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The Quiet Year

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TL;DR: The Quiet Year is a deep, interesting, fun map game. If you like post-apocalyptic story-style games that aren’t RPGs, you need to own this game.

Last year at GenCon, I wound up pretty much by mistake ((It wasn’t by mistake, really. I was at a meeting for Games on Demand, and the award ceremony was held there.)) at the Indie RPG Awards ceremony. As I recall it, the game The Quiet Year seemed to be nominated in pretty much every category, and it won the Most Innovative Game award. That made me curious, so I went out and found it the next day on the exhibitor floor.

Now, you can get a .pdf version for eight bucks, but Indie Game Revolution had a great little bagged set that had almost everything you need to play:

  • Rules
  • Deck of specially printed cards
  • Reference card
  • Little skull beads to use as contempt tokens
  • Six d6s to use for project dice
  • A funky-cool burlap sack that holds it all

The only things missing were something to draw on and something to draw with.

The drawing is important – the game is all about trying to build a post-apocalyptic community ((Really, it doesn’t need to be post-apocalyptic, but that’s the default. And you get to decide how soon after the apocalypse it is, and how wacky things are. Is it Road Warrior, Thundarr, or Adventure Time?)) in the one quiet year you have between major crises. And to show the community building and the progress of your little group of folks, you draw it all on a map.

Anyway, after many months of trying to fit the game in ((One downside the game has is that it is only for 2-4 players. That means it doesn’t fit at a lot of my game nights, because we often wind up with too many people.)), I got a chance to play it last night, and we had a blast.

Here's our blank map and the pieces of the game laid out before we begin.

Here’s our blank map and the pieces of the game laid out before we begin.

Now, I tend to put together little kits for games like this, so I can just grab the organizer pouch I keep them in and bring it to an event, so I stocked it with a cheap coilbound book of sketch paper and a set of coloured markers, along with a few index cards (not shown) and some writing pens.

While you need index cards and something to write/draw with and something to write/draw on, you don’t need to go as deep into this as I did. But I figure that if we’re going to be drawing stuff as a major part of the game, let’s do it right.

Anyway, the rulebook is written in such a way that the facilitator – there is no GM for the game – reads the overall description of the game, and then everyone takes turns reading the rules sections. This works very well, takes maybe 15 minutes, and keeps everyone involved and thinking about the game. To start, you decide where your community will be situated – seacoast, forest, abandoned shopping mall, an old military installation, ruined subway tunnels, whatever. This is one of the few communal decisions of the game. Once you have a very general idea, each player takes a turn drawing one detail on the map.

The way this happens is kind of important – each person decides their own detail based on the general location, and draws it on in turn, explaining what they’re adding to the others. There is no discussion, no debate, no consensus – when it’s your turn, it’s your decision. You’re not allowed to ask for help or suggestions, and others aren’t allowed to offer. This is a theme that carries through the entire game, and I’m going to be coming back to talk about it a bit later.

After the basic map is drawn with each person’s detail, each person decides on one resource that will be important to the community. This can be basic stuff like food, arable land, clean water, shelter, etc., or it can be something a little weirder – old books, scrap metal, energy crystals, mutant hogs, whatever. Then, in your second communal decision, you pick one of your resources to be abundant, and all the rest to be scarce. This gets written down on an index card, and each player then draws a symbol on the map to represent their resource and its abundance or scarcity.

So, here's our starter map. details we added were the cove on the seacoast, the neaby caves, and the abandoned cottages along the road. Resources were abundant old books (a bookmobile up on blocks), scarce shelter (holes in the walls and roofs of the houses) and scarce clean drinking water (nearby freshwater source is an almost-empty pool in the nearby cave).

So, here’s our starter map. details we added were the cove on the seacoast, the neaby caves, and the abandoned cottages along the road. Resources were abundant old books (a bookmobile up on blocks), scarce shelter (holes in the walls and roofs of the houses) and scarce clean drinking water (nearby freshwater source is an almost-empty pool in the nearby cave).

And now the game begins.

Each game turn represents a week of your year, and is represented by a card you draw on your turn. The cards are divided into seasons – hearts for spring, diamonds for summer, clubs for autumn, and spades for winter. You shuffle each season separately, then stack them in the above order. So, you’ll draw all the spring cards, then all the summer, then all the autumn, and then the winter cards. One of the winter cards ends the game, so you may draw only a single winter card in your game or, like us, you may draw the game-ending card as the last card in the deck. The point is, you never know when the game is going to end, once winter begins.

Each of the cards has instructions, usually a choice between two things that happen or two questions to answer. These help flesh out the story of your community, sometimes making good things happen, sometimes bad things, and sometimes neutral things. After picking your event from the card you drew, you add a little drawing to the map to represent it, if applicable. Then, each project on the go advances towards completion by one week, and then the player gets to take one of three available actions:

  • Discover something new. Tell a little story about something new the community has discovered, and draw it on the map.
  • Start a project. Say that the community is going to start working on a project and what the project is. Discuss with the other players to determine how long the project is going to take, from one to six weeks, and set a die on the map showing the number of weeks left in that project’s duration.
  • Hold a discussion. Ask a question or make a statement. Each player gets a chance to weigh in with a sentence or two. Then it’s done.

Discovering something new adds an element to the map, and finished projects also add elements to the map. After a season, the map starts to fill in, as does the story of your community.

Here's our little community at the beginning of summer. There's been sightings of ships at sea, and a bad omen comet, and we've had a soldier move in. We've also fixed up the houses (still one week to go on the last one), found a generator and got it working, built a way to get to the birds nesting on the cliffs, and met the neighbours one town over. in addition to the house repairs, we've got two projects on the go - a scouting expedition down the coast, and a watchtower being built on the cove.

Here’s our little community at the beginning of summer. There’s been sightings of ships at sea, and a bad omen comet, and we’ve had a soldier move in. We’ve also fixed up the houses (still one week to go on the last one), found a generator and got it working, and met the neighbours one town over. in addition to the house repairs, we’ve got three projects on the go – a scouting expedition down the coast, a way to reach the birds nesting on the cliffs, and a watchtower being built on the cove. Oh, and there’s big bitey sharklike things in the cove who will eat us if we’re not careful.

Each season has its own rhythm and flavour. Spring is all about learning who you are and what’s going on. Summer is about putting down roots and getting things done. In autumn, things get harder and tenser. And winter kicks the crap out of you.

So, that’s the way the game goes. But let’s talk about some of the subtleties.

I mentioned before that most decisions ((The exceptions are project duration and when to add or remove an abundance or scarcity, based on events in the game.)) in the game are made by the person whose turn it is, without discussion or debate or consensus. I don’t know about you folks, but that kind of limitation on table talk is tough for me, and for a lot of my group. Especially because, in this game, we all want our little community to succeed. So, building consensus and making group decisions seems like the way to go, right?

But, as the rules point out, that’s not how communities work. Parts of communities make decisions that affect the entire community, often without discussion, engagement, or approval. That’s what happens in the game. If the card you drew gives you two choices, and they’re both bad, you get to pick the badness you prefer. Others may not like your choice, or the choice of a project that you started, or the fact that you didn’t listen at all to what they said in the discussion you called.

This allows factions to form in your community, and disagreements to enter the story. When someone feels that something someone else has done is upsetting to part of the community, or ignores you, or just basically pisses you off, you take a contempt counter – one of the little skull beads. These show that part of the community is not happy.

