reviews – The Dice Pool

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 7

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

Nostalgia rarely serves you well, I always think. If you let yourself be solely motivated by nostalgia, you’re destined for disappointment. Nostalgia is a feeling; it’s the feeling you get when you yearn for the feelings things in the past stirred in you. It often gets mistaken for the things themselves. I certainly worried that I was making that mistake when I came up with the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every edition of the venerable dragon game over the course of about 24 months. I told myself I had academic motives; I wanted to compare them, see how they changed through time, how the changes in designers affected them, what happened with the emergence of different play styles, character first stories, actual plays. All that. But, I was particularly excited to run AD&D 2nd Edition. There was no doubt this was driven by nostalgia. I played 2E more than any other edition of the game, concocted some of my favourite campaigns with my players, created worlds for their characters, some of whom would live forever in infamy. Those games live large in my memory.

But I’ll give myself credit for going in with my eyes open. I understood that nostalgic feeling in myself from the start and decided to approach the experience almost as if it were a new one. This turned out easy enough. I really did have to reread the books, relearn the rules, refamiliarise myself with the setting and the adventure. I had no concrete memory of any of that. Before diving back in, I couldn’t have told you that initiative was rolled on a d10 and the lowest roll wins. I didn’t realise that paladins only got spells at level 9 and certainly couldn’t have explained the surprise rule to anyone.

A Collection of Complete Handbooks for player classes and races.

Taken from that perspective, here’s what I learned. Character creation in this game is a task to be endured. It might have been less difficult and time-consuming if I had not chosen an adventure in the Planescape setting with its peculiarities of race and place and faction. It might have been easier if I had not insisted on everyone at least considering the kits in the various “complete handbooks.” I did that because it felt like a uniquely 2nd Edition experience that I didn’t want my players to miss out on. If you only allow the races and classes from the Player’s Handbook and you leave out the optional non-weapon proficiency rules, your Session 0 might involve fewer players tearing their hair out, and it might only take two hours instead of four. Whether or not my players appreciated the pure, unadulterated, 2nd char-gen, I’m not sure. I think some got more mileage out of it than others. But here’s what I am sure of, once that process was over with, we all loved those characters and the adventure we went on. Eventually, it became clear that the best way to play it was to embrace the long-winded spell descriptions, the needless crunch, the haystack-like books and the needle-like rules. If you can laugh about those things together at the table, while also using those rules to create cool stories together, then you are doing AD&D 2nd Edition right, I think. I got frustrated with it on occasion, but that was mainly during prep, when I tried to do most of my rule research. I know some of the players struggled with spells, spell slots, spells per day etc. But, importantly, my priority during play was always to try to keep the session moving. So, in some instances, I made rulings that maybe didn’t reflect the rules. But that’s in the spirit of the game in my opinion. Generally, that would be my advice for any GM and any game, to be honest.

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

The cover of Planescape adventure, the Eternal Boundary. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background. — The Eternal Boundary

Dear reader, this is the last instalment! If you are interested to read all the previous ones, go here. If you think, however, that you might be a player in this adventure, The Eternal Boundary, someday, maybe give it a miss.

Last time, our heroes’ investigations brought them to somewhere unexpected. They’d leapt through a portal in the Mortuary that would take them to the Elemental Plane of Fire. There, they found themselves on an asteroid-like rock floating amongst the never-ending inferno, protected, somehow from being burned to cinders. The rock played host to a citadel of sorts. It had platforms with great ballistae to protect it from the more hostile denizens of the plane, a marble-clad temple complex of some sort and guard tower watching over everything. After killing some sentries, the PCs tricked some hobgoblin mercenaries into believing they were new recruits. They’d been advised to report to the high-up men in the temple. To do so, they tried to by-pass that tower, but the guards questioned them and their prisoner, Toranna the Grey, shouted for help. A fight broke out! The paladin ran in to take on the guards at the door while the thief fired some arrows and the cleric used his Spiritual Hammer to attack the archers on the roof. Even the witch’s goat got in on the action. They took some damage but eventually managed to defeat all six guards inside, steal their uniforms and stock up on weapons and supplies before heading on to the temple. During the chaos of the battle, they misplaced Toranna.

It turned out, once they entered the temple, that she had alerted the guards, the priests and the citadel’s commander, Green Marvent, that they were coming, so their clever disguises counted for naught!

It was a long, wide chamber with a series of columns on either side and an altar at the far end. A large, glowing gem hung, suspended in the air above the altar. It seemed to be important. The PCs were outnumbered here. There were just the four of them and they had just been in a couple of fights. They were not at their best. So they had to think laterally. They played a delaying game as they were engaged in combat by the guards inside the door, the human captain of the guard and the head of the hobgoblin mercenaries. They cast Silence on the spell casters gathered near the altar, forcing them to move, and preventing them from casting things like Command and Scare. This helped Trance, the thief to get close to the altar, before being rendered unconscious by Green Marvent. The Githzerai commander of the faction in charge of this place, the Illuminated. I gave the others one round to help Trance before she would die. Devansh came through with a heal just in time as the fight continued. Aurora, the bariaur witch, was down to using her sling-staff and no-one except the paladin was doing well for hit points when Trance managed to grab the gem and threaten to destroy it. This brought the fight to an abrupt end. Green Marvent explained that the gem was all that was preventing the rock from being consumed by the flames. The hobgoblin chief was swayed by Glaermond the paladin’s superior charisma and agreed to switch sides, seeing how the wind had changed direction. He went out and ordered his lads to go after the other Illuminated guards.

Finally, Devansh used Command on Green Marvent to “Explain.” And so she did. The Illuminated, she said was her faction. It was young and still light on power but she had come up with a way to bring the other factions of the Planes down from the inside. The plan was kidnap the barmies off the streets of the Hive, cure them of their madness and then convince them that their very own deities had brought them back from the dead, assigning them with one task, to join the Society of Sensation, or the Governors, or the Dustmen or the Doomguard or any faction, and to do as they were bidden when they had done so. Of course, Green Marvent was the one using illusions and disguises and appropriately fitted out chambers in the citadel to persuade the former barmies of this. And she would be the one giving them their orders, rather than Saint Cuthbert or Bahamut or Gruumsh or whatever deity they worshipped. It was a long game, perhaps, but she was patient. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these pesky adventurers.

Once the hobgoblins had dealt with he rest of the guards, the PCs rescued the few ex-barmies who were still not eh Rock and delivered them and Green Marvent back to Sigil. The Governors would deal with her treachery, if the Lady of Pain didn’t get to her first.

Meanwhile, Aurora considered the citadel for a new lick of paint and took its measurements for some more witchy decorations…

Conclusion

I had to make some changes to the adventure in the end. “Green Marvent” was the big bad hinted at in the body of the adventure. They were the one issuing orders via messenger and letter. They were the one with the plans for the Illuminated. But, as written, they never appeared in this adventure. I can only assume they were meant to turn up in a sequel to the Eternal Boundary that never happened. So I swapped out the commander of the citadel, Imogen, for Green Marvent. That way, the PCs get a sense of closure to the plot, at least. Other than this, I wouldn’t change too much about this adventure. I do think it was slightly too linear for my liking. I occasionally struggled to fight the text’s efforts to get the party back on the rails. In the end, they got where the adventure needed them to be, but maybe in a different way. As I think I mentioned before, having a member of the Dustmen faction on the team was a shortcut that ensured they did not have to treat the Mortuary section like a dungeon crawl, and that was a significant proportion of the adventure as written! I would imagine, if that hadn’t been the case, or if the PCs couldn’t come up with a clever plan to bypass it, the adventure would have taken at least a session or two longer than the 6 it took us.

In the end, we all agreed that we’d go back to these characters and this campaign and the Planes. I loved the PCs they created and I want to see more. I would like to give them a chance to pursue the original adventure hook given them by Bendon Mawl of the Senstes, the seek out the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees, which had been teased several times throughout the game. And I want to see how Devansh’s little temple turns out, not to mention Aurora’s new wizard’s sanctum.

But all that will have to wait. AD&D 1st Edition will continue for a while, but I won’t be running any more D&D until the New Year. I just need little break. I’ll run something else though so be sure to come back, dear reader, and see what that is.

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Dare to Be Wise

Success at a Cost

This phrase comes up a lot in the second adventure from the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set Campaign Book; success at a cost. What it boils down to is that, no matter how well or poorly the PCs do, this here train is going to stay on its rails. This is one of my main gripes with “Dare to Be Wise,” but not the only one.

Dear reader, if you’re following along with my Star Trek Adventures adventure, welcome back! If this is your first time aboard ship, that’s cool too. But you might want to go back and take a look at some of my other posts in this series. In fact, my review of the preceding adventure, Incursion Point, is probably where you want to start. It should give you context for both the game and the campaign.

Going back to “success at a cost;” I think it describes the adventure pretty well. This second of the three full adventures presented in the Campaign Book continues the mission of this boxed set to teach you how to play the game. But, I think it does that at the cost of something essential to a good adventure, something Incursion Point had, freedom. The freedom of the PCs to decide what their next steps would be, what tasks they wanted to try, what ends they wanted to pursue, what mistakes they were willing to make. There was an inevitability to the events of Incursion Point; that city was always going to fall into the core of the gas giant, after all. But the PCs were more or less free to decide what they were going to spend their time doing while that occurred. Dare to Be Wise, though, in two different acts, is trying to teach you how to use the linear challenge, a mechanic that requires the team to complete a series of key tasks in a particular order to achieve a greater goal. The tasks they are to complete are prescribed in the text, and there is a note at the end of several key tasks to say failure allows they to success at a cost. This was dull to run and the tasks themselves felt relatively inconsequential (at least to me; I didn’t tell the players that they would have succeeded at a cost even if they failed) so we sped through them, and the entire scene that they consisted of. Maybe it’s just this mechanic that I don’t like. But I feel as though there was a way to make these tasks feel more like they mattered, by simply giving the PCs the series of problems to solve, but leaving the solutions to them.

The Adventure

There’s a handy summary of the whole adventure on the first couple of pages, along with a callout that indicates that it can be easily adapted for other eras, even though it is meant for the mid-23rd century. There’s a short section on the spotlight roles of this adventure (engineers, flight controllers and communications officers) and another with suggestions on what sort of actions other types of officers might be able to take.

There is also a prelude section here, before the start of the adventure proper. It suggests a period of shore leave and that’s where I got the idea for our heroes to explore the starbase which got extended with my little haunted ship episode, both of which I detailed here. I really appreciated this suggestion and I suspect its the kind of thing I’ll come back to in future.

Spoilers from this point on for “Dare to Be Wise,” by Al Spader.

The USS Challenger received new orders. It was a nice, easy survey mission to an asteroid field that’d been rumoured to contain a lot of heavy metals. Leaving Starbase 343, they were looking forward to a quiet, scientific survey, but they were unaware that the ship had been sabotaged by Urotoxa, the Nausicaan archaeologist they rescued from Cressida in the last adventure. At first, the sabotage revealed itself only in a couple of negative traits, which the GM was supposed to apply to the ship. These traits made any navigational or sensor tasks more difficult. In play, I indicated to the players performing those tasks only that they seemed to be more complicated and difficult than normal. They noted that, but didn’t immediately pursue it.

