably serve well to emulate stuff like Firefly or Farscape. While the same can be said about Traveller, M-Space or Stars Without Number, FrontierSpace does its thing really, really well, and in terms of its rules, it might be my favourite science fiction RPG yet. It has pretty light and consistent core rules, and most of the page count of the two core books (which clock in at more than 400 pages together) is made up of sub-systems that can be slotted in and of encyclopedic stuff like equipment lists. I'm pretty sure that at the table, this is al lighter game than, say, Mongoose Traveller.

However, I haven't played FS yet, so this is just a thorough read-through of the core books. This first part is just about the first chapter of the Player's Handbook, which packs a lot of punch.

A (belated) Review of Hessaret's Treasure

 I've been meaning to review this Mythras scenario since I ran I more than a year ago, but somehow, I'm only now getting around to it ... full disclosure: I'm working on a few small, Mythras-related projects with its author Matt Eager, but that's actually only because I've reached out to him after reading and playing the scenario. Also, this review is based on the German translation of it.

I'm not going into details here, but still,

SPOILERS AHEAD

Some thoughts on OpenQuest 3rd Edition

I'm having trouble with reading through the third edition of OpenQuest. The thing is, this new edition warrants a complete re-read, but since I feel that I know most of it from 2nd Edition, I keep leafing back and forth for the new stuff. And the new stuff is good, good enough to convince me that OQ3 is both the best expression of OQ yet and probably also the best rules-light take on BRPish d100 mechanics out there.

A Legacy of missed Opportunities

By the end of this review, I well tell you that Legacy of Blood for vsD is worth buying - after picking it apart in bloody pieces. Really, I'm positively angry about many things this scenario does, BUT it features a great premise and enough material to actually make it work. This could be a great, complex, atmospheric scenario about falling from grace (and maybe rising again) - instead, author Jonathan Hicks for some reason decided to write LoB as a railroaded mediocre dungeon romp that doesn't make much sense. It's a mystery, and not one of the good kind, but it leaves enough to be salvaged and turned into something beautiful.

vsD Adventure Review: The Silence of Dawnfell

 I fear that I might be a little unfair towards this adventure: It is a good one, but I'm reading it right on the heels of Shadows of the Northern Woods, which is a tough act to follow. Especially since a lot of motives and themes of Dawnfell are reminiscent of SotNW: Again, there's a small village to be saved, free folk who have become estranged from each other and must be brought back together, a magical McGuffin that the bad guys are after and a climatic battle where the outcome depends hugely on how many checkmarks the characters were able to make on their adventurous to-do list in advance. In both adventures, we have spiders in the woods and ancient burial sites hiding treasures and answers. Even some of the NPCs feel like variations on a theme when compared to SotNW (Annis/Beltine, Wulfric/Brynjar, Morcant and his She-Wolf/Urgusk and his Mountain-Lion). It's hard to say if, playing both scenarios back to back in an actual campaign, this would feel like a thematic throughline or rather like "Oh well, another troll with a vicious pet and another problematic thane."

But while SotNW uses its sleepy, rural setting as a springboard to dive deep into the (admittedly vague) mythology of vsD's implied setting, Dawnfell firmly sticks to being an adventure about saving a village from a band of trolls. Which is actually a good thing, because it makes Dawnfell truly self-contained and also thematically more suitable for a group of 1st level characters. As such, one might say that Dawnfell is better at being what it is than SotNW, but it is also a little less impressive.