These have no mechanical effect ((I thought, upon reading the rules, that some of the cards might trigger on certain numbers of contempt tokens or something, but nope.)); they’re just visual indicators that all is not milk and honey in your little town. And I found myself considering my contempt tokens, and the reasons I had taken them, when making decisions, meaning that they fed back into the game, but not in a directly mechanical way. This, to me, is very cool.

Things are progressing. We're trading with the woodcutters to the south, and paying tribute to the Sea Kings. There's been a scandal in town as our soldier ran off with one of the town girls, abandoning our half-trained militia. We've got a garden in, found a ruined hospital down the coast, and set up some fishing nets, as well as our watchtower and our egg and bird source.

Things are progressing. We’re trading with the woodcutters to the south, and paying tribute to the Sea Kings. There’s been a scandal in town as our soldier ran off with one of the town girls, abandoning our half-trained militia. We’ve got a garden in, found a ruined hospital down the coast, and set up some fishing nets, as well as our watchtower and our egg and bird source. A set of three flags appeared mysteriously down in the southwest, but then some yahoos put up flags meant to represent us. They had the the bad-omen comet on them, though, so we burned them down. That uncovered a pit of flints. We’ve also found some useful ores and an abandoned listening post in one of the caves. The projects on the map right now are repairing an old warehouse for shelter and building a fence around our garden. It’s been a busy summer, and now we’re moving into autumn.

Another interesting thing is that it is totally possible to “win” this game by gaming the system. In our game, we spent a lot ((Like probably 70%.)) of our turns starting projects. We shored up the weaknesses of our community, worked to acquire more resources, and all the reasonable gamerly things you do make your community the best it can be.

Here’s the thing, though: there’s no victory condition. Every game ends the same way – the Frost Shepherds arrive and the game is over. You don’t know if you survive the encounter. You don’t know if you can survive the encounter. You don’t even know what the encounter is, except that it ends the game and the story of the community. There’s no way to “beat” the Frost Shepherds. They show up, and the game is over.

Thus, it became apparent during play that the real way to win is to make the most interesting story of the community. You follow the storylines that emerge from the events of the game, and use them to add interesting challenges and dilemmas to the game. It’s all about the story you tell before the game ends. And that means that, like an author, you will decide to do horrible things to your community, because that’s where stories come from.

Harvest is in, and the Grange is fortified, thanks to the efforts of the Parish. We lost a lot of folks in a vicious storm at the end of autumn, and we also found a shallow grave with the body of the girl we thought had run off with the soldier. Currently, we're working on using the flints and wood we've traded for to make some weapons. We've also substantially improved our water source.

Harvest is in, and the Grange is fortified, thanks to the efforts of the Parish. We lost a lot of folks in a vicious storm at the end of autumn, and we also found a shallow grave with the body of the girl we thought had run off with the soldier. Currently, we’re working on using the flints and wood we’ve traded for to make some weapons. We’ve also substantially improved our water source, trained up a militia, and got the houses wired to the generator (which is running out of fuel). Now begins winter.

So, The Quiet Year was a very different play experience from pretty much any other game we’ve played. It built an interesting story for the community ((And we all agreed it would be an interesting world to run an RPG in, once we’d built the community.)), and created an interesting, colourful artifact of the game – the map.

The restrictions on table talk – designed to make sure that each person makes their decisions without input or influence from the others – were especially tough on me. I talk a lot during games, bantering and expressing my opinion, and doing my best to help people, because I’m usually teaching whatever game we’re playing. A few times, I had to clamp my hands over my mouth when I realized I was trying to persuade someone or suggest something. But the result of the rules is worth the effort.

The Frost Shepherds showed up on card 52. They can appear on any of the (potentially) 13 winter card draws, but we got the whole season out of the way before they arrived, just before the next spring. So, a full Quiet Year.

The Frost Shepherds showed up on card 52. They can appear on any of the (potentially) 13 winter card draws, but we got the whole season out of the way before they arrived, just before the next spring. So, a full Quiet Year. Things were going well, with food and power and a smelter and fortified building. We even had uncovered old songs and music to help the winter pass, and were going to be hosting a summit between us, the Sea Kings, the Woodcutters, and the Biker Consortium next year. Oh, and it turned out the dead girl’s father killed her to keep her from running off with the soldier, so we put him in jail. Outside.

And that’s how our town ended. We had an amazing time playing, and want to play again. The two choices on the cards – as well as the wide-open starting state of the map – gives the game great replay value. And because it’s card-based, it would be simple ((Which is not the same as easy.)) to set up a different set of events for each of the cards and add variety.

The big catch for me is that four-player limit. To be fair, I can completely understand why it’s there – this game would get unwieldy pretty quickly with more players. But it does mean that this game may not get the time in our game rotation it deserves.

One of the coolest aspects of the game is that, at the end, you’ve got the map to remember the game by. Here’s ours.

For some reason, we did not name our settlement. We'll have to remember to do that next time.

For some reason, we did not name our settlement. We’ll have to remember to do that next time.

I recommend this game very highly, if you like games that generate stories and post-apocalyptic settings. You can order it here. And you should do that now.

Back in the Chi War

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I’m still behind on my blogging. I’ve got two posts ((That I haven’t written yet.)) that should be going up before this one, but you’re getting this one because there’s some time sensitivity to it: the Kickstarter for Feng Shui 2 is supposed to go live this week, so I wanted to get my impressions up before that.

TL; DR – Feng Shui 2 is an awful lot of fun, and you should back it as soon as the campaign starts.

Feng Shui is an awesome game by Robin D. Laws from 1996 that captures the style and feel of the early Hong Kong action movies and ((To a lesser degree.)) wuxia. I got a copy of the Atlas Games version of the game, but never got a chance to play it – the approach was different enough at the time that I didn’t quite get it, and didn’t have a group that I could force it on.

Earlier this year, I found out that Feng Shui 2 was in the works. Robin was doing a new edition of the game, and it was going to be published by Atlas, starting with a Kickstarter to get things going. At the time this was announced, there was a call for playtesters, but I really didn’t have time in my gaming schedule to commit to a serious playtest of a new system ((If I’m going to do an “official” playtest, I tend to take it pretty seriously, as evidenced by my posts on The Dresden Files RPG and, indeed, the existence of this blog.)), so I just sighed and resigned myself to waiting for the publication.

Then, Cam Banks started looking for GenCon GMs to run FS2 events. I checked to see if I could fit that into my schedule, and couldn’t. But Cam said that he’d give me the playtest package to use to run the game at Games on Demand, and I jumped at that chance ((Thanks again, Cam!)).

So, I got to run FS2 at Games on Demand, and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to try it again with a group at home, where we could take more time and explore it a little more. Both sessions were a lot of fun, and everyone at both tables seemed to enjoy themselves a lot.

Now, the ruleset I’m using is a playtest document, so I’m not going to go into too much detail about specifics – they may still change before publications, but I’ve got some observations I want to share.

Characters

Back when I saw the first edition of Feng Shui, I was kind of taken aback by the idea of choosing an archetype, doing some pretty minimal customization, and playing that rather than building my own character from scratch. Since that time, other games like Apocalypse World and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and Lady Blackbird using similar ((And, in some cases, more restrictive.)) methods of character creation. I’ve lost my fear of such systems, and have grown to appreciate the way such approaches get you up and playing quickly.

FS2 sticks with the picking of an archetype, but you don’t customize mechanical things about your character ((Not entirely true – swapping out some character abilities is offered as an advanced option.)). Instead, you customize the backstory and motivations of your character, adding life to the numbers that way. There are over 30 different archetypes in the playtest document, so you’ve got lots of variety – pretty much every major character type from the source material is covered ((Though, after rewatching A Better Tomorrow, I found myself wanting a Reformed Gangster archetype, so I could play Sung Tse-Ho.)), plus some interesting variations based on the game’s setting.

