I haven’t been able to attend every PAX Unplugged, but I was there at the start and as the convention circuit has grown back I’ve actually managed to chain a few of them together. In addition to noting as many familiar faces and games as I could manage for a middle-of-the-night article, I wanted to write about some of my own experiences now that the 2024 iteration is over to highlight a few things. Also, Aaron has been doing five-year retrospectives about Crowdfunding Carnival for a while now, so why not do a seven-year con one of my own?
Tag Archives: Review
Solitaire Storytelling: Koriko: A Magical Year Part 1
Koriko: A Magical Year is a solo game written by Jack Harrison. Using dice, tarot cards, and a journal, a player tells the story of a young witch going to the big city for the first time, and all that they learn there. Koriko is decidedly not a single session game; the experience is divided into seven ‘Volumes’ which each take 1-2 hours to complete. The benefit of a longer game is, just like with any other RPG, more time to sit with your character and see them develop.
Given the length of Koriko, I am about halfway done with the story of Lapis, a young witch from the village of Brod who communes with nature spirits and is looking for new experiences. So far Lapis has made new friends, discovered new skills, had a few dramatic failures, and might even be finding some romantic entanglements. Every season she writes a letter home to her grandmother and mentor, Yarrow, which I will include here. Needless to say, like any sixteen year old there are a lot of things she’s not telling her parents.
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Zombie World Review
Apocalypse World won accolades due to its design, but Powered by the Apocalypse won sales thanks to its handling of genre. The minute that someone took a stylized post-apocalyptic soap opera and ran D&D with it, everyone wanted to see what they could do with the framework. Horror is no different; PbtA has proven adept as a basis for monster hunting, urban fantasy, and Victorian Penny Dreadful, among others. Naturally, someone turned to zombies.
Zombie World is a Magpie Games production, primarily designed by Brendan Conway (of Masks fame). Given coverage of their current licensed games, one could easily surmise I have a chip on my shoulder regarding Magpie’s output. Luckily, Zombie World is a great example to show that this is not the case; the game is both intensely innovative and intense to play. There are some problems with the game but the biggest one affects how well the game has sold, not the quality of the play experience. What is that problem? The game is card-based, and for all of the (positive) impacts it has on the play and packaging, it has made the game difficult to translate into a digital counterpart, affecting sales and availability.
As a card-based game, Zombie World threads the needle of using tried and true PbtA mechanics while making the best use of its unique form factor. In my opinion this is accomplished well; the game reads and plays fast and the 32 page rulebook included really is all you need. To really test how this all worked, I picked up a copy of Zombie World and took it to my online gaming group’s in-person gaming weekend for a one-shot. While the players were going harder than normal given the vibe of the weekend, I was still surprised at how quickly and easily Zombie World devolved into Walking Dead-like drama; our game involved backstabbings, double-dealing factions, and, of course, overrunning both the harbor and city hall of a large city with zombies.
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Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart Review
A world, and a mirror of worlds. Atop four giant elephants atop a giant turtle rests Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – where the most dangerous barbarian is an old barbarian, where fleeing your destiny is the surest way to run into it, where a million-to-one chance always works out, where a single humble hero will always win while outnumbered, and where you have to practice believing in the little lies (stories) in order to make the big ones become true (justice, mercy, etc.. It’s been the subject of Roundworld-made roleplaying games before, but sometimes stories like to repeat themselves with a new twist, and this time there’s something of a primer. This is the Discworld Quickstart Guide from Modiphius Entertainment!
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Solitaire Storytelling: CHVLR
DATE: 01/17/3728 Time: 1523
DESIGNATION: 09272024
UNIT: Paladin CHX-01
Today marks my first week in the CHVLR program, and is the day of my first deployment to the field. My SCS was installed three days ago, and I’ve run a few training simulations, but it’s the first time I’ve even been in the cockpit.
The Colonel says there is no other choice. The enemy is here and I have to stop them.
Paladin initializing. Systems green. Forrest McCoy, signing off.
Rom Com Drama Bomb Review – Explosive Three Player Romantic Comedy
Love is strange. Sometimes it finds you at the office. Sometimes it finds you over a cup of coffee.
Sometimes it finds you with a bomb strapped to your heart and an evil maniac forcing you to perform in a fucked-up romantic comedy.
This is that third kind of love. This is Rom Com Drama Bomb, the explosive romantic comedy roleplaying game for three players by Elliot Davis!
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Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2024
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! September is a classically thin month, sitting in the shadow of GenCon. It was so thin five years ago that I actually skipped wonking about it to write an editorial. This year, though, is a bit better. Seven campaigns is still thin, yes, but these are all good ones. Also, interestingly, this may mark one of the first months where the majority of campaigns aren’t from Kickstarter! That’s right, four out of seven campaigns are from Backerkit this month. Backerkit was the best contender for second place pretty much since they started doing crowdfunding, but this may indicate a sea change.
Sea change or not, we’ve got some solid games this month. Solo games, Year Zero, and a generic Onyx Path game are all waiting for you to peruse and perhaps pledge. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.
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The Price of Coal – A Labor Day Review
“In 1920, the coal miners of West Virginia faced shameful living conditions, and even worse working conditions. Miners were paid subsistence wages, despite high profits, or even paid only in scrip which could only be used at the company-owned store. Within the mines themselves, workers experienced frequent cave-ins and other dangerous accidents, as the operators were reluctant to reduce production for the sake of safety. Whispers of unionization began to arise in the mountains. The coal companies responded harshly, employing company gun thugs to violently and cruelly enact the company’s will upon the miners. Events escalated from there, including the declaration of martial law, spiraling into the 1921 assassination of Sid Hatfield, who had by then become a local icon and a leader to the miners throughout the region. Federal troops were dispatched to Blair Mountain, including aerial bombers equipped with leftover gas and explosive bombs from the Great War. Days of guerrilla warfare followed, during which as many as one hundred miners were killed for the crime of wanting a better life.”
This is, in actual real life, The Price of Coal – and for our purposes, it is also a GMless storytelling game for 3-5 players by Jennifer Adcock!
Guide for the Perplexed: Biggest Names
Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?
Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.
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Clever Girl Review – Wretched & Together With A Raptor
You probably know the story – a theme park where things go horribly awry, but instead of an accident on a ride or something there are real dinosaurs on the loose and they’re eating everyone. There is a solitary survivor, holed up in the park’s control center, trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and get off of the island. There is also, however, a raptor leading a pack of their fellows in trying to get to the human to avenge themselves upon their former tormenter. The human has chosen to live; can they? The raptor has chosen to embark on a crusade of vengeance; will it destroy them? This is Clever Girl, two-games-in-one by Matthew Gravelyn!
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 