The Newest Flesh

This dungeon booklet is an expansion of a one page dungeon for B/X style Dungeons and Dragons.

But let's start with the good stuff. The art is great and in particular the black and white interior illustrations are very atmospheric. The dungeon has a number of encounters that do not require violence to resolve and instead it is possible to negotiate and trade information with dangerous people and groups. It has some nice magical items that blur the line between useful and cursed. For example a sword that lets you breath underwater but also turns you into an amphibian (if you aren't one already), a gem that attracts undead and prevents undead affected by its aura being turned. The dungeon genuinely feels like a hub for various groups who have an interest in controlling it but lack the strength to do so.

And this turns us to some of the things that don't work so well. The dungeon hasn't really been expanded into a proper module. It doesn't really introduce the factions (cultists, goblins, dwarves and bandits) properly and instead introduces them in the room description which is their base despite the cult being present in several rooms and the factions potentially being encountered as a random encounter before their “base” has been found.

The introduction is also weirdly circumspect about why the academy was sacked in the first place, again according to some of the rooms it seems the cult infiltrated the academy's students and used a play as cover for a ritual that allowed them to take over and consecrate a temple to their patron. When this was discovered the irate local lords attacked and levelled the place but weren't able to completely fill the cellars of the buildings which were then expanded by the cult and other creatures using the ruins. This context seems important to bringing the location to life but the information is buried in the text as something the facilitator is meant to infer as a little literary puzzle for them.

The dungeon layout is also quite square and boxy and the conceit of a school doesn't really inform the space very much. The most vivid descriptions are of the rooms the cult uses for their rituals.

There is a lot of potentially interesting things going on here but the presentation makes it more difficult than it needs to be make the best use of the material. The expansion from a single page has not involved a reorganisation of how to present the context of the situation best. It feels like it still needs an edit to highlight the numerous interesting ideas that the situation contains.

Other views

• Ten foot pole

Weird North is another Mark of the Odd game with public domain colour art within. The base rules really do seem to be straight Into the Odd so I will focus on the things that make this game different.

There six archetypes to choose from and they all have aspects that make them interesting: the Contender is a formidable fighter but has a taunt that they can't resist responding to, the Dirtfriend can learn information about things they consume and can choose an ability to befriend rats. It's all good but there are only six of them and there isn't quite enough variety in the base abilities to make them feel varied. If you have a small group and the characters are unlikely to die then this might be fine but Electric Bastionland has a huge number of Failed Careers (perhaps too many) for a reason.

Sorcery is a table of powers you roll to find out what magic you can do at the moment you invoke the sorcery. However rolling on it can lead to your character developing Aspects of Demon, Snake and Stranger. These are permanent effects or abilities however when you gain five elements of the same aspect your character is transformed into a creature of that Aspect becoming an antagonist NPC.

This seems on the face of it a great magic system with the only tweak I could see being helpful being that a character could sacrifice something to retain an ability they roll which they really like.

The game has an implied setting and I like some of the flavour but it does fall into the camp of games that ask you to read between the lines of the content to understand the background. For example despite the title the illustrations and flavour text have an Ottoman flavour to them, cities are crossroads of cultures but the countryside is wild and full of adventure, danger and potential. It feels like the default setting is an 18th century crossroads of the world sitting in territory that has been occupied for centuries but where much has been forgotten.

There are a large number of tables for generating ideas and these seem really handy for getting a sense of what kind of adventures the characters are meant to be having but I'll need to play around with them a bit to see how well they work.

Weird North doesn't deviate too much from Into the Odd but what it adds is useful. What it needs is more archetypes to expand out its vision of the world and allow more variety in the kind of characters that are possible.

As a set of rules Weird North doesn't really bring much that is new and the pages given over to repeating the Into the Odd rules could have referenced the SRD and more information could have been given about the background and its unique elements.

This minimal rules game has a slightly implied background but mostly feels like some game notes trapped inside a booklet layout exercise. The art is public domain, the layout loose and baggy, it all feels like it should have been a webpage.