System

The system is pretty similar to the original game, but the mechanics have been vastly simplified. All the information you need to play your character is right there on the character sheet, and you don’t have to deal with large lists of skills and abilities.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of options for your character. Most of the options are covered by broad skills or abilities and a simple rule for default rolls when you don’t actually have a rating in whatever you’re trying to do ((Example? Sure! The player of the Old Master in our last playtest decided that he was blind, which was fine – it was just character colour, and didn’t limit him. Blind masters are common in wuxia movies. But then he decided that he wanted to use his heightened hearing to check the heartbeat of someone they were interviewing to see if he was lying. I thought that was a cool idea, but didn’t want it to become a defining schtick, so I just had him roll on the default skill level. Took about thirty seconds to figure out how to do that in game, and he got a cool character moment that wasn’t covered by the rules. Easy.)). What it means is that players can rapidly master their characters and resolution is quick and flavourful.

Combat ((Yeah, it’s part of the system, but in a game like this, combat deserves a bit of special comment.))

There are three things about combat you should know:

  1. Stunts. When you do something in combat, whether attacking a foe or dodging a hail of automatic weapon fire or trying haul babies out of an exploding hospital, you are encouraged ((In the original system, in fact, you were penalized if you didn’t come up with a cool description.)) to phrase it as an action-movie-style stunt. So, you don’t just shoot the mook, you slide across the polished bar-top, scattering bottles, and fly off the end ((In slow motion, of course.)) while firing two .45s into the chest of the foe, who staggers back into a giant mirror which smashes and rains glass down on the whole area. Now, the description of the stunt doesn’t have any mechanical effect, but it has a narrative one – it makes your characters as cool as their movie counterparts. It supports the theme and style of the game brilliantly.
  2. Shots. Initiative is handled by the same shots system as the original game ((Though there may be a few tweaks. It’s been a while since I looked at the original, so I can’t say for certain.)), which provides an interesting, fluid structure to the fights. There’s a bit of a risk though: if you roll low and others roll high on your initiative, you could have some folks taking multiple turns before you get to do anything. It’s not a huge problem, because each turn takes very little time to resolve. The longest part of the turn is trying to come up with the coolest stunt you can.
  3. Up  Checks. One of the coolest aspects of combat, in my opinion, is the way characters don’t have hit points the way they do in other games. As you accumulate damage, you become more impaired (i.e., you take a penalty to rolls) and, at a certain threshold you need to start making checks to see if you can stay on your feet. What that means in play is that, once you reach a certain level of injury, your character could drop at any point. Even if he or she doesn’t, you may have to make a check at the end of combat to see if you were wounded badly enough to die ((After a touching scene with your comrades, where you get to utter a few parting words.)). This uncertainty adds a level of risk to combat that I haven’t seen since Unknown Armies, where the GM tracks hit points, and just describes the injuries to the players.

Setting

The setting is an adjusted version of the original Chi War setting. You still have your genre-bending, time-hopping badasses fighting for possession of various feng shui sites so as to control the secret history of the world, but the four time junctures have switched up a bit. Now you get to play in the modern era, in 690 CE ((During the reign of the woman emperor, Wu Zetian.)), in 1850 CE ((During a fairly dark period of European domination of China.)), and 2074 CE ((Where

Spoiler
the Jammers have turned the world into a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland by detonating a Chi Bomb that killed 97% of the population.
)) ((Why is that in a spoiler tag? That bit of backstory forms part of the plot of the intro adventure.)), as well as in the spooky, mystical Netherworld that links these time periods.

The assumption is that you will play members of the Dragons, a Chi War faction that mainly wants to prevent the various other factions from exerting their cross-time tyranny over the common citizen of the planet. They have – once again – been pretty much wiped out, and the PCs are new recruits dragged into the conflict.

If you don’t think that sounds cool, there’s no hope for you.

Play Experience

So, that’s the bones of it all, but anyone can get that from reading the rules. How does it play at the table?

Awesome. It’s fast, it’s flavourful, and it creates great cinematic moments.

Now, the basic structure of the game, like the source material, is somewhat formulaic – adventures are crafted around big, set-piece fights, and then connections are built to help get from one fight to another. That said, one of the things I tried in both playtests ((But emphasized in the most recent one.)) was taking more time with the between-fight stuff, letting the players roleplay more, interact with the world ((In non-fighty ways.)), and generally try the system in non-combat contexts. The simple resolution system let things flow, the characters’ Melodramatic Hooks ((That’s the game term for the aspect of the character’s backstory that drives him or her to do crazy, action-movie things – stuff like “I must avenge the murder of my father!” or “I will find a worthy heir for my family kung fu style!”)) kept them pushing forward, and the style and theme of the game kept them all being over-the-top awesome.

Summary

Feng Shui 2 is one of the most fun systems I have ever run. The setting is crazy, the mechanics are both simple and flavourful, and it’s very fast to get a new group up and running. These are all things I look for in games these days, and they are here in spades. We all had a lot of fun playing, and I’ve added the game to the list of campaigns I will pitch to my players when one of my current campaigns wraps up.

The Kickstarter is slated to begin later this week, according to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff ((Which, incidentally, is a good podcast to listen to if you’re interested in finding out more about FS2. Hell, it’s just a good podcast to listen to, regardless.)). There will probably be some more info once the campaign goes live, so look for that.

And back the project, Chi Warrior! The Dragons need all the help they can get!

Atomic Robo RPG

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I’ve been waiting anxiously for the Atomic Robo RPG since I heard it was coming out. I got a chance to try it out last year at Games on Demand at GenCon, and had an absolute blast playing Robo. Earlier this week, after spending a week or so teasing us all with glimpses of the book ((Thus earning the “evil” part of the company name.)), Evil Hat went ahead and launched the preorder ((I’m thinking that’s about enough links for one paragraph. Yeah?)). Now, as is typical with these fine folks, when you buy the game from them ((Or one of the retailers participating in their Bits and Mortar initiative.)), you also get the .pdf of the game at no extra cost. With the preorder, you get the .pdf right away, so you can read through the game ((And, incidentally, do a last, crowd-sourced check for typos.)) while waiting for the physical copy to get printed.

Surprising absolutely no one who knows me, I’m pretty sure I was in the first two dozen preorders – Fred Hicks tweeted that there had been 24 preorders, and mine had already been placed. And then I spent the next two nights reading it.

TL;DR – The game is great. It’s a nice implementation of Fate rules, really captures the feel of the comics, and can be hacked to support a wide range of set-ups similar to Atomic Robo. I heartily recommend buying it. FOR SCIENCE!

The Book ((Well, obviously I don’t have the book, yet. But you know what I mean.))

More than any other company these days, Evil Hat books are cleanly and clearly laid out, and ARRPG is not an exception to that rule. The pages are attractive and inviting, and the overall design is practically invisible, while helping you find your way through the book and get the most out of it. This kind of invisible design is hard to do, and so wonderfully helpful when reading the book.

Mixed in, as might be expected, is a lot of art from the Atomic Robo comics. Indeed, most of the examples in the book are panels and sequences from the comic book, with little talking heads plugged in to explain the mechanics in use. Besides being helpful in understanding the game and how to play it, these examples made me dig out my comic books and reread them all, just because they reminded me of all the fun moments in the series.

