The Ends of the Earth is an excellent little hex crawl setting that advertises itself as a weird fantasy setting but compared to the more obtuse ends of the Troika world this is pretty clearly explained content and a compelling otherworld driven by its own strange logic.
The setting is literally at the edge of whichever world you locate it, a place where reality is thin and strange people dwell. The setting revolves around four demi-god style characters and the factions around them. The key locations relate to the history and machinations of the factions and the powerful entities behind them.
The only issue I'd raise with them is that one of the factions involves a violation of heaven and I initially read this as being something akin to the Christian heaven but I think it is actually something more akin to a plane of Paradise or the home realm of a powerful god. Just one piece of obfuscation in the whole setting I can live with although it would have been good to have had a bit of clarification about the intent on this.
A full description and narrative is given to help the GM to run the game while the players are likely to be encountering more enigmatic relics and bands of NPCs and trying to piece together what is going on. The legibility of the setting is hard to judge just by reading alone.
The actual hex map is divided into sub-sections that have their own detailed map and location descriptions. These obviously refer to the faction information but detail resident NPCs or locations present. A number and letter system makes it easy to find to look up references and follow references across the detailed and general map. Generally the content is well constructed and easy to reference, I didn't feel like I was ever losing track of ideas in the setting or getting mixed up between implied world building and more concrete concepts.
The writing is evocative without being elliptical, poetic at times but not obscure. I think what I really enjoyed about it was the richness to the way that everything layers within the setting. The people are pursuing agendas in places that relate to the history of the world and the influence of the demigods bleeds out into the context that the locations exist in. It feels like a miniature world, deep but not overwhelming.
I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to play this but it has set a new benchmark for me as to how hexcrawlers can work and should be written.
Wargod! is a collection of careers in the style of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for Troika!. Kreigsmesser was a similar idea but probably undershot the skill values compared to this collection. Maybe this collection has had more playtesting, maybe it is just lucky.
The standard stereotypes of the grimdark game are present and correct. The ratcatcher has a Small Vicious Dog as is required by the rules of the genre. However Warlock! remains my gold standard for trappings and plot hooks. A few potential hooks for what might have driven out of each career and into the life of an adventurer would have been welcome.
The backgrounds also don't really take the opportunity to create an implied background or a perspective on the world that these people live in. Troika! took it too far but this collection goes to far in the opposite direction there's less verve than the original game.
If you like gothic fantasy and Troika (or the Advanced Fighting Fantasy family of games) then it is worth having a copy of this for future reference but digital is probably going to be fine.
The high-level pitch was irresistible, Starfare is Into the Odd in Space. The first read through this pamphlet game though was a little off-putting: a universe infused with cosmic, psychic power but a society broken into interstellar dark ages. Still no magic but also no spaceships.
I initially thought that this is might be an Odd-infused Starfinder. It kind of describes itself as superheroes in space which is not a genre mashup I really thought needs to exist but maybe is a clear-eyed view of transhuman sci-fi or something akin to the Trinity or Mutant Chronicles games. It certainly doesn't feel similar to the Marvel Cosmic heroes genre.
Characters are still defined by their gear and weird tech that they discover though. Your superhuman powers are more like the Arcana of Into the Odd but being powered by a pool of points (called Kinetic Pips). Each character generates a special condition that allows them to reset the pool of points which is a great idea but the rules only provide six of them so for all but the smallest groups you're going to have to deal with repetition or create some more of your own.
There's a nice little method for creating a character's background where you can pick from a table where you roll a minimum and maximum value and pick from any column in the table between those values. It is somewhere between Into the Odd's packages and Electric Bastionland's Failed Careers. I think this is something I would like to see in more of the Marked by the Odd games.
The GM is called the Pilot here and they get an additional book on creating space dungeons which is procedural but also has some flavourful prompts. The idea of exploring ships and stations in a dying space culture actually got me back into the idea of the game. It's the same thing that I liked about Death in Space but the rules here are a lot lighter.
Starfare is a bit hit and miss for me, I think it has some great mechanic and setting ideas but I might be too conversative but I think I would prefer a mix of psionics and “technology as magic” rather than the slightly inconsistent mix of healing, psionics and weird powers it has currently. I think it's a great place to start hacking from and I'd be happy to play a game of if but I'm not inspired to try and organise a game myself.
This small booklet game and scenario is pretty revolting. It belongs to the subgenre of gross out weird fantasy where the characters aren't just in a sewer, the point of the game is the sewer itself. In Lords of Bile Keep the titular lords have filled the Bile Lands with pus, pestilence, slime and sludge but recently the infection of the land has stopped and the Bile Keep is no longer polluting the land around it.
The artwork is the Mork Borg patented collage of public domain art and distorted ambient backgrounds. It's well executed but also at this point a little bland.
Unusually this is not a hex or point crawl but more of a narrative game with a fixed set of scenes to be traversed to uncover the mystery of what has happened to the Lords. Six character backgrounds are provided and a very simple resolution mechanic (flip a coin, heads win, a suitable birth omen provides advantage). The scenes make up the narrative flow of the game so I presume that characters are meant to survive through the scenario but how that fits in with OSR sensibilities I'm not sure.