The first roll the text has a PC make is to create a trait. This is for the conn officer to plot a course to the asteroid field. This is a Difficulty 2 Reason + Conn task, but it has been raised to Difficulty 3 because of one of the negative traits I mentioned above. This roll also let the players practice getting assistance from the ship. I don’t think this should have been a roll at all, and, if had it to do again, I wouldn’t have made it one. There were no stakes, nothing interesting would have happened if they had failed. It did alert them to the fact of the extra difficulty, but this might have been done more dramatically later, when we were in the tick of the action. The other thing it did was give the conn officer -1 Difficulty to any Conn-related tasks for the rest of the adventure, which doesn’t make sense to me either.

Once they got to the asteroid field, they revealed the presence of gradon particles amongst the rocks through the use of a Sensor Sweep major action (also hampered by the sabotaged systems) and the spending of Momentum to Obtain Information. They also detected gradonic radiation around the trimetric spatial fractures that allowed Bryozoan beings to come through from another dimension during the Cressida disaster in the last adventure. I just don’t know what would have been gained if this sensor sweep failed. They would not have gotten this interesting piece of information and the adventure would have been the poorer for it. Anyway, at this point, the impulse drive kicks in of its own accord and they are launched into the first of two linear challenges in this adventure. I have already outlined my thoughts on these challenges above, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that the PCs had to fix the navigational controls, then the impulse drive and then modulate the fluctuations in the engines. Once they had done all that successfully, it was time for Act 2.

Uss Challenger - shields being drained by Bryozoans — Uss Challenger – shields being drained by Bryozoans

In Act 2, the crew were much freer to perform any tasks they wanted to try and determine what was happening. We had sensor sweeps, telepathic links, and computer searches. These revealed that a trimetric fracture had opened here, releasing large numbers of Bryozoan beings, which draining the Challenger’s shields. The longer this went on, the more danger they were in. So they had to figure out how to get away. With a Control + Engineering task success the Chief Engineer discovered a pulse in the warp core that aligned with the frequency of the pulses from the fracture.

At that moment, a bunch of Bryozoans entered Engineering and formed themselves into a vaguely humanoid form. It was clear it was attempting to communicate with them, but the universal translator was not up to the task. Time for another Linear Challenge. This time they had to identify the manner of communication, modify the universal translator and, finally communicate. This suffered from the same issues as the first one, in my opinion. I think there is a way this mechanic can work better. I just need to think of it for the next time it comes up.

The final act had the crew getting some answers from this Bryozoan Conveyor, racing against time to repair the ship and escaping the trimetric fracture. They talked to the aliens and found that they were an ancient species which used to travel the dimensions, exploring. But, essentially, they got sick of everyone else’s bullshit and decided they would rather not be sentient. In their home dimension, it was possible to live separately, blissfully unaware of their own place in the universe. With the incursion of our dimension they were forced to combine into sentient colonies for some reason. Turns out the colonies voted and decided that the source of the pulses that created the fracture should be destroyed. That was the USS Challenger, of course. But this one colony dissented and came to warn the crew, which was nice. At this point, the PCs had a moment to determine what was causing the issues with the ship and to find the cause of the pulses in the warp core. With a bit of investigation, they discovered Urotoxa’s worm-like virus that she deposited at the starbase when she was aboard the Challenger. This virus affected the systems but also caused the resonance in the warp core that she knew would create a trimetric fracture under the right circumstances.

Armed with this information, the crew got to work on a Timed Extended Task. This was like the extended task to evacuate Cressida in the previous adventure, but with the added pressure of a timer. It was a 12 point progress track. But every time the PCs completed a task towards the goal of breaking free, it took two Intervals. Once they reached 10 intervals, they would have failed. Now, I had been doing the extended tasks wrong last time. Impact is the number of points of progress a PC makes against an extended task’s progress track. I thought they only got 1 Impact per task last time, even though that didn’t make sense because an extended task with a Resistance of 1, would mean they got no progress at all. I had thought that only every second task had any Impact at all last time. Looking back that was so obviously wrong that I wish I had just double-checked the rules in the core book. In fact, the Impact made is equal to the Department rating used by the PC in the performance of the task. So, if it was an Engineering task performed by our Chief Engineer, Burk ven Jaxa, the Impact would have been 5, reduced by the Resistance of 1, to 4. This made a lot of sense I was glad to have come to this realisation.

Anyway, an extended task like this allowed the PCs to do whatever sort of task they thought could be of help and they did. Lt. Kemal gunned the impasse drive to try to escape, Tennan, somewhat cursed by complications brought about by my spending of Threat points ran from pillar to post around the ship trying to find a working communications panel to let the aliens know they meat no harm, and finally Burk created a barrier around the warp core, to contain the pulses. The fracture collapsed, the Bryozoans retreated and the ship escaped.

Our session ended up with the PCs describing how they gained milestones, linking their actions in this adventure back to resonant moments in the last one. This allowed them all to improve in some way and then we totted up their Acclaim points so the could increase their reputations, gain awards, curry favours or earn promotions.

Bryozoan Conveyor in Engineering - a vaguely humanoid collection of beings surrounded by flabbergasted crew. — Bryozoan Conveyor

Conclusion

I had my problems with this adventure, as you will be aware, dear reader, if you made it this far. There was not enough freedom for PCs to do what they wanted. It should have presented more problems and fewer solutions. Some of the plot points felt like they were full of holes and still do. But, it did succeed in teaching some major mechanics of the game and linked the first adventure with the upcoming final one. Was it worth it? Sure. I mean we still had fun with it and there were parts that were genuinely dramatic.

Our trek through the stars will continue soon, dear reader. In the meantime, live long and prosper.

Old School v Old School Essentials

Downtime Discussion

I had a really interesting discussion last night with, friends of the blog, Tom and Isaac. They’ve both been along with me for the Editioning ride and have some great insights. We have started a monthly round-up of games in a Discord video chat. We’re calling it Tables & Tales Downtime. It’s a simple opportunity, that we don’t generally get at the table, to talk about the games we’re playing. We’ve only had two of these Downtimes and they have each turned out quite different. The first went into detail on the games themselves, what happened in the sessions of the previous month, how the systems and mechanics worked at the table, what surprised or delighted players, or what didn’t work for them. In this second one, it was just the three of us so we got into a fairly free-wheeling discussion of the things we had been thinking about games in general recently.

Isaac has been preparing to run the classic AD&D 1st Edition module, Ravenloft, grappling with its copious verbiage and unwanted levels of detail. Meanwhile, I have been reading a couple of OSE adventures and coming to grips with their house-style, which feels like the exact opposite. Tom’s perspective was unique in this mix as the DM of our Dungeon World game, coming up with all their adventure ideas off the dome, which presents its own challenges and opportunities.

The Keep on the Borderlands

I can’t comment too much on Ravenloft since I haven’t read it, but it sounds similar to many adventures of the time. It is arranged in paragraphs, long and wordy. It’s got stats and descriptions for NPCs and areas that are almost certainly never going to be needed. It makes a lot of assumptions about what the PCs are going to try to do and it provides the DM ways to thwart their idiotic plans.

Another prime example is B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. As a beginner module, it has a lot of advice for the starting DM and even for players included. But it also spells out the consequences if the party decides to go on an anti-social rampage through the keep, the exact numbers and stats for the guards, their locations, how many are on duty and in armour, etc. etc. The cognitive load this requires of a DM is not to be underestimated.

Description of hte guard towers in the Keep. — Description of the guard towers in the Keep.

We’re going back in time with adventure modules like this, of course. Maybe comparing them to more modern styles of adventure presentation is unfair. Every adventure produced relies on creators who learned from the mistakes and successes of those who came before, after all. But, in preparation for this post, I read some reviews of Holy Mountain Shaker, the OSE adventure I’m going to use as comparison. Some reviewers and commenters simply hated the OSE house style used to present it because its terse bullet points and single phrase descriptors didn’t include enough sentences or actual paragraphs. Some DMs feel like they need a piece of prose to get to grips with the atmosphere, the setting or the characters. Some people want to have to read through a module two or three times before they feel ready to bring it to the table. The Keep on the Borderlands suggests this approach in the “Preparation for the Use of the Module” section.

Now, up until this point in the text, Gary Gygax has been really bigging up the DM, Here’s an except. Sorry it’s so long. Gary needs an editor tbh:

So, you can see that he has been buttering up the poor rube who agreed to run this classic adventure before telling them they have to learn the damn thing off by heart in preparation. And you can see that that would be no mean feat given the style of writing, the denseness of the prose and lack of distinction between description and stats.

I want to make one thing very clear at this stage; I played The Keep on the Borderlands recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was a great module with lots of player freedom, options for the DM to customise and almost endless possibilities for how it might play out at the table. But its the reading of these older adventures that’s a chore. I don’t really want to read them through once, never mind three times. It takes a long time and it’s boring.

Adventures are for playing, not for reading. Is that controversial?

Holy Mountain Shaker

Holy Mountain Shaker is a 2021 adventure module for Old School Essentials by Luka Rejec of Ultraviolet Grasslands fame. I think it’s interesting that UVG was the first RPG book that got me to stop reading it so that I could start playing it. The longer I spent reading it the more it dawned on me that it was a reference book, not a work of fiction. Anyway, Holy Mountain Shaker is an ambitious adventure that includes a really large number of compelling and enormous locations as well as a town with a few relatively unimportant factions. This is a point crawl where each point is big, like a massive underground chasm, an enormous ziggurat under a mountain, an entire mine. That sort of thing. These are not accompanied by maps of the areas. This is only a 56 page adventure. Instead, the DM is given some of those terse descriptors, a few options for what a party might do in the locations, where their investigations might lead to and some encounters and events.

Sure, it might help if you read some of the location descriptions ahead of time to get an idea of what’s coming for the adventurers, but that won’t take very long and you could absolutely get away with not doing it. It’s easy to see, at a glance, what you need to give the players, what they will need to do some work to find, and what might happen if they do certain things. Personally, I think this gives you just enough to improvise with. We’re playing a use-your-imagination-game here, and I like being given the chance to use mine, even on the fly with minimum prep. Admittedly, having run UVG for a while, I have quite a bit of experience doing this, as it is laid out similarly. But, equally, if you play Blades in the Dark, Heart, the Between or any other story game, you are faced with making up locations, NPCs, items constantly. That’s part of the challenge and part of the fun.

The lack of location-specific maps is a little jarring. I get that. I wanted a map of the ziggurat like we got a (kind of) map of the Pharaoh Fish, but, ultimately, I understand that the exploration is meant to be abstracted, and occasionally cut with scenes of discovery where a PC finds one of those wonderful magic items, or by combat, where we zoom in on the action when a random encounter occurs with one of the creatures that is described at the beginning (and only at the beginning) of the book. It reminds me of a Final Fantasy game. Your little guy is travelling by map across country when you suddenly run into a rabid chocobo or whatever. The map disappears and your party are gathered there in a fully realised location facing that one poor flightless bird.