There’s also a good index. A good index has become more valuable to me than gold as I have gotten older. I don’t have as much time for prep, and often wind up looking things up on the fly during a game. For that, nothing beats a good index, which most game books traditionally don’t have. Evil Hat has been reversing this trend with their releases, which feature meaty, professionally done indices, and that makes me happy.

The Characters

ARRPG has what is, I think, the second most complicated character generation I’ve seen in Fate games, with the first most complicated being DFRPG, with it’s point-buy powers. Now, before that scares you off, it is still massively less complicated than most of the big name RPGs out there. In the time it takes to create a single D&D 3.5E character, you can have all the characters in an ARRPG game up and running and half-way into the adventure.

ARRPG gives you two ((Really, three, because you can split the difference between the two main ones.)) methods to create characters. One, which they call the E-Z No-Math Character Creation ((I’m torn on the name, here. There is a tiny bit of math, but really, it’s the kind of addition that could fairly be called “counting.”)), has you pick three different character modes ((If you’ve read the Fate System Toolkit, you’ve seen the mode idea discussed there.)) , which are groups of skills, from the default four of Action, Banter, Intrigue, and Science. You then rank the three modes you picked, and bump up those skills that feature in more than one mode ((This is the counting thing I was talking about. Or mild addition, if you prefer.)). You also, because this is a Fate game, choose aspects for your concept, each of your modes, and an extra aspect they call the Omega aspect. Finally, you calculate your stress boxes ((A little more counting.)). And, of course, somewhere in there, you need to come up with a name.

The other character creation method is called Weird Character Creation. It works pretty much the same as the E-Z No-Math method, but pulls the curtain aside a bit to show you the underlying point structure that makes it work. This allows you to build new modes, called Weird Modes, for your character. So, if you wanted to build, say, an atomic-powered robot created by Nicola Tesla in 1926 ((Just to pull an example out of the air.)), you can construct a Robot mode to give him ((Or her.)). The method is pretty straightforward, though I had to read the entire chapter on modes, skills, and stunts to get all the pieces to fall into place ((Maybe it’s just me, though.)) with the skill costs and how to build new skills for the Weird Modes. There are a number ((And that number is 13.)) of ready-made Weird Modes in the book, for everything from dinosaurs and warbots to pilots and reporters.

There are also two flavours of stunts in AARPG: stunts and mega-stunts. Stunts are exactly like stunts in other Fate games – little tricks that make your skills work a little better for you in certain situations. Mega-stunts, which you can only take if you have a weird mode for your character, are more powerful, incorporating multiple stunt-like effects ((Along with some effects that couldn’t be achieved with a normal stunt, like being bulletproof.)). Everyone gets five stunts, whether of the normal or the mega varieties. The cost for taking mega-stunts is that it gives more fate points to the GM to use against you.

One interesting thing about ARRPG character creation is that, despite how it sounds above and how I said it’s one of the most complicated chargen implementations in Fate, it’s designed to get you up and running very quickly. The book recommends that you just choose your modes, a couple of aspects, come up with a name, and figure out your stress boxes, then jump right in. You can fill in the rest of the aspects and stunts ((And use the skill improvements that every character gets but that I haven’t mentioned until now.)) as required on the fly.

The exception to this is weird modes and mega-stunts. These require some thought up front to construct and implement, so it’s best that you nail these downs before the game starts.

I have to admit, I was a little confused on my first read of the character creation chapter. My confusion cleared up a lot when I got to the chapter on modes, stunts, and skills, but between the two chapters is one on aspects and fate points ((Does this mean the book has a problem with structure? I don’t think so. I thought about this a lot, and I see why the character creation chapter doesn’t have all the information you need – it would bulk it out with a lot of information that would need to be repeated elsewhere. And the chapter on fate points and aspects should come where it does for gamers new to Fate games. But as someone already familiar with the basic Fate system, the separation of the material was a little confusing at first. Now I get it.)). What I’m saying is that, if you get to the end of the character creation chapter scratching your head and wondering if you’ve missed something, hang in there. The answers are coming two chapters down the road.

Other Rules

The rest of the rules are, for the most part, pretty standard Fate fare. There are some tweaks to the skills ((Most notably the Science skill, which gets its own subsection called Science: It’s Special.)), but other than that, there are just four big innovations:

  • Across the Fourth Dimension: The stories in the Atomic Robo comics cover events from shortly after his creation up to 2021. Now, when I say “cover,” what I mean is that there are stories and flashbacks ((And one flash-forward.)) set throughout almost 100 years of Robo’s life ((If you bring in the Real Science Adventures comics, you get to see Tesla and his adventuring companions even earlier than that.)). And they aren’t necessarily told in chronological order. The game has a lot of advice for how to get that kind of feel in your campaign, and the ability to throw non-weird characters together in ten minutes means that it’s completely feasible to jump around in time at the game table. So that’s cool.
  • Invention: What would a game about action science be without the ability to kit-bash and create new pieces of tech as required in play? Boring, that’s what! So of course the game contains rules for how to construct useful and obscenely dangerous devices that you can use both to solve problems and create new ones. It’s a neat little system that lets you assemble cool toys, trading functionality against risk and time.
  • Factions: This is a special implementation of the Fate Fractal – the idea that everything in Fate can be treated like a character, with aspects, skills, stunts, etc. Here, it’s used specifically to flesh out Tesladyne and the resources that the action scientists can call on, but the implication that you can do the same thing to M12 ((Or the BPRD.)) is pretty clear. It gives me a lot of ideas about how to run a campaign aimed at destroying ((Or otherwise rendering ineffective.)) an agency or organization, rather than just concentrating on the big boss that runs it. Very cool stuff.
  • Brainstorming: I saved this one for last, because I think it’s the coolest. You know how, in the movies and comics where scientists are featured, there’s always that one ((Sometimes more than one.)) scene where they have to put together the clues, figure out what’s going on, and come up with a solution? That’s the brainstorming mechanic in ARRPG. Everyone involved in the brainstorm gets to roll dice and use their science to come up with clue aspects for the problem and, if they get enough successes over a number of rounds, they can figure out the problem. And that problem is whatever the players say it is at that point. Yeah, the players get to decide what the big problem is. Oh, they have to stay within the bounds set by the clues, and a careful GM can steer things to a degree, but at the end of the day, if they successfully brainstorm the problem, they get to determine reality. Which is awesome. Of course, then they have to come up with a plan, but they’ll have a number of aspects created by the brainstorming which they can use when they implement the plan. This is just sheer genius, as far as I’m concerned.

Hackability

As I was reading the game, it became clear to me that Atomic Robo and Hellboy both use very similar narrative set-ups for their comics ((And Scott Wegner’s art in the early Atomic Robo books showed a great deal of Mike Mignola influence. Over time, it’s evolved into what is very much his own style. I love it.)). It would be trivially easy to play a BPRD game using this system. All you’d need to do is build a couple of weird modes, a few mega-stunts, and maybe replace the flexibility of the Science mode with an Occult mode. It would maybe take an hour to get the whole thing worked out.

Other suggestions online I’ve seen have been for Ghostbusters, and again that seems a pretty easy port. It would also be a good setup to use for one-shots based on disaster movies, like Armageddon or The Core. And, of course, any of the 50s-style science-horror movies like Them or Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman or Godzilla or The Blob are influences on the comic book, and thus make for excellent adventures.

And lifting the mode method of character creation ((As shown in the Fate System Toolkit.)) or the subsystems for cross-time play, invention, factions, and brainstorming is easy. These are easy bolt-ons to other games, or pieces to build a new one.