The main narrative builds through to an interesting choice at the end as long as the characters are sufficiently invested in the existing power structures but the character archetypes don't seem to create that investment and in fact it seems that some of the backgrounds seem antithetical to the lords and it is unclear why they would continue on to the second half of the adventure.
I don't really enjoy the gross out putrescence and wouldn't go out of my way to either play or run a game in this vein. I like the Arthurian vibe of the game and would probably adapt it but I'm not sure I would want to play it straight. An interesting inspiration but not to my gaming or aesthetical taste.
Vampire Cruise is a zine scenario based around a disastrous cruise holiday organised by vampires.
The cruise ship is built around the reclaimed carcass of a ship lost in mysterious circumstances. The captain now entertains the passengers while trying to drink away their guilt at the loss of the ship that has become the “Sea Star”. The vampires think they have created a floating prison for prey that they will feed on during the cruise and have had their victims pay for the privilege. What they don't realise is that the Life Society (a parody of Scientology) is secretly intent on performing a ritual that will have disastrous unintended consequences for the entire ship.
There are little subsystems for cruise activities such as ping pong tournaments, tables for onboard entertainment. Random generators are provided for crew, vampires and passengers and purloined cargo. It feels very aligned with systems like Electric Bastionland which mix fantasy and modern tropes in a rules-light way.
The scenario is surprisingly short compared to the sandbox situations that are common in zines. In a few days a risen god will kill any remaining occupants of the ship whether they be cruisers or vampires. The whole trip is fated to end in disaster. I think one weaknesses is that this ticking clock isn't particularly well communicated, this adds to a feeling of misadventure rather than urgency. Maybe this is the desired outcome, it isn't clear.
In my experience it would be rare to understand the ship, the factions and the threat in less than two game days when you have multiple factions and locations to explore (some of which are off-limits to passengers).
As a collection of notes on the idea of vampires organising a leisure cruise it's a great read. As a playable sandbox it's an odd fish as there is comparatively little space to explore and form relationships with the factions. Be prepared to use this a springboard for your own ideas if the premise floats your, ahem, boat.
This scenario for DCC Dying Earth is strange, whimsical, nicely constructed and not particularly bound to the Dying Earth setting.
It has quite a specific kicker in that it wants the characters to initially be adrift on the ocean, which sounds like a better opening for a one shot. A divine spirit called Water Woman asks the characters to rescue her son Algae who has been kidnapped and taken on to land where she is unable to go.
Algae has been kidnapped by a sentient house that is plagued by an irritating flow of spores into its basement from an otherworldly polyp via the intradimensional portal that the house uses to recharge its enchantment.
If the characters want the favour of Water Woman and the House of the Island then they need to descend into the basement of the house and cross over into the other dimension to destroy the polyp. It feels like the weirdest metaphor for haemorrhoid surgery in a roleplaying scenario I've read.
A small mini-dungeon fleshes out the scenario, it is straight-forward to navigate (down all the way) and keeps a consistent theme in its encounters.
I like the weirdness and mythic quality of the scenario but I'm not sure it really reflects any of themes of the Dying Earth fiction and doesn't really use anything emblematic from the series in my view. It feels like a great DCC/weird fantasy scenario though and small enough to be a good evening's entertainment.
This scenario is part of a series of pamphlet fold out adventures which have a map on the inner pages and the scenario notes on the outer pages. The layout uses the classic red as a contrast colour. It's quite an elegant and interesting physical design if you can pick one up (there was a Kickstarter for a larger print run).
In terms of content I think this is the best entry in the series and even it has a bit of shakiness in the entries and tone. The central idea is that a castle and its surrounds have been subject to a curse due to the misdeeds of its conqueror The Bastard King. Anyone who sees the dawn within the castle or its immediate surroundings are doomed to be unable to leave it and if they die while cursed they arise as an undead creature.
The undead follow patterns of behaviour they had in life creating grim tableau in mockery of life within the castle. If intruders play along with the creatures then they are not attacked and are able to explore the area and encounter some of the less affected creatures in the castle and start planning how to resolve the curse.
The conceit of an ordinary world corrupted is hampered for me by bits of gross out horror that end up seeming comic. Human flesh is used as firewood, the castle rampart is now rotting flesh, an impaled priest conducts sermons having presumably dragged his spike into the temple. There are true moments of horror like the trapped adventurer passing time in the tavern cursed and surrounded by the dead, the tanner now focusing on human hides (which when turned into armour have a chance to fool the undead) and a gate of disembodied mouths mutter nonsense and secrets in equal measure. Less is definitely more here and the strongest ideas should have had more space to grow rather than attempting a carnival of grotesqueries.
Resolving the curse has some interesting complications, all revolve around killing The Bastard King, which seems a reasonable expectation. However none of the consequences of the curse lifting seem discoverable in the adventure and if the party sails in and kills the big bad then they allow all the undead to escape the castle and rampage the countryside. Without any warning of such a consequence then it feels like there isn't a way for players to try for a better outcome that lifts the curse on the castle despite there being at least two ways in the text of doing exactly this.