You don’t have to slog through descriptions of endless empty rooms or 30 ft long corridors. We’ve all done that. I get that that’s D&D and I also enjoy the sort of play that involves precise measurement, perfectly drawn maps and searching for traps with ten foot poles. But reading this was refreshing. It presented me with a different way to play even large-scale locations in a mega dungeon that won’t take the rest of your life to play through and was packaged in such a compact and attractive book.

But, for the sake of comparison, we looked at the Keep from Keep on the Borderlands above so let’s look at the town in Holy Mountain Shaker. The town of Plish is described in two pages, both of which are half illustration. The factions get a bullet point each. This actually seems fair since they don’t come into the adventure itself much. Then you get a paragraph about the native Plishlings compared to the Newfolk who have come to mine the mountain. And lastly, there is another short paragraph describing the Cult of the God Carp. On the second page we have a couple of lines about the earthquakes plaguing the town and then a table of rumours. That’s it. No descriptions of fortifications, no guard stats, no structural engineering reports. What it’s doing is trusting that we all know the kinds of things you might find in a fantasy mining town at the foot of a holy mountain. And it’s giving us permission to come up with that stuff at the table (or for the DM to make it up before they start, I suppose.)

Conclusion

Now, I have a some issues with Holy Mountain Shaker as well. I think some of the descriptors used are too obscure for the average DM to know without looking them up. And that sort of stumbling block is a big deal if you only have one word to go on (what is a vitrine, anyway?) Some of the illustrations do not really illustrate what I would want them to illustrate about some of the locations. And I would actually like a bit more involvement from the factions. But I’m not really here to review this adventure, especially as I haven’t played it yet. I’m just here to compare these two styles.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the former style has not completely died out. Some trad games are still presented using dense paragraphs when, in my opinion, bullet points would be better (looking at you Dragon Age RPG, Call of Cthulhu, DCC) but, as I mentioned above, that style still has its fans and adherents. More power to ‘em. But, for me? Keep it minimal.

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Incursion Point

Starter Campaign

Dear reader, last week, I created a character for Star Trek Adventures 2E. His name was Mesh and he was an Orion Star Fleet Officer on the command track. The lifepath character generation system was satisfying and sufficiently different from other games that I felt it novel and enjoyable. But, the fact is, I’m unlikely to ever get to play a character in a Star Trek Adventures game, since I’m the one running it.

I picked up the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set and Core Rulebook a couple of months ago when Modiphius was having a sale and I haven’t regretted it. Sometimes, when I buy the core rulebook for a game that I’m interested in along with its Starter Set, I wonder why. The starter set can feel like a waste of money. But, the truth is almost always contrary. The general quality of boxed starter sets recently has been really good. Free League are the masters of producing sets of such high quality and with such a wealth of content that I would generally always advise you to pick it up, even if you’re getting the core rules as well. I have played or run starter set adventures of the One Ring, Tales from the Loop and the Bladerunner RPG. All great quality adventures too! The Bladerunner one sticks out as a real highlight for me. The casefile, Electric Dreams was a brilliant intro to the game and the world but was also an engaging and evocative adventure in its own right. That’s a game you could run without ever reading the core rulebook, as long as you have the starter set and you don’t mind pregenerated PCs. We got four sessions out of that game, and I considered that extremely good value for money.

Cover of the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set featuring a group of Star Fleet officers ont he surface of a planet. — Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

Back of the Start Set box — Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

And then we have the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set. In the box, you’ve got a set of five Star Fleet themed d20s, a sheet of tokens, a bunch of handouts which include pregens and rules references and, of course, a rules booklet. This booklet provides you with almost everything to run this game. The biggest omission is, of course, character creation rules. But, as I said above, if you don’t mind the pregens, that’s fine. The campaign booklet is just that: a booklet with a campaign in it. Inside the sixty pages are three interconnected adventures and three mission briefs, which act as adventure frameworks. After three sessions, I can confidently say, the Campaign Booklet, if played in full, is likely to bring you fifteen or sixteen sessions of play in the Star Trek universe. Now that’s making your latinum strips go a long way! Quark would be proud of you, Modiphius!

Rules

Star Trek Adventures 2E uses Modiphius’ own 2d20 system. Despite owning multiple Modiphius games, this is the first time I or, indeed, any of my players have had the pleasure of using it. I was expecting this to be a lot more trad than it is. It is actually really narrative-focused.

The core mechanic is simple. Every character has six attributes and six departments (see my last post for more detail on these.) When you are asked to perform a task, the GM will tell you which attribute and which department you need to use. So you might be using your Daring attribute of 9 and your Conn department of 3 to chase an enemy craft through an asteroid belt. You add the two scores to give you you target number. In this example, that would be 12. If you roll equal to or below that, that’s a success. You automatically get to roll at least 2d20, but you have various ways to add dice to that pool. A task’s Difficulty rating tells you how many successes you need to complete the task. So, for a Difficulty 3 task, you better get more dice, pray for a crit (a 1 counts as two success) or reduce the Difficulty somehow.

Momentum is a resource that the PCs share. They build it up by scoring more successes on rolls than they need. So, in the example above, if you managed to roll four successes on the Difficulty 3 task, you get to add 1 point of Momentum to your pool. That Momentum pool can’t go above 6 points so you are incentivised to use it up. They can use a point of Momentum to add a die to a pool, three points to add two dice and six points for three dice. There are other ways to spend this resource too, such as to get the GM to give you more info on a particular scene.

Threat is a resource for the GM to use that mirrors Momentum. The PCs can add a Threat for more dice in the same sort of way as spending Momentum. The GM gets to use threat to increase the likelihood of Complications occurring (this happens on the roll of a 20 usually.) Complications can come in many different forms. They might be a simple and mechanical as causing an injury. But they also might take the form of a massive narrative twist that really sticks spanner on the works of the PCs’ plans. This comes up way more often than I expected.

Those are the basics. There’s other stuff like taking Stress to Avoid Injury, Extended Tasks that use tracks, Resistance on tasks and in conflicts that absorb successes, but we don’t need to go into them here. If you are interested to learn more, check out the free Quickstart guide here.

Part One, Incursion Point

Opening page of the adventure, Incursion Point. Two page spread. One page features and illustration of Kirk and Spock. — Incursion Point

Incursion Point is the first adventure in the campaign contained in the Starter Set. The campaign is entitled “Infinite Combinations,” but the reasons for that are not really obvious from reading or playing this first part of it. It was written by Meric Moir.

Summaries of each part of the campaign, Inifinite Combinations.

This is quite explicitly a teaching adventure. In fact, the whole campaign is there to teach you how to run and play this game. It has lots of callouts to help out the new GM, from suggestions on what each type of character might do in the current situation, to advice on what to do if your players roll real bad. Much of the text itself is also devoted to explaining how to handle each situation as and when it’s likely to come up. For instance, the first scene has a high likelihood of conflict so the text runs you through how to order actions, resolve and attack and what to do if a PC gets injured. Where necessary, it will direct you to the relevant part of the Rules Booklet. In my experience, it was incredibly effective in teaching me what to do in my first few sessions. Of course, my clever and adaptable players got the hang of it without the need for such hand-holding. Before the first session was over they were stacking and spending Momentum like they’d been doing it all their lives. By session two, the risk of adding more Threat points to my pool was outweighed by their ambition and they were using it to do just oh so much cool shit.

Dear reader, if you think you might be lucky enough to play in this adventure, stop reading now. I’ve got loads of other posts, go and read one of them. There’ll be SPOILERS below.

Stardate 3422.1: We have received an urgent distress call from the independent floating city of Cressida, a resource-gathering collective on the gaseous world Kizomic VI. Creatures of unknown origin have attacked, causing casualties as well as compromising the city’s superstructure. We have responded to the distress call and are proceeding to Kizomic VI at high warp.

When we arrive, we will have only a few short hours to evacuate the city’s 600 inhabitants before the structure fails entirely and sinks into the crushing gravitational depths of the planet. With the number of beings to be evacuated, our first order of business will be to set up pattern enhancers and then direct the locals to the beam-out sites.

The Captain or other commanding officer is supposed to read out this log entry to introduce us to the current situation. We didn’t really have such a PC in our group, so I read it, which was fine. I like the conceit of this as it immediately feels trekkie.

Map of the initial beam in point. Also has details on taking a hit, healing and concluding the conflict with the Bryozoans. — Map of the initial beam in point.

The situation is dire and quickly worsening. The PCs are left to come up with ways to evacuate the citizens as quickly as possible. And that’s when the plant-like aliens they will come to know as Bryozoans seem to attack the evacuees. This is the start of Act 1: Operation Evacuate! In our game, the PCs, Lieutenant Commander Burk ven Jaxa, the Tellarite engineer, Lieutenant Junior Grade Rashid Kemal, our hotshot pilot, and Ensign Laniyar Tennan, Betazoid technician, stunned one Bryyozoan and frightened off the other before quickly moving onto ways they could speed up evacuation. Everything from locating more survivors to constructing elaborate containers to transport more people at a time, (the human cattle container was the term, I believe) were put into practice. With each success, they ate away at an Extended Task track which continued for the rest of the adventure.

Cressida Falling apart - illustration shows a shuttle pursuing the plummetting dome that broke away from Cressida. — Cressida Falling

Act 2: The Fall of Cressida started with a huge chunk of city breaking off and falling into the lower atmosphere of the gas giant. The PCs hopped in a shuttle without so much as a call to the bridge of their ship, the USS Challenger. They shot down after the plummeting hunk of city and managed to land almost safely. This is when I started to really spend Threat and introduce Complications. The shuttle door was jammed and they began to be attacked by more Bryzoans. The PCs quickly took steps to uncomplicated matters and save the citizens who had been trapped on the falling district just before it broke up into so much debris. They brought them back to the ship and escorted them to Sick Bay. Here the PCs encountered some NPCs. This was really the first opportunity any of had to do a little roleplaying in this adventure, and this was session two. It’s a high-speed scenario that demands quick action and decisive play.

Anyway, a well-dressed Orion woman, Administrator Demaad wanted use of the transporters to beam up valuable trade goods. Meanwhile, Urotoxa, an older Nausiccan academic, wanted them to help the humanoid inhabitants of the planet’s fluidic layer far below by bringing them a shipment of phasers. She was sure they would be decimated by the Bryozoans, and, as she had been in communication with them, she wanted to help them.

During this three-sided interaction, they discovered a lot through the use of Tennant’s Betazoid telepathy. They found out that Demaad had an underhanded ulterior motive and that Urotoxa was probably the cause of the entire disaster befalling the planet and its inhabitants. Despite neither woman coming out of the conversation smelling like roses, the PCs decided to try to convince the Captain of the Challenger to let them help the Kizomans, although, perhaps not by breaking the Prime Directive to furnish them with advanced weapons.