Summary

Atomic Robo comic books are pretty much perfect in their mix of action, science, and humour. I love them to death. The Atomic Robo RPG does a great job of creating a game that give you the experience of the comic stories. The production values on the book are exemplary, and the rules adaptation is note-perfect. It’s available for preorder now, and you get the .pdf right away. If you’ve made it through the above 2000-word review and STILL aren’t rushing to buy it, I’ve gotta question why you bothered reading this far.

It’s got ACTION. It’s got SCIENCE!

IT’S GOT A ROBOT AND CARL SAGAN AND THE GHOST OF THOMAS EDISON!!!

How have you not already bought it? GO NOW!

Eldritch Horror

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Trying the solo version of Eldritch Horror.

Trying the solo version of Eldritch Horror.

Last night, I had a bunch of friends over, and we played a game of Fortune and Glory and a game of Cards Against Humanity ((I lost both games pretty badly, but still had an awesome time.)). This afternoon, after I had cleared up all the game stuff from the table, but before I removed the table leaf and pushed the table back into the correct position, I decided to try out my newest board game: Eldritch Horror, from Fantasy Flight Games.

Eldritch Horror is another Lovecraft-themed game from FFG. It’s got the same basic underpinnings as Arkham Horror or Elder Sign – it’s a co-operative game, set in the 1920s, with a Ancient One trying to break through into this reality and mess up all the furniture ((And, by “furniture,” of course, I mean, “reality as we know it.”)). It differs in scale; it covers the entire globe, while AH is a town ((Or a couple of nearby towns, with the expansions.)), and ES is a single museum. So, your investigators have to travel the globe, tracking down clues and information to prevent the Ancient One from winning.

Complexity-wise, EH falls between AH on the high end and ES on the low end. There are more moving parts and options and special rules than in ES, but not nearly as many as in AH ((Caveat: of course, there haven’t been any expansions for EH, yet. This may change; the expansions sure ratcheted up the complexity of AH, after all.)). Turn structure is a simplified version of AH turn structure, with three phases for players:

  1. Action Phase. Players get two actions. This is stuff like moving, resting, acquiring assets, resting, etc.
  2. Encounter Phase. Players get to have an encounter. They may fight a monster, or draw a special encounter card, or what have you.
  3. Mythos Phase. Draw a card to see how the Ancient One tries to screw you over.

Turns seem to tick along more quickly than with AH, and possibly even more quickly than ES, once you remove the fact that I was relying pretty heavily on the rulebook and reference guide while trying to get the hang of the way things work. All in all, I got set up and through five rounds in about an hour, with two characters. About half that time ((Maybe a little less.)) was me checking the rules to see what I was supposed to be doing. So that’s about ten minutes set-up, the big part of which is building the Mythos Deck ((You use a subset of all the Mythos cards in each game.)) and sorting out cards that don’t get used with the Ancient One, leaving about a minute per phase per player.

Of course, if you’re not playing solo, some of that time savings from not relying on the rulebooks so heavily will be eaten up by discussion, planning, and socializing. Still, compared to about five minutes per player per phase in AH, you still come out ahead if you double the EH turn esitmate.

Right there, that’s enough to make me like the game. I mean, I love AH, but it is a huge investment of time to set up and play. A version that sets up and tears down quickly, with speedy play, is just what I want, and I’d have been happy if that was all EH brought to the table ((As it were.)). But there’s a lot more than that.

I mentioned while describing the set-up that you use subsets of different kinds of cards during the game – building a Mythos Deck from a larger assortment of cards, for example. You also have some specialized decks for the various ((Four, right now: Cthulhu, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub-Niggurath.)) Ancient Ones that you must battle. These decks allow the game to build strong narratives for each of the different Ancient Ones, setting different goals and tactics for each one.

To defeat each Ancient One, you must complete three ((Or four, for some Ancient Ones.)) Mysteries. These are unique to each Ancient One, and are related to the trademarks of the specific Ancient Ones. For example, you may have to investigate the strange meteor that landed in Tunguska if you’re facing off against Azathoth, or explore newly re-risen R’lyeh if you’re dealing with Cthulhu, or defeat the Dunwich Horror if Yog-Stothoth is your opponent, or break up horrid witch cults in remote corners of the world to beat Shub-Niggurath.

In addition, there are specialized research cards and (for some) encounter decks. These, coupled with the special ways the different Ancient Ones advance the Doom Track, add a lot more consistent and ((To my mind, anyway.)) interesting narrative to play. Facing off against Azathoth is qualitatively different than dealing with Cthulhu, which is great.

There’s also a mechanic for scaling the difficulty of the game based on the number of players. A set of crib cards show you how many gates, monsters, and clues get spawned at the appropriate times, as well as the position of the initial Doom Track marker.

One other mechanic deserves mention here: double-sided cards. These are Condition cards and Spell cards, which have information on two sides. Players can freely read the top side, but are not allowed to turn them over to read the back side until something specific directs them to do so ((This is a little like the Danger/Cliffhanger cards in Fortune and Glory.)). For Spell cards, this is usually casting the spell. For Condition cards, it’s when a certain symbol comes up on a Mythos card, indicating that a Reckoning is due. The cards flip over, you get to read the consequences of your leg injury acting up on you or your bank loan coming due or the downside of messing with powers man was not meant to know.

Players win if they complete the three Mysteries of the Ancient One before the Doom Track reaches zero. Well, they mostly do. When the three Mysteries are completed, there are instructions on the Ancient One card as to what to do next. Sometimes, that’s it, you’ve one. Other times, you must face the final Mystery that is printed on the Ancient One card itself.

The Ancient One wins if the Doom Track reaches zero before all three Mysteries are solved, or if all the investigators are eliminated.

I do worry, however, about replayability. There are only the four Ancient ones included in the game, and each has a deck of four Mysteries, three of which get used each game. Right there, you’re only looking at sixteen combinations. But there is a lot of other stuff going on, too, that adds variety to each game, so it’s entirely possible that my concern is completely misplaced.

Another concern is a common one to Arkham Horror and Elder Sign ((And, indeed to other games with similar rules for getting various stuff to beef up your character, such as Fortune and Glory.)) : once your character starts doing well, he or she can get stuff to help him or her, like gear and allies and spells and so forth. But if you need to succeed at a couple of encounters without that kind of help to get the game currency you need to get the stuff that helps you. If you take some time to get rolling, it can be very frustrating ((Trust me. That’s how I spend a lot of these games.)).

On the up side, it looks like the gate and monster holders from Litko that I got for AH will work just as well with EH. I’ll have to check to see if I have the character figures for the investigators in EH, too.

So, final evaluation? I like Eldritch Horror. It fits nicely into the complexity/duration gap between Arkham Horror and Elder Sign, and does some very cool things that neither of those other games do. It’s not just a simplified version of AH, though it is that too. But it’s a great game in its own right.

I’m glad I bought it when it came out. I’m looking forward to playing a full game with real people.

Mask of the Other

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motocover

Mask of the Other is a modern Lovecraftian horror/military adventure novel by Greg Stolze. Here’s the sell text from the back cover:

In 1991, a squad of US soldiers in Iraq stumbled across the wreckage of Saddam Hussein’s secret occult weapons program. Mask of the Other tells their story.

In 1974, something two armies couldn’t kill was buried under the wreckage of Varosha, during the invasion of Cyprus. Over the next three decades, teams of Turkish soldiers repeatedly attempted to poison it, burn it, or blow it to bits. They only succeeded in keeping it pent up, waiting.

In 2001, a skirmish in rural Afghanistan somehow escalated to the point that an entire village was wiped out, along with most of the personnel of a private military company. The only survivors were four Americans suspected of looting Iraqi antiquities a decade earlier.

