The Fall of Home is a bit of an odd storygame, odd because it has a really specific scenario that is probably metaphorical but which I find hard to follow. It is about a group of people who have left a location they once called home and are now that it has fallen into ruin they are returning to pick over the pieces of the past. The media inspiration for the game includes “Night in the Woods” and “Bastion” which are good in terms of setting an atmosphere but don't clarify the reasons for how this specific scenario might occur. Perhaps it is drawn from American rust belt towns or Detroit's abandoned suburbs.

In some ways Fall of Home is like a lot of lyric or storygames with the players almost free narrating on their character's feelings about the concept of what a home is and what it means to irretrievably lose it. However it does have a three act structure, structured character archetypes, a turn-taking structure and an endgame condition that drives the character's emotional situation at the end of the game. It therefore has quite a few mechanics that are worth reviewing as this is not the same as a prompt or playbook driven game.

It does have archetypes or stripped down playbooks though, each player chooses a “Walk” for their character which encapsulates a certain relationship with that community. Each archetype has a special ability to affect the narrative and a goal that if achieved during a scene allows the gathering of Fragments, which normally require the expenditure from a limited pool of Remnants to acquire.

Fragments are memories and keepsakes of home, if you have enough at the endgame then your character has resolved their relationship with the place they once called home in a healthy way that allows them to move on. Failing to do this means you need to incorporate specific themes into your final narration.

I initially found the Remnants to Fragments economy quite strange and it still feels that primarily it is there to ensure appropriate turn taking while not being as strict a turn-taking mechanic. It is probably too mechanical for storygame fans and not interesting enough for game players.

The playbook moves are also quite varied, quite a few seem quite good allowing you to declare a fact or expose a hidden aspect of an existing scene but a lot of them feel like they are intruding on the free narration part of the Scene that occurs in Act 2. For example one move allows the archetype to introduce a newcomer to a scene but reading the description of playing the Scene it seems that this is something that anyone can do at any time and therefore quite underwhelming as a thing that is meant to differentiate your character.

The whole game feels like a freeform storygame that has lost confidence in guiding principles for the freeform and therefore ends up unnecessarily drafting elements from Belonging Outside Belonging.

I'm not sure I feel this is a strong enough concept or system to ever want to bring to the table myself but I'd be happy to give it a go if someone else was offering to facilitate.

I feel the biggest hell-yeah aspect of this game is its straight-forward commitment to outlawry and the idea that you're fighting so hard for justice that you're driven to live a life deep in woods where the line between worlds gets blurry and that this is the most awesome thing that could happen to you.

The game encourages the outlaws to take an inclusive, anarchist, justice-based approach to the flawed world that has condemned them but otherwise is fairly faithful to the Robin Hood formula. You steal from the rich to provide for yourself and your merry band and anything left over goes to those wronged by the rich.

This central precept has already influenced how I think about games set in the Cyberpunk genre and led me to rethink how fantasy post-apocalypse games like Dark Sun should be framed. So without having actually played it I would recommend giving it a read.

Mechanics

The basic mechanic is very similar to Traveller or WSCA with a 2d6 roll versus a target of 8. Rolls of 12 or over are critical successes. Skill checks can also be subject to Advantage and Disadvantage. Opposed checks compare the rolls against one another rather than a fixed target number.

The GM is not intended to make rolls in the game so there are also saving throws where the player tries to roll under an attribute (Endurance, Willpower, Wits and Luck) to avoid trouble.

Allies also have mechanics (as befits a game about a gang of companions), either providing Advantage to a character or being able to carry out tasks on their own with a 4 or more on a d6 meaning success or a miss resulting in trouble.

Damage is taken off attributes (generally Endurance) so Saving Throws become harder as per Mark of the Odd systems. Going down to zero means being “Out of action” rather than dead and generally the system tends towards jeopardy rather than death.

Magic is handled as a skill (with an attribute requirement of a Willpower of eight or more) and generally you have to make a skill roll and spend Willpower to use arcane powers. It is less punishing that magic systems that use hit points but does also mean that magic users are reducing their ability to make Willpower saving throws so its not like a mana system either. It seems to plot a healthy path between the two ideas.

Character creation

The game uses a lifepath kind of system which describes the life the character was born into followed by the reason for their being declared outlaws. There are some chances to pick from lists for your starting abilities and some rolls against tables for the life stages. It all seems quite characterful from reading through it.