In Act 3: The Fate of Kizomic VI, we saw our heroes contending with the Bryozoan Terror, a massive amalgamation of smaller aliens that they had detected swimming towards the main population centre of the Kizoman people in the fluidic layer. They boarded the shuttle Galileo with a probe ripe for jury-rigging and a trio of EVA suits. While Tennan and Burk worked to modify the probe to emit a high-level of gradonic radiation, (they had figured out earlier that that’s what the Bryozoans fed on, destroying the inanimate objects that contained it in the process) Kemal piloted the shuttle down, down, down until it became a submarine. In modifying the probe, they were too successful, as it turned out. It drew the Terror to them before they had even had a chance to launch the probe towards one of the few remaining rifts that the creatures had emerged through in the first place. The shuttle took corrosive damage that left it immobile and losing structural integrity. They eventually managed to launch the probe to draw the Terror away, but two of them had to exit the craft to effect repairs. They managed it with only moments to spare before their suits ruptured. Kemal got them to the gaseous layer before the hull gave out, just in time to be transported back to the ship. Whew! That was quite the finale! Except there was more.

Here’s where the PCs get one final opportunity to make some headway on that Evacuation Extended Task. They had to each take actions to try to help save some more citizens of Cressida. And they did fine, managing to rescue most of the inhabitants before the city crumbled away to nothing in the atmosphere of Kizomic VI. This felt anticlimactic, though, I won’t lie. I should have taken this part of the adventure and moved it to a point before they went to deal with the Bryozoan Terror.

Conclusion

This was a very well put together adventure. As I mentioned above, the teaching elements worked very well, at least when I got to use them. Actually the most gratifying part of it was that the players avoided doing most things the adventure expected of them. Generally, they avoided violence whenever possible, which felt very Star Trek, and this was great because it got me to engage fully with the mechanics and think on my feet as a GM too.

But also, each Act lasted exactly one session. No overlap, no worries about not getting it finished on the night. Nothing but net. They clearly play-tested the hell out of it.

It could maybe have done with a few more opportunities for role-play, but then again, that’s just not the type of adventure it was. In Act 2, there was that interaction between the PCs, Demaad and Urotoxa, which highlighted social conflict and it worked really well.

Honestly, the only real issue was that ending. The adventure directs you to ask the PCs for more tasks to help complete the evacuation once the finale had already occurred in my opinion. It was an anti-climax and the players agreed. If I had it to do over, I would have taken this and placed it before the Bryozoan Terror encounter.

We are looking forward to continuing the campaign! The players are looking for a bit more of a chance to role-play so I think we’ll have a Starbase episode next!

Stay Frosty, Forneus Research Base Review

Zero Prep

It’s the dream, wouldn’t you say, dear reader? Pick up and play. Many claim it, few deliver. One thing I’ll say about this Stay Frosty adventure, and, to be fair, any Stay Frosty adventure I’ve read (which isn’t many,) is that you can pick it up and play it with pretty much no preparation. I mean, that goes for Stay Frosty to a certain extent too. I discovered that when I reviewed the game itself last October.

The cover of Stay Frosty Remastered by Casey Garske. Space Marines fighting aliens/demons — Stay Frosty Remastered

But, of course, zero prep is not all you might want from an adventure. In fact, for some GMs, prep is as much fun as play. So what else has Andrew Walter’s Forneus Research Base got going for it?

Well, Tom, Isaac and I played it over the space of three sessions recently. In fact, we just finished it the other night. I have thoughts.

Action

There’s no fucking around with Stay Frosty, no long opening scene to allow for introductions of our characters, just a short summary for the PCs, of what they’re doing out there in space and an immediate crash landing at the eponymous Research Base. Oh, the crash landing was caused by black ooze exploding from the controls of their shuttle btw.

As I stated, there is a short read-aloud piece of text at the start. It explains that the PCs are private marines, employed by the United Universal Corporation to check in on its research colonies. As they are doing this, they are forced to crash land.

As I said, Stay Frosty is not really interested in your PCs feelings, unless they involve terror or going apeshit. At no point is anyone encouraged to take a moment to express their concern for their fellow marines or, for that matter, the colonists they were supposedly there to protect. This is a DOOM simulator. The PCs are there to shoot shotguns and blow up demons. And Forneus Research Base is all action from the get-go.

The Frostiness Tracker goes from Warm to Ice Cold — Frostiness Tracker

As soon as they emerged from the wreckage, the PCs realised they were not going to be able to take off again without significant work on the shuttle, so they decided to make their way to the base. Meanwhile, I’m rolling the Danger Die every time they move from one location to another, take a look around or stop to think, as intended by the rules. The Danger Die works a bit like a random encounter table. You roll a d6 and the result will give you one of the following:

Encounter and Stress – i.e. roll on the relevant encounter table. Forneus has one table for the moon’s surface and one for inside the base. Stress is added to the PCs to build Tension. Tension also equals Frostiness. They higher the Frostiness level the better as it gives PCs bonuses like advantage on initiative and even extra attacks. But Tension can also explode. See below for more on that.
In dangerous areas, Encounter, otherwise, Environment – Forneus has its own Environment table also. But this didn’t come up too often, to be honest.
Environment – as above
Stress – see point 1
Entropy – for some reason, I rolled this one a lot and it had no effect. It’s only relevant if the PCs are using a thing constantly that has its own Supply die. For instance, if they are using Combat Drugs or Fuel when they’re driving a vehicle. The idea is that when Entropy is rolled, the Supply Die for that thing goes down to the next lowest die size. But whenever this was rolled, they had nothing to decrease.
TENSION EXPLODES! – Only rolled this once. The idea here is that when this comes up, the PCs make a Willpower Save. If they succeed, they get to reduce their Tension by one. If they fail though, they take Tension x level damage and reduce their Tension to 1. Then they roll on the Going Apeshit table if their HP are reduced to 0 by the damage. The effects of this can be anything from getting Advantage on damage rolls but constantly rolling your Ammo Die (like a Supply Die for your weapons,) to Last Stand: going down mano-a-mano with your enemies. I actually adjudicated this mechanic incorrectly at the table. I didn’t allow them the Willpower Save, I just rolled the Tension damage and gave it to every PC. Also, this damage is not supposed to be applied to attribute scores when all HP are gone, as normal damage is. Only one PC had to roll on the Going Apeshit table. She ran for her goddamn life and they had to manacle her to the ATV to stop her.

(I only just realised I was calling this the Doom Die the whole way through our game. Oops.)

The Danger Die is the mechanic that really keeps things interesting in Stay Frosty. Many of the locations in the Forneus Research Base, for instance, have no pre-written encounters or much of interest at all, so the random encounters, environmental hazards and ratcheting Tension from the Danger Die are doing a lot of the work. This works fairly successfully but I found I was rolling up Encounters a lot, since a third of the possible Danger Die results give you one most of the time, and after a certain event in Forneus, you actually get Encounters on a roll of 1 to 3. So the marines were drifting from one Encounter to another with only cursory exploration in between.

At least the variety of enemies is suitably gristly, demonic and fun. You have the obvious demons, like the Black Leathery Imps, that used poison to make their enemies fire on each other. Then you have the basic cultists who just have guns, the mutated cultists who have been transformed to allow them to fly with their fiendish lord Xithrabla through the cosmos, sucking from his hellish teats and the Centiservitor who is a cultist combined with a centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. On top of that you have the real horrors like the Cadaverous Persecutor, a giant cyborg corpse with a rocket launcher, and the Fledgeling Pest (The Final Boss,) a sickening, enormous baby’s head with a partially exposed brain and a vicious bite.

The Mutated Cultist has an eye where his torso should be — Mutant Cultist

The Centiservitor is a mashup of a human and a giant centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. — Mutant Cultist

We found the lower level encounters were essentially just target practice. Since we only had two players, I gave them each three marines and decided to treat it a bit like a funnel. I think this was too many for this adventure. Four would have been a bit more balanced. The main reason I think this is because of the initiative roll in Stay Frosty. Whoever makes a successful Dexterity check gets to go before the enemy in this game. This generally meant that a significant portion of the six characters got to act before the demons and cultists. There were enough weapons between the marines that could do blast damage (flamers, grenades etc.) that they could wipe out the opposition before they ever got a shot off. It felt too easy at times. But, it also seemed to accurately emulate the feeling of playing a video game like Doom. At one point they were crossing a bridge over a chasm and being swarmed by imps and cultists. There were 26 opponents and the party defeated them in two rounds, just mowing them down in waves of gunfire and explosions. In only the second encounter, they came up against a group of six foaming cultists, one of whom was holding a grenade in each hand and standing near a leaky fuel tank. One well-placed shot from the grenade launcher took out the whole bunch with a mushroom cloud left in their wake. These moments felt hilarious, exhilarating and hilarious.

But when it comes to the more challenging opponents like the Centiservitor, the Cadaverous Persecutor and the Fledgeling Pest, I can’t stress how important it is to use the Powerful Opponents mechanic in Stay Frosty. That rule states that when there is a disparity on either side of a fight, the side with fewer Hit Dice, should subtract the difference between their HD and their Opponents’s HD from their attack rolls. For example, when my PCs were facing the Fledgeling Pest at the end of the adventure, the 1 HD/Level 1 marines had to subtract 3 from every one of their attacks against it because it had 4 HD. This meant that they were not able to overwhelm it by sheer numbers in the first round or two. Many shots that might have hit, did not, because of this nicely scaling rule. However, when they were up against the Centiservitor, I forgot to apply the Powerful Opponents rule and they slaughtered it before it ever got a chance to fire off its cool weapon.

My main complaint when it comes to the action in this adventure is that the Fledgeling Pest, labelled as the Final Boss, is quite avoidable. It is described as being attached to a wall by its very flesh in one of the Hangars, which have been converted to perform devilish rituals. But there is no reason for them to go to the Hangars in the adventure. I made one up, of course, to try and get them there. One of the NPCs they met told them there could be a working shuttle in one of them. This did lead them to the Hangars, but as soon as they got there, Tension Exploded and one of their number went running off across the moon’s surface so they hopped in the ATVs they had just found and booked it after her. After that, they decided to leg it as well. Since they had the ATVs, they were better able to make it back to their own shuttle. I had to think on my feet here or they were going to miss out on the best couple of encounters of the whole adventure. So, first, I had the Demon Arms (also restricted to the hangars) appear out of a hellish portal in the ground ahead of one of the ATVs, grabbing the driver and causing the vehicle to flip over. The mouth in the hand of one of the arms devoured one of the party but they won out. Then they moved on again and just as they were about to reach their shuttle the giant demonic archway (also found in the hangars) appeared in the air before them, with the Fledgeling Pest emerging out of it to attack them along with a few of its cultists. This was a genuinely tough fight and resulted in the death of a couple more party members. I might have just let them make it to the shuttle, I suppose, but I didn’t want to deprive the players of the Final Boss.

Non-action

Of course, it wasn’t all action. There was some exploration. This is done in a point-crawl style as you can see by the map here.