In 2004, those same Americans were hired to provide security for a mining firm looking to restart operations on the abandoned island of Hashima. Both they, and the man who hired them, knew that the island’s abandonment in 1974 had left it as the home to far worse things than smugglers and squatters.

Mask of the Other takes modern ghost towns, low-intensity combat zones, international espionage and corporate intrigue, weaving them together with the ineffable horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It’s a war story, a survival tale, and an account of existential survival against incredible threats.

Now, bias alert. Here’s a list of reasons that you might decide my review of the book is biased:

  • Greg Stolze, along with John Tynes, bought a bunch of my writing back in the days of Unknown Armies.
  • I got to know Greg back in those days, and we’ve been friends ever since.
  • Greg sent me a .pdf of the book back when it was first released, for free.
  • I backed the Kickstarter for the audiobook version ((Some may view this as bias, some may view it as further endorsement. I leave it to you to decide which it is for you.)).
  • In general, I like Greg’s writing, both his fiction and his game material.

So, those factors may indicate that I am predisposed to like this book, and you’d be right, I guess. But I try to be honest in my reviews. I think the above points make it more likely that I’d read the book, certainly, and to write a review if I like it ((I don’t write reviews of things I don’t like. I’d rather celebrate and share stuff that I think is good than whine about or tear down stuff that I don’t. After all, opinions are very subjective, and there’s lots of good stuff out there, so why not focus on stuff I like?)).

This review is coming very late – the book was released over a year ago, and I started reading it then, but I got distracted and never got back to it. When the Kickstarter for the audio version of the book came along, I backed it at a high enough level to get the softcover version, as well. I just finished listening to the audiobook this afternoon, so it’s time and past time to write a review.

The sell text above hits the high points of the story. The book actually weaves a few different narrative tracks together, some of which come together later in the book, and some of which are more in the nature of vignettes, filling in some blanks from the story and illuminating the nature of the threats facing the characters ((Most of the illumination is some form of “See? This is why it’s very, very bad.”)). This does a good job of controlling the revelations of information for the reader to heighten suspense, because sometimes it’s scarier to be surprised and sometimes it’s scarier to see it coming.

I had a bit of a problem with this approach, though, especially in the earlier part of the novel. The chapters don’t progress chronologically; that is, they jump forward and backwards in time. Each chapter starts with a date/place heading, so it’s not that huge a deal – except with the audiobook. With a written text, you can flip back to the chapter’s beginning, and to other chapter beginnings, to help keep track of where you are in the story’s timeline. You can’t do that with the audiobook, though, and with all the jumping around in the start of the book, it’s not hard to lose track.

It’s not a huge problem, though; just something that caused me a little confusion. And, as the book proceeds, the narratives come together and begin to advance in a more conventional manner, the problem evaporates.

The story itself is a lot of fun, and really quite disturbing in many places ((Which is what one looks for in Lovecraftian story, after all.)). Greg uses a couple of very common monsters from the Lovecraft corpus, and uses them pretty much in their conventional roles, but throws a couple of awesome twists in to move them from standard tropes up to things of real horror again. The deep ones are nasty and terrifying in their breeding program and level of infiltration, and the shoggoth pulls some tricks that show why they were essentially an Old One doomsday weapon.

The main characters of the book – the squad of soldiers – are great. They make the same kinds of desperate, foolish, awesome decisions as player characters in an RPG ((And, incidentally, so completely unlike the rather sterile, cerebral characters of an actual Lovecraft story.)), and enjoy the same kinds of great victories and horrible defeats. The horror of Lovecraft’s stories is often so cosmic, that it is removed from personal horror, but this story does a good job of showing how the cosmic horror leads the characters into personal horror. Their choices, and the consequences of those choices, really drive the most disturbing parts of the novel.

Of course, some mention must be made of the narrator of the audiobook. His name is Trevor Dutton, and Greg described his voice as “gravy on gravel.” I can’t do any better than that; it’s a smooth voice, with a bit of a rumble in it. He doesn’t do a lot of voices, but reads clearly, and at a good pace. I believe he produced the book, as well as reading it, so he’s responsible for the sound effects interspersed throughout. The first time I heard one of the sound effects on the recording, I was startled, but they work really well, and I wound up enjoying them a lot ((Mostly. There were one or two little tinkly musical stings that struck me as kind of incongruous.)). All in all, a fine job of reading.

End result? I really enjoyed Mask of the Other. It hit all the right buttons for modern Lovecraft fiction, as far as I’m concerned, marrying his stark, horrific universe with the more personal, immediate horror of modern sensibility. It’s a tough balance to strike, and Greg Stolze hits it about perfect. If you like Lovecraft, Delta Green, or just modern horror, you should read this book.

The Demolished Ones

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TheDemolishedOnesFrontCover

So, a while back, Steven D. Russell at Rite Publishing asked if I’d be willing to review their first Fate product, The Demolished Ones, by Brian Engard. I sent him an e-mail talking about my review policy ((Spelled out on my About… page.)), and he said he could live with those conditions, and sent me a free .pdf copy of the game. This was back at the end of July, and I’ve finally got around to reading it.

Here’s the blurb for the game, from the back cover:

You wake in a room.

You don’t where you are, where you came from, what’s happening. You don’t know who you are. Your identity has been taken from you. It will come back with time, but can you trust it? This world is not what it seems. Are you?

And then there’s the murder. 

Who killed the dead man? Was it you? Was it one of the people who woke in the room with you? Are you all being blamed for a crime you didn’t commit? If you want to keep your freedom, you’ll need to solve the mystery of Jack Smith’s murder while you solve the riddle of your own identity. But is freedom even possible, or is it just another lie?

This is a game.

The Demolished Ones is a game about identity, amnesia, and the power – and danger – that comes with knowledge. This game uses Fate, a rules system that helps you build characters with personalities, histories, and baggage. If you’re not familiar with Fate, don’t worry: this game teaches you everything you need to know.

This is a story.

This book also includes a full story for you to play through. It contains all of the characters, locations, and events that you’ll need to tell a story of mystery, intrigue, identity, and horror.

The Demolished Ones is written as a limited-duration campaign. Looking at it, I estimate it could be wrapped up in as little as four to five sessions, or stretched out to double that, depending on how you ran and paced things. There’s also a section near the end that gives you a bunch of options for continuing play after the main storyline is completed.

I’m not going to talk too much about the plot, because a lot of the great bits about the game depend on revelation and discovery. The whole idea of starting as blank slates of characters, slowly adding abilities and memories throughout the game, is interesting, and Fate is a great system for doing something like this, as it already has a default build-as-you-play character generation option. The strangeness and mystery of the setting unfolds as the story proceeds, and the characters learn about the setting at the same time they learn about the world.

And it’s a world worth learning about. The background story is deep and interesting, with wonderful secrets to uncover and explore. The weirdness is compelling and engaging, and the options it offers for characters are just cool.

But the game has one potential flaw. It seems ((I say, “seems,” because the movie is never directly mentioned in the book.)) to be based on a particular movie ((The back of the book hints at what that movie might be, but for those who wish to know, I’ve hidden the movie name here: [spoilers]Dark City[/spoiler] )). And based very firmly on the movie, in both setting, structure, and terminology, so much so that, if I were playing, I’d be hard-pressed to keep from anticipating things from the movie in the game.

It’s not like the game slavishly follows the movie, though. There are plenty of tweaks to the plot and the setting. But if the connection is made early in the game, it will give away some of the cool secrets of the world, and may undermine the enjoyment of the players. In other words, knowing the movie constitutes spoilers for the game.

