Tag Archives: Review

Articles, Editorial

Deathmatch Island Review

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Back in 2020 I reviewed the newest edition of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Agon. Agon is a fascinating game, taking the characters on an Odyssey-like journey of myth through a number of islands. Like Greek myth, though, the game has a strict structure and, barring a small chance of premature retirement, usually ends in the same way. It’s great for generating stories, but not what I’m typically looking for.

Deathmatch Island is based on Agon’s mechanics, but casts the strict structure differently. The structure of each island is because the characters are contestants in a game show, a twisted game show where physical challenges and loot boxes give way to a literal battle to the death. Survivors make their way from one island to another until they reach the end game with Production, the shadowy administrators of the whole thing, shaping the game based on how many social media followers each contestant gets. The last surviving contestant may win a big prize…or wake up on yet another island with a job offer they never could have imagined.

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Articles, Editorial

Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 1

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About two months ago I wrote a piece here on rules-lite superhero games. In the piece I talked about a bunch of games, and at the end I made a list of the games that I found most essential.

I recommend reading these Revisited articles first and then circling back to my original piece, because everything I say here supersedes my opinions from the original piece. The important thing to note is that I didn’t actually read the rulebooks for almost all of the games I discussed; I read forums posts and reviews, listened to podcasts, read product descriptions, and studied other sources to get some kind of rough idea about each game.

In this four part series I’m going to go deeper and take a closer look at the handful of games that I said I most wanted to play last time, which is to say I’m going to read the rulebooks and make further observations about the games. I’m also going to look at a small handful of games that I didn’t mention last time, and look at the rulebooks for most of those as well.

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Articles, The Independents

Stewpot: Tales from A Fantasy Tavern Backerkit Review

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The tavern is the fulcrum point of the adventuring lifestyle. It’s where wandering heroes can find food and shelter after weeks out in the wilderness, it’s where quests can often begin… and it’s where quite a few stories find their happy ending. After all, being an adventurer is a tough life. Many adventurers, whether they retire after a successful career or call it quits early, get the idea to be the ones running the tavern, providing the same things they needed back when to a younger generation. It can take some doing, however, integrating back into settled society after a life living on the road and by sword and spell. How do you let go of who you were, and who will you become? Let’s have a taste of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern from Takuma Okada, now on Backerkit with Evil Hat Productions!

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Articles, The Independents

The Facility – A Breathless Choose Your Own Mad Science Adventure

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You awaken, cold and in the dark. Fumbling around by low blue lights in a coffin shaped pod. You pull yourself out of the box, and in the dark see the faces of others. You are all wearing loose fitting white clothing and laceless shoes. Hospital patients? You peer into the dark, seeing little but hearing the sound of dripping, running water and distant machinery. You gather what you can, knowing that something is hunting you. It will be here soon.

Wait.

Can you remember who you are?

Welcome to The Facility by Galen Pejeau!

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Articles, The Independents

World Ending Game – Saying Goodbye With Style

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“Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.” Longtime readers might recall I’ve written about saying goodbye to characters before, but that was largely in a ‘how to remember and treasure them’ way. The reasoning behind that article is, however, the same one that drew me to check out the subject of this one: the attachment to characters that we’ve created and a desire for closure as we leave them, and the snapshot of their lives that we played out, behind. This is a look at World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin.

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Articles, Editorial

Spooktacular Adventure Writing: Part 1

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This is a vague sequel to the Maid RPG post published here recently. Spooktacular is a retroclone of the 80s Ghostbusters role-playing game written by Ewen Cluney, who not only translated Maid RPG but also wrote an original game, Kagegami High, that mixes Maid RPG‘s mechanics with the ones found in Ghostbusters.

I decided to write an original adventure for when I would eventually run Spooktacular for my players. This was a problem for me, because I live by the Mythbusters credo; if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

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Articles, Editorial

Black Sword Hack and the evolving OSR

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The Old School Renaissance is a microcosm within the RPG world. Although many (including myself) refer to the OSR as a whole, cohesive thing, the reality is that the movement is more the result of at least half a dozen origins that random-walked into game preferences which, to an outsider, look similar. The broad preference towards the genre establishment of Dungeons and Dragons (or at least Appendix N, if not the system itself) bounds the definitions we work with; other retroclones and revivals like Cepheus and RuneQuest aren’t included, even if they too are ‘old school’. No, the main thing that all vectors of the OSR have in common is that they are trying to recreate the time when the roleplaying game was new. And when RPGs were new, either literally or in the eyes of the designer, the new thing that they first touched was (almost always) D&D.