The Forneus Research base point-crawl map. — Point-crawl Map

The descriptions of the locations in the adventure are pretty bare-bones. At times, I found I wanted a bit more. For instance, the Systems, Generator & Atmosphere area is supposed to be enormous and encapsulates everything from winding, labyrinthine machine rooms to massive bridges spanning deep chasms. To be honest, these feel like they should be separate, individual locations. Another point about this area in particular is that we’re told that the communications can be turned back on and full computer bank access can be gained here, but not what that might achieve. I had no idea what the computer banks might tell them and I had no idea who they might communicate with off-world. That’s a lot to leave in the lap of a GM, especially when the rest of this adventure is pretty much zero-prep, as I mentioned before.

Apollo

Actually, it is really hard for the PCs to get much information about what has happened here. Even the few living, rational NPCs they meet had no way of knowing what happened on the base, since one was a prisoner and had been kept out of the loop the whole time, one was in a coma and one was a talking chimp, named Apollo, who was in stasis the whole time. It would have been more interesting if at least one of these guys had the full story for the marines. I should have improvised that, in hindsight. Of course, the PCs did recruit both Apollo, the chimp, and Jamal, the prisoner, gave them guns and got them shooting, so that was fun.

Conclusion

I ran this, as I mentioned above, for two players with three PCs each. I think this was a mistake. I mean, once they had recruited the NPCs, they had a squad of eight and they were just mulching the hostiles at every turn, until the very end. Four PCs would have been about right to make it a challenge. Also, I thought I might be able to run it as a one-shot, but that was highly unrealistic. It took three sessions in all, and they did not explore any more than about half the locations.

If I had to do it over again, I might have seeded some of the locations or NPCs with a bit more information on the background of the adventure, but I would still keep preparation time to near zero.

All in all, it was a fun, exploding demon sort of romp as an adventure and a system that we all enjoyed, although I expected Tension to Explode more often.

DCC Day 2026

Collections

It’s been a long time since I collected anything. I used to collect comics, although it wasn’t a conscious choice to build a collection. I just bought 2000AD every week and didn’t throw it out as that seemed rude. Those comics went the way of all things for one reason or another, and any comics I bought after that were digital. I even gave up on that when Amazon bought Comixology and ruined it as a service. I used to have a small collection of DVDs and Blurays. Still have a lot of them in the attic, actually. But with the advent of streaming services, I don’t purchase too many of those anymore.

RPGs, though… When I got back into playing them around 2014/2015, I was only playing 4E because I had the books. Then I decided to see what this whole 5E thing was about. That quickly ballooned out of all sense. Frustration with that brought me to discover indie RPGs starting with Spire and then everything that Rowan, Rook and Decard ever produced. That’s when things started to really get out of hand. Now I seem to never have quite enough shelf space. Every time I buy a new set of book shelves, I fill them immediately and then a new kickstarter fulfilment or three arrives.

DCC has been a major contributor to my collection woes. I have backed a number of Goodman Games crowd-funders in the last couple of years, including the recently arrived Dungeon Denizens II, Terror from the Underdeep (a 5E set, but still Goodman Games) and Caverns of Thracia. Also, there are just so many adventures, taken on their own, mere booklets, a few pages. But its hard to buy just one…

The cover of Dungeon Crawl Classics Caverns of Thracia. :arge face of a savage fighter in a bronze helm, lizard man in the background, Minotaur with axe and shield in the foreground. — DCC Caverns of Thracia

Anyway, back to the Caverns of Thracia. The kickstarter was to produce a book that included both the original Judges’ Guild mega-dungeon adventure by Jennell Jaquays and the newly realised version for DCC (or 5E.) It came with a bunch of add-ons like fold-out maps, a handout booklet, a GM screen and a few side adventures that were set in the same general area as the main one. So, I have been thinking recently, especially as I retread old ground in the Editioning, that I should be using some of these books! I thoroughly enjoy DCC but I have only ever run two funnel adventures and a 1st level one. So, I decided to take one of those side adventures from my Caverns of Thracia haul and run it for DCC Day 2026, which just passed on July 18th.

Beneath the Isle of the Serpents

Beneath the Isle of Serpents inside cover illustration shows a band of adventurers filing down a narrow corridor with a warrior in front, a Wizard in the middle and a hypnotised Dwarf in the rear, attacking the Wizard. They are being attacked by a Serpent man who looks a lot like a Lizard man if I'm being honest about it. — Hypnotise!

I settled on DCC # 109 Beneath the Isle of the Serpents by Bob Brinkman as a suitably evocative scenario that would showcase a pretty cool dungeon and could easily be finished in two sessions. I have already learned that, no matter how short a DCC adventure is, you are not likely to finish it in one session without severely editing it or via TPK. Turns out I had more lessons to learn.

We started the adventure in montage. My players, just two for this DCC Day, had a couple of PCs each. One of these was a Wizard, and one of the adventure hooks is that the Wizard’s patron calls in one of the many favours owed them. Hilda’s patron Ydd’grrl, demanded that she and her friends deal with the burgeoning evil beneath the Isle of the Serpents on the Starry Archipelago. So they trekked across the continent, traveling largely by map. They got to a fishing village on the mainland closest to the Isle of the Serpents and then a fisherman, named Kamay, offered to take them where they wanted to go. No-one else would…

Map of the Starry Archipelago. A number of green islands dotted acorss a blue sea. — Starry Archipelago: its fun to say. Try it!

Kamay dropped them off at the black sand beach on the south of the island. Here they faced the terror that was a Giant Devil Crab. They largely had the measure of this thing, but when it hit, it hit hard. After a couple of rounds where they battered away at its devilish shell, one of its claw attacks impaled Hilda, killing her instantly. Kinda, I mean, we fucked up here. It has been about ten months since we last played with these characters so we forgot how they worked. It looked like our Hilda had 15 HP, but we all thought that must be some mistake for a level 1 Wizard, right? Wrong, it was only after the session, when Hilda’s player, Tom, was trying to figure out where the 15 came from that they realised it was one of the benefits she got from her familiar! So, when I ruled that she couldn’t have had so many HP, and must have been killed by the 8 devil claw damage, I killed her without due process or any real legal basis. Some Judge! Anyway, once we knew what had happened, we ret-conned the death. Instead, she awoke amidst the devastation of the devil crab, stripped of all her belongings by her fellows, and badly injured. “Fuck this,” she thought, and went back to the boat.

While she was “dead/unconscious” however, I asked Tom to roll up a new PC using purplesorceror.com as I was worried about the ability of the party to survive the dungeon when there were just three of them. Tom rolled up Glagrill, a Dwarf who they’d all forgotten was asleep in the hold of Kamay’s fishing boat the whole time.

The Island

The map of the isle of Serpents. It is vaguely oblong with a volcano with a face in the middle. No hexes. — No hexes here.

The adventure provides a really great random encounter table for those parties that decide to explore the island’s surface. Now, there’s a perfectly good, relatively recently forged path through the jungle that leads directly to the main dungeon entrance. If they take that path, they get to move full speed and forgo having to roll for any random encounters at all! so those PCs who avoid that are probably just paranoid. No good reason to do that, surely!

Now, I will say that while the encounter table is great, if a bit over the top for what is probably going to be a very minor aspect of the adventure, the text tells the Judge to roll for a random encounter every two hexes traveled by the party, but the island map ain’t got no hexes so you would need to kind of guess how far two hexes might be, I suppose.

The Dungeon

Anyway, my clever party took the safe option and went straight down the path and straight down the ancient, root-choked chimney to the buried temple to some chaos God. Here they discovered some indecipherable wall art, a room filled with rust-midges and a grate in the floor, below which those blessed with infravision could see barely living bodies of humans hanging by manacles from the sloping ceiling of what looked like a sluice. And that was the end of session 1.

Session 2 saw them descend the winding staircase out of that first chamber. They found it ill-suited to them, too narrow, with steps too long and too low, as though built for a very different type of body. Before long, they encountered an opening in the wall on one side. Our Dwarf, Glagrill, checked it over but made some noise in the process. So, when he made his way into the chamber beyond, he found two Serpent Men and one Cobra Sub-commander on their way to attack. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the doorway meant only one PC could stand in the front. The Sub-commander attempted to hypnotize the PC right behind the Dwarf, but Glagrill did his best to defend, and Helfgott, our Cleric, cast darkness to prevent any more hypnosis attacks. Three against four, this turned into a war of attrition, which is bad news for a band of 1st level characters. Eventually, the darkness failed and Magnolia, our Halfling, was hypnotized by the Cobra Sub-commander. She had no choice but to attack Helfgott. She critted and did an extra 2d6 damage on top of her normal weapon damage. Helfgott only had 3 HP. He was one of the longer lived PCs. Isaac had had him since Sailors on the Starless Sea. It was a tough way to go but the others looted his corpse and moved on after they killed the two guards. The Sub-commander had locked himself in his room in the back of these guard quarters. On their way through they found a pair of lucky dice, some coin and a barrel of human hands, feet and other bits.

Eventually, they decided to open the door and deal with their opponent. This time, Melmoth, Isaac’s Elf character was the one to suffer the hypnosis of the Cobra Sub-commander. He was forced to turn on his new associate, Glagrill. He critted… Glagrill, so new to the world, was sent out of it again in but a moment. The two remaining adventurers, taking no chances, fire-bombed the trapped Cobra Sub-commander to death and found a bunch of treasure in the ruin of his chamber.

Not even half way through this adventure and technically, three PCs down. This was the dice telling a story. I was rolling so well, I felt bad about it. Tom and Isaac had never rolled worse, except when they were under the Cobra Sub-commander’s sway and they critted. There was shock, sorrow and outrage on display at the table. Everyone was questioning their choices. We laughed and cried. This is why I play these games to be honest. Not to kill characters but to experience the extremes of those moments.

Conclusion

The Cover of the Special Edition of DCC RPG. it has a gold embossed demon skull complete with horns on the faux-leather black cover. — DCC RPG Demon Skull

Eventually they trudged back towards the beach, thinking to retreat. Meanwhile, Kamay the fisherman started lifting the anchor. Hilda asked where he thought he was going. He told her his business was done here. She sent him into a deep and magical sleep and made for shore where she reunited with her former companions. They decided one more try was in order.

DCC Day 2026 may be done, but the expedition Beneath the Isle of the Serpents is far from over, dear reader. Join me again soon, when I will complete my review of this deadly module.

The Editioning, Basic D&D, the End

The Kept on the Borderlands

You see, it’s past tense because the game’s over now. Anyway… dear reader, if you are reading this and you don’t know what any of the words in the title or sub-heading mean, maybe go back and have a read of the entire collection of posts on the Editioning, our challenge to play every edition of the original fantasy RPG, and on this game of B/X or Basic D&D.

We finished up the game on session 11 a few of days ago and I have been thinking about it a lot since then. There’s a lot to consider! After all, this was the adventure that kicked off the role-playing lives of so many nerds from 1981 on, since it came with the Basic Set. Not only that; in the context of the Editioning, playing it now, in 2026, allows me to think about it in a way that players at the time could never have. As well, it’s the adventure that launched a thousand clones. Could Gary Gygax ever have foreseen the enduring popularity and desire to emulate this scenario, when he first designed it?