That said, I think this would be a very cool game to run for a group that were unfamiliar with the movie. And, if I were not familiar with the movie, I would love to play it. Brian Engard has done a great job of creating a claustrophobic, twisted, paranoid world where identity and reality are fluid and unreliable. It’s a great mini-campaign for the right group – one that enjoys mystery, horror, adventure, and isn’t afraid of something off the beaten track.

Beyond that, it really shows off a lot of the strengths of the Fate system. The implementation of the Fate rules fit into about 20 pages, including all the special character stuff the game requires. The in-game weirdness works very well with the structure of aspects and skills. And the cinematic, free-form mechanics make for some potentially fantastic sequences.

Yeah, so if any of that sounds interesting, I’d recommend you check out The Demolished Ones.

Twittering Throne of the White Birds

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I haven’t talked about books in a while, and now I have three that I want to tell you about, so I’m putting them all in one review.

The reason I’m doing this is Twitter. I found out about each of these books on Twitter, tracked them down, read them, and thoroughly enjoyed each one ((That’s the quick review.)). More and more, I’m using my Twitter feed to find out about good books and authors that I might not hear about otherwise. These three books are just the first that I’ve picked up this way – there are more that I’ve found and read ((Like John Scalzi’s Redshirts and John Horner Jacobs’s Southern Gods.)), and others ((Like Tom Pollock’s The City’s Son.)) that I’ve been teased with, but that aren’t yet released.

So. Yeah. Twitter is fast becoming my go-to book recommendation service.

Enough about that. Let’s talk books.

Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed

Throne is note-perfect sword-and-sorcery, in the tradition of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard, but with a more modern sensibility to things like the inner lives of the characters, diversity, language, and the like. It takes the rollicking, swashbuckling, over-the-top action and adventure of the pulps, and adds character depth, ambiguity, and actual moral dilemma, creating a novel that is both exciting and rich in story.

It’s set in the pseudo-Arabic city of Dhamsawat. I say “pseudo-Arabic” because it’s not set in the real Middle East, even by cleverly changing the names, but in a fantasy world that combines the best of the 1001 Nights and real touches of history to create a place and time that is richly evocative of a fairy-tale Arabia. The main character, Adoulla, is a ghul-hunter – the last of a mystical order that hunts down and destroys the undead ghuls and the sorcerers who create them. He’s old, he’s fat, he’s cynical and irreverent, but still has the heart of a hero ((As well as the appetite.)), though he’s slowing down and thinking about retiring before he gets killed.

And so, of course, he gets dragged into one last case by an old flame ((Yeah, there are a few nice noir touches in there, too.)).

I loved this book ((So much so that I’ve used it as the loose basis for a D&D adventure.)), mainly because of all the ways it subverts genre tropes. First off, a non-European-based fantasy world is a treat. No clones of Arthur and his knights or the Fellowship of the Ring showing up. Characters of different races and cultures – sure, pseudo-British and pseudo-German cultures are fine and good, but we’ve seen a lot of that over the years, and it’s nice to get a different perspective on things. Faith is dealt with in an interesting, two-edged way, showing both admirably pious characters and villainous zealots. And a nice contrast of ages, as the older characters ((Including the main character.)) and younger characters each show very different strengths and weaknesses.

And every one of the heroes kicks ass. The aging ghul-hunter? Kicks ass. The pious and naive young dervish bodyguard? Kicks ass. The angry young nomad shapeshifter? Kicks ass. The old alchemist, worried about her husband’s failing health? Kicks ass. Her husband, the mage, who spends his own life-force to power his magic? Kicks ass.

The bad guys are suitably detestable, whether they are the shadow-jackal servant Mouw Awa ((Easily one of the best-written, creepiest bad guys I’ve read.)) or simple thugs in the street. Perspectives shift and change as the simple question of who is raising the ghuls evolves into a desperate race to save the entire city.

It’s a wonderful book, and you should read it. If you like sword-and-sorcery stuff, you’ll like the way it handles the genre. If you hate sword-and-sorcery stuff, you’ll like the way it subverts the genre. It’s clever, and dotted with little delights to keep you reading. Go buy it now.

White Horse, by Alex Adams

The only reason I found this book was because I butted into a conversation about chickens ((Evil, stupid creatures. Ambulatory plants motivated by pure malice.)) on Twitter, and Alex Adams was involved. We bantered, and she followed me, and I followed her, and then I checked out her page, and found that she was an author with this book coming out, and it sounded interesting, so I bought it ((Authors on Twitter take note: being a friendly, approachable human being is good marketing. You don’t always have to be hard-selling your stuff. That said, no one begrudges you a little self-marketing either. Mix the two – like the authors I’m reviewing here – and you’re golden.)).

The story is a little bleak. It tells the tale of Zoe, a young woman who survives a multi-stage end-of-the-world scenario, and is on a journey from the US to Greece. It flashes back to the time before and during the… well, Apocalypse, I guess… slowly building a very compelling, ground-level view of how the world ends. There’s scientific hubris and human fear and agression and sheer bad luck all mixed together in bringing things to the point where most people are dead, a lot of technology is trashed, and strange things are happening to the survivors. By showing it through Zoe’s eyes, the whole thing is personalized, and the impact of it is visceral. Chaos, confusion, fear, loss, and desperate hope all get some page time as we see the world fall apart.

In the midst of all this grimness, Alex Adams weaves some solid literary magic. She plays with you. She teases you with a couple of wonderful bait-and-switch-and-switch-again threads that follow Zoe through her journeys, both inner and outer, leading you to the edge of revelation before showing you that – again – things aren’t what they seem. I don’t want to give away what those threads are, or where they eventually lead; discovering and following them, thinking you’ve got them figured out and finding that the author is still a step ahead of you, that’s one of the great joys of this book.

I’m gonna be honest: I almost didn’t finish this book. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic book, with some great writing and compelling characters. And I’m not afraid of a bleak story.

What got to me, what almost made me stop reading, was the lack of any really likable male characters ((There was another, subtler issue, as well: the fact that Zoe was determined not to kill, even when her opponent was someone that I, as a reader, really felt should have been killed. But there’s another dynamic, only partially gender-based, at work there – in the bleak, post-apocalyptic world, we expect life to be cheap. But to Zoe, it wasn’t. It was the most precious thing there was, and I finally started to get that later in the book, and began to understand the strength it showed. Just a different kind of strength than we’re used to in the kind of book I expected this to be. Again, my expectations were confounded, and brilliantly so. Bravo.)). Well, okay, not really lack of them, but the nice guys were pretty quickly removed from play, and the male characters that took the centre stage were all unmitigated bastards. I hated them. They were vile, brutal men, and they made me want to throw the book across the room.

Why didn’t I stop? Well, because I’ve been reading a fair bit about privilege, and I thought it would be enlightening and good for me to read a book where I wasn’t given a character that I, as a straight white male, could identify with as my proxy in the story. I mean, I read a lot of books where I am given that character, but other readers – women, non-white, non-straight readers – aren’t. So I wanted to see how that made me feel, to raise my awareness of such issues.

That’s the end of my little political tirade, by the way.

I’m immensely glad that I didn’t stop reading the book because Alex Adams – and I picture her with a saucy, knowing smirk when I think about this – plays games with this, too. Expectations are both fulfilled and confounded, understanding dawns as the final tricks are exposed, and the issues are revealed as both subtler and more complex than they first appeared. And I am left marveling at the craftsmanship and beauty of the story, and the delicate, artful way that my emotions and reactions have been led to the end.