Scenarios

There are two scenarios provided: one about ambushing a tax caravan and the other about an heiress trapped in a another dimension within her own castle. The heist doesn't feel that supportive as a framework, there's a description of the inn and there is a group of travelling players there so I guess its meant to offer the opportunity to create a cover story and try and steal away the taxes but it would have been good to have a few clearly signposted opportunities to offer up. Otherwise I think it would just be more enjoyable to throw open the theft to any approach the characters might have chosen.

“The Prison Keep of Lady Maude” is better as there is a stronger metaphorical reading of a corrupt priest imprisoning an heiress to claim her inheritance. The supernatural is both explicit in the shadow keep and implicit in the ghostly black dog form of Lady Maude's father roaming the night.

Conclusion

The exact content of Sherwood may or may not be to your tastes but as a way of constructing a progressive campaign frame for a game of magic, rogues and wild forests it is worth studying. You can have magic, trickery and swordplay and it doesn't need to be murderous, gross or exploitative. You can have outsider characters and yet not reject the concept of society.

Crescent B/X is a very, very rules light game that is aimed at generating a whimsical light fantasy experience that still nods towards D&D.

One of the aspects of the game I'm finding fascinating is the degree of negotiation there is in the creation of the shared world. There is the usual Palette, Tone, Lines and Veils but then explicit discussions of whether character death is on the table and with what regularity, what kind of tasks do adventurers routinely do and what presents a challenge for them?

Powerfully it also introduces the concept of a negotiated Baseline which sets the power-level of the characters. Namely what things are routine for the kind of people the characters are, what requires a game check and what things are beyond them and are the realm of higher powers.

The world building section is explicit but short and I've immediately thought of hacking in Archipelago's ownership to make this idea a bit more concrete.

Character generation is interesting and almost all entirely narratively based with no numbers assigned. There is a mention of dots on Features and this doesn't seem very well explained and probably could have been handled by adding an adjective to the Feature. It is the one duff note in an otherwise excellent guide to sketching a character.

The Alignments and Priorities section is quite interesting. For Alignments player describes a few opposing axes and places the character on them with a preference to one side of the axis. So “more dishonest than honest”, “More inclined to trust someone than distrust them”, “Eager to embrace magic and rarely rejects it”. These seem like they are ways to ease into the character without being too restrictive.

Priorities are described as moral compass but some of the examples are more like things that matter to the character like “Having the last word”, “Living life to the fullest”. They feel more like maxims of how the character wants to behave. The description here isn't the greatest but the examples are clear and together the Alignments and Priorities give you a sense of the moral nature of the character and what they are trying to achieve.

Crescent B/X espouses a lot of FKR principles in terms of focus on the world and negotiation in game rather than mechanics but it also combines it with some storygaming concepts. The story may not be the point of the game but shared creation is important with creation and inspiration coming from all players not just the facilitator (GM).

The final page has a quick roll table for creating characters which helps illustrate the creation rules and then has some optional rules for Experience (which to be honest don't seem to be that great) and death which seems good.

The game is great distillation of freeform and storygaming principles that retains a very light mechanic with relatively light consequences for failure. It is a brilliant distillation of what good rules light games should embody and I'm really interested in using it to bring some ideas I have to life.

This is an interesting storytelling game centred around adventurers in a tavern boasting about their adventures and the villains that they have (hopefully bested). These latter are the eponymous Bastards who are half something, half another but All Bastard and deserving of being brought low for their wicked ways.

Each player takes three turns, in each one facing a Bastard that is played by another player. The first two are encounters on the way to confront the main villain and represent minions of the main Bastard or incidental threats along the way.

Each Bastard is resolved using a pool of dice 4d8 that the player controlling the Bastard rolls in secret. Characters are defined on three stats which have polyhedral dice assigned to them. The player chooses their approach and rolls the die that is associated with the stat.

Success in a challenge against the Bastard removes the lower dice in the pool but failure the highest die so it feels like the mechanics should generate a narrative that favours a success for the hero, perhaps after an initial setback. The rules do mention the balancing calculations that the designer has used and how to play around with them for a different feel to the game.

Success generates fame tokens which can be banked for reknown or traded for a Relic, a helpful item with an associated special rule. At the end of the game each character's saved fame tokens measures how impressive and well-known their story is and allows the character with the most fame to claim bragging rights as the best adventurer.

The turn taking aspect of the game seems to me to be the Achilles heel of the game: as only two players are critically engaged at a time. There isn't a well-defined role for the other players; they might be fine sitting by and enjoying the action or taking on bit-parts in the other player's scenes but also they also might not have much to do and none of what happens in the scenes will affect their own scenes unless they are sophisticated players who will reincorporate elements on their own accord. This is compounded by the fact that the hero is meant to play through three Bastards before the next player starts their first.

