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.
Ossuary is a game inspired by the OSR but distinctively with a taste of the gothic world of the Soulsbourne about it.
The game's motifs centre around bones: characters are made up of a Spine, Femur and Skull (strength, dexterity, willpower) which have dice values randomly assigned to them. Failed rolls (results between 1 and 3) have dice stepped down the dice chain until failing on a d4 ultimately leads to death.
Strangely the rules are aimed at level 0 characters and there are some rules for levelling up. As the game is just two A5 pages long it was a bit hard to understand the idea here. There's not a massive difference between levelled and unlevelled characters except for the randomness of the initial dice allocation and in some ways it would have felt fine not to have a progression system here at all.
There's a random table to create a character which is quite nice but also a lot of space that could have been used for a bit more of a zero-prep experience.
There is quite a clever use of underlined words in the rules main body which are initially odd but a note towards the end explains that the underlined words represent a mini-scenario for you to use. It's probably more stylistically effective than a great adventure seeds but it is a good show of creative ambition.
Ossuary is intriguing as an OSR heartbreaker. It genuinely seems to have just enough rules and a sense of the kind of game it is aimed at creating. I'd like to give it a play and see how the mechanic works out in practice.
This small scenario features a reverse monster hunt where the adventurers are the target of the hunt by two vat-created Visps that score points for their creators for each character they kill. The dispute is over a trivial offence and the efforts to draw in adventurers and create the deadly creatures far outweighs the cost of making it good, therefore pettiness is all present and correct.
The adventure requires an overland journey to a village and along the way the characters encounter a different village that pretends to be the character's destination to take advantage of them to resolve a local problem while still playing tricks and attempting to humiliate the party. It's a good riff on the charlatanism and indifferent exploitation of the books but ultimately only really works if the characters are pretending to know what visps are and are otherwise unwilling to be altruistic.
The encounter between the two villages is much better with two captives vying to lure the characters to their deaths to save themselves but both offering quite useful knowledge and skills if they can be extracted from the situation.
This scenario is quite slight and is probably better as a collection of encounters that can be mined for inspiration and the nuggets dropped into an ongoing game with a stronger framework.
1400 is a collection of fantasy inspired games based around the same core mechanisms but using different character generation and play systems to offer a range of play from things inspired by Planescape to Underdark campaigns.
The different playsets are:
Quest; high fantasy
Planes; planar travel (Planescape and Spelljammer)
Sneak; crime, stealth (computer games Thief and Dishonoured)
Mage; high fantasy, almost superhero powers (Dying Earth)
The core mechanics are inspired by 24xx which means polyhedral dice sequences and a roll of 5 or higher succeeds with the higher the roll the better.
Each game theme has different rules for creating characters and these different constructions are what makes the “genres” different. Quest and Planes are similar for example but equipment has more rules in Quest whereas relics and spells matter more in Planes. Sneak has gadgets, Below has magical items but includes cursed and weird items whereas Quest's items are more straight-forward and transactional (potions and scrolls for example).
There are a variety of tables in the back of each genre chapter for creating game elements such as factions and sparking ideas for games with relatively low prep. The final item in the zine is a dungeon called the “The Planar Nexus” which is high fantasy but mixes up rules and contexts from the different genres to provide an example of how to mix and matches rules and adapt existing material to the rules systems.
Essentially this is a collection of two-page rules light games that customise the 24xx template to fantasy genres. The range of play styles covered is really good and each one sparked a few ideas for me in terms of existing things I have that I could use with the rules or creating a new scenario.
As far as reading goes this looks like a great anthology around a single system and I'm really glad to have it. I was already excited about the idea of Dungeon Soul which uses the same mechanism for dark fantasy games in a dying worlds so really the question to answer is how well constructed and meaningful the various tables and subsystems are and that will require some playing.
The Station is a GM-less prompt-driven story game that is heavily inspired by The Quiet Year and ...sorry did you say street magic. It uses a deck cards of cards to generate the prompts and has a points accumulation system that allows narrative authority in the resolution of character's stories at the end of the game.
The game concerns the eponymous station but more importantly the train that is due to arrive there. The train has not been at the station for some time and therefore the arrival of the train in anticipated and is the subject of the hopes and fears of those at the station. Some people may be hoping to travel on it, some may be expecting something or someone to arrive on it. All these things are created during the course of the game.
The game describes itself as inspired by worldbuilding games but unusually it has no fixed procedure for worldbuilding itself and is somewhat like For the Queen in jumping straight into prompts. Generally these cold starts are pretty horrible experiences but For the Queen is the exception that proves the rule. I think this may be something that can only be judged in play.
The games point system seems equally quirky, some cards give you points when they are drawn but players can also pass a prompt to another player to answer but if they do then the passing player must pay them two points. This seems unnecessarily fussy and counter-productive, part of the point of passing a prompt is that you might be feeling uninspired by it so it seems unhelpful that a player without any points currently is forced to play a prompt they aren't enjoying. I feel it would have been more logical to have the person who answered a passed prompt points from the “bank” and if a prompt is not answered by anyone it leaves play unanswered.
The points are used to resolve the stories of the characters that are introduced during play. These epilogues are usually a source of delight in these sort of games and I feel the points system is similar to the Protocol System so overall I feel that this will probably result in a good conclusion to the game.
The points also provide the only game mechanic that seems to be in play, without it this would simply be a storytelling game with a fixed frame and some turn-taking prompts. Not really massively different from improv. This isn't a bad thing but is a different thing from a game strictly speaking.
The zine looks very pretty with a nice risograph print and a whimsical art direction that gives it a quirky but homely feel.
I'm definitely curious to give it a go but it might need the right group to make it really work.
This zine format scenario collection has an intriguing concept a series of scenarios that can be played in an hour and which build into a satisfying campaign. Can it be done?
The framing device for the scenarios is that the characters are members of the eponymous City Watch and each individual adventure is an incident that the guards deal with. Typically each incident consists of an interaction and a fight. Without playing it I have no idea if the fights have been balanced to fit within an hour but I did think that adopting some of the devices used in One-Night Strahd to fix the duration of a combat would have been a good idea to guarantee the duration. These include environment circumstances that might cause the foes to lose if they do not defeat the players quickly or a pre-programmed retreat after achieving an objective.
I thought most of the situations outlined in the scenarios were interesting starting points but I suspect that anyone running it will want to tweak things for their style and personal game. Only a couple struck me as good straight out of the box.
What is clever is that there are a series of callbacks and payoffs in the concluding scenarios of the campaign where previous outcomes affect the flow of the scenarios and earlier situations are repeated, allowing players to anticipate traps for example. This linking of the early adventures to the conclusion gives the proper sense of a narrative to the campaign and practically rewards earlier efforts from the players.
I find the idea of highly focused games really interesting and to its credit these scenarios have a fully fleshed out narrative arc to them that does describe a full background world by implication. The only thing that is really lost here is the more open world sandbox style experience and that isn't really much of an option for the time constrained anyway where play by post might be a better option.