reviews – The Dice Pool

The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Dream Eater

I think it’s interesting that each of the scenarios is styled as being possible to run as a one-shot but I can see Dream Eater’s potential in the context of the greater campaign.

Format of the Sutra

This is the second post in my exploration of the 1980s Japan Call of Cthulhu campaign, the Sutra of Pale Leaves. Go here for the first one, which deals with the overall premise and the Campaign Background chapter from Twin Suns Rising. Although the text suggests that you can play the constituent scenarios in any order, they are presented chronologically and I can’t imagine running them any other way. They are also presented in two different books, of which Twin Suns Rising is obviously the first, with its three scenarios taking place between July 1986 and Spring 1987. I thought I’d be able to write about all the scenarios in this book in a single post, but it turns out, I can’t read that fast. Each scenario is long, between 35 and about 50 pages of dense, small-font-size text. So, instead, I’ll just be examining the first of them today, Dream Eater, written by Damon Lang. Please note that I haven’t played or run this scenario, I have only read it. So, take my conclusions and thoughts on it with that in mind.

WARNING: SPOILERS!

I would find it very difficult to write about Dream Eater without massive spoilers, so I am giving you a warning, right now: if you want to be a player in this scenario or the wider campaign, its probably best to skip this post. Come back later! I’ll probably have something for you then. Or check out my ever-growing back-catalog of posts.

Dream Eater

I once wrote two novels about the adventures of a twelve year old Japanese boy who moved to Ireland with his family. In them, he discovered that he was able to use his cat as a conduit to enter the dreams of others. This allowed him to reconnect with his friends at home but his consciousness became trapped in the kitten! Various hijinks and drama ensue. Anyway, suffice it to say, I was very quickly on board with the premise of this scenario given teh Japan and dream-related elements of it.

The premise is that a small, rural Japanese town is beset by sleeplessness and terrifying dreams of monsters. The longer it goes on, the more the citizens worry for their safety and sanity. The authorities have offered financial rewards to anyone who can help them solve the problem or take care of the afflicted.

That’s where the Investigators come in. Perhaps they are from this small town of Ikaruga, or maybe they just heard of their troubles and have come from the city to look into them. Either way, their assistance is greatly welcomed.

Indeed, their investigations are likely to take them quite quickly to the door of an old man, Mr Taneguchi, who was responsible for the death of a young girl in a traffic accident recently. From there, they will visit other sites in the town, and other potentially recurring NPCs, and they will learn of the Baku. This Yokai is the eponymous Dream Eater, and the cause, it would seem, of the town’s problems. The Investigators will have to find a way to defeat, satisfy or neutralise this creature if they are to help.

But, of course, there is another layer to this story, just below the almost obvious one. The Prince of Pale Leaves has worked through one of his recruits to use Mr Taneguchi to spread the Sutra of Pale Leaves. The Prince has been invading the dreams of the people of Ikaruga, through the old man’s chanting of its mantras at night. It has been creeping through the town, insidiously and terribly. This is what has drawn the Baku to this place. It finds dreams of the Prince the most delicious. The Baku is known as a benevolent yokai in Japanese legends, one that takes your nightmares away and lets you sleep soundly. And that is what it’s attempting to do. The thing is, as it eats the dreams of the Prince, erasing them from the memories of the dreamers, the only image they are left with is of a scary looking ,purple, tapir monster, the Baku. And so, it becomes the scape-goat. The Prince attempts to use this misunderstanding and the Investigators’ intervention to defeat the Baku, thus allowing his influence to grow all the faster.

The question is, will the investigators figure this out? Will they destroy the Baku? Will they leave this town better or worse than they found it?

The Flow of the Scenario

The flow of the Dream Eater scenario in visual form. From Ikaruga Town to Talking with Townspeople to Meeting Taneguchi to Horyuji temple or Nightly Prayers to Unpleasant Dreams to The Fortune Teller to Research in the Sutra to Dream Dive to the Final Encounter and finally to the Epilogue. — Dream Eater Scenario Structure

Take a look at this flowchart. This is useful in a scenario like this for a game like this. Call of Cthulhu is a trad game, and, as such, its scenarios rely on these sorts of stepping stones to get you from hook to ending. So I really appreciate it when you get something like this that cleanly represents that idea visually.

So, after a lengthy preamble giving us Keeper background, an intro to the main NPCs and a few PC hooks, we start with Ikaruga town, a place that’s renowned for its truly ancient buddhist temples, which contain the oldest wooden buildings in the entire world. I like that the section on the town asks the Keeper to get in media res and kick things off with a shared dream sequence. Something weird is happening from the off and it gives PCs who don’t know each other yet a good reason to seek each other out.

You get a basic map of Ikaruga in the style of a roadmap, which is a nice touch. Along with this, we have an “Exploring the Town” section, which spells out stuff like population, transport, amenities and accommodation but the only real subheading to this is the Shepherd Bar: A Foreshadowing, the purpose of which is a little too subtle for my tastes.

The scenario, and indeed, the campaign is sprinkled with “Lore Sheets,” which detail elements of Japanese cultural, societal or mythical knowledge that the average Investigator might be expected to know without having to make a Know roll for it. The Keeper is supposed to hand them out as and when the subjects come up. In this section, we have one on Hōryūji Temple, for instance. Each of these includes a little snippet of “Personal Background,” which the player given the lore sheet might adopt for they own character. It’s a nice way to weave the PCs in with the place and the lore of the place.

The Investigators are expected to visit the Town Hall to begin their investigations. The Town Hall section, as is the case with each of the major plot points of the scenario, begins with a handy summary that looks like this:

Location: Ikaruga town.
Leads In: Hooks One, Two, and Four
Leads Out: Meeting Taneguchi (page 62); Talking to Townsfolk (page 61).
Purpose: investigators learn about the case.

This is another incredibly useful tool to assist the Keeper at the table, allowing them to see, at a glance, if they are at the right section, where they should be looking next and the overall purpose of the scene. This last is important to let you figure out where a scene should end, which is not always obvious.

As we get into this section, we notice that precise and exacting answers are provided to every relevant question the PCs might ask Mr Maeda, the Vice-Chairman of the Public Welfare Committee. This is common to most of the NPC interactions in the scenario, which will keep you, as the Keeper, on track with regards to what each of them knows. Once again, it’s a trad scenario. Rather than summarising the things they know and letting you play them as you see fit, things are a little more proscribed here. Of course, if you want to run these interactions differently, you can. It will just mean you spending more time prepping.

We get some general knowledge and descriptions of half-remembered dreams from talking to the townsfolk, but we really get into it when the Investigators go to meet Taneguchi, the old man who is secretly harbouring the Prince of Pale Leaves in his mind. He was approached by a representative of the Association of Pale Leaves and told that, by chanting from he Sutra of Pale Leaves nightly, he would pay off his karmic debt from running over the little girl on the road. Unbeknownst even to himself, he has been making beautiful and elaborate copies of the Sutra at night, when the Prince takes over his body. The APL is planning to use these to spread the Prince’s influence even further across Japan. It is in this section where the Investigators are likely to gain their first exposure to the Sutra, thus beginning their journey towards recruitment by the Prince, themselves.

From here, the investigations might lead to Hōryūji Temple, where they might encounter another recruit, Ukami, a former monk, who is also a martial arts master. Or they might go to the Momijidera Temple, where Taneguchi recites his prayers each night, But eventually, we come to one of the more interesting parts of this scenario, Unpleasant Dreams, where the Keeper can tailor nightmares to individual investigators’ personalities, backgrounds and memories. This is the first time they will encounter the Baku. There will be different outcomes depending on the levels of exposure they have had to the Sutra so far. It could lead to significant Sanity loss, but, on the bright side, it could also lead to Exposure Point (the points which track how exposed you are to the Sutra and how much influence the Prince has over you) reduction.

Lore Sheet 3: Fortune-Telling in Japan and the Fortune-Teller, Madam Inaba. — Lore sheet

After this, they are likely to visit Madam Inaba, the Fortune Teller or go to the aforementioned Hōryūji Temple to find out more about the Baku and how to defeat it. Importantly, they should then go and do some research in the Sutra itself, exposing them once agian to the Princes influence. This will lead them inevitably to the Dream Dive section. The scenario takes us back into dreams here, this time, a shared, lucid dream, which they will have learned how to perform from their research in the Sutra, of course. Rather than have the Keeper craft the dreamscapes they encounter this time, they are put through a “Gauntlet of Nightmares.” I like the nightmares that have been described in this section, they are Japanese-flavoured (I have definitely had nightmares about the mukade myself) and they’re scary, but they seem a little random. They’re not as thematically coherent as other parts of this scenario. At least, until you get to Taneguchi’s Dream: The Accident. In this one, you relive, along with Mr Taneguchi, the night he killed Nakamura Hinako on the road. The scenario presents several ways the Investigators might deal with the situation, from doing nothing to showing some humanity to the dying girl, to rewriting history!

The baku, a big, purple, tapir-like creature, feeding on a n old man who is sleeping on a futon in a tatami room. — Yum Yum

The only thing left to do is to face the Baku itself. By now, the PCs might have learned enough to know that the Baku is not the real threat here. Rather, it comes from the Pale Monk haunting the dreams of Taneguchi, the representation of the Pale Prince. Or they might play right into the Prince’s hands and attempt to defeat the creature, clearing a path for the Sutra to capture more recruits. Whatever they decide, there is a good chance they will have to use signs and magics learned from the Sutra itself to do battle in the Final Encounter. The scenario introduces mechanics by which they can spend Magic Points to summon useful items or weapons to help them, but their opponents can do the same or worse. The Baku can fully transform the dreamscape allowing it easier access to Taneguchi, which is all it wants. It wants to gorge itself on the old man’s Sutra-ridden mind. If the Investigators allow that to happen, it is one of the best endings you can achieve, leaving Taneguchi in a state of extreme dementia, but freeing the town of the Prince’s influence.

Endings

Note that the endings presented here and in later scenarios are labeled and numbered, as is common for indie scenarios in Japan. This enables players to tell others how their game went on social media while avoiding spoilers for everyone else.

