reviews – Page 4 – The Dice Pool

More Troika! – One-shots

Appendectomy

When was the last time your mind was genuinely blown by an idea, a concept, a creature or a situation presented to you when you played a fantasy role playing game? Because I don’t think D&D is providing opportunities for that sort of thing these days. I don’t necessarily blame the writers of D&D books for that; Wizards of the Coast has painted themselves into a corner that they are very comfortable occupying. In fact, because D&D is responsible for much of the public image of fantasy games for the last half century, they have dragged a lot of the hobby with them. As a result you have endless polished and glittering iterations of elves and dwarves and dragons and wizards with spell levels and clerics with devotion to individual deities and all the same monsters repeated ad nauseam. It is particularly interesting when you look at Appendix N, the appendix to the original D&D, in which Gary Gygaxstated his inspirations for the game. It has a few names you would expect to see: JRR Tolkien, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson but you also have a few that might make you wonder about the connection to the D&D of today.

HP Lovecraft is well known as the author of The Call of Cthulhu and other cosmic horror stories but his influence on D&D might not be obvious to all. Jack Vance wrote fantasy novels but they were tinged with an element of science fiction and gonzo world building in his Dying Earth books. In fact, many of the authors represented in Appendix N were famous for science fantasy rather than straight fantasy books, just look at Roger Zelazny and Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can still see bits of that influence in Wizards of the Coast’s D&D if you think of Spelljammer and Eberron but they always feel little too clean and sanitised compared to the books those ideas came from.

What I am getting at is that the true spiritual successors to the game developed with Appendix N in mind are part of the OSR. I wrote just yesterday on this very blog about Dungeon Crawl Classics and that very much embraces those influences, but it’s Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council that truly embodies them for me.

Stretching those imagination muscles

The cover of my copy of Troika! Numinous Edition.

From Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing:
“To the East lies the Plastic Sea, a miraculous main of liquid plastic. Upon contact with living skin it solidifies, covering the coast with Coated Men dueling each other in elegant, fatal contests, having made the choice to die young and glorious, sealed in flexible plastic armour.”

From Fronds of Benevolence by Andrew Walter:
“Fletherfalloon is a floating Thinking Engine of a very basic sort, dating from a bygone age. Festooned with rotting ribbons and rusty curlicues, it hovers at varying altitudes burbling and whistling to itself.”

From Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie:
“Water: three billion years old, frozen by the perpetual
night at the edge of the Galaxy, compressed into glaciers
of midnight blue. Taste the weight of time and solitude,
darkness and purity. With Djajadiningrat.
Hear it crackle in your favorite spirit. The sound of time
calving into an ocean of premium flavor.
Cut by natural-born hand, never by machine, never by clone.
At night’s edge, taste the infinity. Only from Djajadiningrat.
— advertisement in Ice Tomorrow (trade magazine)”

Troika! Is a city at the centre of everything, and around it gathers a host of bizarre and fantastical settings dotted throughout the cosmos. Perhaps you traverse this universe in a space-ship, perhaps it’s a Golden Barge you use. Maybe your character is a Displacement Prosthesist, maybe they are a Hyenaman Scavenger. The possibilities are truly endless and the strangenesses abound.

A page from Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing. It details of the background you can choose to play in that setting, the Hyenaman Scavenger.

We had the chance to play a single one-shot of Troika! A couple of months ago and it did nothing but whet my appetite for more oddness. The adventure we played was a published one, The Blancmange and Thistle, in which the PCs encounter a hotel. Saying any more would involve spoilers but suffice it to say, if you are a fan of the unusual, that hotel is the place to stay.

The inside front cover of my copy of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie.

From that, I fed the PCs a hook that should, someday, when I find the time, lead them to the world of Myung’s Mis-step and the whodunnit adventure at the centre of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs.

But I have a few others too:

Some lads on a page from Frond of Benevolence by Andrew Walter.

Fronds of Benevolence is a short, point-crawl where the PCs journey in search of an item of great importance to their friend/ruler/patron/deity, Duke DeCorticus, which will lead them “to the Rainbow Badlands, across the precipitous face of The Wall and in the very vaults of the hump-backed sky!
Acid Death Fantasy is more of a setting book but could equally be used as a point-crawl adventure. It contains elements from Dune, Planet of the Apes, others from dying earth genre books and still others from classic fantasy.
Whalgravaak’s Warehouse also by Andrew Walter is an adventure “that centres the play experience on the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player engagement agency.”

And given the fact that I will probably only get to run these once every few months, these will no doubt last me a while!

Have you had any experience playing Troika!? If you met a Slug Monarch in an awkward situation, would you help them or attack them?

Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder

Indie mascot horror

Maybe I’m giving away a bit too much with the title of this scenario. What do you think? I mean, look, here’s the thing; when we set up Tables and Tales a few months ago, I was curious about the kinds of things new members were into. One of them said they liked Indie Mascot Horror. Now, let me tell you, dear reader, I did not know what that was. Since then, I have learned that it refers to video games like Five Nights at Freddie’s and Poppy’s Playtime. I had obviously not played these games but I looked into them a bit and got the vibe. I thought about the types of RPGs that would be good for those themes and tropes. It did not take me long to decide on Tales from the Loop.

