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.