But, when it comes down to it, I want to take this game that we played at face value. That’s the real purpose of the Editioning as I see it. That, and comparison. I want to compare this experience with the experience of playing every other edition of D&D. And that’s something I can usefully begin to do now that two of them are done and another is under weigh.

Beginnings

The About page of the Keep on the Borderlands - inlcudes a gnraly illustration of a band of adventurers fighting an owlbear in a dungeon. — Info Page

One of the major attractions of Basic D&D for many will undoubtedly be the ease and speed with which you can create and even detail your PCs. You can easily roll up stats, choose a class and equip a level one character in about half an hour, maybe a bit more depending on your familiarity with the game and the genre. Genre is an important point here. There are no gonzo elements, really. It’s pretty straight-forward medieval Europe with dwarves, elves and goblins. Most anyone interested in playing D&D is going to have at least a passing cultural understanding of the broad strokes and tropes. This ease of character creation is a major bonus, from my point of view, it allowed us to have our session 0 and session 1 in the same evening. But, maybe more importantly, it allows you to roll up a new PC on the fly while the others mourn the loss of the one that just got an arrow through the eye. What this means, in many instances is that any particular PC can be easily substituted by another of the same class.

To compare this aspect of the game to OD&D all I can say is there is not a huge amount of difference, except to say you have slightly fewer decisions to make in Basic. OD&D allows you to choose race as well as class, so, for instance, we had a halfling thief and an elf magic user in our OD&D game. From this perspective, I often think of AD&D as the natural descendant of OD&D rather than Basic. AD&D 2nd Edition is determined to overwhelm the player with options, however, and requires multiple decisions to be made simultaneously. From alternative ability score rolling methods to the inclusion of kits, non-weapon proficiencies and schools of magic, the complexity is ramped up ten-fold from Basic. This is a matter of preference, I think. Some of my players enjoyed all the options quite a bit. While others would much rather get to the game more quickly, like you can with Basic or OSE or most OSR games these days.

Map of the Wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands. A great forest in the north surrounds the Caves of Chaos and the Cave of the Unknown. A river meanders through the central part of the map, with marshes along its edges and more forest to the south. The Keep stands just north of the river on the western side of hte map. — Map of the wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands

As for the beginning of the adventure itself, The Keep on the Borderlands encourages the DM to take the Background section and expand on it or tailor it to their own campaign. Isaac did this for us by indicating that we were the last surviving members of a mercenary band that was returning from a failed campaign in the wilderness. This worked well to explain the relationship of the PCs, why they were traveling together and to give us a motivation to seek out gainful employment so we could get back on our feet.

My experience with OD&D and AD&D 2nd Ed is quite different. Of course, I created the OD&D adventure from scratch so I necessarily created the starting situation for them as well, but for the Eternal Boundary in 2nd Ed, the DM is presented with two options to start, and it’s quite proscriptive otherwise.

Middles

The map of the caves of chaos - a finger-shaped ravine with cave systems branching out from it. — Caves of Chaos Map

The Keep on the Borderlands adventure booklet consists largely of location descriptions. The “plot” such as it is, is contained within those. This is a familiar adventure design methodology for anyone who has been paying attention to the OSR. One of the first descriptions is of the Inner Bailey of the keep. In the two paragraphs devoted to it, the major points made regarding it are that the PCs must do a great service to the keep to gain entrance and if they do that, they’ll have a feast thrown in their honour, where the Castellan will gain the measure of them. If they impress him, he will send them on missions later, have them blessed on the way out and pay them a reasonable rate each time.

Isaac nicked a great little mechanic from the Root RPG for handling our reputations with the various factions involved in the adventure. Root uses reputation trackers to record how well liked or despised your PC is by the various woodland factions, with PC actions able to add points to or subtract them from the tracks. You can find a good description of that here on the Cannibal Halfling Gaming site. Gaining rep with the various factions and being aware of it definitely made us push our characters to make certain choices that we might otherwise not have. Mostly, we wanted to build reputations with factions we were already friendly with and tank all the others. The fact is, the way we ended up playing the adventure, it was about 75% impressing or pissing off factions, 15% dungeon crawl, 10% getting absolutely fucked by random encounters. So, the gaining of rep was at least as important as gaining experience. The module does refer to the possibility that the PCs might become aware of the conflicts between the denizens of the Caves of Chaos and use that as a way to set them against one another. But, it doesn’t provide any useful advice as to how to handle it beyond, “be careful to handle this whole thing properly,” which is genuinely worse than useless. What it does not do, at any stage is present the monsters as anything other than elements to be eliminated. We don’t need a name and background for every monster NPCs but at least the leaders should get that! Once again, Isaac took it upon himself to fill in those blanks, naming the leader of each faction, giving them personalities and motivations that we could attempt to work with or butt up against. He never managed it from a combat-first perspective, and I really appreciated that, because combat is exceedingly lethal and to be avoided at all costs. This might have just been the random encounters which included monsters of higher levels than us who were quite capable of one-shotting our toughest members, but it did feel more lethal than the other two games I’m comparing here.

Comparing all of this to OD&D, once again, in my own home-brew adventure, I actually felt there were some things I could have learned from it. I often felt I should have had more factions and even NPCs in general in my OD&D game, even though the concept I had for it did not require that. Combat-wise, OD&D and Basic both have a hitting problem, in that it’s really hard to do. We missed a lot and it was generally agreed that having a shit-load of hirelings was a necessity, if only so that the law of averages would be on our side. This was true of the enemies killing our party members too. We lost two PCs throughout the campaign, but oh so many more hirelings.

It’s harder for me to compare the middle of the adventure to 2nd ed, since we are not there yet, but I can compare the style of adventure. The Eternal Boundary is an entirely different beast. Of course, it does have the factions of Sigil baked into the adventure, and the factions the PCs belong to have a real effect on things, but they are not trying to ingratiate themselves to the factions, really. It involves a lot of investigations that may involve factions, but that’s about it. Actually, it would be interesting to include a Root-style rep track but, there are so many factions involved in the city, it might become like too much overhead. One thing is for sure, so far, it seems like a more diplomatic than combat-oriented adventure. Combat-wise, I can’t comment too much. We haven’t had any fighting yet, but, from what I remember, combat had the potential to take an age and to be very crunchy compared to Basic. Still quite lethal but with a lot less instant death. I’ll revisit this after we have a few more fights in Planescape.

Endings

An illustration of a minotaur, GHolds a weapon. Looks angry, — Minotaur

Isaac gave us an ending more because we had to move on to other games than because we came upon it naturally. The fact is, looking at the adventure now, we had barely scratched the surface of the Caves of Chaos. We missed the entire minotaur labyrinth! There are caves denoted by letters A to K and we only entered three of them. That third one, though, that was a doozy.

Isaac had been coming up with a variety of events through the course of the adventure, and we had no idea they weren’t detailed in it. The main area of his invention involved the Serpent Cult and its relation to the Curate of the church in the keep and his relation to the Castellan’s advisor, an elf. Now, we had immediately discovered the Curate’s elf-racism since one of our party was an elf, but it ran deeper. One day, we returned to the keep to find that the advisor had killed the curate when he accused him of being a spy for the Serpent Cult. We investigated and found no evidence that the elf had anything to do with the cult, but did discover evidence that the cult was operating from one of the Caves of Chaos. On our word, the Castellan released the imprisoned advisor and then promised us a permanent residence in the keep and his eternal gratitude if we would clear out the cult. In order to take on the cult, we recruited the assistance of the goblins we had previously made friends with and then marched on the evil cave.

This led us to the last session of play. As a cleric-heavy group, we turn-undeaded our way through the majority of the encounters leading to the final boss, the Chaos Priest hiding in his chamber beyond a chapel swarming with skeletons and zombies. We used Hold Person on him, he failed his Save against it and we stabbed him to death and cut off his head to bring back to the castellan. Hurrah! We lost the majority of the goblins on our team but otherwise came out a great deal richer and even more experienced.

Isaac had us do epilogues for our PCs, since we are unlikely to return to them and I will genuinely miss playing Thaddeus Nightbane. He finally proved that not everyone he cared about had to die and that felt like a good end to his arc. I will say that, as far as running this only in Basic D&D goes, I think it could be difficult. Thaddeus ended up as level 5 and, thechnically, Basic only goes to level 3. You would have had to have the Expert set on hand before you finished playing the adventure, I feel. Or, just make sure, as DM, that you don’t hand out too much treasure or encounter XP.

So that was the end for us. But, I’m quite sure you could continue playing in and around the Keep and Caves for twenty or more sessions if you wanted to explore every cave and every faction. It’s even got re-playability, especially with a different DM. Isaac put so much of himself and his ideas into it, I’m sure, if I ran it myself, for instance, it would be a very different game.

Comparing to OD&D’s end, it’s difficult, once again, but I can say that my adventure, the Woes of Sorrowfield had a very clear ending, although they might have approached it from different ways. This has nothing to do with the edition either, of course, more the adventure. Woes was a totally different type of adventure compared to Keep, so, like I said, it’s hard to compare.

As for the Eternal Boundary, although we are a long way from the end of that, I know, for sure, that the ending also be at a very definite time and place, although, once again, they might arrive at it in any one of a number of different ways.

The main difference, here is that Keep on the Borderlands is not really interested in telling a particular story, so much as presenting a situation, but both the AD&D 2nd Ed adventure and my own OD&D adventure, had a specific story to tell.

Conclusion

I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This adventure tops a lot of people’s favourite adventures lists and I can see why now. Although, I would say a lot of my enjoyment came from the way in which Isaac ran it rather than from the contents of the module itself. But the module gives a DM the freedom to expand and improvise as they want, so that is a very cool aspect of it. As a teaching adventure, I can see its value.

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Character Attacks, Saving Throws, and Cost of Equipment and Weapons — Useful Tables in KotBL

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Clerical Abilities, Armour Classes, and Wandering Monsters — Useful Tables in KotBL

As for Basic D&D, I thoroughly enjoyed this pared-down version of the game. It’s freeing having no real skills and only a few stats you need to keep track of. Some things like saving throws and THAC0 still bother me but I look at them now as more of a nostalgic idiosyncrasy than a real bother. They are not difficult to get used to and they don’t get in the way too much in play.

The Editioning will continue, dear reader, but its time to leave the Keep on the Borderlands behind along with poor Edmund, my cleric who died in session 2 and whose corpse we found shambling around in the Chaos Cult’s lair. We put out his other eye and chopped off his head for good measure.

The Bloggies 2026

It’s Bloggies time again! This year, I’m not nominated, mainly because I didn’t nominate myself, which is what I did last year. But there are lots of great blog posts involved. I recommend you go and treat yourself to some of them.

This year, it’s being run by Clayton Notestine, last years’ winner over on the Explorer’s Design blog. It’s a lot of work! The honour of winning is tempered by the commitment of time and effort it requires to run it the next year. But he’s doing a brilliant job so far.

Today, I’m going to highlight one of my favourite posts from each category. The categories are:

Advice
Critique
Gameable
Meta
Theory
Debut Blog
Blog Series

For voting purposes, the posts are all paired, so they’ll be pitted against each other in a brutal gladiatorial blog-off. There can be only one!