I wonder if a simple tweak to assign roles to groups of players instead of just the two might help resolve this. It also feels like it would be better for the game to be played in rounds rather than each player performing a complete set of stories. That might have a better feeling of rising peril and the characters trying to top one's exploits.

I think I'm going to try and bring this game to a storytelling group and get a better sense of whether it has enough game options and sparks inspiration in the players. It looks good but the structure does put an emphasis on the contribution of the players.

This two-page RPG is a satire of polyamory and pantheistic religions which page for page is an impressive amount of heresy and social commentary.

Players take on the roles of adventuring clerics trying to write wrongs and help people while being in spiritual relationships with various gods in the same pantheon. The more a god Favours you then the more dice you roll to overcome problems in the world. The more dice you roll the more likely it is that your divine gifts will flow out of control, wrecking havoc all around you. If you don't roll enough dice though then you run the risk of your hubris and lack of divine favour being exposed.

Success therefore involves juggling the favour of the gods snubbing and soliciting them in turn.

A God Master helps facilitate the game with the aid of some principles and spark table for problems afflicting the land. There is a sample pantheon provided for quick play but I bet there is going to be some real enjoyment in creating your own.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited to play a game; it feels like the right mix of silly and serious with a high concept that is easy to grasp and a play mechanic that requires some player skill and which drives narrative action.

This is a weird little game that starts of with a brilliant high concept and then promptly abandons you to try and make something of it as it drifts off into describing various rules and tables. Just another confused OSR inspired booklet then? Well there's something I feel is compelling about this game, enough to make me want to fill in the blanks.

There is a colonialism theme with an invading empire that has been killing the divine spirits of the country by having the spirits possess someone (accused criminals) and then executing the possessed humans, killing the spirit in the process. A kind of literal cultural genocide.

A crisis in the empire has resulted in the imperial soldiers being recalled and in the confusion your character is spared execution but is still possessed of the divine spirit. At liberty they now have the chance to reclaim their land before either the empire returns or the threat that defeats the empire becomes a threat to them and their society as well.

The imperial and spirit possession themes really resonated with me; evoking the Roman Empire as portrayed in the Sláine comic and Britannia TV show and the opening moments of Morrowind. There is the menace of a military power using cunning to cull the local divinities.

The recall reminds me of Britain under the Romans with the sudden departure of the Roman Legions who had re-shaped the country but left practically overnight due to circumstances that must have seemed obscure and far away.

The game is illustrated with photos of beautifully painted miniatures in dioramas. Each one features a strange character which presumably represents either the spirit fused characters or the monstrosities they might face.

I'm not clear whether this game is means to be played solo or as a group. Clearly a group of prisoners could have escaped together but the game doesn't really have any focus on group play but the scene setting section doesn't feel like it has enough structure to really spark interesting solo play.

Bury the Gods is intriguing and mysterious, it could have been a bit more explicit but it just manages to fall on the right side of being compelling.

Dukkborg is an alternative play frame for Mork Borg with a new character class, the Treasure Hunter, and several allusions to the world of Duck Tales (which I don't really get as I'm not familiar with the source material). The game was originally available on itch but has had a Kickstarter for a printed version.

Characters in Dukkborg are anthropomorphic animals (generally ducks but there is a random table than includes a free choice of your preferred animal).

What makes Dukkborg interesting to me is the focus on the adventuring group. The characters belong to “Clans” that can have randomly generated characteristics. This focus on familial relationships and issues of duty and honour is more interesting than the amorphous group of freebooters I've mostly encountered in Mork Borg games.

The Clans give a structure to game and sense of having something to come home to and therefore to cherish and defend which is not the the point of Mork Borg. I think there is something useful to adopt here even if ducks aren't your thing.

That Dungeon game with Dragons & stuff

The high concept of this small booklet is the idea of AD&D but played from memory and house rules. The focus is on facilitating the player's creativity within a consistent framework that provides the sense of the power

Creating characters is quite freeform there are three standard attributes: Attack, Defence and Body. The fourth you make up yourself to reflect your character's supernatural dimension.

Race and Class consist of a simple formula of: “It's like a species or profession but with a quirk or twist”. The best examples from the book are the Orkstar (Like an orc but also the lead singer of a hair metal band) and Sniper-Mage (Like a wizard but with guns).