Tales from the Loop

If you have never seen the artworks of Simon Stålenhag, do yourself a favour and go check them out. I have taken some photos of his work from his art book, Tales from the Loop and embedded them here but they don’t do the work justice. When I first encountered his work several years ago, it filed me with wonder. He created such a realistic depiction of a past that was largely recognisable to me from my own childhood, interspersed with or shockingly dominated by futuristic architectures and sci-fi wonders. His work excited my imagination like only RPGs had in the past. So when I discovered that Free League were producing a Tales From the Loop game, it didn’t take me long to pick it up. It took a little longer to get it to the table but when I did I discovered that the players loved it.

## Indie mascot horror
Maybe I’m giving away a bit too much with the title of this scenario. What do you think? I mean, look, here’s the thing; when we set up Tables and Tales a few months ago, I was curious about the kinds of things new members were into. One of them said they liked Indie Mascot Horror. Now, let me tell you, dear reader, I did not know what that was. Since then, I have learned that it refers to video games like Five Nights at Freddie’s and Poppy’s Playtime. I had obviously not played these games but I looked into them a bit and got the vibe. I thought about the types of RPGs that would be good for those themes and tropes. It did not take me long to decide on Tales from the Loop.

## Tales from the Loop
If you have never seen the artworks of [Simon Stålenhag](https://www.simonstalenhag.se/), do yourself a favour and go check them out. When I first encountered his work several years ago, it filed me with wonder. He created such a realistic depiction of a past that was largely recognisable to me from my own childhood, interspersed with or shockingly dominated by futuristic architectures and sci-fi wonders. His work excited my imagination like only RPGs had in the past. So when I discovered that Free League were producing a [Tales From the Loop game](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/tales-from-the-loop-rpg/), it didn’t take me long to pick it up. It took a little longer to get it to the table but when I did I discovered that the players loved it.

Tales from the Loop is a game about the 1980s that never was. It posits a world in which some astounding scientific breakthroughs occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s so that, by the time in which the game is set, they are not considered so strange. You have your robots and your hovercraft and your infinitely renewable energy. But most of that stuff is considered mundane in Stålenhag’s world. Not only that, they exist alongside the ‘80s mainstay technologies like Walkmans, cassette tapes, VCRs and Soda Stream. In Stålenhag’s artwork this created some beautifully uncanny images. Most were set in the region of Sweden known as Mälaröarna, where the Loop project was based. This is where the world’s largest particle accelerator was built. Though it is not necessarily directly responsible for the many strange occurrences in the region, the people who populate such a scientifically rarified place usually are. Scientists and administrators and students flocked to the region and started families there. So many of Stålenhag’s paintings involved kids; a toe-headed child threatening an old Volkswagen van marked “Polis” with a giant robot under his control; a pair of woolly-hatted kids digging in the Swedish snow and gazing back at their homes, dwarfed by the cyclopean, other-worldly cooling towers used to release heat from the core of the Loop itself, the Gravitron; a little kid in cold weather coveralls leading his grandfather through the snow to a mysterious sphere, left abandoned in the countryside, its purpose and provenance forgotten. These were the inspirations for the RPG.

The game came out at the height of the popularity of Stranger Things, which helped it gain a lot of traction I think, and then it even had its own, unfortunately not so popular, spinoff [TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop), which I, at least, loved.

In the RPG you play kids between 10 and 15 years old. You get to choose a Type from such classics as the Computer Geek, the Hick and the Weirdo. You also have to choose some really fun things like your Iconic Item, your key relationships and your favourite 1980s song.

Once you have your Kid, you and your friends can go out and investigate weird shit on your bikes. Stuff like, where are all the birds gone? What are all the adults doing gathered around that weird machine in the field? What’s that dinosaur looking claw print in the snow? You know, normal kid shit.

## Roll mechanics
Tales from the Loop uses a version of the Year Zero engine, and, in fact, it was the first game I played using that system. It’s really straight-forward and intuitive, easy to learn and resolves situations quickly. “Situations” are generally and collectively referred to in the text as “Trouble” with a capital “T,” appropriately enough. For many, the Trouble you got into and out of when they were kids are some of the most enduring and treasured memories. In the game, you combine your ability dice and your skill dice into one dice pool and roll them all to try and get at least one 6. Since you only use d6s in this game, that’s the highest you can roll. The more 6s you roll the better, generally.

The only issue my players and I had with the rules is the Extended Trouble mechanic. The way this works is that, during the final showdown, encounter or whatever, every kid says what they are going to do and the GM tells them how many successes they will need to succeed fully. Then one player rolls all the dice in one enormous pool. Generally, if they don’t succeed fully but they still have a few successes, they might achieve what they were trying to but one or more kids will earn conditions or even become Broken. But, in play, we found this approach to be unsatisfying. Each player wanted their own cool moment to roll for and the all-or-nothing approach meant that they couldn’t attempt to take any rectifying actions if and when they saw things going wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, we won’t be using the Extended Trouble rule next time.

## Mascots and Murder
Here are the very basics of the scenario I have planned:
Although the first Loop was in Sweden and much of the book is written as though it is the default setting, they do actually provide a second potential setting in it. That’s Boulder City, Nevada, the “Best city by a dam site,” which is a reference to its proximity to the Hoover Dam. There is another Loop in this region and all of the scenarios presented in the core book can be transposed very easily to the desert, believe it or not. This is where the kids in this scenario will be from. It is summer in Boulder City so it’s going to be so sizzling hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. This will be a nice change as all the other Tales from the Loop games I have played were set in Sweden in autumn and winter.