I understand this concept and the reason for it. But I don’t particularly enjoy the implication that you can’t have your game end any other way than one of the six potential endings provided here. I am not going to judge it without playing it out, but I will say they are described in terms of one ending being a “failure” and others being “Bad Ending,” “Good Ending,” and “Best Ending.” Of course, these are value judgements. Just because you TPK, doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad ending for your party, and, to be fair, the text does describe this one as “something of an achievement.”

The inclusion of “Optional Post-credit Scenes” is interesting too. These each present a little vignette of how the Investigators might have changed reality during their adventure through dreams. It explains that they work better if the scenario was run as a one-shot but that they might just serve to show the sheer power of the Sutra over reality.

Conclusion

This feels like a great scenario to start off this campaign dealing with the Prince of Pale Leaves as the antagonist. It immediately introduces the players to the idea that this is a being that exists in the mind of others and is spread through the dissemination of the Sutra, or it should. I can’t say for sure if it does it effectively without playing it. Overall, I like the structure, which is designed to keep the Keeper on track, no matter which way the players decide to go from one scene to the next. I do find the extreme levels of detail in the NPC encounters a little unnecessary. I still think it’s possible to summarise a character’s personality and the things they know in a much shorter manner, that would work just as well, if not better.

I think it’s interesting that each of the scenarios is styled as being possible to run as a one-shot but I can see Dream Eater’s potential in the context of the greater campaign. I’m looking forward to reading the next one, Fanfic, where the APL hatches a plan to recreate the Sutra as an action manga.

Sleighed

You might remember a few weeks ago… I reviewed Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs. Well, the disclaimer on that review, that I had not played or run it is no longer valid.

Nun too soon for an update

Just a short one this week, dear reader.

You might remember a few weeks ago, for my Halloween post, I reviewed Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs. Well, the disclaimer on that review, that I had not played or run it is no longer valid. Sister Majid, the Misstep Monastic (a type of nun) and Lee Tuluk, the Scud Miller (meat grinder) formed an unlikely friendship through a misallocated cabin and a game of chance and before you know it they were investigating a murder!

We played one session on Halloween and just finished it up last night. It took about six hours altogether, although there was some time spent on character creation in the first session.

Take a butcher’s at this!

Here are some things I loved about running this adventure:

The new backgrounds are great. Most of them are really far out there but the two that my players chose were obviously quite mundane. They still had some incredible Advanced Skills that got milked for all they were worth. Somehow, our nun used “Reconcile God’s Glory with the Failings of Mortals” constantly. Meanwhile, the Scud Miller managed to use “Fix Anything, Not Necessarily Well, Even with the Wrong Tools” on everything, including relationships. Use the backgrounds if you’re going to play this.
It’s so easy to prepare and run. The keyed descriptions are short enough to easily use on the fly, the premise of the adventure is straight-forward and there are only a couple of unavoidable events that are not difficult to get to grips with. I read it through once, fully, and then reviewed particular sections such as basics of the adventure and the murders before actually running it. It doesn’t take long to do this; its a svelte little scenario.
I really got into describing the aftermaths of the murders and the effects they had on the crew and other NPCs. As rumours spread I had nuns moving in pods and whispering about terrible occurences while blessing themselves, while the porters and mates dealt with grief at the passing of their colleague. Upon the discovery of the second victim, the security guards were puking in corners and staring blankly at blood-soaked toilet stalls. The creature has a silly name, which my players refused to say right, but the murders are gruesome and horrific. It felt important to play into that.
The map of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride. We used this work of art throughout. It was so useful to help the players orient themselves on the hovercraft and it was a genuine pleasure to refer to it. Its beautiful.
The Weather table. I got the players to roll for weather right before the final encounter and they rolled us up a storm. The ship was forced to drop its robotic anchors and ride it out just after the second murder. They figured out who the murderer was and that they were outside on the Observation Deck. What a setup for the final showdown. It was poetic.

A victim, missing its maxilla in a toilet stall. The Maxillary Uslurper in the air vent above. — Aftermath

Conclusion

Dear reader, I would highly recommend you take the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on a trip to Plankton Downs. If you have a couple of evenings to spare and a couple of friends who might enjoy a who-nunnit, as it were, you could do a lot worse. It’s not your typical Troika fare but I am beginning to think there may not be such a thing. You will have horror, you will have laughs and you will definitely have fun.

Call of Cthulhu: The Derelict Review

[My players] didn’t find the book of norse legends, the handwritten notes that presented possible ways to defeat the Sciapod, the silver items that would allow people to actually see the creature, etc, etc.

Two-part One-shot

SPOLIERS BELOW, ME HEARTIES! Turn back now if you want to be a player in the Derelict!

You know how it is, dear reader, when you board your luxury yacht and expect to make excellent time crossing the North Atlantic? And then you start to run into complications? Almost everyone gets drunk, you come across a seemingly abandoned reefer ship washed up on an iceberg, you decide to explore the possibility of rescuing anyone from it or maybe even salvaging it for vast profits, you board it and find its covered in blood and the controls have been deliberately sabotaged, you’re hunted by a towering monstrosity with a crystalline bow and only one weird leg, which is visible only to about half of your number, your own yacht’s controls are smashed to bits and the captain is eviscerated and several of your number begin to lose their grip on sanity?

Of course you do! Anyway, when I write it out like that, quite a lot did happen in the first session of the Derelict. It took so long, in fact, that we had to stretch it to two. We played it out in about five hours in total, I’d say, but there was plenty left undone as far as this scenario goes. You could easily stretch it out to three sessions of three hours each, I’d say.

The Scenario

A busted up dining room on the Groenland Tropisch. — What a mess!

In this post from about a month ago I introduced the premise of the Call of Cthulhu scenario I ran as part of our Tables & Tales October Event, during which we ran a bunch of horror/spooky/halloween themed games especially for our newbies. Today, I’m going to look at how it went and how I think it could have gone better.

The Derelict is a 28 page adventure for Call of Cthulhu. It appears in Petersen’s Abominations, published in 2015 by Chaosium. It was written by Sandy Petersen with Mike Mason.

It seems Petersen got the idea for this adventure while reading about Viking explorers and this particular encounter that was described quite matter-of-factly as a Sciapod, a one-legged creature with a crystal bow. The conceit is that such creatures were not necessarily taken as supernatural by people of by-gone ages so the encounter was recorded as a relatively mundane occurrence. I like that this theme jibes with Zedeck Siew’s observations about the attitude many Malaysians would have to signs of the Pontianak in his scenario, A Perfect Wife, as well as my own personal experience of growing up in Ireland. Of course, when the Investigators encounter the Sciapod in the Derelict, they are not likely to react the same way at all.

The portrait of Siren/Lori Washington, a femme presenting person with long dark hair and a bright dangling earring in one ear. — Siren/Lori Washinton

The Derelict was clearly designed as a one-shot or very short campaign. It would be hard to work it into an ongoing campaign, I think, given the rarefied circumstances and setting, so if you want to run it, I would suggest taking it at face value and go for something short and self-contained. I would also recommend using the pre-generated characters. They are all rich/famous arseholes of one stripe or another. You know, the type of people you would expect to have on a luxury yacht. But they also have their own motives, some are having money troubles, some are looking for sponsors, some are party animals, that sort of thing. They are relatively well painted and designed to be easy to pick up and play. There is a second option presented in the scenario: the PCs could be members of a rescue team sent to investigate the Derelict, but this option lacks the horror movie energy you get from the rich yachters, in my opinion.

The formatting is useable and fairly presentable. It starts with the intro and a brief description of our cast of characters before a short section on Starting the Scenario, under which we also get a useful Sequence of Events. I say “useful,” but my players exited the sequence pretty quickly and I was forced to improvise liberally from that point on.

The bulk of the scenario is taken up with descriptions of the main areas of the Derelict ship and the iceberg it’s stuck on. It does go into a fair amount of detail even about the areas that are of little or no interest. It will tell you where to find the clues and items of interest within these descriptions. This is the greatest weakness of the adventure, to be honest. My players spent almost no time exploring the ship. They were incredibly goal oriented, going to Engineering to find things to help them fix their own boat and to the radio room for a way to contact someone. So, they didn’t find the book of norse legends, the handwritten notes that presented possible ways to defeat the Sciapod, the silver items that would allow people to actually see the creature, etc, etc. I wish I had started just transplanting some of the more important clues and things to the rooms they did explore earlier. In the end, I did do that but we had played the bulk of the game by then.

It has some great maps and illustrations throughout. The maps of both boats were particularly useful. We were playing on Roll20. So I used the maps a lot. In the first session I used fog of war on the map of the Derelict, but I found this led to too much player confusion about the location of everything and too much time spent by me on descriptions. It was supposed to be a one-shot! So, in the second session I turned off fog of war under the pretence that they found a full map in Engineering. That made things a lot easier. The players were able to see where they might want to explore and they started to do that.

One of the strengths of this scenario is that, even though it provides you with a sequence of events, it encourages you to play it quite free-form. Simply allow the PCs to look around, discovering clues as to what happened here and maybe how to defeat the monster, and then start picking off characters with the Sciapod as they go, NPCs first. They’ll start getting injured and insane and the scenario should blossom from that. In many ways, this is what led to our game going quickly off the rails. The sequence of events expects the players to start trying to find ways to kill or drive off the Sciapod but that’s not what happened at all. As I started to kill them off and ship away at their sanity, they began to look only for alternative ways of escape. But, of course, along the way they saw some some pretty disturbing things and one of them lost the plot completely, going full axe-murderer before eventually getting it together while they all bundled into the last remaining lifeboat. Except for looking for firearms on board, they never considered finding a way to kill it. And, of course, this was great! I loved it and the players had fun. But I will admit to, at times, trying to get them to take the route that was expected of them. I think I would have had more fun if I had lust loosened my grip on the reins a bit more.