The Leader is the player that creates the challenges within the game and defines the dungeon that is being explored. The Leader can be changed at any time so it's more an indicator of who is feeling inspired at any given moment. The Leader defines what challenges have been encountered in the dungeon and can use random tables for inspiration. The group has to agree with the Leader so the goal is more of a consensus game rather than having a rotational GM.

Monsters have a Danger rating that by default is 5 but the group get to choose their rating and how many of the monsters are encountered. The higher the rating the greater the rewards in Coin that the party receive. It's a basic push your luck mechanism.

Coins can be gambled to try to win a magical item which is similar to the character's supernatural ability mechanically but uses its own pool of points. Acquiring coins also allows you to level up so they seem to be the basic currency of the game.

The entire mechanics seem quite abstract and there isn't much in the way of world building so I wonder how groups are meant to keep a cohesive tone and whether too much responsibility is with the Leader to create a satisfying dungeon experience.

This feels a very different game to most OSR propositions with its variable authority an abstraction of the power curve for characters. I think it falls into the category of games that has to be played to be understood.

A leaflet comdey game about trying to pass yourself off as sailors on a ship journey when you in fact know very little about sailing and ships. The main threats are discovery and exposure as being a sham or a fraud so the tone is very light-hearted.

Mechancially I find it interesting, there is a common pool of dice and over the course of four problems or rounds each player narrates their character's approach to the problem and adds a stat which is rated from 0 to 2 to a number of dice they take from the pool. Each dice thrown that is 5 or higher (adding in the stat number) is a success and returns to the pool but each dice that doesn't meet this threshold is placed in front of the player to indicate suspicion that they may not be all they say they are.

If all the dice are removed from the pool there is a collective negative outcome where the characters are exposed and consequences are based on how suspicious you are deemed.

If all four problems are overcome the remaining pool dice are shared between the players and rolled with successes indicating how well the character has done out of the whole misadventure.

I think the mechanics could work for something less comic, anything that involves subterfuge in a social setting.

The main problem with the game is that there isn't enough space to do some proper hand-holding on setting up a successful game. The GM is meant to come up with four interesting problems that require teamwork to overcome. The group needs to decide the setting and how the situation has come about and also set the stakes on what a successful voyage might be. It's one of those “create interesting and engaging scenes until you find a satisfying resolution” situations.

I'm very tempted to give this a go and I'm also interested in skinning it different but I would have preferred a bit more structure for something that feels clearly pitched as a pick-up game.

This hardbacked scenario for Old-School Essentials presents the manor of a plane-hopping vampire who claims dominion over vampires and imposes a blood tithe on them. One of his “subjects” has failed to provide his tithe and the Blood King has arrived in the character's world to impose his will over his errant vassal.

The scenario is presented as an old-school mid-level run on a hostile stronghold but it feels like it would work better in a more planar-based game where the various intrigues and sub-plots can play out. Alternatively you can drop the conceit that the Blood King is here for a specific time (the Blood Moon) and have him arrive as a new faction into an existing situation, present until he chastises his wayward child and obtains what the feels he is owed.

Some of the NPCs presented are intriguing: the vampire refusing to pay the blood tithe has been cursed with moral feeling and therefore doesn't want to murder people. He's hiding in the castle plotting with the king's adopted daughter while an enchanted vampire look-a-like is tortured in his place.

A vampire hunter has become trapped within the manor and is unable to escape but is a wildcard threat to the occupants and a potential ally for the invaders. She has captured a vampire and is subsisting by drinking their captive's blood.

These are vivid portraits of desperate people but sadly more interesting than the Blood King himself.

The castle also has a hive mind fungus infection which is one idea too far for me, although the idea of using an infestation to your advantage would have appealed to several of the groups I've played with.

There is also a cosmic astronomy theme with minature worlds and a heart hidden inside a star. I found it interesting but I'm not quite sure it really fitted in with the rest of the blood, flesh and horror motifs.

I like the rich, electric illustrations by Justine Jones but in a couple of cases (like the Shadow Hounds) the art and the text don't agree. I think you can pick which you like but the art is definitely the richer and more evocative if a little bit more conventional.

The biggest issue I have with the scenario is that it is half-sandbox and half-frozen tableau waiting for the players to arrive and allow the plot to progress. The rebellion against the king isn't a ticking bomb but also doesn't feel like a slow-burning situation where the characters can make a decisive difference. Only the situation with the vampire hunter makes sense as a status quo that the appearance of the characters can majorly alter.

Overall I think this is a book to take ideas from but its more inspiration than play ready.