You can read them all using the links provided on this page. Or you can join me in listening to them via the We Read the Bloggies podcast, to which many members of the TTRPG/blogging community have so generously donated their time.

Advice

This is my pick from the Advice category:

Just Tell Them What They Need! by Nate Whittington of the Grinning Rat blog. It was published on December 9th 2025.

If you have ever read a TTRPG adventure and screamed at it to provide you with the relevant information on a dungeon room, an NPC or a situation, this one’s for you.

Critique

This review of Mausritter, and, more specifically, the campaign set, The Estate, for that game, is really interesting. Recently, Quinns was on the Dice Exploder podcast talking about his love of the tactile, chit-based inventory system Mausritter uses. But, in this review, although the author, Malmuria, likes the way the system works, they point out that it’s a lot of work just to keep track of all those little pieces.

Gameable

On the d4 Caltrops blog, we have a very short but incredibly useful post on the stocking of wilderness hexes in OSR games. The main resource here is a d66 table which identifies discoveries as:

Landmarks
Lairs
Resources
Special
Hazard

Or some combination of these. Mostly, it provides sparks of inspiration to allow a GM to come up with discoveries that make sense in their campaigns/worlds. Here’s an example:

Hazard/Resource: Consider a Hazard that renders the Resource invaluable or inaccessible in some way.

Doesn’t that get your little GM brain whirring?

Theory

I love this post about Making Hacking an OSR Style Problem from the goblin.zone blog. I don’t play a lot of cyberpunk games or even games set in the modern day so this is not a subject that comes up very often in my gaming life. I am, however, in my day job, responsible for system security and data protection so I particularly clicked with Part 2: Useful Real World Concepts

Best Debut Blog

My pick in this category is the Valeria Loves blog. Here’s the post that got me hooked. Valeria has a compelling and entertaining voice:

I am a priestess of Blorb. Just as the map is not the territory, the rules are not the fiction. You do not need a codified movement speed to permit player characters to move.

And there is a satisfying assortment of blog posts so you’re sure to find something to your liking.

Best Blog Series

It’s the Playful Void again. Over the Christmas/New Years period Idle Cartulary reviewed a truly staggering number of games/modules for Critique Navidad. It was one a day for thirty days. I wrote a blog a day during my first month on the dice pool dot com. I can tell you, that’s a lot of work! And I was only prattling away about the shit the occurred to me, not reading, critiquing and writing about the work of others in a thoughtful and fair manner. That’s what this series is. Go check it out.

The Sutra of Pale Leaves, The Fixer

Goodbye Carcosa

Dear reader, last week, we took a look at the final part of the Sutra of Pale Leaves campaign. Today, we’re looking at the Fixer, the final scenario in Carcosa Manifest, the second book in the series. Its part of the Sutra of Pale Leaves, but its not necessarily part of a campaign. You could play it as a stand-alone module, but you could also play it as a coda to your SoPL game. It makes as much sense as the very loose way the campaign is presented, if not the way you might actually find yourself playing it.

The Repairer of Reputations

The Fixer is based on the short story by Robert W Chambers, the Repairer of Reputations. I’ve just listened to it on Youtube. It’s a story of insanity, ambition and murder, which is told from the point of view of a man who has come under the influence of the King in Yellow and a deformed, yellow Repairer of Reputations named Mr Wilde. Go listen to it or read it here. It’s not very long and I think it’s worth reading. The story and the scenario share a few major scenes and themes, but the Fixer is resembles the Repairer of Reputations only loosely. For one thing, the original was set in a then future New York City, while the scenario is based in 1990s Tokyo. The main thing, of course, is that it’s an RPG scenario for a number of players, and that necessitates a few things. The PCs need to have something to do, there has to be room for all of them to be the “main character” and it has to have enough meat on its bones to keep them going for a few sessions of play. I think the Fixer is quite successful at doing these things.

Beginnings

There is an interesting conceit here, that the investigators are down on their luck. They are members of Tokyo’s growing homeless community and are lacking money and respect. It’s possible that they are the same investigators that played through the full Sutra of Pale Leaves campaign. In fact it’s suggested that that’s the reason for their current predicament. Perhaps the things they were forced to do to fight the Pale Prince got them arrested or sent to a psych ward. Maybe they became social outcasts due to their talk about mind viruses and Carcosa and faceless people. Whatever the reason, they have ended up on the streets.

But then they’re given an opportunity by Mr Nomura to make some good money and repair their reputations, restoring their lot in life. Nomura is a strange man with terrible disfigurements and an ever-increasing number of cats. He acts as a wakaresaseya, a breaker-upper, if you will. This is a real business in Japan, and it fits in the scenario perfectly. In fact, in the short story, we never discover what it is that Mr Wilde actually does to Repair Reputations and I’m not sure that such a job ever truly existed in history. So, I like this logical adaptation in the scenario. He calls on the PCs to target several “wrong-doers who have made it into his ledgers.” These include a politician, a dirty cop, a buddhist abbott, a yakuza gangster and a fashion CEO. These are known as the Strawmen. He doesn’t want them killed or physically harmed. Rather, he would like the investigators to humiliate and humble them in particular ways.

Episodic

The visual flow chart of the scenario features the five portraits of the strwmen from the scenario at each of the points of a pentagram with a portait of the Fixer, Nomura above them all. — The Fixer Flow Chart

This scenario bucks the trend when it comes to format. Rather than simply following leads from location to location as the other SoPL scenarios, the investigators need to deal with each of the Strawmen one by one. Now, these people are all assholes in one way or another, even the buddhist abbott is a drug-addict who tricked his way into inheriting his title from his father by convincing the old man that his brother was actually the junkie. So, the investigators are unlikely to feel too bad about bringing them down. In fact, each of the strawman sections details the exact kind of shitheel each one is, their background, their weaknesses and where they’re most likely to be found. For instance, the politician can usually be intercepted at the National Diet (Japanese parliament) or on the golf course. Most useful is the “possible approaches” part in each strawman section. Obviously, this is Keeper-facing information, but it can be used to confirm that the investigators are on the right track. Generally, they are going to have to overcome things like getting onto a golf course or into parliament buildings while being homeless person. But once they get there, they get to do fun things like blackmail, or just straight-up releasing blackmail material to destroy them.

I can see each of the strawmen maybe taking a single session, with an episodic, strawman of the week type game. This would be interspersed with the results of the investigators’ efforts. You see, the truth is that targeting these individuals is essential to the completion of a ritual that will succeed in bringing Carcosa into our world. Nomura wants to overwrite Akihabara with the home of the Prince of Pale Leaves. They will start to see changes such as the police station being turned into changed into a castle looming over the town market square of Carcosa, or the National Diet transforming into the Royal Ballroom. As the city changes, so too does Nomura himself. His simple silicone prosthetic fingers become a cybernetic arm, and eventually he wears a porcelain mask and he is completely subsumed in some sort of cloak of scales with odd protuberances. I really like the gradual change in this villain and in the world. The investigators must assume their actions have something to do with these changes. The become more extreme with each strawman they bring low. And yet, the scenario assumes they continue to do what they have been employed to do.

Endings

Nomura, the Fixer pictured with his cybernetic arms on the table in front of him. He is otherwise a normal enough looking Japanese man wearing a light coloured shirt. There are cats in both the foreground and the background. — Nomura, the Fixer

Once Carcosa has been fully unlocked by the actions of the PCs, Nomura will attempt to fulfil their bargain by offering them positions of authority in his new city. The scenario provides us with a number of lore sheets, which the Keeper can give to any investigators that agree to this. These include, the Rightful Crown Prince, the Royal Matchmaker and the Judge of the Star Chamber. These are to be assigned to particular investigators, not randomly. For instance, the Rightful Crown Prince is supposed to be given to a PC with a good reason to despise the politician strawman so that they can rightfully exceed his level of political power. Even if the PCs don’t want to take on these roles in Nomura’s new world, they might anyway, if they enter into a period of underlying insanity, or if their Exposure Points get high enough, which is fun.

As a truly standalone scenario, we are told that the Fixer is not proscriptive on how it might end. It provides a couple of potential climaxes but it could really go any way. It does, however, still have the numbered Endings common to all these scenarios. I don’t know how we square that circle, to be honest. Anyway, here are the Endings:

Party Wipe (Failure)
Carcosa Manifests (Bad Ending)
Reality prevails (Good Ending)
Split Decision (Umwelt Ending)

Conclusion

I like this scenario. It’s weird and contains some potentially amazing scenes and revelations for the players. The NPCs are well drawn and the events are memorable. I think it would be a perfect way to wrap up your time with the Sutra of Pale Leaves and would act as a fun epilogue to the campaign.

All in all, I’m happy I took this deep dive into these books. I haven’t all that much experience running Call of Cthulhu but I think I would run this full campaign because it resonates with me personally. I think the Prince of Pale Leaves is an insidious and threatening unbeatable villain. The setting is one that I think will fascinate many people and the themes revolving around elements of Japanese culture and society work really well. The variety in the scenarios would, I think, keep it compelling and interesting for both Keeper and players. But I don’t think I would take their advice on running the scenarios in any order other than the one they are presented in and I can’t imagine myself playing it more than once, as they suggest is possible in the intro.

The Sutra of Pale Leaves, The Bridge Maiden Part 2

The Sutra Ends?

Not quite. We’re almost there, dear reader. This post is about the scenario that’s designed to be the culmination of the Sutra of Pale Leaves campaign for Call of Cthulhu. But it’s not the last scenario. There is one more to go. It’s called the Fixer and I’ll deal with that one next time. If you’re interested in the rest of the posts on this subject, check them out here.

The Bridge Maiden, Part 2 is, guess what, the continuation of the Bridge Maiden, Part 1. You come here to the dice pool for all the hottest insights, dear reader. The intro section tells you that you should run this as the last scenario in your campaign also. As I mentioned in these posts before, you’re informed early on that you can run the scenarios of this campaign in any order, but obviously, if you try running the Bridge Maiden Part 2 before Part 1, it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense. I would contend that the only two scenarios you really have to play to make an, admittedly very short, campaign are these two. None of the events of the other scenarios are central to the main plot of the Sutra of Pale Leaves. Honestly, even the events of the first part are basically surplus to requirements. More on that later.

Make way for SPOILERS below!

Who and What is the Bridge Maiden?

“Who” is a relatively easy question to answer, thankfully. In a very real sense, the Hashihime or Bridge Maiden, is embodied by Umezono Kaho, the NPC from Part 1 who probably employed the investigators to find her brother. Unfortunately, her brother had been transformed by the power of the Sutra, into a pale, subterranean, tentacular creature, but he was basically an asshole so whatever. However, after the events of that scenario, Kaho disappeared. No matter what the PCs did, there was no way to find her. During that time, she had become more and more assimilated into the Association of Pale Leaves (APL.) Not only that, but she has become the vessel for the entity known as Hashihime, as had her ancient ancestor, the great warrior-woman, Gozen Tomoe.