Some teens have gone missing from Boulder City. Although their parents don’t seem too worried about it, our intrepid Kids are going to solve this mystery as they track down the source of the eerie, carnival-like music out in the Nevada desert and figure out what the connection is.

I have had fun writing this scenario, even though I have gone over it and over it to get it right. So, it’ll be ready to play in a few weeks.

The Tales from the Loop core book has some very useful advice for writing and structuring a scenario for it yourself. As long as you stick to that, you’re unlikely to go wrong. This is not actually the first one I have written myself, using these guidelines and, I can tell you, it works really well.

Have you played Tales from the Loop? What did you think of it? If you had to run a particular game for Indie Mascot Horror vibes, what would it be?

Tales from the Loop is a game about the 1980s that never was. It posits a world in which some astounding scientific breakthroughs occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s so that, by the time in which the game is set, they are not considered so strange. You have your robots and your hovercraft and your infinitely renewable energy. But most of that stuff is considered mundane in Stålenhag’s world. Not only that, they exist alongside the ‘80s mainstay technologies like Walkmans, cassette tapes, VCRs and Soda Stream. In Stålenhag’s artwork this created some beautifully uncanny images. Most were set in the region of Sweden known as Mälaröarna, where the Loop project was based. This is where the world’s largest particle accelerator was built. Though it is not necessarily directly responsible for the many strange occurrences in the region, the people who populate such a scientifically rarified place usually are. Scientists and administrators and students flocked to the region and started families there. So many of Stålenhag’s paintings involved kids; a toe-headed child threatening an old Volkswagen van marked “Polis” with a giant robot under his control; a pair of woolly-hatted kids digging in the Swedish snow and gazing back at their homes, dwarfed by the cyclopean, other-worldly cooling towers used to release heat from the core of the Loop itself, the Gravitron; a little kid in cold weather coveralls leading his grandfather through the snow to a mysterious sphere, left abandoned in the countryside, its purpose and provenance forgotten. These were the inspirations for the RPG.

The game came out at the height of the popularity of Stranger Things, which helped it gain a lot of traction I think, and then it even had its own, unfortunately not so popular, spinoff TV series, which I, at least, loved.

In the RPG you play kids between 10 and 15 years old. You get to choose a Type from such classics as the Computer Geek, the Hick and the Weirdo. You also have to choose some really fun things like your Iconic Item, your key relationships and your favourite 1980s song.

Once you have your Kid, you and your friends can go out and investigate weird shit on your bikes. Stuff like, where are all the birds gone? What are all the adults doing gathered around that weird machine in the field? What’s that dinosaur looking claw print in the snow? You know, normal kid shit.

Roll mechanics

Tales from the Loop uses a version of the Year Zero engine, and, in fact, it was the first game I played using that system. It’s really straight-forward and intuitive, easy to learn and resolves situations quickly. “Situations” are generally and collectively referred to in the text as “Trouble” with a capital “T,” appropriately enough. For many, the Trouble you got into and out of when they were kids are some of the most enduring and treasured memories. In the game, you combine your ability dice and your skill dice into one dice pool and roll them all to try and get at least one 6. Since you only use d6s in this game, that’s the highest you can roll. The more 6s you roll the better, generally.

The only issue my players and I had with the rules is the Extended Trouble mechanic. The way this works is that, during the final showdown, encounter or whatever, every kid says what they are going to do and the GM tells them how many successes they will need to succeed fully. Then one player rolls all the dice in one enormous pool. Generally, if they don’t succeed fully but they still have a few successes, they might achieve what they were trying to but one or more kids will earn conditions or even become Broken. But, in play, we found this approach to be unsatisfying. Each player wanted their own cool moment to roll for and the all-or-nothing approach meant that they couldn’t attempt to take any rectifying actions if and when they saw things going wrong. Anyway, suffice it to say, we won’t be using the Extended Trouble rule next time.

Mascots and Murder

Here are the very basics of the scenario I have planned:
Although the first Loop was in Sweden and much of the book is written as though it is the default setting, they do actually provide a second potential setting in it. That’s Boulder City, Nevada, the “Best city by a dam site,” which is a reference to its proximity to the Hoover Dam. There is another Loop in this region and all of the scenarios presented in the core book can be transposed very easily to the desert, believe it or not. This is where the kids in this scenario will be from. It is summer in Boulder City so it’s going to be so sizzling hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. This will be a nice change as all the other Tales from the Loop games I have played were set in Sweden in autumn and winter.

Photo from the book, Tales from the Loop by Simon Stålenhag.

Some teens have gone missing from Boulder City. Although their parents don’t seem too worried about it, our intrepid Kids are going to solve this mystery as they track down the source of the eerie, carnival-like music out in the Nevada desert and figure out what the connection is.

I have had fun writing this scenario, even though I have gone over it and over it to get it right. So, it’ll be ready to play in a few weeks.

The Tales from the Loop core book has some very useful advice for writing and structuring a scenario for it yourself. As long as you stick to that, you’re unlikely to go wrong. This is not actually the first one I have written myself, using these guidelines and, I can tell you, it works really well.

Have you played Tales from the Loop? What did you think of it? If you had to run a particular game for Indie Mascot Horror vibes, what would it be?

