Tag Archives: Review

Articles, Editorial

Fantasy World Review

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While Apocalypse World was the starting line for Powered by the Apocalypse, Dungeon World was what got the ruleset to really take off. By adapting the rules of the perennially popular Dungeons and Dragons as well as showing gamers what it looked like when Apocalypse World was hacked, Dungeon World not only moved significantly more copies than Apocalypse World but also kickstarted the popularity of PbtA in general. Now, years later, Dungeon World’s somewhat inartful mushing of Apocalypse World and D&D together is looked upon less fondly, given years of innovation and expansion of the PbtA ruleset. When you combine that with the checkered behavior of one of its authors, Dungeon World is a game that has sent many of its fans looking for a replacement.

Oddly, straight-up fantasy has not seen a lot of entrants into PbtA. There is Fellowship, but that is designed around a specific Tolkienesque sort of story. There is The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power, but while that plays to Game of Thrones and popular dark fantasy themes, actually playing the game demands engaging in a unique and quite adversarial experience. No, the sort of fantasy romp typified by D&D but also offered in games like Forbidden Lands, RuneQuest, and even GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, is not really present to the same degree in PbtA as it is in other places. Maybe it’s the OSR attracting the sort of small press hackers and designers who want to write fantasy, or maybe Dungeon World’s shadow is too long. Either way, there’s a new fantasy PbtA game in town.

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Articles, The Independents

Fabula Ultima Review: A Golden Table Talk JRPG

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Epic stories of larger-than-life heroes destined to accomplish great deeds fighting against fearsome villains and tragic antagonists! Fantasy worlds brimming with magic, wondrous locations, and uniquely bizarre monsters! Challenging battles that will call for clever tactics, cooperation with allies, and tricks up your sleeve to win! If you’ve played Japanese roleplaying games like Bravely Default, Chrono Trigger, Granblue Fantasy, Ocotopath Traveler, or (duh) Final Fantasy, the premise might be quite familiar indeed. This, however, is no video game. Neither will it take you through a predetermined story, however many branches it may have, thought up by writers and enabled by coders you’ll never meet. Instead, grab some dice and prepare to put your own tabletop twist on the genre you love, with a story and world of your own creation. Welcome to Fabula Ultima, created by Emanuele Galletto and published by Need Games!

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Articles, System Split

System Split: Burning Wheel Hacks

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Burning Wheel is past its twentieth birthday. The game, a famously complex child of the Forge, is one that everyone seems to either love or hate. I personally love it, but in this week’s System Split I’m extending a fig leaf to those on the other side (or at least those who tried to love it and bounced off).

Burning Wheel is a game predicated on its detail; thanks to its long lists of traits, skills, and lifepaths each one of its mechanics operates in a way that is predicated on its setting, itself a nerd-among-nerd’s joy of medieval history (via Desmond Seward and Barbara Tuchman) and Tolkien (via, well, Tolkien). You can’t really take much out of Burning Wheel and have it remain Burning Wheel…when the designers tried to take things out of Burning Wheel, they ended up with Torchbearer.

That all said, just because Burning Wheel is all layered into itself like an indie RPG biscuit doesn’t mean that there aren’t buttery nuggets we can take out. Those systems, like the mechanics around Beliefs, can certainly stand alone even if we usually see them in the context of something more. With that in mind, I turn to the subjects of today’s pondering. Hot Circle, a clear riff on Burning Wheel, is written by Casper Dudarec and aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. But wait! The Gold Hack, more of a riff on the recent editions of Burning Wheel (i.e. Burning Wheel Gold), is written by Martin Van Houtte and…aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. Huh.

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Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: Desperation

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Welcome to another Solitaire Storytelling! Until now, Seamus has been the one leading the way on solo games coverage here, finding a lot of interesting gems among all of the recent releases. Now, though, I’m throwing my hat in the ring and seeing what solo gaming has to offer. My first game is not only a solo game, it supports between one and five players. It also comes from one of the best known names in the narrative and storytelling game world, Bully Pulpit Games. In addition to a few straight-up RPGs like Night Witches and publishing other designers’ games, like Star Crossed, Bully Pulpit Games and its lead designer Jason Morningstar are likely best known for Fiasco, a comic game of Coen Brothers-style antics and table improv. The game I played this week takes a card-based format like that of the newest Fiasco edition and uses it for a very different purpose; instead of comedy we’re leaning into horror.

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Articles, Editorial

The Ink That Bleeds Review – An Immersive Dive Into Immersive Journaling

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“My friend Adam feel that bleed, and games that aim for it, are ‘comparatively cheap, short-term pleasures… a bit like jump scares.’ My experience is so the opposite.

I think immersive, bleedy journaling games are act of purging ourselves of narratives that aren’t in our interests and enlivening ourselves for the temporal world.

I’m totally going to show you how.”

So writes Paul Czege in The Ink That Bleeds – How To Play Immersive Journaling  Games, and I’m going to show you some of what’s inside and what it made me think.

