The Newest Flesh

When I first got Lair of the Bog Lich through the post I misread the title as “Lair of the Dog Lich” which is going to be a very different game that I run at some time.

This is a short, genuinely zine-like adventure based around the Bog Lich, a wizard who drowned in a swamp and has returned as a swamp-themed undead creature. Needing to feed on the soul energy of the living it has cast a spell that lures people into the swamp. Once it has consumed them it then coats their body in mud and animates them as mud zombies.

The lair itself is a simple four room affair off a central hub and is strong on atmosphere rather than dungeon crawling cleverness.

The zine takes the core idea of a life-draining mud wizard living in a swamp and riffs around it, it'll probably make a good one shot and it blends horror and fantasy effectively, more serious than Warhammer, less goofy than Mork Borg.

The Dark Blade is a one-page game entry into the One Page Game 2024 game jam. It's about a sword filled with evil spirits who having been long-lost has now been found by a heroic adventurer type. The evil spirits need the sword to slay pure souls to be free but they can only influence the wielder, not control them.

This is an interesting asymmetric GM-less game built over a PbtA chassis. One player takes on the role of the sword bearer, dubbed The Fool who is created via the aid of some spark tables and the rest of the players take on the role of the spirits trapped in the sword. The spirits are predefined and have specific powers that they can use to help or hinder the Fool. The spirits can also contribute an extra die to any challenges the Fool is facing.

The spirits can also make use of a mana-type mechanism to manifest themselves or their powers to or on behalf of the Fool.

I think this design is fascinating. It is concise, asymmetrical and has a dark humour while using solid existing mechanics to provide the basic gameplay and focusing the design on what makes the game unique. I'm looking forward to playing it.

This is a lightweight OSR game inspired by the Zelda games which gives it quite a distinctive flavour.

Character creation is done through picking or rolling on tables and characters are distinguished more by their past and equipment than innate traits.

Mechanically you are rolling as many d6 as you can justify and a 5 or a 6 is a hit. Combat is quite Apocalypse World (AW) influenced with weapons doing fixed harm and defence reducing damage by a fixed amount.

The AW influence is also felt in the provision of principles of play for the players and the game guide. The principles help embed the thematic core of the source material the game is inspired by and helpful if you're not familiar with the themes of the Zelda games.

Songs

The key unique mechanics are the music and songs that are used in the magic system. There are a few things that really stand out for me here.

Firstly there is the flavour of the system, the background posits the existence of an ancient civilisation whose treasures have been lost. The idea that the the lost treasure is a cultural one, a form that mixes art and practical power is just a strong idea. The idea of delving into a ruined temple to discover a lost melody is just really evocative to me.

Secondly there are some really interesting mechanical aspects that build on the idea of the group performing music together rather than the more traditional Merlin-style individual super spellcaster.

Each spell or ballad has a number of notes that you need to perform it correctly, these notes are represented by the numbers 1 to 6 and you need to roll a pool of d6 and be able to match each note in the song.

Having multiple performers therefore is a good move as you have more dice thrown and options to choose from because in addition to requiring all the notes of the song you can also use additional numbers to generate special effects. For example if the group has enough numbers to be able to play two complete songs they can combine the songs.

This little sub-system is rich and compelling and links to the themes and world of the game in a really deep and creative way.

Procedural generation

Over half of the book is given over for tables for creating settlements, people and dungeons making the game a bit more zero-prep. There is also a bestiary which I found handy not being very familiar with the Zelda games myself.

Conclusion

The gameplay loop about recovering lost songs from buried ruins and using them to save the world is really compelling and distinctive compared to a lot of fantasy play. I'm not sure I feel enough affinity with the source material to do it justice but I would definitely be interested in giving it a go. The game seems like it demands a mini-campaign context where you can develop both the background threat and allow the players to develop songbooks and customise the magic they discover.

A short entry because this game is distributed as a Google Doc which is a much better format for sharing games content than the traditional PDF. This means you can go and read it yourself and come to your own conclusions about it.

Reasons you might want to have a read is that the skin maps the Spiderman ethos neatly onto the two poles required by Lasers & Feelings and does an excellent job of invoking the spirit of the Spiderverse films. Characters take on various incarnations of Spiderman, embodying one aspect of the Peter Parker character more than the others. They have been brought together to defeat some threat that one of them alone could not bring down.

I'm a big Spiderman fan and felt that the latest animated films both captured the essence of the character but were willing to expand on it in a thoughtful way. Spider and Man does the same for Lasers & Feelings.

This is a Forged in the Dark leaflet game that brings the Blades in the Dark heist formula to Cyberpunk dystopianism. The game is aimed at one shot games about veteran runners on their last run.

Rules-wise this is a familiar chassis with not much different except that there are no classes or archetypes and cyberware helps differentiate the characters.

For me personally the game isn't stripped down enough if people aren't already familiar with the system. The mechanics and interaction between Threat, Edge, Stress, Consequences and Resistance is just complicated from my point of view. I'm not sure what all these different elements are bringing to game particularly when the idea is that our timeframe is very short, our focus narrow and there won't be downtime to get rid of Stress and Consequences must all happen very quickly to be relevant (or otherwise will need to play into the character's epilogue).

This hack falls between the stools of Blades campaign play and its self-stated goal of a one-shot. It needs another round of stripping back to get to the tight core. It is a shame because the Blades heist phase does seem to map onto the typical cyberpunk “run” in concept but without the framing scenes and campaign play the mechanical difficulty is probably too high for the characters and the rules complexity is too high for my personal tastes.

Where I think it might work better is for handling a mini-campaign where you have a team that is embedded in a community and they are still driving towards a conclusion but you can make better use of the Stress and Consequences.

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.