The basic mechanism is pretty sound, roll 1d6, 5 and 6 are a success, everything else is a failure and if the situation is dangerous the lowest dice value represents wounds taken. By default you get one die but can gain others based on your vocation (like a career in many other games) and any relevant skill. This mechanism is pretty common and it can be a bit a bit divisive but I've not had a problem with it. It does mean that you're like to focus on activities that will generate you multiple dice.

You start the game with one vocation and skill (as well as an origin which is a bit like a culture or a species) and every two sessions you can add a vocation up to a maximum of three, after which you swap a new one for a old one.

New skills are earned by trying something imaginative in a test. This last bit is one of my favourite bits from these rules as they reinforce the history of the character.

Magic corrupts and mutation is contagious, corruption and degeneration seem inevitable. Your character dies if they gain more than four mutations. I think it would have been better to have the characters turn in monsters themselves at this point (as per Wizards and the Wastes).

Another one of the game's neat mechanisms is in corruption, you can always risk corruption to gain an extra die with a corruption point being gained if the corruption die is the highest value (regardless of whether the roll is a success or not).

The game world is hinted at through the Vocations and the material culture of the equipment list. Ceramic coins are used instead of gold. Armour is made of sea creatures. All of this seems interesting. However the random tables are not really sufficient to make for interesting and varied characters. Generally there seems to be just six options for every random idea and that simply means repetition in play.

There's also a lack of procedures or tables to generate potential adventures or scenarios, these can provide an excellent insight into the intended world as well as helping to inspire potential players.

The components of Shortsword are fine but there's nothing that really picks me and demands to be brought to the table.

An amusing little story game about a group of actor-thieves who are performing a play and carrying out a heist simultaneously. Some obvious inspiration feels like the “Now you see me” films

Structurally the game breaks down into a world and character building phase, followed by the private creation of props. These are items that will be used in both the play and the heist (with the play providing the cover for the use of the item in the heist).

Then the play is ready to begin with Act I, the prop cards are used to build up a timeline of the play as they are drawn. Each player will be directing the action twice in each Act, when directing the player sets up two scenes. One within the play and one as part of the heist, the one onstage uses the player's character; the lead character for the heist can be anyone including a character created just for that scene (although how these characters are meant to be handled isn't clearer, I presume they go into a pool of characters that can be reused later by any player). There's some basic guidance on how the scene is meant to be structured (goal, obstacle, prop) and players are encouraged to lean on the other players to help frame and play out their scenes, which is sound advice as using a random prop to frame two scenes: one advancing a shared dramatic narrative and the other logically building on a heist plot, seems like quite a big ask of one player.

The first Act is followed by an interval where the outcomes of the previous scenes are reviewed and the players have the metagame conversation about how they feel about the game so far and what kind of conclusion they are going to drive towards. Think of the tilt section of Fiasco but a bit more considered and driven by player consensus. With the discussion complete, Act II plays out leading to a conclusion or epilogue section where the consequences of the heist are resolved. Act II has the same structure as the first Act.

I've said this is a storygame but it's actually more of a poem or a story framework as in Act I you can't do anything mechanically to affect the random outcome of your action which is simply based on coin-flipping at the end of your scene and it isn't until Act II that you actually get a bit of a gameplay and some decisions to be made in whether you use the reincorporation mechanism or not. At this stage the mechanics and the direction of the story are aligned but before this the resolution is really just random. Something like player voting on success or failure might have been more interesting.

The final stage is the Denouement where the drama and the heist are resolved. Satisfyingly the question about the play is not whether it goes well. The characters are assumed to be skilled performers who deliver an excellent performance. Instead the question is whether the final performance is a tragedy (more performance failures than successes) or a comedy (not a tragedy).

It feels like matching tones and using ideas like palettes is going to be important for this game. I feel like its natural tone is gonzo comedy but the play examples seem a little straighter.

The physical version of the zine comes a spiral-bound portrait booklet, this might be handy at the table but when going for the end to end read I actually found it a bit trickier than a normal booklet zine.

This is an interesting one, its imaginative, demanding, highly portable and well-structured for one shots. I wonder if it maybe just asks too much of the players and doesn't offer quite enough support to make the whole thing work.