Games I Have Played So Far this Year, Part 2

Lists part 2.2

You will notice a trend in this list. More than half of them are Open Hearth one-shot games. I just joined the community in January of this year and I thought the best way to ease my way into it would be to sign up for a short game or two. So I started with Alien Dark. Not long after that another member in a similar timezone started posting one-shots of a bunch of games I wanted to try out, and that accounts for almost all the other Open Hearth one-shots listed below. I wasn’t new to Mörk Borg, admittedly, but it is usually a gritty good time and it was at a time that suited me so I joined up. Honestly, sometimes, that’s all the impetus you need.

Games I have played in so far this year

Black Sword Hack – Three of Blades – ongoing campaign. I went into a bit of detail about this campaign in the linked post. My mate and King of Accents, Isaac, is the the GM. He has a website of his own and is a game designer in his own right. Go check out his work here on itch.

Root – The Nightmare Before Winterfest – Concluded Campaign. Root is the PBTA RPG of the board game where you play anthropomorphic denizens of the forest, traveling from Clearing to Clearing getting into trouble, making friends and enemies of various factions and having prolonged Christmas episodes. Good friend and esteemed character-actor, Thomas GMed this “festive” campaign for our little Tables and Tales gaming crew. The quotes are only partially ironic. It did start around Christmas but then it kept going right through Easter and out the other side! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. This campaign was a laugh. I got to play a German badger named Beagan, known to one and all in the Clearing of Lindor. Beagan and his companions busted open the people-in-the-chocolate mystery, demolished the local police station, repelled the siege of Lindor’s famous Winterfest market from the branches of its festive tree and unmasked Ebenmeowser Scrooge as the ultimate villain of the piece. Good times.

Alien Dark – Open Hearth one-shot. Click the link for more about this one.

Remembrance – Open Hearth one-shot. Remembrance is a GMless story game designed by a fellow Open Hearth member and this was a play-test of it. All the characters start off as members of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence, brothers in arms and valued friends too. But, as those who know about Irish history of the early twentieth century will be able to tell you, the War of Independence was followed quickly by the Irish Civil War. This was fought between those forces who wanted to accept independence for all but the six counties in the North of Ireland and those who would only accept freedom for all thirty-two counties. The three act structure of this one-shot was split between the time of fraternity in the first act, the tragic split into two opposing camps in the second act and a sort of epilogue, or maybe denouement in the third. The story we constructed over the space of three hours is something I won’t soon forget and an experience that stuck with me as an Irish person and someone who lives in those six counties.

Mörk Borg – Rot Black Sludge – Open Hearth one-shot. Open Hearth community member, Dom ran this one. This was actually the second time I had played through this scenario. The second time went significantly better than the first, partly because of the very limited time-slot we had to play it in, I think. Rather than stupidly investigating every bloody thing that was definitely a trap of some kind, we pressed on looking for the ultimate goal, finding some kid or something. My character was Joachim the Devoted, a Dead God’s Prophet, who, paradoxically, was a nihilist who insisted on telling everyone he was a nihilist. He survived this scenario despite being largely useless!

Mothership – Sandalphon and the Sleeping Angels – Open Hearth one-shot. The second one-shot I was a part of that was run by Dom. This was my first taste of Mothership. In this scenario, you dock with an asteroid/space station and try to discover what is going on there. Spoiler: it gets fucked up and scary pretty fast. The Mothership system is mostly based on d100 rolls and, if you are familiar with Call of Cthulhu at all, you will know that that means you fail, a lot. This leads to horror in a good way of course, setting up scenes of panic and fear as you face the increasingly unsettling and gross realities of the setting. Somehow, my character Burt Connery, ever-suffering Teamster from New York City survived this one too!

Cohors Cthulhu – Rude Awakening – Open Hearth one-shot. The third and final one-shot that Dom ran in the list. Cohors Cthulhu is a game that imagines Cthulhu type mysteries and scenarios set in the Roman Empire. Out of all of the one-shots we played this year, I found that this one possibly suited the format the least. It is definitely interesting as a game and a setting but is more designed for campaign play I think. Each character was pre-generated but a little too complex to really get to grips with over the course of a single three hour session. That being said, I enjoyed the speed run we did of this scenario where my character, Herodion the Schemer narrowly avoided being ritually sacrificed to an old god and had fun with the other players. I’d be interested to try the game in a longer form.

Blades in the Dark – the Spirit Fondlers – ongoing Open Hearth campaign. See that link? Click it!

DnD – An Unexpected Wedding Invitation – ongoing short campaign. I’m not going to pretend this link doesn’t take you to the same page as the one right above.

The Quiet Year – one-shot. This is an unusual game to put on this list really. It is not an RPG to be honest but it is RPG-adjacent. It is a map-making game that uses cards and lists of prompts to allow a group of players to design a settlement that is recovering from some sort of apocalypse or disaster. You have one year to do it and the game is split into four periods represented by the seasons represented by the suits in a pack of regular old playing cards. It was so interesting that each of the players around our table started to embody certain sections of the fledgeling community that had often conflicting priorities and ideas about how to build it. I enjoyed this as an exercise in understanding the difficulties in being one part of a community that is, ostensibly, working towards common goals where other factions have very different plans to you. It has conflict built in to it due to requirements for always having some level of scarcity of necessary resources and this can lead to some, surprisingly fraught interactions above the table. I have heard of a lot of people using this game to create the starting state of a setting for a new RPG and I love that idea.