“What” is a bit more difficult. As the Hashihime, Kaho will be the one to guide the Prince of Pale Leaves from his home in Carcosa, across a magical bridge to Earth. This is achieved through the performance of a ritual. It’s not fully clear to me how this all works, though. We know that Gozen was an adherent of the Prince but I don’t know why only she, or her ancestors, have the ability to act as escort. We are told that it’s part of the ritual, but not why. We don’t have many other details about the ritual either, to be honest. But that’s because the PCs will not be able to stop it from beginning. So, let’s move on.

Beginnings

It’s at least a year since the events of Part 1. The investigators might have forgotten that Kaho ghosted them after they found/killed/escaped the clutches of her brother. But something comes up that leads them back to her. As usual, you can use the investigators’ confidants to get them involved, but there are no explicit hooks provided in this scenario as there are in the others we’ve looked at so far. Instead, we have a few bullet points describing ways to bring in the PCs without the intervention of the confidants. Honestly, I’m not sure why that is. After a year, I think it would be great to have a solid narrative hook to utilise to re-introduce them to this case. Especially as it’s not really even the same case! Part 1 revolved around the disappearance of Kaho’s brother, Minoru. Her relation to the Bridge Maiden and the APL is entirely tangential to it.

Except for one important detail. The Mandala of the Divine Eye was the artwork/sign/magic that allowed the APL to identify Kaho, through the thoughts and memories of her brother. Minoru had taken it to his lair beneath Tokyo in Part 1. It’s quite possible the investigators found it when they tracked him there. If they didn’t manage to do that, never fear! It has plot armour, so they will have been given it by one of their ever useful confidants who got their hands on it after it washed out of a storm drain. Either way, the PCs will, hopefully, want to examine it. Otherwise the beginning section of the scenario, “Interval: Examine the Mandala,” will be rendered useless and their progress through the rest of Part 2 will be drastically stymied. Yes, that’s correct, we’re starting with an interval. A bold move indeed. In this interval they will, with any luck, learn a great deal about the plans of the APL through regular old studying. But, if they’re really lucky, they’ll also experience a vision of the future, the coming of the Prince of Pale Leaves himself to our world as its new sovereign. They will also learn about the robbery in which the Sutra was stolen and a lot more about the Sutra itself. This is potentially weeks of Library Use rolls and social skills to investigate. Don’t get me wrong, I think this sort of thing is important to a Call of Cthulhu scenario. In fact, I think a lot of other scenarios in this campaign do not allow for enough Library Use. But it’s not exactly an in media res beginning, is it?

Actual Beginnings

So, 9 pages into the scenario, we get to the actual start, with a section call “Start: Pedestrian Paradise.” In this section the PCs finally hit the streets and get out of the dusty libraries and backrooms. This is where we get back to one of the themes of the previous part, the fashion industry in 1980s Tokyo. In fact, this part is far more linked to fashion than the first part. Kaho has been using her designs to influence the youth of the city and the country by integrating elements of the Sutra into her designs. It uses flower motifs and the brand is called Blume. Its set in the evocative neighbourhood of Harajuku, which was coming into its own in the ‘80s as a hub for youth and fashion, the likes of which, its fair to say, Japan had never seen before.

As the investigators try to question the groups of young people in the streets, they realise that there is something wrong here. The various groups, all wearing Kaho’s designs, tend to move as one, even going so far as to surround some poor girl menacingly, and acting like some sort of crazed flash-mob. All she had done was dropped her ice-cream on one of them! The mob are almost dancing at first, as though choreographed, but if the PCs intervene in anyway, the whole crowd will turn on them and attack.

This is more like it! This is the way I like to start a scenario. But, unfortunately, it comes only after weeks of in-game time while the PCs hit the books.

Leads

The visual flow chart for this scenario starting from the conclusion of part 1 and ending with the epilogue — Bridge Maiden Part 2 – Flow Chart

Following the flash-mob frenzy, the investigators are expected to follow some bread-crumbs. These lead to locations such as the design studio, Blume, where they might encounter one of Kaho’s employees with some answers for them, and a hypnotic motivational poster that’s forcing the staff to work absurdly long hours to fulfil the company’s goals. If only tearing a poster off the wall were enough to cure that particular illness in Japanese society. One of the disappointments in this scenario is that it doesn’t lean further into this particular theme. I think Part 1 does so quite well, though with other themes, as does Wonderland and Fanfic. But this scenario has a more urgent feeling to it (except during the ponderous starting interval.) It’s trying to wrap things up. So let’s move on.

The Association of Pale Leaves

The page of the scenario that includes an image of the invitation to the event/ritual that will launch the new fashion brand and summon the Pale Prince.

They’ll eventually receive an invitation to the launch party of Kaho’s new brand. Her co-mastermind, according to the invitation, is a man named, simply, Prince. Nope, not the Purple One, the Pale one. And they’re having a big party in a warehouse on a wharf in the city. This is to be the location of the ritual during which they will summon a Bridge of Light linking our world to Carcosa, allowing the Prince to cross over. That, of course, is where the big finale will be.

But before then, they might just want to investigate the offices of their nemeses, the APL. Truly this could be an “into the belly of the beast” moment in this scenario. They might actually have been invited there by the leader of the APL, Ōhiro Kimitaka, who could have given them one of his business cards in an earlier and entirely optional encounter. In the text, this encounter is described as “dangerous.” In reality, it is nothing of the sort. The most dangerous thing that might come out of it is to push the plot forward. Which begs the question, “why make the encounter optional in the first place?” Of course, there’s always the possibility that the PCs might attack him. You never know what they might do, after all. But it’s unlikely and he is heavily guarded.

Speaking of Ōhiro, I am not convinced by this guy’s villainy at all. Only within the Keeper-facing backstory has he proven himself to be ruthless and single-minded in the pursuit of his goals, which include bringing the Pale Prince to Earth. He Is, if anything, a slightly tragic figure. He can never realise his other goal, which is to become one with the Prince like everyone else exposed to the Sutra. Due to some neurological damage he suffered in World War II, he is “unsuitable.” Obviously, what he wants is unfavourable to the rest of humanity, but we never get to see him do anything particularly heinous in the course of the campaign at all. However, in one potential ending for this scenario, he begs the Prince to take him with him back to Carcosa. In answer, the Prince picks him up, defying all logic and physics, folds him like origami and pops him in his pocket, while Ōhiro screams in either despair or ecstasy. And that’s good.

OK, back to the APL HQ. During their time in this location there is a chance they will not only encounter Kaho, finally, but also uncover a great many answers as to what the heck is going on. They might even be able to recover the original copy of the Sutra. All of this is great, but is also fraught with danger. Obviously there are many opportunities for the investigators to gain more Exposure Points, thus drawing them closer to being taken over by the Prince themselves. They could be discovered and detained until the ritual. They might even risk death if they go up against some of the Courtiers of the Pale Prince. Hopefully not though. If you had a TPK before getting to the finale, that would be a real shame.

Finale

The PAle Prince is a blonde guy with sunglasses on and a low cut top.

“Spectacle” is the word I would use to describe the ending of this scenario and, I suppose, the whole campaign. This feels appropriate. Most of the scenarios have ended that way, Fanfic on top of Tokyo Tower, Dream Eater in a fight to the death in the dreamscape, The Pallid Masks of Tokyo in the otherworldly Château Carcosa/psychaitric hospital. Also, this one involves, for the first time, the incursion of the Prince of Pale Leaves himself into our world. It should be huge. He doesn’t strike me as an understated kind of bloke.

So this is what we have. After the investigators have milled around in the warehouse party for a short while, it’ll be time for the event/ritual. Everyone goes out to the wharf where construction has begun on the real-life Port of Tokyo Connector Bridge, aka the Rainbow Bridge. I like this intersection of the mundane and the mythical in the real-world, crossed with the events in this campaign. This is a really good example of it. Anyway, As everyone arrives, a great, winding bridge of solid light appears at the end of the unfinished, physical bridge as fireworks burst and fall above. Beyond, Tokyo disappears and Carcosa appears.

What a vision, what a reveal. This feels like a proper culmination to this long series of scenarios. The way is open and the Prince appears in a parade led by Kaho, now in her role as Hashihime, the Bridge Maiden. Carcosa threatens to overlay itself on Tokyo, and, eventually, the whole of the Earth. Only the investigators stand between their world and utter erasure. Big stakes! Surely they’ll throw everything they have at this threat!

There are several options to do this. They can take out Kaho in one way or another. Without her, the ritual will fail and the Prince will be forced back into Carcosa, closing the portal behind him. They could try ramming the Prince’s car off the bridge (there are lots of large construction vehicles handy), they could even do a suicide run on the bridge with a helicopter.

Endings

We have three potential endings this time. The worst is really the worst.

Symphony in Yellow (Failure) – If they don’t defeat the Prince, the Bridge Maiden or disrupt the ritual, the entire world will fall to the Prince and will merge with Carcosa.
Pre-emptive Strike (Best Defense Ending) – Its possible the PCs did some questionable, “the ends justify the means” type shit to disrupt the ritual. So, they might just end up in prison, safe in the knowledge that it was in a worthy cause.
The Once and Future King (Triumphant Ending) – The investigators come out completely on top, having disrupted the ritual and destroyed the Bridge of Light. The APL might rise again, but, for now, it has been defeated.

Conclusion

There are things I like about this scenario. I like the actual start with the Pedestrian Paradise. I like the thematic elements like the mandala making the workers work harder and longer. I love the finale. It’s over the top and you might even argue that it is less than fitting for a Cthulhu game, but it works for me, especially as the culmination of the entire campaign.

On the other hand, I am not a fan of the interval to begin the scenario. I also don’t like the lack of additional thematic elements or the lack of action from one of the main villains of the piece.

But, as with all of my reviews of these Sutra of Pale Leaves scenarios, I haven’t played them. I don’t know how they might work at the table. I make a lot of suppositions and assumptions. They are educated guesses really. So, please do bear that in mind when you read them.

As I mentioned at the start, there is actually one last scenario in Carcosa Manifest. It is somewhat different in flavour, format and content, but it is related, nonetheless. If you have been following along, dear reader, you probably have a good idea of my overall impression of these books, the scenarios and the campaign. But I will go into it in more depth at the end of the next post.

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

Conclusion

Success at a Cost

The Adventure

Conclusion

Downtime Discussion

The Keep on the Borderlands

Holy Mountain Shaker

Conclusion

Starter Campaign

Rules

Part One, Incursion Point

Conclusion

Zero Prep

Action

Non-action

Conclusion

Collections

Beneath the Isle of the Serpents

The Island

The Dungeon

Conclusion

The Kept on the Borderlands

Beginnings

Middles

Endings

Conclusion

Advice

Critique

Gameable

Theory

Meta

Best Debut Blog

Best Blog Series

Goodbye Carcosa

The Repairer of Reputations

Beginnings

Episodic

Endings

Conclusion

The Sutra Ends?

Who and What is the Bridge Maiden?

Beginnings

Actual Beginnings

Leads

The Association of Pale Leaves

Finale

Endings

Conclusion