All OSR games are aiming for either D&D as it was, D&D as it could be, or D&D as it was supposed to be. D&D as it was is simple; Old School Essentials is a straight-up retroclone and proves that ‘Basic D&D without shitty layout and shitty editing’ is a winning recipe. It’s the best known and best selling retroclone, but the retroclone camp of the OSR is arguably the oldest (to the degree that OSR is a label we can trace it back to OSRIC). D&D as it could be is where we start getting a lot of the distillations; the rules in early editions were such a mess you barely used any of them, so clearly one could write a game only using those few rules we could actually make work. This is where Into the Odd comes in, this is arguably where The Black Hack comes in, and, if rules were in any way supposed to be primary in the game, this might be where Mork Borg would come in. This example shows setting and tone are a different topic here than ‘game’. D&D as it was supposed to be is a tough one, and there aren’t many games that really aim for this mark. Whitehack is the one that comes to mind for me, taking the length and complexity of the original booklets and turning that into something much more flexible and consistent.

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Articles, Editorial

Daggerheart Preview

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Earlier this month, Darrington Press released the free playtest version of Daggerheart, their traditional fantasy RPG meant to go toe-to-toe with D&D. First with Pathfinder but now also with entries from MCDM and Kobold Press, we’re getting an awful lot of D&D-alikes, thanks to last year’s saga with the OGL. It’s now clear that a corporate game is a liability, so anyone making a livelihood in the gaming space is clearing out of the Halls of Hasbro. What makes Daggerheart, the entry from the Critical Role folks so special? I downloaded it for free, for one thing. In all seriousness Daggerheart is entering the public eye a little earlier than the MCDM RPG or Tales of the Valiant, both of which are currently fulfilling crowdfunding and doing any additional playtesting either contained to backers or within their own teams. The public playtest process is a great way to get a lot of feedback, and it’s worked well in the past; both 5e and the second edition of Pathfinder went through public playtesting.

It’s also caused some grief already. Darrington is somewhat in the crosshairs, between the moderate reception to their first game Candela Obscura and the relatively polarized fanbase that Critical Role has created by being the biggest voice in the room. Seems like a perfect time for someone like me to come in. I’m not the most impartial judge, given my growing disinterest in D&D or its cousins over the last five years, but I do understand what these games are trying to do. To that end, Daggerheart seems to have what it takes to grow a fanbase. It just needs to solve a few niggling issues with its own relationship to narrative mechanics first.

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Articles, Editorial

Wildsea Review

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve often thrown shade on the archetypal ‘dungeon fantasy’ setting. Cemented by Tolkien, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons, copied by everyone, the typical western medieval pastiche with dwarves and elves (and sometimes orcs and halflings) has so permeated fantasy fiction that we often give it a pass; it’s transcended cliché to become a trope. I’m still sick of it. That said, my experiences with settings that try to be aggressively ‘not’ the norm often fall into the trap of painting a new overlay on old tropes, falling into fantasy same-old same-old because there wasn’t enough worldbuilding done. I have, though, found a game with a setting so intensely its own thing (and so intensely weird as a result) that I backed it on Kickstarter, read it, and then made sure to play it before really collecting my thoughts.

The gorgeous book and art catches your eye, but what makes Wildsea unique in its worldbuilding vision is that there’s follow-through. The concept is outlandish: The world has been overrun by a veritable forest of massive trees, and your characters ‘sail’ across it on a ship that’s essentially a giant chainsaw. From this base concept comes many of the underlying setting assumptions, and they help the world feel cohesive even though it, at a high level, works very differently from our world. In an ocean of wood fire is catastrophic, so there is taboo against open flame. That affects how things are cooked, which in turn affects culture around food. The ‘spits’, settlements above the treetops, are threatened by the constantly growing and shifting flora, so impermanence is, once again, reflected through the whole culture. The game sticks the landing on creating something new by thinking through the core concept they present.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month 2024 Round-Up

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Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling sounds), but as has been tradition I’m taking a look beyond the white-green halls of the original ZQ to see what other excellent projects can be found in the wider Zine Month 2024.

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