Still, if your players do get so far as to start coming up with ways to beat the bad guy, there is a useful section at the end of the scenario devoted to potential plans that they might come up with, using lots of things my player never even discovered. They could use the CO2 stores, the bulldozer or forklift that was in the hold, etc.

The Appendix

The Sciapod. A bluish tinged, armoured humanoid with only one thick leg, which ends in a wide, umbrella-like foot with claws all around the outside of it. it holds a crystaline bow and has a single green glowing eye. — Hawkeye? You’ve changed.

In the Appendix, you get stats for the two NPCs and the Sciapod itself.

The NPC stats could be particularly useful if a player loses their PC early and they need a replacement. This did happen in my game but only after both NPCs were already dead so it didn’t help.

When it comes to stats for the Sciapod, I don’t think it should matter really. It is designed to be undefeatable by normal means. The PCs are supposed to have to come up with some big, brash, loud plan to kill it, after all. But there are elements to the creature that are of real interest. For instance, it is visible only to those who have silver touching skin for some reason. This proved to be a weird and scary element of the PCs encounters with the monster. It directly led to the death of one of them but it is a strange addition to the abilities of what is already an odd adversary. It is utterly silent too, and it wields this weird crystalline bow with enormous glass like arrows. This last bit feels very un-Cthulhu to me. It adds more of a D&D flavour to this monster but it did allow it to attack from a distance, which I made use of. This led to two memorable moments of gameplay, in fact. First, our pop-star character, Siren stood on the deck and had a showdown with the Sciapod, she with her little .22 pistol and it with its giant glass bow. Second, the creature launched one of its enormous arrows into the hull of the lifeboat they were escaping on right at the end, ushering in their deaths and the end of the game.

Conclusion

This was a fun one-shot/two-shot. It had great pre-generated characters and a fascinating premise and setting. (Although I have to stop running one-shots on boats. Apparently its become a trend…) But I question whether the monster that’s central to it is really Cthulhu-mythosy enough. It’s strange but not necessarily horrific in and of itself. Also, the adventure involved a lot of prep for something that could be designed to be run with little or no preparation. But you have to read the descriptions to familiarise yourself with the setting, the clues, the origin stories, hidden history etc, etc. and that all takes time.

Kanabo

The best part of the whole How to Play section is the list of Best Practices…We have gems like, “Ask questions. Take Notes. Draw diagrams. Write in pen” and “Fight unfairly. Lay ambushes. Hit below the belt. Run away.” And familiar old favourites like “Play to find out what happens, and how it happens” and “Strive for victory, but revel in your defeats.”

Waku Waku

Dear reader, my excitement is threatening to overwhelm me. As some of you may know, I studied Japanese in university and lived and worked in Japan for about three years in total. It’s hard to put into words exactly how I feel knowing that, this weekend (probably yesterday by the time I publish this post), I’ll be going to see the Ireland vs Japan rugby match in Dublin and next weekend I’ll be finally going back to Japan for the first time in eight years! I think the right word is probably　わくわく (waku waku, loosely translated as excited.)

Anyway, as a build up to that, I thought I would look at an RPG based on a Japanese historical period.

Kanabo: Fantasy Role-Playing Adventure in Tokugawa-Era Japan

A Kanabo is a Japanese weapon, a long metal club, adorned with spikes or studs. The game, Kanabo by N Masyk, is an RPG published by Monkey’s Paw Games. It comes in the form of three neat booklets, Volume 1, Characters, Volume 2, Chroniclers and Volume 3, Adventure. It was gifted to me by friends and all round good eggs, Tom and Isaac several years ago. I can’t remember which year exactly and I don’t see a publication date on any of the booklets so I am going to guess and say it was sometime between 2020 and 2022.

These booklets truly are only wee. The longest of them is 21 pages of A5. But they pack a lot into each one.

Volume 1, Characters

This booklet, as is the case for each one, begins with the credits. N Masyk did the words and the layout, “Dead People” did the artwork and the Hexmap uses the Highland Paranormal Society Cartography Kit, by Nate Treme. Finally, consulting was done by James Mendez Hodes. I think you will notice a peculiarly Western bent to the people associated with this project, other than the Dead People who are all Japanese (by the looks of their artistic styles) but remain conspicuously unnamed.

It starts off with an intro section that explains briefly what the game is about and suggests the use of safety tools such as Lines and Veils and the X Card. The “What is this?” section tells us that this is a game set in the Tokugawa period of Japanese history. It informs us that this is the time after the Warring States Period when the country is united but many wandering Travelers are abroad, “seeking fame, fortune, justice, revenge, or simply the freedom to roam.” That’s the PCs! I like this as a time period and setting. The Tokugawa era was long, more than 250 years. It was a time when Japan was cut off from the rest of the world, guarded its coast jealously and avoided the great changes that engulfed the other regions during the same time. The role of the Samurai was slowly being eroded, nobles were forced to pilgrimage from their lands to the capital under their own expense to keep them in line, the Shogun ruled the land and Japanese culture deepened. But I also like that there is a paragraph here on historical accuracy. Masyk takes pains to explain that, despite the potential realities of the place and time, as players of a game, we must strive to be inclusive before being accurate. Japan of this time was a place of terrible inequality, Kanabo at the table does not have to be.

The introduction section is reprinted in Volume 2, Chroniclers and Volume 3, Adventure. I wonder, in a set of booklets of such limited page-count, if this was necessary. Perhaps it was felt that the Characters booklet, meant largely for the players, and the Chroniclers booklet, meant only for the Chronicler had to both have it to refer back to regularly, but I would question that, especially as the Adventure booklet is also meant for the Chronicler exclusively. Maybe its so the kid who finds one of these booklets all on its own, tucked into a box in the dark reaches of a secondhand bookshop thirty years from now, knows what it is they’ve found.

Stats

The Stats section actually introduces the entire character creation process. Stats themselves are only one part of that. You roll 2d10+20 for each stat, for a maximum of 40.

I was expecting this ruleset to be a D&D clone or maybe an Odd-like but I was surprised to discover this is a percentile system. When you want to do something you roll a d100 and hope for a result equal to or under the stat you are rolling on. You will notice that this makes it necessary to roll really rather low to succeed, but there are several ways to gain a +10 to your rolls, such as using the right piece of equipment, possessing just the right skill, spending a filled segment of your Fate Clock or, in battle, gaining Advantage. There are three specific ways to accumulate +10s in a battle. If you want to disengage from combat safely, you can expend all of them and do so.

The Stats themselves are incredibly and deliberately abstract:

Fire: confrontation, aggression, force
Water: tranquility, inquisitiveness, exploration
Earth: stoicism, calculation, discipline
Wind: intuition, reflection, grace

As such, there is a lot of potential leeway in the decision on which stat to roll in any given situation. I like this sort of thing. I imagine Blades in the Dark style negotiations occurring as to how they might work out in play. However, I struggle a little with the whimsicality of the naming convention. It has a sort of mah-jong flavour to it, I’ll admit, which is not, in itself a bad thing. But, if you were to choose particular Chinese characters from the available mah-jong tiles, there are others that really describe human traits that might work better. I am thinking of things like 力, chikara (strength,) 心, kokoro (heart) etc. The use of the four elements makes it feel a little more like Avatar than any of the sword-fighting movies that inspired this game. It is a stylistic choice, though, and I’m sure it would work just fine at the table.

There are other elements to character creation, of course. Some of them remind me, quite delightfully of making a DCC character. Others have an Into the Odd feeling which I enjoy.

You can roll for your Chinese Zodiac sign. Whatever sign you roll, you can take it and apply a +5 to a stat that you think it reflects positively on. It would have been fun to have to apply a -5 to a different stat in this step I think.

When you roll on the Birthplace table, you will get somewhere like “Fishing Village,” “Hill Fort,” or even “Haunted Ruin.” Depending on what you get here, you will start with a different piece of equipment, such as a “fishing rod,” “spear,” or “lucky charm.”

Next up you roll on the Career table, which will give you another piece of equipment. Soldiers start with a matchlock pistol but Farmers only get a straw hat!

Your birthplace and career also allow you to list two things you know about or are skilled in. These can give you +10 to rolls in certain situations.

By rolling on the Curio table you might find yourself starting with a lucky cricket, a mask or maybe some rice balls. Each curio comes with a question that might help to round out your character.

After this you have a bunch of tables that will help you describe your PC. You have Mannerisms, Clothes, Face, Names etc. There should be plenty here to give you a very clear picture of your Traveler.

How to Play

This section lays out the rules quite economically. I’ve given you the basics already and there isn’t too much more to them than that, which is great.

There is a PBTA element to the rolls. You only roll when there is some risk, of course, but if you succeed, you do so without consequence. If you fail, you can still succeed, but with consequences. In combat, this means that you trade harm.

Kanabo character sheet on the back of the Characters booklet. There are spaces for Name, stats, zodia, career, birthplace, curio, description, Knowledge & Skills, Inventory, Wounds and a Fate clock split into eight wedges. — Kanabo Character Sheet

You get a Fate Clock on your character sheet. It has eight segments, which you will be filling and erasing as you gain and spend them. You gain a segment whenever you roll doubles on a d100 roll. I choose to interpret this as 11, 22, 33 etc. You can choose to erase a segment to give yourself +10 to a roll, prevent 1 Harm, recover 1d10 wounds or survive past your 5th wound. It’s a bit like stress in Blades in the Dark, a superpower that these Travelers have that allows them to contend against terrible odds and powerful forces.

Some few paragraphs are devoted to the idea of Travel. Kanabo assumes you will be hex-crawling and lays out the rules for that in relation to time, encounters, foraging, rest & healing etc. This is presented in a way that is player friendly and does not blind anyone with science. I appreciate it.

Character Advancement gets one very short section. Characters can choose one of two options at the end of each session, “increase a stat by 1” or “write down a new skill or piece of knowledge.” It’s neat and lacks frills. No room for confusion at all.

The booklet is rounded off with sections on hiring help, common equipment and refreshments. They are presented in several short and entirely non-exhaustive lists that are merely starting points for the interested player to do some research on what stuff might have been available in Tokugawa-era Japan.