So, that’s it for my list of games played so far this year. I am looking forward to adding a few more to this list in the coming months. I’ll probably do a post about that in fact. How about you? What games have you played/enjoyed this year?

Games I Have Played So Far this Year, Part 1

Lists part 2.1

Also not a top ten, not by any means, but I do think this one is useful for me, especially. Even this time last year I could not has envisioned a seven month period where I got to experience so many different games with so many different people. Looking back on it, I don’t think there has ever been a period in my life where I have been involved in so many RPGs.

This got me thinking so I went to dig up some of my old prep books from the 90s (a few notebooks, filled largely with encounter stats.) In these ancient tomes I found prep notes and full scenarios that I wrote for no fewer than three AD&D campaigns (Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape,) a Gamma World campaign, a Beyond the Supernatural campaign, a Robotech campaign, and a home-brewed Aliens game that I think I based largely on the Palladium ruleset. I know I ran a couple of other things too but not much more. I have run more different games in the last 7 months than I did throughout my teenage years! It is a golden age for me and I am loving it!

Anyway, on to the list. In this post I am only doing the games I have GMed/run/refereed. I will do the ones I played in in the next post:

Games I have run this year so far

DnD – Spelljammer – Ongoing Campaign. I wrote a post on this campaign already. Click the link to check it out.

Spire – Kings of Silver – Concluded Campaign. Far more epic in scope than it ever had any right to be. This was largely due to my choice at the start to make use of an optional rule that made the PCs much less likely to accrue fallout. At the time I did not realise exactly how crucial fallout is to pushing he campaign forward. I wouldn’t do that again. This campaign really got me into the products of Rowan Rook and Decard. You will find another couple of games on this list that they made too, in fact. It was a great experience and I know I’ll be going back to Spire sometime soon. I am also definitely going to do a more in-depth look at this one in a post all its own sometime soon.

Heart – From Haven to Terminus, Drowned – Ongoing Campaign. This one has a post all of its own too. You know what to do.

Eat the Reich – short campaign. We started playing this shortly after I received my physical copy from the Kickstarter campaign, just because our regular game night fell through. And what a happy accident! If you too hate nazis and love making up inventive and ultra-violent ways to kill them with vampires, this is the game for you. Also, it is Ennie nominated right now, go vote for it! It is one of the most eye-catching RPG books I own, which is saying quite a lot. It is worth picking it up for that alone.

Death in Space – Why Are We Out Here? – one-shot. I discussed this one a little in my one-shots post. Click it!

Never Tell Me The Odds – Rebel Scum – one-shot. I planned this one for Star Wars Day this year and really enjoyed it. We actually watched Star Wars: A New Hope before we played it too. This really helped because the premise of the whole one-shot was that the PCs were a rival band of rebels who were actually sent to the Death Star to rescue Leia at the same time as Luke and his pals were blundering about, getting captured and accidentally doing good. Great fun, would recommend this game for one-shots too. It’s all about the stakes and how you play them.

Troika! – The Blancmange and Thistle – one-shot. Possibly the most fun I have had in a one-shot all year. Everyone rolled on the random table in this OSR game and played what they got, a Rhino-Man, a Questing Knight and a Befouler of Ponds. Then we played the starter adventure from the Troika! Numinous Edition core book, where they went to their room in a hotel and attended a party. Fucking hilarious at almost every turn. 10/10 would play again, and I definitely will.

Blade Runner – Electric Dreams – ongoing short campaign. Link! Go! Now!

Check back for part 2 where I get into the ones I’ve been a player in so far this year.

Fear of an Indie RPG Podcast

RPG podcasts

I suspect that when most people think of RPG podcasts, they think of actual play, where a bunch of nerdy voice actors/comedians/nerds get together around a table/microphone/Zoom app and record their games. It is such a common format that one of the more famous ones is called Not Another D&D Pocast (NADDPOD.) There are a number of these that I like and I might get into them in another post at some point. This post is not about them.

So, as you may have gathered, I enjoy not just playing RPGs but also talking about them, reading about them, listening to people talk about them. There are not many podcasts that I listen to regularly that do this. I just don’t gel with all of them. But today I wanted to highlight two that I get a lot out out of. Sometimes I get advice to be a better GM or player from them, sometimes they introduce me to new games or supplements, sometimes I just get to relish people chatting about a subject that is close to my heart and interests me too.

The Yes Indie’d Podcast

Thomas Manuel runs this little gem. I got into it when a friend suggested I sign up for the Indie RPG Newsletter, also run by Thomas. Please go and sign up for that too, by the way. I look forward to that turning up in my inbox every Sunday morning. It’s a really good way of keeping up with what is happening in the indie RPG scene and getting some fascinating insights into aspects of the hobby you might never have thought you needed to think about.

The usual format for the podcast is that Thomas will invite an indie RPG luminary on to the show and interview them. He always has a bunch of insightful questions for them and the discussions that emerge have a lot to offer, particularly if you have ever been interested in creating and publishing your own indie RPG material. There are lots of good episodes but I would recommend a specific few recent ones that I got a lot out of:

Meeting Games Where They’re at with Quinns, one of the most reliable and funny RPG reviewers out there

Getting Weirder than Lovecraft with Graham Walmsley, creator of Cthulhu Dark among other good stuff

Open Hearth’s Games of the Year 2023. This is a bit of a cheat since it is not technically a Yes Indie’d episode but it did appear on the Yes indie’d feed so I get to include it. It is also the thing that made me go and sign up for Open Hearth so it gets extra points for that.