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Articles, Editorial

Cowboy Bebop RPG Review

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Adaptations are dangerous business, and that’s true no matter what medium you’re working in. Licensed RPG adaptations fall all over the map; for every The One Ring you get rules for Power Rangers contracting tetanus, and for every Star Wars there’s a Fallout. Reimagining old properties stays risky even if you’re staying in the same medium; the live-action reboot of Cowboy Bebop was a cautionary tale, albeit not quite as badly panned as live-action Death Note or live-action Ghost in the Shell. But what happens if you take Cowboy Bebop, the celebrated anime, and make it into an RPG? Well, in this case, something kind of magical.

The Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game was developed by designers from Italian company Fumble GDR and published by (also Italian) Mana Project Studio. While Mana Project is mostly known for publishing 5e settings, Fumble has a fairly impressive list of original games, including Not the End, a heroic game using an original ruleset called HexSys. A variant of HexSys powers Cowboy Bebop and, while it employs elements from games you likely know, it is completely original. The result is a game that feels like jazz; there is structure, rules, and even system mastery, but the mechanics create a loose, free environment to tell stories. And, because this is Cowboy Bebop, the stories center around bounty hunters, the bounties they’re chasing, and the memories from their past that haunt them.

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Articles, Editorial

Adventures in Rokugan Review

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This review is delayed, far from the “hot off the press” take that I had intended back some time ago. Instead this has been an article I have stewed on for some time. In 2020 there came an announcement that Edge Studios would be taking over RPG properties that had been held by Fantasy Flight, which includes two that I have written about extensively in the past: Star Wars and Legend of the Five Rings. Since the acquisition, the publishing has mainly been constrained to reprints of books in use and published already developed supplements that had been in the pipeline before the acquisition. It was a bit of a surprise to me that the first new material from this new studio was to take the setting of Rokugan and put it into the mechanics of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

My reaction to reading it at first was, to put it politely, visceral.

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Articles, The Independents

To Change Review – Transformative Tarot

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Stories of transformation are both very old and very common. From Tiresias and Circe to The Emperor’s New Groove and Turning Red, people have been changing gender, species, state of matter, and all sorts of other things up and down the stories we tell through the ages. Heck, on a personal note one of the first stories I was ever told was about the Children of Lir. To Change seeks to put that kind of story in the spotlight through the medium of a roleplaying game, using short sessions and Tarot cards to explore dramatic transformations and the consequences of becoming something new. 

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Articles, Editorial

Embers of the Imperium Review

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Genesys was released in late 2017, and supported with four major supplements from 2018 through 2020. At that point, the generic RPG went dark. The Covid pandemic was certainly part of this, but it was first a symptom of the broader issues for the RPG business at Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). In the mid 2010s, Fantasy Flight was (excuse me) flying high; as both the licensor of Star Wars and several enormously popular RPGs based on Games Workshop properties, Fantasy Flight was one of the biggest players in the RPG space, but that turned around quickly and badly. When FFG lost the Games Workshop license in 2017 they had nothing left in the portfolio outside of Star Wars; their biggest other game, Anima: Beyond Fantasy had been discontinued the year before. The company wasn’t ready to give up on RPGs, though. They had bought the rights to Legend of the Five Rings two years before, and whether in an effort to maximize their investment or simply because of the sunk cost fallacy, they also invested in a new game based on the ruleset they used for Star Wars. Genesys came out first, while Legend of the Five Rings was ultimately released over three years after FFG bought the property.

Embers of the Imperium comes into the picture after several upheavals, only one of which was a pandemic. In late 2019 FFG divested themselves of their RPG business, shuttling it over to another division of their parent company, Asmodee. Edge Studios, a Spanish company which originally published The End of the World, was the new brand for Asmodee’s RPG line. How did it work? Hard to say. The company does have two 5e-based games now (Midnight: Legacy of Darkness and Adventures in Rokugan), so they might be making money. That said, they did not give up on Genesys. After being announced in April of 2021, Embers of the Imperium has finally been released.

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Articles, Solitaire Storytelling

Solitaire Storytelling: I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream

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Hey, so, if you’re reading this, first of all I’d like to know how you got your hands on my diary. Second of all, if it’s because I’m, you know, dead, then thanks for taking the time to read what I’ve written. It’s kind of a comforting thought. Anyway, my name is Hope! I’m seventeen years old, they/them. I like farming sims and books. And I’m writing this because magical extraplanar alien mecha have invaded, and I need some way to vent!

See, it’s not enough that giant bird robots are stomping around trying to kill all of us. My older sister Hazel happens to be one of the Pilots fighting them, using mecha of our own. She gets a railgun. I have to make do with a diary, I guess.

I miss her a lot.

So yeah, I’m going to be scrapbooking headlines right out of the news and recording my own experiences as the world tries to get itself ended by the Nondwellers – that’s what we call the alien mecha. Oh, and hey, if I am dead and you’re going to post or publish this yourself for a quick buck or something, could you at least title it the way I would? I already have it picked out.

“I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream.”

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