The best part of the whole How to Play section is the list of Best Practices. Many of these will be familiar to the those of you who have been reading my series on Blades in the Dark recently. We have gems like, “Ask questions. Take Notes. Draw diagrams. Write in pen” and “Fight unfairly. Lay ambushes. Hit below the belt. Run away.” And familiar old favourites like “Play to find out what happens, and how it happens” and “Strive for victory, but revel in your defeats.”

Volume 2, Chroniclers

After the repeated intro section we get straight into a section on how to run the game. Let me reproduce here the entirety of that section:

You control the world around the Travelers and the people within in, and the places they have built for themselves. Fill that world with adventure, danger and magic.
There are no further words by witch I might describe or prepare you for the journey ahead.
The contents of this tome, much like the contents of the Universe, are mostly lies.

I think this is probably one of the most uniquely unhelpful such sections I have ever read. I understand that the author is trying for poetry instead of boring old instruction, but it reads as though they want you to think there is no advice that might help a prospective Chronicler. There is something to be said for the idea that a GM/referee/judge/whatever should trust their instincts, but it is certainly not always true. Also, there is an enormous wealth of real advice out there, both in printed books and for free on the internet. I understand the author had limited room here, so, perhaps they could have directed the newbie GM to the blogosphere, or a particular publication that they thought aligned with their own design ethos.

Anyway, as soon as they have described everything in the “tome” as lies, they go on to provide guidance on how to run the game… and it’s useful! It’s practical and answers the sorts of questions that would definitely come up at the table when playing Kanabo! Things like discussing the possible consequences of rolls before making them, determining the effectiveness of successes etc. So, my main takeaway from all this is don’t believe the bit that tells you its lying to you…

There are a couple of pages here devoted to describing very Japanese-themed encounters, we have Kappa, Oni, Kitsune etc, without ever using those words. I like the pared down descriptions and the minimal stats presented, and I can see the idea of removing the Japanese names so as to allow a Chronicler to set their game of Kanabo in a non-Japanese context. Or maybe it’s done to for localisation purposes. I don’t know really, but, personally, I would prefer to use the Japanese names. It feels wrong to me to do otherwise.

Hexcrawl section from Chroniclers booklet. There are several landmark and terrain tables and the top half of a hex rose here. — Hexcrawl

I think another very interesting element to this game is that, despite its semi-PBTA roots, you are expected to run it Old School. We have Weather tables, advice on rolling for encounters, an encounter reaction table and a whole bunch of tables to help you build your once-a-session hex map. These are, honestly, great. They are extremely practical and useful with lots of tables of landmarks for a variety of terrain types from Grassland to Hamlet. There are more tables for Factions, Communities, and Adventure Sites that would allow a Chronicler to build an engaging monster-of-the-week-style adventure with little to no prep required.

But, the advice for doing all this is limited within the booklet itself. The third of the the three booklets, however, serves to illustrate how it should work!

Volume 3, Adventure

This one if incredibly short, only eight pages, two of which have the intro again. After that, we get a bunch of ten point lists, which come together to create Peach Trees Village. The list of Locals describes each one in a single line, provides a piece of their dialogue and outlines an adventure hook. Here’s the first one:

Asuka. A farmer. So forgetful; “did my apprentice bring the cattle in?” Needs someone to go check. Something’s been at the cattle.

I love this way of presenting information. It’s incredibly efficient and is just enough to spark the imagination. You get something similar from the Shops and the Rumours lists.

Next, we have The Surrounding Wilderness section. This kicks off with a hex rose, already filled in to give the Chronicler an idea of how it’s done. Each of the 19 hexes is described in a similar way to the Locals above. Here’s no. 10:

Frozen wood. Snow-blanketed trees. A dead mile where nothing grows. Strange lights at night. What is causing the lights?

Once again, it’s just enough to spark the imaginations of both Chronicler and Travelers to perhaps pursue the mystery of the lights in the woods, without bogging you down with established fiction.

A “Searching, you find…” D100 table rounds this adventure booklet out.

Conclusion

All in all, I think this little RPG punches above its weight. I question some of the choices made regarding naming conventions, use of space and GM advice but otherwise, I am quietly impressed. I would like to try running it, but it will have to wait till after my own adventure in Japan!

Pirate Borg: The Repentant Review

To be clear, the ship is the whole adventure. You could easily work it into an ongoing campaign, I think. It could be a random encounter or the goal of a mission. But, for me, it worked perfectly as a one-shot. It gives you everything you need in those eleven pages.

Talk Like a Pirate Delay

I was really excited about this year’s Second Annual Tables and Tales Talk Like a Pirate Day Pirate Borg One Shot on September 19th but I was, unfortunately, overcome by some malady that day. We postponed it only to have a massive storm roll in off the Atlantic, forcing us to delay the departure of this vessel yet again. Finally, last Sunday the players’ pirates were ready to board the Repentant come hell or high water…

OK, I say they boarded it but it would be more correct to say they were taken aboard. I started them off in the expanded brig, area 1 on the map of the ship. They awoke, captured, stinking and hurting and minus all their stuff. Nevertheless, with a few improvised weapons they found lying around the cabin and the assistance of a skeleton thrall raised by the skeletal sorcerer, they managed to overpower their demon guard. This was the first of many obstacles to their defeat of the Ashen Priest commanding the ship and taking the Repentant for themselves.

The Scenario

The cover of Cabin Fever, a skeletal pirate with a tricorn hat and the words "Cabin Fever" erupting in fire from his eyesockets — The cover of Cabin Fever

The Repentant is an 11 page one-shot scenario for Pirate Borg by Zac Goins. It is published in the forthcoming sourcebook for that game, Cabin Fever, via KNOWN CONSPIRATORS, Limithron’s subtable for third-party creators. Cabin Fever is a treasure chest of extras for Pirate Borg including new PC classes, GM tools, a Bestiary, no fewer than six adventures as well as solo rules. I am one of the backers of the Kickstarter project so I got access to the PDF through that. I’m hoping to receive the physical rewards for that soon.

This scenario is presented in a typical Borg-ish style, with maps, and illustrations taking the lead in establishing the atmosphere. It’s almost all in grey and black, emphasising the theme of ASH. The layout is also typical with lots of tables, stat-blocks, keyed area descriptions etc being worked into the spaces between and around the artwork. I occasionally had to take a few extra seconds to find what I was looking for due to this but it was never a major disruption. In general it looks great and ewers relatively easy to use.

The Premise

The Repentant is a charnel ship, an unkempt brigantine with tattered sails and a crew of demons and cultists, commanded by a cadre of Ashen Clergy. Their goal is spelled out clearly in the three step plan on the second page. In summary, the plan is to summon demons, form an unholy pact with the Dark One, raid some settlements to take captives, kill ‘em, raise them as undead and then grind them up to make Brimstone ASH. This is a type of cursed and arcane narcotic on which the crew plan to make lots and lots of pieces of eight.

The Reality

There is a fun variety of enemies for such a short scenario. You have seven different types of possible demon (one for each deadly sin, with commensurate sinful powers,) the emaciated crew, the Ashen Vicars and the Ashen Priest who has a variety of fun powers. And if you deal with all those, there is a hold full of Brimstone Zombies, who have the power to promise your soul to the Dark One with a bite.

Although not every encounter ended in combat, almost all did. It felt inevitable in general. I started the players off where I did, in the brig because of the restrictions of a one-shot session. I wanted them in the thick of it from the start and escape gave them a powerful motivation to attack the terrifying demon, even without real weapons. Also, I figured the brig is area 1 on the map for a reason. The scenario does not explicitly indicate where or how you should start it as a one-shot, but if you take the hint, here, you’re probably not going to go wrong. It definitely got them into the action immediately. Without the timely and repeated use of Devil’s Luck and mystical powers in the first two encounters, at least one of the party would have gone down. The only thing is that it led to two mostly combat encounters in quick succession. Starting with them boarding over the rails or some other way might have engendered a totally different kind of adventure.

The map was fine. I was a little put off that three of the four decks had one side of the map cut off but it was of no practical disadvantage in play.

Tables, tables, tables. The tables are great, from the effects of the Brimstone ASH (different to the regular ASH introduced in Pirate Borg) to the “What did I just step in?” Table which I underused criminally.

My players only used the Brimstone ASH on their enemies, which was a shame. I think it’s because when they rolled on the table for those uses, they got 1s and 2s, which are very very bad. After I told them what else was on the table, they regretted not trying it!

6 The Devil’s inside ye. Immune to fire. All weapons’ dice size increases.

The Finale

The ASH grinder. Looks like a meat grinder, with a big funnel on top, a mincer on one side and a cranking wheel on the other. Has steps up to allow you the zombies to feed themselves into it. — The ASH grinder.

I saved the Ashen Priest, the scenario’s main villain, for the end. He might have been found in either the captain’s quarters or the hold, according to the keyed locations, but, honestly, you could locate him anywhere to suit your own game. The PCs had done away with almost everyone else aboard when they descended into the cargo hold found him there, feeding zombies into the ASH Grinder. There were a lot of undead down there with him but the PCs made such short work of him that it hardly mattered. Then they got to take the ship as plunder, not to mention the undead and the grinder so they could enact the plan themselves!

Conclusion

This was one of the most well-crafted one-shot scenarios I’ve run. We played it in about three and a half hours, though, if things had gone badly, it might have been over after less than an hour! I did give them a couple of NPCs for back-up and in case anyone lost their first PC (there were two deaths.) This might have given them a slight advantage, if I’m honest, but everyone had a good time. Looking forward to trying out some more scenarios from Cabin Fever and the rest of the slew of new books from Limithron!

Dragon Age RPG: Amber Rage Review

So, off they went, following a magic raven, through the rain and the swamp, fording rivers, defeating enemies and stabling horses, until they got to the appointed place and the raven dropped dead.