Fantasy Non-Fiction with Tom McGrenery of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast

Fear of a Black Dragon

Which brings me nicely on to Fear of a Black Dragon. For the umpteenth time, Thomas Manuel directed me to check out something that I ended up loving.

The Fear of a Black Dragon podcast is the venerable OSR module review show produced by the Gauntlet. The Gauntlet is responsible for several high quality, popular indie RPGs and other related publications and podcasts. Their best known products probably include Brindlewood Bay, Public Access and The Silt Verses RPG. These games are very much not OSR by nature but the modules Jason Cordova (author or co-author of the games listed above) and Tom McGrenery (of the paragraph-before-this-one fame and creator of several games himself) review very much are.

The format is simple and unchanging, the reviews go deep and are guaranteed tested at the table, the vibes are spot-on. I started on the first episode from 2017 and have been binging it relentlessly for the last couple of weeks. What’s nice about this is that all the modules they reviewed back then are still relevant and available. Another interesting point is that the hosts mostly do not use OSR systems to play the games they review, rather they usually use something like Trophy Gold or Dungeon World, Powered by the Apocalypse games that are much less crunchy and more interested in the narrative of a game than the number of dice you roll for damage. They provide a lot of expert advice on how to handle conversions like these as well as great ideas for introducing scenes, developing NPCs, doing sound effects and other fun stuff.

The episodes I have listed below made me go and purchase the items they reviewed. These links are to their website but you can listen on your pod-catcher of choice of course:

Ultraviolet Grasslands

Fever Swamp

Slumbering Ursine Dunes

But you should also check out this one, which was the first one I listened to and is much more recent:

Episode 100 Special

Go and subscribe to these podcasts and sign up for their Patreons if you can:

Indie RPG Newsletter/Yes Indie’d Podcast

The Gauntlet/Fear of a Black Dragon

Black Sword in the Dark at a Wedding

Player Freedom

I have never been the forever GM. Back in the olden days, me and my mates would spend entire Saturdays and Sundays just passing that GM baton. I’d run some Dark Sun for an hour or two, then my friend would try and blow us up in Rifts for a while and later, yet another pal would run us through some MERP. I don’t know if that was unusual in those days as I had no frame of reference. We kept our weird little hobby to ourselves for fear of bullying and humiliation from our peers. But that’s besides the point.

I have always enjoyed RPGs from both sides of the screen. In fact, in some games, I feel almost freer when I have the reins for just a single character instead of being burdened by a whole world. It depends on the game, for certain, but I love the process of establishing, advancing and developing a character over the course of weeks and months and years of play. In many ways, that’s my motivation when GMing too, it’s just more vicarious in that instance.

Anyway, here’s a little bit about each of the games I am playing in right now. Each of them is incredibly different to the others but I get something special and unique from every one.

Black Sword Hack

This is what I would call a home game. It’s just four of us, friends who make up the core of a role playing crew. We have been playing together for the last 5 years or so and it’s the exact same people who make up our Heart game.

Our GM for Black Sword Hack was very excited to run this when he got his copy of the book (I think he backed the Kickstarter for it but I might be wrong.) We played a memorable one-shot set in the village of Rust where we had to deal with some fucking wizard (those guys are the worst.) We all agreed that we liked it from that experience so he agreed to go ahead with a longer game.

But he took his time putting together something special before diving into the campaign. He made a stunningly beautiful map of the region we would be exploring, a loose history that included neighbouring cultures and ancient empires and some fantastical locales for adventuring in. So when we started off, we felt like we were in a living world, populated by recognisable people with a variety of extremely well acted voices and accents (our GM is a fully paid up member of the funny voice club.)

Until the Queen of the Dead turned up to kill all these people and transform them into the living dead. We escaped in a flying ship and have been more-or-less on the run from her ever since, attempting to curry favour with the bigwigs in the surviving lands so we can add their strength to ours in the fight against the zombie hordes.

Black Sword Hack is an OSR game (At some point, I’m definitely coming back to this term for what will probably be a long post. OSR stands for Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance, which confusingly, seem to mean two different things, or just many different things to different people) that’s very much based on the works of authors like Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock. It’s dark and slightly weird with the potential to become something grand and fantastical. But your characters are really just little guys. You do not play super powerful mages or unbeatable warriors, you start off with a bunch of probably not very impressive ability scores, a background and a culture and, when you gain a level, you don’t often get a bunch of new powers or anything. That’s fine. There are ways to improve your character through play, rather than through advancement and you are usually encouraged to seek those out. It’s fun!

My character is a former assassin of the Iron Horde. He has one friend who is a blue-arsed Pictish berserker and another who is a charismatic sword guy from the Northern Raiders, a mum he cares dearly for, an international drug dealing business and a dog variously named Dev Patel, Devandra Bernhardt and Devourer. He is known as Poppy. He has respect for life in general but not for most lives in particular. He talks with a slight rasp that hurts after a while. I love playing him.