The horror content could have been scaled back to allow either for more lore discovery or NPCs who could help outline what possibilities and choices the players actually have.
The Bastard King of Thraxford Castle is a beautiful and self-contained bubble dark horror fantasy that generally makes good use of undead monsters. It has lots of interesting opportunities available to the players but doesn't make any effort to highlight these in the text leaving the potential GM to fill in all the gaps and provide the depth that has been lost in favour of describing large maggots. Definitely worth picking up if you see a physical copy and the beautiful map of the castle will be a joy to explore but be prepared to do some work on building on what is offered by the text.
The players talk on the role of bounty hunters actively seeking adventure, monsters, bounties and loot. It is quite refreshing to have an unashamedly pro-adventure bias to the concept of the game. Adventure Hobo rather than Murder Hobo. The basic elements are the same as Into the Odd in terms of stats and rolls but there are generation tables to create your character's birth omens, background (which in turns determines some of your starting items) so while mechanically the characters are not so different from any Mark of the Odd game they do at least feel different.
One of the more distinctive areas of the game is the crafting systems: weapons and equipment degrade with a simplified Usage Die mechanic and there are various systems for creating your own weapons and even places to live if you can acquire enough raw material to create it. I'm actually quite taken with the idea of players devising their own weapons as it feels it builds on the basic Mark of the Odd premise that characters are differentiated by their equipment and takes in a new direction where the character's equipment is unique and invested with the player's imagination and the character's dedication to keep materials in their inventory instead of treasure or pre-made items.
The game also has tables to generate situations that the characters might find themselves in and the city states and their surroundings. It's a way to simplify the prep for the game but I think probably a little bit of creative editing of the results would improve the experience as things like rivers and marshes are not linked procedurally which could result in some unusual geography, I presume the map is meant to be rationalised after the random creation.
Magic is an interesting system of words in a sacred language where acquiring new words broadens your magical abilities rather than spells. Anyone can use magic but the spells require a sacrifice of hit points (and then Strength once hit points are gone). Normally I don't like this as a means of rationing magic but I think it works in Marked by the Odd as hit points are regained almost immediately after an encounter so it's more like managing other risks within combat, making you more vulnerable but maybe rendering an opponent unable to respond to your action.
Words also occupy inventory slots which I like a lot in spellbook style systems but it doesn't make much sense here. The rules are also unclear on how many words can be in an inventory slot. I think I would have preferred to have a separate “sacred language” lexicon inventory here, maybe based on Will rather than Strength.
Into the Bronze is a game that takes the Odd core and uses it as a starting point to create a very different sets of systems and intents for the game. It feels different due to its background but it is definably different in the way it ties its background into the activities of the players. I'd love to try a game of it and I think it is worth reading from a game design point of view as well for the way it gently twists things like having a base of operations in the game. Very interesting and a recommended read.
This pocketmod style game takes a minimalist design to point of impracticality for me. You could argue that minimalism is the removal of everything that is not strictly necessary. In From The Mud it feels like much that is necessary is missing and what is here is simply what fits the aesthetic and the physical format.
On that basis I think it is best to consider the game in conjunction with this online generator which creates suggestions for the game's Tyrants who are the antagonists of the characters.
The implied world is Soulsbourne, there is a neat experience mechanic that implies a kind of base building and restoration of order to the world as well as the need to bring down the tyrants that ruin the world.
Healing is grotesquely different from most games with characters healing by acquiring replacement body parts for those of yours that are damaged. An interesting take on the soul and the Ship of Theseus.
The physical edition of the game is very beautiful with the simple single colour over black and white, as a physical artefact it is very attractive.
From the Mud intrigues me but I'm not sure how likely I would be to find people to give it a go.
I hadn't expected much of this entry in the Osprey Games series as previous things I had read had been very mechanically complicated and tonally stuck between rpgs and skirmish games. Those Dark Places though seems mechanically simple and focused in genre on space horror games in the style of Alien and Dead Space.
Mechanically it has four stats with a handy mnemonic (CASE) and 2d6 beat 7 core (pitching itself somewhere between Traveller and PbtA). Instead of skills you select your primary and secondary roles on the spaceship and these map to +2 and +1 bonuses respectively. It all seems very straight-forward.
Harm goes against your stats making you less capable and then less alive.
The book has a nice conceit in presenting the rules as a company induction in the first person. The conceit gets a bit threadbare at points and it probably makes the description of the rules longer but it is quite a nice individual touch and is well-written.
The book comes with a suggested scenarios which is actually a bit more Death in Space than I expected featuring an encounter with mutated descendents of a ship's crew that has been lost for generations. Other suggested situations feature regular spacers cracking up under the hostile pressure of living in outer space which sounds quite a rich seam to explore.
This game reminds me a lot of a rules-light Mothership and I think a lot of the things written for the 1st edition of that game would actually work better here.
I wouldn't have minded have some procedural tables to help create situations and space structures on the fly without prep but overall I like this game a lot more than I thought I would and would definitely be eager to play it.