Blood in Ferelden

There have not been a lot of supplements for the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. Other than a quickstart guide, a GM’s Kit and Faces of Thedas, a sourcebook filled with fan-favorite characters from the video game series, Blood in Ferelden is pretty much it. It’s a collection of adventures designed by Walt Ciechanowski, Kevin Kulp, T.S. Luikart and it came out in 2010. It contains three full scenarios and a few adventure seeds all of which take place in and showcase various regions of the land that played host to Dragon Age Origins.

It came out at a time before the Dragon Age core book collected all the rules from Dragon Age boxed sets 1, 2 and 3. Dragon Age set 1 only dealt with levels 1-5 and, indeed, Blood in Ferelden’s adventures are designed to get characters from 1st to 5th level.

I discussed another published adventure, Duty Unto Death previously. That was the first Dragon Age adventure I ran for my group and it assumed the PCs started at level 3. So that’s what we did. Not only that, but they progressed to level 4 and became fully fledged Grey Wardens before we moved on to the first adventure from Blood in Ferelden, Amber Rage. I made only a few adjustments to Target Numbers (like DCs in D&D) and enemy stats to increase the difficulty. Despite this, this level 1 adventure proved quite challenging enough at times.

SPOILER ALERT! This review is absolutely packed with spoilers. Turn back now, potential players!

Overview

Amber Rage is a 39 page adventure. It’s split into six distinct parts, each of which presents its own unique challenges for the PCs, a variety of enemies, NPCs and moral dilemmas for them to wrestle with. All of these are of varying quality.

Here’s the summary: The PCs find themselves in Sothmere, a village near the Korcari Wilds. Our group of newly minted Grey Wardens had been sent south by Duncan, their commander, to determine the strength of the Darkspawn force amassing in the south, preparing for the Fifth Blight. Sothmere was just a pitstop for them. There was a festival happening there to celebrate the building of a new fort, which gave the PCs a chance to take part in some axe-throwing, mud-wrestling, archery competition mini-games. While this was going on, the village was attacked by a band of crazed Chasind stalkers. These lads had been infected with the eponymous Amber Rage and were spreading it all over town. If no-one did anything about it, all the infected villagers were going to transform into mindless Ragers in three days! After some debate amongst the NPCs, it was decided that the Grey Wardens should go and find an ingredient in a grotto in the Korcari Wilds. This shadowmoss could be used to cure the infected.

So, off they went, following a magic raven, through the rain and the swamp, fording rivers, defeating enemies and stabling horses, until they got to the appointed place and the raven dropped dead. There they boiled up a stew and this attracted the firesprites. These guys lived in the grotto of the shadowmoss, so the PCs followed them home. Kind of creepy, when you think about it. Not only that, but they then went ahead and murdered the firesprites’ Guardian Serpent. I mean, the serpent didn’t leave them much choice, but they were invading its home after all. The real problem with this, as the wardens discovered in a sort of psychic vision provided by the firesprites later, was that the firesprites consumed the shadowmoss for sustenance, and the Serpent, ahem, excreted the shadowmoss. So, with the serpent dead, if the PCs collected all the shadowmoss they would need to cure the infected, they would be condemning the firesprites to starvation and extinction. But if they left them with the shadowmoss they had, that would give them enough time for a new Guardian Serpent to mature (this weird symbiotic arrangement was further compounded but the revelation that one of the firesprites would transform into the Serpent itself!) This was the central moral conundrum of the scenario, save the villagers or allow the firesprites to live.

The blackhaller and the burning of the villagers

Once this decision was made, they had to make their way back to Sothmere where a local judge, known as a blackhaller, had been helicoptered in to force the issue of the infected villagers. As the PCs got back to Sothmere, they had the sick ones tied to stakes, ready to be barbecued. The PCs had to make another big decision here, and, perhaps, try to convince the blackhaller to back down.

Thus ends the adventure. I skipped over some middle bits, but that is the essence of it.

Layout, artwork and maps

The layout of this thing is kind of all over the place. There are NPC descriptions separated from their stat blocks by entire pages in some instances. There are some which have the stat blocks of one NPC associated with the description of another, making it really hard to find what you need in a pinch. It’s the same with the enemy stat blocks, which are sometimes so far removed from the encounter descriptions as to make them seem as though they belong to another encounter altogether. I think one of the problems here is the massive parcels of real estate demanded by the standard Dragon Age RPG stat blocks, which presents some serious layout headaches. I had to do a lot of prep to make sure I had all of the relevant info and stat blocks on hand for any given encounter, social or combat.

The splitting of the adventure into parts, like chapters in a novel, was something I found useful. I tried to aim for completing one part each session. In the end, it did take 6 sessions to complete it.

The artwork is nice, although much of it was clearly supposed to be full colour but was presented in black and white, which was a shame.

Southron Hills map — Shadowmoss Grotto Map

The maps are great. I really liked the small regional map and the one of the grotto. I used both at the table, revealing parts of the grotto map to the players as they discovered more of it.

Decisions, Decisions

Dragon Age is built upon difficult decisions, choices that matter and have lasting consequences and you can see that’s what the writers are trying to present as the frame that Amber Rage is built on. Should they allow the little boy be killed by ragers, or his sister? Should they kill the leatherworker who’s been infected but hasn’t turned yet, or should they give him their brew that slows the infection, endangering themselves? And, ultimately, should they condemn the firesprites to extinction or save the villagers?

Josef the Leatherworker - poor bastard — Josef the Leatherworker – poor bastard

Now, this is an adventure that is written with some trad sensibilities. There are long paragraphs that examine each and every option available to the PCs in any given situation (or so the designers thought.) It presents you with the sorts of ability tests the PCs will need to make, their target numbers, the modifiers applied due to darkness or marshiness or stinkyness etc, etc. But, in almost every situation, my PCs found another alternative. They saved both children by the clever application of (checks notes) ranged weapons, They debated over the fate of the leatherworker so long that he turned Rager while they were still talking, and the shadowmoss problem? Well, they took the long view, what if they stole all the shadowmoss, killing all the firesprites in the process, and saved the villagers, but then there was another infection later and there was no Shadowmoss to help them? So they said, screw you Sothmere, we’ll only bring enough of this shit back to cure one individual fucking villager and then leave you to decide who should get it! The firesprites were happy, but no-one else was.

What particularly annoyed me about the text was this, it assumes that the party would choose to take the Shadowmoss. Almost all of the events described after the grotto involve the “fact” that they have a potential cure for the Amber Rage and others want it or others don’t want it used or something along those lines. So, those were largely useless to me. At least this allowed me to cut out swathes of what was always going to be the least interesting portion of the adventure, the trip back to town, which was staged as a series of encounters. There is a box on one page entitled, “Sustaining Drama and Varying Beats on the Journey Back.” The text in this is there to advise you to switch things up and vary the encounters because otherwise they might seem a bit samey… Could have just left them out, in my humble opinion.

They also present a number of NPCs that are either sympathetic or not, though. I can’t imagine anyone really liking Bogdan, the blacksmith, or even agreeing with him, in fact. Everyone is going to like the personable and honourable Sherrif Milo, though. So, when the players are asked to choose between the two, it’s no choice at all.

Some of the more sympathetic NPCs were the elven performers, the brother and sister duo, Oleg and Dielza. Our very own elven Grey Warden, Halvari, developed a closeness to them early on, so when Oleg was infected and Dielza was not, she promised to save him… But of course, in the end, she couldn’t. She had had to send over the single portion of shadowmoss and the good people of Sothmere were never going to cure the elf with it, so Halvari was left with no choice but to take Ole’g life before he turned and before the villagers could burn him. This was a truly sad moment that was always a possibility in the text but which was brought alive by the player in some outstanding role-play.

Conclusion

I loved the set-up for this, the festival, the mini-games (I forgot to mention a drinking mini-game from later in the adventure that was also very fun,) the moral dilemmas. But, throughout, I found myself wishing to be freed of the constraints of the text. I wanted to have been presented with the overall situation, the NPCs and some potential encounters and locations, and then let the PCs just go and figure it out. I guess I have been playing a lot of OSR recently, and it’s had an effect on my brain. In my thinking though, this would have solved the problem of the designers assuming the decisions the PCs would make, that I pointed out above.

I also don’t feel like it was quite Dragon Agey enough. It was missing abominating mages, darkspawn, spirits and demons. It could have been set in almost any generic fantasy setting without making almost any changes.

Finally, our crew of fourth level grey wardens had a very tough time with some of the only slightly upgraded combat encounters. They were lucky to have survived the evil giant crab attack and don’t even mention the marsh wolves, the mage went down twice… Actual 1st level characters would have been completely buggered, in my opinion.

Despite all my gripes with this adventure, we had a great time with it. This had a lot more to do with the fantastic bunch of Tables and Tales members and Dragon Age fans we’ve gathered, who have gotten into the game, the system, the stunts and the potential for heartache, than it had to do with the scenario itself.

My advice, dear reader, is, if you’re still interested in running this adventure, go through each part of it and prepare it your own way first. Think of potential consequences for decisions the PCs might make that the text does not prepare for, and feel free to cut out large parts of the journey back to the village.

Troika! Whalgravaak’s Warehouse Review

Here’s the story: hundreds of years ago, the city’s premier logistics wizard, Whalgravaak, abandoned his warehouse, having shredded the Manual of Operations for his Sphere Pool (a mechanism used to import and export goods across the cosmos) so that his rivals could never figure it out.

One-shot fun-shot to campaign of terror

You know what it’s like, dear reader: you want to introduce some noobs to RPGs or just to your group of players, you want to make a good impression but you don’t want to scare them off by plunging them into a multi-session campaign with a complicated, crunchy system. So you pick up a location-based adventure, thinking you can just use a small portion of it, just what you need, just enough for one session, one single shot. But, after that session, the curiosity gets the better of you all. That was a weird, but enjoyable experience, you tell each-other. I bet we could have fun exploring the rest of that odd locale, you tell the players, why not have some more sessions and see how it goes? So you do that. And then the bloodbath begins.

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

SPOLIERS BELOW! If you are interested in being a player in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, turn back now!