Blades in the Dark

I’d imagine Blades in the Dark needs no introduction for most modern RPG players. It’s a phenomenon that has launched a thousand games with variations in its ruleset, know as “Forged in the Dark.” I had been curious about playing it for so long so I purchased the book and read it cover to cover. Became even more curious to play it. But my home group was busy with other games (see the other paragraphs in this post and the other posts in this series.) But, it just so happens that I have another option when it comes to play groups. The Open Hearth is an online gaming community. It is a welcoming and friendly place where you can find people to play almost any RPG you care to think of and many you have never heard of. Probably not D&D though. A fellow member in a similar timezone also wanted to get a Blades game going so he put it together!

Now this has been a refreshing experience from the get-go, largely because of our GM’s inventiveness and insistence on doing things differently. Before we ever started playing Blades we got together to design and populate the particular pocket of the city of Doskvol that our game would centre around. We did this using a couple of other games called, I’m Sorry, Did You Say Street Magic? and Clean Spirits and, let me tell you, reader, that worked like a charm. I immediately had a very clear picture in my head of not just the major locations and NPCs but also our crew’s HQ and our various relationships to one another.

Soon, we were interacting with the mechanics of the Blades in the Dark system itself; planning scores, having flashbacks, doing downtime actions, dealing with stress and heat and entanglements. We got involved with a bunch of other factions, mostly in the wrong ways but sometimes to our benefit.

And we certainly built a team, with what has become something of a revolving cast of characters and players from all over the world. Another benefit of the Open Hearth is that, if you know someone is going to miss a session or two in advance, you can usually get a replacement at short notice. This is obviously aided by the fact that we are playing online using Discord and Roll20.

I’ll be honest, it took me a while to get into the swing of the system but as time has gone on, I have not just gotten used to it but actually embraced its flexibility and its focus on the narrative. Everyone at the table really gets a chance to tell their part of what feels like a shared story every session and our GM has been incredible at drawing that out of us.

I’m playing a Skovlan Spider, a master of manipulation and centre of a web of contacts, informants and assets. He has been changed by his experiences of late; he was once called Red, but now he just goes by Finn. We are nearing the end of a twelve session run so, if he survives this one last score, he might just retire into the mundane life of a tavern keep, but probably not.

An Unexpected Wedding Invitation

I do not remember the last time I got to play D&D as a player. Honestly, it’s years ago for sure. So, when another member of our little gaming community, Tables and Tales, suggested a 5E adventure that she would DM, I jumped at the chance. I had a githzerai Oath of Redemption Paladin created the next night. Honestly, I probably could have come up with something a little less weird than a hippy knight alien from Limbo for the purposes of this adventure, but our DM is endlessly patient (as my Paladin would appreciate) and she has rolled with it beautifully.

I don’t think I need to go into any detail on the ruleset of D&D 5E but I will say that this adventure uses it in a unique and fascinating way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we haven’t killed any monsters, or rescued any unfortunate travelers from the road, it’s just that that is very much not the point here. An Unexpected Wedding Invitation is going for Regency, it’s going for romance, it’s going for Austen. You’re trying to impress some wedding guests with your charm, or your hunting skills or your graciousness. The key, we are beginning to find out at this stage of the game, is to get to know the extensive cast of well-to-do NPCs and romance them or befriend them, all during the course of an elvish wedding.
This may be the whole and only point to this adventure, and I think, if that’s what you did as a party, you would come out feeling good about it. However, there is a sort of overarching mystery, the details of which, I will not go into here. So, even if you are not interested in romance, you won’t be left out.

This crew of Tables and Tales players is, far and away, the most impressive bunch of voice artistes I have ever played with. Our DM is another member of the funny voice club and can pull off almost any accent flawlessly, but everyone around the table is camping it the fuck up. It is hilarious every single session. So much fun to play this sort of game in person with a very full table (there are 6 of us altogether.) And this is the third game we have played as group together. I feel like we are all just pushing ourselves further with each game.

My little guy this time, as I said, is a githzerai Oath of Redemption Paladin of Zerthimon. He swears by patience and peace except that one time when he killed that goblin by accident and he has a bunch of madcap friends including a satyr party-cleric on the run from her mistress, a dour tiefling warlock who’s patron is the cleric’s mistress and was sent to bring her in, an orc rogue who is mates with the bride to be and a half-elf fighter who presents very much like a character from Blackadder Goes Fourth. I’m off to play another session of this tonight. Maybe Paxil Tramadol will make a new friend!

So, in hindsight, that probably could have been three different posts…

Blade Runner

IP

These days I don’t play a lot of games based on an IP. At least not ones as big as Blade Runner. That wasn’t always the case, of course. When I was kid I played Palladium’s TMNT and Robotech quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t think Robotech really counts as a “big IP.” I also played a bit of Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP).

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, maybe the only major IP based game I played in the last few years was the One Ring from Free League. Now, as a player who had been liberally punished by the unforgiving and gruesome crit tables in MERP, I had my reservations going into another Middle Earth game, but I shouldn’t have worried. We played the introductory One Ring adventure as a bunch of Hobbits wandering around the Shire getting into relatively innocent shenanigans. It wasn’t brutal and it wasn’t unforgiving, it was fun!

This wasn’t the first Free League game I had played. I had also run a few sessions of Tales from the Loop, which is a game based on the art books of Simon Stålenhag, where you play kids solving mysteries in the sci-fi 80s that never was. It was almost universally loved by my players and was fun and engaging for all of us.
So, when I saw that Free League were Kickstarting a Blade Runner RPG I smashed that “Back this Project” button. Unsurprisingly, it ended up 16,153% funded…

You know what? They put that money to good use. The core book looks gorgeous with the sort of noirish artwork that draws you into the future megalopolis of LA, its rainy streets, its crumbling facades, its neon drenched midnights. It lays out a version of Free League’s by now familiar Year Zero Engine rules that is specific to this iconic setting. The focus is very much on the dramatic juxtaposition of human and replicant, the mega-corps and the working stiffs, the thriving off-world colonies and the decaying Earth, the LAPD and everyone else. The focus is on those things and the investigation.