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is a Location based adventure by Andrew Walter for Troika! The design is by Shuyi Zhang. It came out in 2023 and was the first of the Melsonian Arts Council’s 1:5, an ongoing series of location-based adventures for Troika! There are a couple more available now and another out very soon. You can find them all here. My somewhat rotating group of Tables and Tales members just had our last session in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse on Monday night, after spending a total of eight sessions there.

Since then, the strange nature of the warehouse, staffed by giants and stocked with oddities, has only grown stranger, and more dangerous. It houses a handful of physics defying, Tardis-like chambers, not least of which is the terrifying Deep Storage, a swirling mass containing several pocket dimensions and a wraith-like being who wants nothing more than to consume intruders. At least one cult has taken up residence, and they are often mutated into horrific Chaotic Spawnlets by the effects of the radiation still spilling from the Sphere Pool. The warehouse is sandwiched by a vast desert of dust occupying the roof, which is peopled by the descendants of Whalgravaak’s former employees and, underneath, the tunnels of a pack of unpredictable Worm-headed Hounds.

But entrance has been forbidden by the Autarch for centuries and, even if you were foolhardy enough to ignore a diktat like that, you would still need to be brave enough to face the unknown dangers within.

The Hook and the Party

The book suggests a few potential hooks for your PCs. Since my game started off as a one-shot, with brand new characters and no existing campaign to work it into, I went for one that seemed like the object might be achieved in one session. They, along with many other groups of mercenaries were contracted to return with the head of a Cacogen, known only as the Opportunist, to their patron, an Exultant of the Autarch’s court. But we dealt with that in flashback as they all sat in the weed-choked yard of the warehouse, dotted now with small encampments of adventurers and brigands all gathering their courage to gain entry. The PCs’ band consisted of a Monkey Monger (and monkeys), a Gremlin Catcher (and dog), a Wizard Hunter and a Landsknecht. They were, to put it bluntly, a motley crew.

That first session was all fun and games. Every encounter, except for the last one with the Cacogen, was resolved peacefully. This happened mainly due to the rolls I made on the Mien table for each encounter. The worm-headed Hounds they encountered wanted to play with the Monkey Mongers monkeys, they did not want to eat them. The Flat Serviceman was happy to follow the party around and clean up after them. The Segmented Crippler in the Pigeonholery, didn’t want to wake up, so they skipped that one entirely. This is a pretty standard mechanic in Troika but I think it gave the players a false sense of security. The session ended with this motley crew finding and defeating the Opportunist quite handily. And, at that point, we thought that would be it.

But a few months later we decided to continue with their explorations of the warehouse. Obviously, their original motivation to explore was gone. They had achieved their objective, but the players were all good sports. They decided between them that the motivation was purely one of curiosity and greed. They had spotted, through a bubble like window in one of the rooms they had traversed, a vast and terrifying pool of chaos and wonder in a room far too big to exist within the confines of the building. This was enough for them. Essentially, they went in search of adventure. Although, through the sessions that followed, I did introduce the idea that they might want to find that cult I mentioned earlier and that they should seek out the incredibly valuable Tome of the Sable Fields that was reported to be stored in the warehouse, somewhere. This gave them a little direction when I thought they might need it, but, honestly, I think my players just wanted to see what new wonder/horror the dungeon had in store in the next room.

The Dungeoncrawl

It was only from this point that I started to really treat this adventure like the dungeoncrawl it is very much meant to be. The book does a good job of introducing the concepts of tracking resources like lantern oil and provisions as the party explores. It also explains the concept of exploration turns and their effect on the game, i.e. the distance you can travel in that time, the amount of lantern oil you use per turn, and the likelihood of running into an encounter. I followed all these rules to the letter and they made for some interesting moments in the game. But, to be frank, the weirdness of the setting is the real draw here, not fiddling with rations and light levels. Also, few of the characters lived long enough for starvation or oil-skins to become a problem.

It also has rules for dealing with the spatially distorted, impossibly large areas within the warehouse. It suggests that the players should make Luck or Skill checks to avoid getting lost in these areas, but, in all honesty, I didn’t really require that sort of thing.

Mapping is also a part of the dungeon crawl format and this adventure does want the party to attempt to map the space for themselves. The thing is, when some rooms appear to be a kilometre wide and the next one is spatially normal, that map becomes effectively impossible for them to draw accurately after a relatively short period of time. Eventually, I gave up and just shared the one from the book with the players, trusting their ability to separate player knowledge and character knowledge. My advice, if you are doing this, try get your hands on the PDF version, since the one in the physical book stretches across two pages and the crease obscures part of it.

In fact, the adventure has four maps:

the warehouse floorpan, using 10ft squares to denote distance
a hex crawl for the desert on the roof, replete with points of interest
a map of the Worm-headed Hound tunnels beneath the warehouse, superimposed over the warehouse plan
a largely vibes-based map of Deep Storage

These are all great but usefulness will vary. In our game, the party spent several sessions trapped in Deep Storage but took one look at the desert and noped right out of there. This seems like a good point to note how good all the artwork is in this. There are plenty of colour and black and white illustrations but they leave me wanting even more!

Warehouse Workers and other Beasties

A warehouse is a dangerous place to work, especially when the correct safety protocols are not observed. It doesn’t help at all when you are trespassers and several of the residents are large enough to crush you with a single blow.

The crimson giant, Paude, the pipe-smoking, bearded giant, Arbuthnot and the blue, jelly giant, Gamtomerian. — The giants are not what you might expect.

The giants are the main NPCs of the adventure and Whalgravaak’s only remaining employees. Each one is fabulously interesting, diverse and well-drawn. They have their own motivations and desires. I was gratified that the party managed to encounter all of them during the eight sessions we played. In fact, one player had two different characters killed by two different giants. I will point out that it is entirely possible to avoid violence when dealing with the giants, it’s just that, sometimes, the Monkey Monger on the team has monkeys who decide to fuck with them and one thing leads to another.

The wraith-like Gulf Man Roamer from the swirling vortex of Deep Storage is a potentially lethal foe who has a chance to show up each time the party moves through that already dangerous room. If it captures you in its bag, it’s going to spirit you away to eat you in its extra-dimensional lair.

No warehouse is complete without forklifts. Whalgravaak’s forklifts are humanoid constructs with the face of the wizard himself. They treat intruders like stock, and will attempt to whack them and pack them. They hit very very hard.

Its a black and white dog, with a neck like an earthworm — When you read the words, Worm-headed Hound, is this what you imagined?

There are also a bunch of random encounters, including the Worm-headed Hounds I mentioned before, desert nomads from the roof, and Bandits/Burglars/Bastards. These only turn up on the roll of a 1 on a 1d6 for each turn the party travels. It didn’t occur very often in my game. The Roof and the tunnels have their own random encounter tables as well, but I never used them as the party never spent any appreciable time there.

This is just a selection of the possible encounters you can have in this setting. I haven’t even mentioned the tiny army guys, the sentient crane parts, the Onion God or the Mulled Dead.

The Rooms

I have hinted at rooms that defy physics and rooms with pocket dimensions, and those are usually the big-ticket locations that contain some of the greatest set-pieces in the adventure. Deep Storage alone evoked some of the most inventive use of skills and spells and a great degree of fear and tension from the PCs. It killed one of them (two if you count the Rhinoman eaten by the Gulf Man Roamer.) The Roof could act as an entire short hex-crawl campaign and the Sphere Pool has some truly memorable and dangerous elements to it.

However, many of the other rooms have weird and wonderful contents as well. Some of them, the party will glance at and move on, while others will capture their imaginations and encourage them to interact. I never really knew which reaction I was going to get from them, actually. The room full of melting rope? They had to spend an hour trying to figure out how to set it on fire, the eternal battle between tiny armies playing out across a battlefield seemingly larger than the whole warehouse? Just popped their heads in and left with some captured little men.

Some of the rooms were relatively mundane warehouse style rooms with shelves and containers. The book has tables in the back to help you identify the state those rooms are in and the contents of the containers, which is useful.

One of my over-riding impressions by the end of our game, was that in some ways, the great variety of bonkers content in the rooms served to detract from any unifying theme. There were some elements that went together, such as the warehouse’s disdain for traditional dimensions. If my PCs had explored the Roof or even encountered any of the nomads who dwelt there, they might have found a distinction between those descendants of the ancient striking workers and the giants who continued to obsessively do their jobs even long after their employer had passed on. But, none of that is to say that the rooms weren’t endlessly fun and inventive.

A Note on Lethality

I recently wrote a post sharing some of the obituaries of the characters who met their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. You can check it out here. There are only three of them in that post. A few months previous to that, I wrote this post, which contained the obituaries of two more. The mathematicians amongst you will have summed those already. That’s five. In the final session, we lost another one. That makes six. That was three character deaths each for two particularly unfortunate/reckless players. Warehouse work is dangerous. Only one of the original party survived to the end. You have been warned.

Conclusions

The covers of the two different versions of Troika! that I own. — Numinous or otherwise, its the same game.

There is so much to recommend in this adventure. It is endlessly entertaining, challenging and bonkers. It has such a variety of locations and such a diversity of encounters that you would need to work hard to get bored in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I think it works so well to show off Troika! as a system, too. The problems it asks the PCs to solve and the encounters they have to deal with utilise things like the Luck check really well and encourage players to invent their own unique Advanced Skills. But if they get into fights, especially with the incredibly random nature of Troika! initiative, there is a very high chance they are going to come out of it dead. There are a few opportunities for insta-kills throughout the warehouse too. I can’t overstate exactly how lethal this adventure is. Luckily, my players leaned into that, even when they were creating new characters to join in the same fight the original one died in (they got very quick at creating characters.)

I think it’s also flexible enough for many GMs to easily take it or part of it and fit it easily into their own ongoing Troika! campaign. As I said at the start, our game started as a one-shot and it could have ended there. But we were able to easily adapt it into a short campaign of its own.

Dear reader, let me know if you have played Whalgravaak’s Warehouse or if you would like to! I’d love to know your views on it.

DCC’s The Grinding Keep Review

At one stage, the Elf cast a Magic Missile and it caused a rain of frogs on the entire party and all their enemies, almost killing several on both sides!

DCC Day

I kind of knew it was DCC Day on the 19th of July. It had been advertised to me enough times on Instagram after all. But that was not why I had scheduled a DCC one-shot on the 20th of July. That just happened to be the best day for most of my players. As serendipity would have it, the module I planned to run was the Grinding Keep, an adventure designed by Marc Bruner, which appeared in the Adventure Pack for DCC Day 2024 along with the XCC RPG adventure, Tucson Death Storm!

Hook

I had introduced the hook for this adventure in our recent run of Sailors on the Starless Sea. The PCs discovered a map to a keep and a note hidden in the lining of a cloak in amongst the charnel remains of many butchered humanoids in that adventure’s tower. The note was from the patron of the poor unfortunate who lost their cloak and it indicated that their patron would pay 1000 gp for the safe return to them of a magical lantern. As budding adventurers, most of whom barely had two groats to rub together, this seemed to be motivation enough.

Each player had only one surviving character from the 0-level funnel and one of them was not able to make it to this latest game so I supplemented the four characters who advanced from 0-level to level 1 with a couple of pre-gens kindly provided for the Grinding Keep by Goodman Games themselves.

Big Party

So the party was made up of six level 1 PCs, a Warrior, a Wizard, a Cleric, a Dwarf, an Elf and a Halfling. Two of the players played two PCs each and two of them played one PC each. All of their abilities proved useful. I would say a varied party is very beneficial for this module. On the other hand, if I had to do it again, I probably would have left the players with one PC each even though the adventure calls for 4 to 6 level 1 PCs. They all survived easily enough, although there were a couple of close calls.

Starting the Adventure

SPOILERS! – If you are a player who might want to play this module, stop reading now!

To begin, I plonked them right at the door to the keep as the text suggests. The module wants you to do this. It is designed to be a one-shot by the gods, and it will be! No faffing around in town, shopping or gathering rumours. Just get them in there as quick as you can. I did have to utilise the handy, and essentially invulnerable Leaf Elemental that waits on the grounds of the estate for anyone foolish enough to hold up the proceedings of your one-shot by searching for herbs amongst the overgrown gardens which seem to be under the influence of all four seasons at once. The seasons are a recurring theme and I was gratified to note that the players realised this almost immediately.

Anyway, once they had been chased inside the keep, they were confronted by something that could only have been a magical effect that transformed the interior from a ruin to an immaculately decorated and lit hall. They were greeted by the white robed Host and eventually waited on at dinner by his veiled servants. All of this set up was important. It presented clues to the nature of the keep to the PCs and let their imaginations run with them. Enough strangenesses occur during dinner and upon their investigation of the ground floor of the keep that they should be suspicious. Indeed, before they had even left the dining room, one of my players joked, “the house is a mimic!” He didn’t know how spot on he was…

Of course, the keep is, in fact, an other planar entity who comes to the world to feed, in disguise. The PCs had seen windows and chimneys on the outside but could find no sign of them on the inside. The couldn’t get through any doors that the Host didn’t want them to enter, etc, etc. Clearly, there is enough evidence to allow your players to uncover the truth before things ever really get interesting.

One regret I have is how much time I allowed them to devote to this whole section before Event One occurs. They spent a lot of time searching, theorising, investigating, and it ate into the more adventuresome elements in the latter stages of the module. My advice would be to get them into the Guest Quarters and asleep as quickly as possible. The adventure does not provide much in the way of motivation for the characters to do this, however, so be prepared to improvise.

Event One

Event One is triggered when they wake up after a nights’ sleep in the keep. I was lucky enough that the players wanted to rest and one of them was rendered magically asleep, but without that, it would have been a struggle to get them to wait until the next morning. I probably would have triggered Event One early, if that had been a problem.

What “Event One” means is that the keep is waking up. It will soon be ready to consume a fresh meal of adventurers.

Mechanically, what it means is that every time they open a door, they will be confronted with an intersection of corridors that lead to two randomly determined rooms in the keep. These could be rooms they already visited in the first part of the adventure, or ones that would have been otherwise inaccessible up until this point.

The first room my players visited was the dining room again. This was satisfying as it gave them a chance to kill the Host and his servants from earlier (although, technically they just put the Host to sleep and dragged him around with them for the rest of the adventure.) After that, they encountered one of the three rooms that contained the organs of the keep. They had discovered the journal of a former prisoner/meal in their quarters that gave them hints as to how to deal with each of the organs; eyes, heart and lungs, and that proved useful in the encounter they had with the heart. It is significant that they identified several magic items that act as keys for the doors to these special rooms. But their first instinct was to destroy them if they could. Luckily they forgot about that plan and just kept ‘splorin’ instead. Eventually they managed to overcome the challenge in the heart room and at that point of our session, I realised I was running out of time to get my one-shot done in one shot so I focused things up a bit.

Event Two

The way it was supposed to work was this: every time they left a room, I would start marking that room off as no longer accessible on the random room table, until there was only one possible room left; the one that contained the Alien Intelligence itself. I didn’t have the time for all that. We were approaching the four hour mark at that point and people had work in the morning. So I just told them that, after they destroyed the fiery orb that acted as the keep’s heart, the entire place shook and when they re-opened the door to leave that place, the corridor beyond led to the last room. The players, unknowing, proceeded to their fate. Their fate, as it happened, was to murder the Alien Intelligence of the Grinding Keep, all its Animated Corpses and the Giant Animalcule Swarm that accompanied them. Destroying the heart had pretty much halved the creature’s HP so it wasn’t too difficult. In the end, they fled through the windows in the back of the room, utilising the Feather Fall spell (which two characters had, by coincidence) to safely land in the river at the bottom of the canyon beyond.

Conclusions

Perhaps you can see now why I think I should have made things a little harder for them by reducing their numbers. On the other hand, I am glad they all survived. They had all created and played such interesting and fun characters, even in the context of a game that is not RP-heavy, to say the least.

I was a little disappointed to reach the end of the adventure with so much cool content unexplored. They didn’t find the trap/treasure room where the magic lantern was stored, they didn’t find any of the other organ rooms, which all had really fun mechanics. On the other hand, I felt the adventure was designed to be flexible enough for a Judge to shortcut it exactly the way I did to get them to the end a little quicker, which seemed like good design to me.

This was only the second time any of us had played DCC and the first time with characters of anything other than 0-level. This was a different game to that first experience. PCs used magic and Mighty Deeds at every available opportunity and they got to roll on the crazy magic random tables a lot. At one stage, the Elf cast a Magic Missile and it caused a rain of frogs on the entire party and all their enemies, almost killing several on both sides! This is why we loved DCC. It’s the wonderful and potentially lethal randomness of it and the endless inventiveness of the adventures.

I would recommend the Grinding Keep as a one-shot DCC adventure, as long as you are willing to either cut out bits or extend it to two sessions.

Modular Gaming

Improbable hot-takes

“The Discourse (TM)” has been focusing on running published adventures/modules/campaigns as opposed to custom/homebrew/sandbox games for the last little while. First Quinns reviewed Impossible Landscapes, an epic and almost legendary campaign for the modern Cthulhu-ish game, Delta Green. This is the first time Quinns has reviewed a campaign/published adventure on his RPG review channel, Quinns’ Quest, so it was unusual enough to spark a significant amount of discussion all on its own. And then Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and Rascal reviewed the same campaign. I believe this was purely coincidental, especially as Impossible Landscapes came out about five years ago now. Both are great reviews in their own right and are based on full play-throughs of the campaign so you know they’re of real value. You should check them both out.

Anyway, on Bluesky, Thomas Manuel went looking for recommendations of other modules to run and this spawned a lot of interesting answers and quote-bleets from RPG luminaries, such as this one, which I found interesting.

I have opinions on the conversation, of course. I have shared a lot of them in other posts from the last year or so, actually. If you want the summary, though, I had a lot of bad experiences running D&D scenarios in the past, especially from the AD&D 2nd edition era. I found they were difficult or impossible to just pick up and run. In fact, they required maybe more preparation time than adventures and campaigns I wrote myself. The one published 5E campaign that I ran, Storm King’s Thunder suffered from the same issues, actually. This made me feel like it was a “me” thing. But, it turns out, a lot of GMs feel the same way, according to Bluesky, at least.

However, I have had my mind changed somewhat by running pre-written adventures for some other games, particularly Free League’s Blade Runner, Dungeon Crawl Classics and, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin.

This is a link to my first post on Electric Dreams, the introductory Case File for Blade Runner:

Blade Runner

And this one compares the same module to a 5E murder mystery adventure I played in around the the same time:

Case Closed

Here’s my post about Sailor’s on the Starless Sea for DCC:

Dungeon Crawls are Classic

And this is my post on running Duty Unto Death, a short intro adventure for the Dragon Age RPG:

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

And finally, this post, although ostensibly an excuse to discuss DCC adventures, also includes my opinions on the one 5E campaign I ran:

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Individual Modules

I will say that, despite my generally favourable outlook on most of these modules, I still find I have to to do a lot of prep for them. The main fear I have is messing things up so bad that I essentially spoil the rest of the adventure. Although, I should really have more faith in my abilities as a GM at this stage. I feel like I can probably improv my way out of any hole, to be honest. But it does not change the fact that I spend hours rewriting long paragraphs presented in module texts into digestible bite-sized bullet-points. I am running another Dragon Age scenario right now. Amber Rage is from Blood in Ferelden, an anthology of scenarios for the game that came out in 2010. It suffers from verboseness and unnecessary detail and makes for a lot of work from the GM. I’m enjoying the contents of the scenario but its presentation is horrendously dated and needs a sprinkle of OSR magic to tighten it up, in my opinion.

I realise that none of the modules I have mentioned here are anywhere close to having the size and epic scope of something like Impossible Landscapes, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have largely changed my mind about running anything pre-published. The one I have my eye on right now is Dagger in the Heart for Heart: The City Beneath. Actually, I have a post about that right here too:

Dagger in the Heart

OK, I’m off to discuss the discourse on Discord of course!