Electric Dreams

And that’s where Case File 001: Electric Dreams comes in. This is the scenario you get in the Blade Runner Starter Set and it’s fair to say that this box is all about the investigation. Oh, and you can see all those sweet, sweet Kickstarter krona in it too. It is full to the brim with beautifully rendered handouts, mugshot cards, initiative and chase manoeuvre cards, detailed and evocative character sheets for the pre-generated characters and maps maps maps. chef’s kiss

This case file is meant as a starter scenario, easing players and Game Runner into the style of play in Blade Runner as well as the rules and unique aspects of the game. I really think it does a great job of that. Everything is laid out efficiently and yet beautifully, with the same type of high quality artwork from the core book throughout. It introduces the ideas of Shifts, 6 to 10 hour periods of time that your days are split into, and Downtime, which you generally have to take after 3 Shifts on the job. It does an excellent job of guiding you through the LAPD, the hierarchy, the resources and the characters there and the ways the Blade Runners can use their abilities and skills to investigate their case. It takes you to a nice selection of areas in the city, too, without overwhelming.

And it does all this while hitting some major touchstones from both Blade Runner movies. My players and I were all delighted by the cameos and the familiar locations, the flying cars and the replicant cats. But none of it feels forced or wedged into the scenario. It feels natural and serves to bring a familiar world even further to life.

Mechanically, it uses the Year Zero system, where you build a dice pool and count up the number of successes. Unlike in Tales from the Loop where the system relied entirely on d6s, and only 6s counted as successes, Blade Runner uses every dice from d6 to d12. 6 or above is still a success but if you roll 10 or over, it counts double. The introduction of the different types of dice in this is quite satisfying and makes for more interesting mathematical permutations when players are trying to figure out who should do what actions, we have found.

Working the case

This game was always going to be a bit different. For one thing, it’s only me as the Game Runner and two friends as the players. For another, they decided to use two of the pre-generated characters, which is unusual in my experience but got us playing as soon as we could. We are spread pretty far and wide around the country so we are using Zoom and Roll20 to play it. It’s not ideal because it means I get to use my beautiful boxed set props only sparingly. However, I have to say, having purcased the Roll20 version of the module, it works really well. I would recommend it. The character sheets are top notch and all the hand outs are there at the tip of my fingers. An added bonus is that I recently figured out how to use the juke box feature so it’s nice to have the Blade Runner soundtrack in the background too.

Our player characters are:
– Willem Novak, a human Inspector. He is an old timer whose back-story says he doesn’t trust replicants, though that is not currently the way the player has decided to go with him, which I love.
– FN9-2.39 “Fenna,” a replicant Doxie (I am really not sure about this particular archetype name, to be honest. I think it might be a case of sticking a little too closely to the source material.) Fenna is a Nexus 9 Blade Runner who has only been alive for about a year. It’s a weird situation and the player is making the most of that.

We are only two sessions in and most of the first session was an intro to the game, the system and the characters. I would expect anywhere from two to four more sessions, depending on how quickly they figure things out.
It’s going well, so far they have been to the morgue, the Esper wall, the LAPD mainframe, Wallace Corp HQ and the crime scene. There have been precisely zero fights and no action scenes of any kind but I feel like the investigation and the NPCs involved in it have a hold of the players already. They are making connections and coming up with theories and it is all very cool.

As for me, I am loving going ham as the Deputy Chief with the synthetic lungs, the traumatised replicant dancer and the inconvenienced club owner and I genuinely can’t wait for session number 3 next week.

What I’m playing, July 2024

Lists

The internet loves a list. A top ten, preferably. I don’t have a top ten today. Sorry to disappoint you, dear reader.
Instead, here I have gathered an unranked list of the six RPGs I am currently involved in. I’m running half of these and I’m a player in the other half, so it’s organised that way only.

This list does not represent the full catalogue of games I have been involved with so far this year. That will come in a separate post or series of posts in the near future. I guess this might seem like a lot of ongoing games to some. On the other hand, I’m quite sure it doesn’t seem like all that many to others. I usually fit in the odd one-shot into the schedule too, but other than that, this works well for me, especially as they are all fortnightly, pretty much.

I play two of these games in my house with my wife and friends, I play one with some members of our fledgling local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We play that in another friend’s house. Two more are online with friends and the last is played online with members of the international RPG community, The Open Hearth.

There’s no doubt that the ability to play online has opened a world of possibilities that, up until the start of the pandemic, I had not really even considered. It’s not the same as meeting around a table with snacks and drinks and banter. You can’t have cross-talk on Zoom. The chaos that is allowed to reign over the table in home games at times is to be treasured, in my opinion, and you really can’t recreate that on a video call. But when your mate you want to play with lives hundreds of miles away or when the only people you can get to play the little-known, esoteric story game you want to experience are located all across the world it’s definitely a boon.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to write a post on each of the games I’m running since I have more to write about each of those. I’ll do a single post for the games in which I am a player.