Alien RPG’s Hope’s Last Day: A Review

If you’re interested, go check out my post previewing this game here.

A Bad Call?

Burke, Carter J “confessed” to Ripley that he had made a bad call in sending them to a colony on the moon, LV-426. But did he mean it? No. He was a scumbag of the highest order. He was just fucking someone else over for a percentage. I sent my players to LV-426 too. I wasn’t looking to fuck them over for a percentage, but, at the very least, I expected most of their characters to get impregnated by facehuggers, ripped to shreds by drones or melted by acid blood. Did any of that happen? Did I make a bad call in choosing the Cinematic Alien RPG scenario, Hope’s Last Day, from the core book, rather than the one from the Starter Set? Well, dear reader, why not come with me on a trip through our one-shot and my thoughts on it, and you’ll find out.

Shake and Bake

These two scenarios couldn’t really be much more different. The one from the Starter Set, Chariot of the Gods, is set on a ship out in space, you know, where no-one can hear you scream? It’s also very much a full scenario with an entire three act structure. They say it would take three sessions to play but I have my doubts about that estimate, having played Hope’s Last Day.

Speaking of which, Hope’s Last Day is a scenario that’s set totally on the moon where Ripley and the Nostromo’s crew found the Alien eggs in the first movie and the setting for the action of the second. This scenario was not even a full Cinematic experience. It is billed as a taster, since it really only encompasses what would be the third act in a normal Cinematic scenario. The book confidently asserts that it could easily be played in under two hours.

Frankly, duration was the deciding factor for me. I only had one night to get through a whole scenario. I don’t have a lot of wiggle-room in my schedule due to the fact that I have at least seven other ongoing games at any given time, so it really had to get wrapped up in one shot. So, I shook it and baked it.

Shaking

Shaking, essentially, meant reading through the scenario a couple of times. It’s very short, so this was not a problem. I also took notes on the various major beats and summarised the contents of the various blocks and rooms into bullet points. Most of the scenario consists of these location descriptions so this was key for me. Also, they are all presented in what I consider to be unwieldy blocks of text in the book, and I prefer referring to bullet points at the table. This work helped me to keep things flowing a little more smoothly on the night. I also screenshot handed the pregenerated characters out to the players I thought they would suit best a couple of days before. This part was fun, and the players were left to wonder how I decided who should play which character. Each character had an agenda that was generally meant to be kept secret from the others. Now these were fun. Stuff like, being willing to sacrifice themselves for the others, wanting to acquire an alien and escape with it or just to keep the company’s actions a secret at all costs. You know, normal stuff. Anyway, I examined these agendas and assigned the characters purely out of a desire to see each player pursue that secret agenda. Other than this fairly sparse preparation, I got a couple of copies of the map of Hadley’s Hope printed and a few character sheets. I familiarised myself with the relevant rules as much as I could and that was it for the shaking.

Baking

At the table, we baked. And, I will say most of the time this one-shot spent in the oven, there were no issues at all. Was I ready to nuke the site from orbit by the end? Not quite, thankfully. I’m mixing my metaphors quite egregiously at this point so I’ll abandon them both and just tell you what happened.

I started exactly as the scenario suggests you start, with the four PCs inside the West airlock of Hadley’s Hope. They had just returned from a day or more outside the settlement and were not aware the Aliens had already decimated the population. I let them investigate a bit, try and get an intercom working, and generally futz around. The scenario calls for an Alien attack whenever the PCs dawdle but I didn’t want to lose anybody so early on. I think this was a mistake on my part. Their first encounter with an Alien occurred a little later after they had made their way to another block of the station and messed around looking at eggs and facehuggers and whatnot. This gave one character the opportunity to collect an egg and another to sacrifice himself to keep the others safe and made them all start running to find the way out. This was more like it. Things really started moving then. The one who sacrificed himself turned out to be an artificial person as Bishop would have us call them. So, the alien just left him, innards outed, on the floor and unable to move, but not dead. Luckily there was an extra pregen for that player to take over so we continued on.

Later they encountered a couple of facehuggers after finding a few weapons. They made short work of them and moved on again. They spent much of the last part of the session effectively split into two parties running from two different drones towards the only way off the planet, a shuttle. And you know what? They all made it! Except the android, who, I can only assume was caught in the conflagration when the nuclear reactor in the processing plant went up as Ripley and the others escaped. Also, they didn’t all make it, because the pilot turned out to be the company plant and she spaced everyone else as soon as they left the atmosphere. I guess that made her the winner?

Game Over, Man

So, what was the verdict? It’s a mixed bag, to be honest.

I think our main complaint was that this was mislabeled as an under-two-hour scenario. I mean, ok, it was our first time playing the Alien RPG so we did have to spend a little extra time referring to the rules and figuring out what all the stats meant, but that does not account for the fact that this thing took us almost four hours. Even then, I had to abandon some integral rules to allow us to make it to the end in that time. I don’t honestly know how anyone gets five people around a table, people who want to role-play, who want to fuck around and find out, people for whom the joy is in the playing, not in the finishing, and have them get through this scenario in anything less than four and a half hours if you stick to all the rules of the game.

As for the rules. The main negative was the initiative system. Alien, like other Free League games, uses an initiative card system. We generally found it a little difficult to keep track of things using this and found it slowed the action down significantly. One of the main issues was that the PCs kept getting into initiative, running away from fights, getting out of initiative, getting caught again and getting into initiative again! So we were shuffling and picking those cards a lot. In fact, as time ran out on our session, I just left the cards to one side and did it narrative style. I got each player in turn to tell me what they were doing and told them how the Aliens or the environment reacted or acted against them. This really sped things up and drew the evening to a very exciting close, in fact. Would I use the initiative system as-is if I played again? I think I would give it a go as long as I had more time to play with but I would be ready to give up on it in a second if it started to get in the way again.

One more issue for me was the system used to figure out how the Aliens attack. Every time it’s their turn, the Game Mother has to roll on a table to determine which of their special attacks they use. This started off as a fun activity, but quickly got frustrating. It felt like each time the Alien had one of the PCs in their grasp, I would roll up an attack that allowed them the chance to escape. Now, if this happens a couple of times, it adds a nice dramatic element to the chase. But this is literally how they all managed to get away in the end. If I had been just choosing the attacks for the Aliens, there would not have been so many occupied seats on the shuttle when it took off. I feel like there is a better way to adjudicate the moves they make. Admittedly, you would not want every attack to be lethal, either, but it felt as though far too many of them were underpowered.

One element that worked well but felt like it was under-utilised or tacked on was the Stunt mechanic. Each skill had a stunt table that told you how you could spend your excess successes (each 6 you get when you roll your dice pool is a success and you gnerally only need one to succeed at your task,) but the players almost exclusively went for one of two options, at least in combat situations: they added extra damage or they pinned the enemy down to prevent them from taking as many actions on their next turn. This was fine but it feels like this needs more work. Perhaps the new edition will deal with this.

You know, there were plenty of mechanics we liked in the game too. The main mechanic in the Alien RPG, the thing you would lean on to sell the system, is Panic. Like other Year Zero Engine games, you roll a dice pool consisting of a number of dice equal to your score in a given skill plus the number of dice equal to your score in the related ability. So, if you have a 1 in Mobility and a 2 in Agility, you roll 3 dice. But, as you play, your character gains Stress for all sorts of awful reasons. For every point of Stress you gain, you get to add another die to every dice pool. This gives you a greater chance of success but also gives you a chance that you’ll have to roll on the Panic Table. This happens if you roll a facehugger (a 1) on the official Alien RPG Stress Dice. There are other ways of panicking. Usually, if one of your companions does something unhinged or crazy or if you see an Alien for the first time. That kind of thing. By the end of the session, everyone had so much Stress that they were rolling obscene numbers of dice and there were Panic rolls happening almost constantly. One Panic roll would often lead to another from someone else because of the result they would get. Also, because, each time you roll on the Panic table, you have to add your Stress Score to the roll and the shit at the bottom of the table is way worse than the shit at the top, the results got very bad as time went on. For example, this is what you get for rolling a 7 gets you:

NERVOUS TWITCH. Your STRESS LEVEL, and the STRESS LEVEL of all friendly PCs in SHORT range of you, increases by one.

This is what you get if you roll a 15+:

CATATONIC. You collapse to the floor and can’t talk or move, staring blankly into oblivion.

This did happen to one character but they were already at the shuttle at that stage and someone was able to drag them inside.

The feedback I got in stars and wishes from the session indicated that the players also loved the agendas they were given with their PCs. This was a worry for me before we started. I mean, not only did they not get to create their own characters, I didn’t even give them the choice of which one to pick. Obviously, this was because I didn’t want to reveal the secret agendas to everyone before play started. And I’m so glad I did it this way! Everyone had pretty much figured out who was the android in under an hour, but no-one, and I mean even me, because I forgot what the pilot’s agenda was, expected to be spaced by one of their own when they were on the verge of escape. Incredible scenes. This element of the game is specific to the short Cinematic Play scenarios. And, indeed, normally, in a full scenario, your PC’s agenda changes as you move through the three acts. I can’t account for how well this works, obviously, but it sounds great.

As for the scenario itself, there is not a lot to it. This is definitely a good thing. If you play it, you’re not going to get to most of the compound. A lot of those areas I summarised into bullet points remained completely unexplored. Once the drones were after them, the PCs soon discovered a sense of urgency and a definite goal, i.e. escaping on the shuttle. There was a bit more to it than that, but not much. Like I said, this was fine, especially as the PCs’ agendas took the place of a set plot most of the time anyway.

It was also cool that the scenario was so closely related to Aliens, the movie. I watched it the night before running the session, and that definitely helped me to picture the place and to describe it at the table. I’d recommend doing that if you do intend to run Hope’s Last Day. I’d also recommend leaving yourself at least four hours to do it justice.

So, was it a bad call? No, but if I went into it again, knowing what I know now, I would have made a few alterations to my expectations.

What about you, dear reader? Have you played this scenario or this RPG? Are you looking forward to the Alien Evolved Edition? Get in the comments?