Normally, I read a book, enjoy the story, and move on to the next. White Horse lingers with me, making me think about how I read it, what it did to me, and how I reacted to that. It has shown me something new about myself and about the world. It wasn’t an easy journey, but it’s one that I’m immensely grateful I was able to take.

And I’m eagerly looking forward to Alex Adams’s next book.

Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig

Chuck Wendig has written some of the most entertaining – and profane – writing advice I’ve ever read and enjoyed. So, I wanted to read his novel when it came out.

First things first: if you have a problem with coarse language, avoid this book. Because the language is coarse like a cheese grater rubbing on your most sensitive bits. But Chuck uses obscenity like the craftsman he is, building brilliant, dark images and situations with finely crafted expletives, each polished to perfection. He is deliberate and inventive in his cursing, understanding the rhythm and pace of each horrific bon-mot he includes. He is an artist in vulgarity, and worth reading just for that.

Anyway, with that caveat out of the way, on to the book.

This is the story of Miriam Black, a young, troubled woman who just happens to be able to tell when people are going to die. When she touches someone, she sees the time, place, method, and circumstances of their death. She can’t change anything about it, though; what she sees comes true, and if she tries to change things, she winds up contributing to the death she’s seen. This has, as you might imagine, messed her up some, and she currently wanders the highways and by-ways, hitching rides and living hand to mouth. She isn’t really a nice person, but she is someone you can root for.

Two things come into the picture that change things for her – the first is a vision of the death of someone that she doesn’t want to die, and the second is someone who has figured out her secret.

The book is fiercely focused, and quite short. There are no wasted words, no distractions, nothing to take you away from the story. It is a brutal trip through a pulpy charcoal sketch of bad people and nasty situations, and it drags you pretty aggressively through to the end at top speed. Along the way, you see how Miriam got to be the way she is, and what she’s really made of.

There’s a dark delight to the story, a nobility in the seediness of the situations and locations, and great heroism happens on very human scales, feeling more real and immediate than all the over-the-top thrillers. It’s a very human book, with messy, damaged characters, rife with good ((Or not so good.)) intentions and stupidity, fear and hope, desperation and resignation.

It’s not a happy book, but it is a hopeful one. And the darkness in it is wonderfully entertaining.

Word is that Miriam’s coming back, too. And that’s good.

For the True Believers

By | | Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Launch Party

I’ll be running a Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Launch Party on Saturday, March 3, 2012, at Imagine Games and Hobbies, starting at 1:00 pm. If you’re interested in trying the game, you can sign up at the store.

So, I got my .pdf copy of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying a week ago. What with one thing ((Lots of work at the day job.)) and another ((A nasty, nasty cold.)), it’s taken me some time to do an in-depth read of the game, and then put together a review. I’ve almost caught my breath for the moment ((Which, of course, jinxes me to make sure another project or illness will land on me tomorrow.)), so I thought I’d get my impressions down before running the launch party event on Saturday.

The Short Version

The game is a lot of fun, and nicely emulates the feel of comic book superhero stories.

The Long Version

If you’ve read my report on the launch party I attended to play the game, you’ve got an overview of things. Now that I’ve had a chance to read the rules, I can talk in more depth about a number of points I touch on in that initial post.

First off, it’s important to understand what the design goals of the game are: what the designers intend the game to do. MHR is not really a superhero RPG – well, it is, but it is more specifically a comic book RPG, focused on emulating the stories told in Marvel comic books. That means it makes certain decisions and choices from the start that are reflected, encouraged, and reinforced throughout the rules. For instance:

  • Playing characters from Marvel comic books is the assumed default.
  • Play focuses on published events, such as the Breakout mini-event in the rule book, and the forthcoming Civil War event book.
  • Important choices and decisions made by the characters are what drive character change and advancement.

By focusing on these things, the game… I don’t want to say “sacrifices,” because that implies something negative. Let’s just say “de-emphasizes” certain elements. For example, because the game assumes playing Marvel characters, there is little advice about how to create your own, original character. There is plenty of discussion about how to model an existing Marvel character using the rules, which is easy to adapt to an original character, but the build-it-yourself hero options doesn’t receive the same kind of support that existing Marvel characters do. You can do it pretty easily, but it’s not something the book spends a lot of time talking about. The same is true of advice on building events.

I want to re-iterate that I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it is pretty counter to the way most superhero games do things. It shouldn’t really surprise people who are familiar with Margaret Weis Productions’ other Cortex Plus games, like Leverage and Smallville. Each game is focused like a laser on a very specific type of play experience – heists for Leverage and inter-character drama for Smallville – paring away everything that doesn’t lead to that play experience and tweaking everything that remains to drive the desired outcome. It produces a magnificently tight, thematic game, with systems that are eminently lootable and hackable.

What it doesn’t produce is generic games. So, if you go into the game thinking that it’ll give you the support and freedom ((Well, to be fair, it does give you the freedom to do what you want. Just not a lot of the support. Not overtly. As mentioned, the games are eminently lootable and hackable, and tweaking them to your desired flavour is not difficult.)) to do your own thing that, say, Champions does, you’re going to be disappointed. Set your expectations accordingly.

What MHR gives you is a fun, short-term, flavourful, pick-up-and-play superhero comic book game.

Let’s talk some specifics.

Dice Pools

The basic mechanic of the game is assembling a dice pool, rolling the dice, picking two dice to add together for your total, and a third die to represent the effect. It’s pretty bare-bones and simple, but the way you do these things turns it into a narrative event worthy of gracing the pages of your favourite comic. The main reason is the way you assemble your dice pool. You get to add a die for each of the following things:

  • Affiliation. Each hero has a die rating for when he or she is operating solo, with a buddy, or with a team. The ratings are d6, d8, and d10, arranged as best fits that hero. Thus, Daredevil shines when he’s solo, Captain America works best in a team, and Spider-Man ((Who teams up with everybody in the Marvel Universe.)) is at the top of his game when he’s helping one other hero. This leads to some very interesting decisions during action scenes, as players weigh the benefit of different group configurations.
  • Distinctions. Each hero also has a set of three Distinctions – character traits, catch phrases, distinguishing characteristics. These can either help the character or cause problems, and the hero can either add a d8 (the Distinction helps) or a d4 (the Distinction causes a problem). Adding a d4 gains the character a Plot Point ((About which more later.)), and the player gets the choice of when the Distinctions is positive or negative. More interesting narrative decisions.
  • Power Groups. Each character has one or two power groups, each of which contain a few different powers rated by die type. The hero can add a single die from each power group to the dice pool, as long as he or she can describe how that power helps. This adds another layer of narrative gold to the process – is Spider-Man going to just punch the bad guy, adding a d10 for Superhuman Strength from his Spider Powers, or is he going to swing off a lamp post and kick the villain in the head, adding both the d10 for Superhuman Strength and a d8 for Swing Line in his Web Shooter power group? These decisions go a long way to creating dynamic description about what’s happening.
  • Specialties. Each hero also has a few skills that he or she is especially good at, and can add a die – usually a d8 or d10 ((There are some dice tricks that can change the die type and number here.)) – to the roll. Thus, you get to decide whether your hero is being sneaky, or tough, or agile, or whatever, based on your specialties. This is usually just the icing on the narrative cake, but can sometimes be the whole point of the action.
  • Other Dice. There are other dice you can pull in, usually from things that you or others have done in the scene. For example, if you’ve damaged your opponent – applied Stress, in this system – you can add the Stress die as a sort of wound penalty for your target. Or if you happen to, say, catch a falling helicopter, you may get a die to use it as a weapon on your next turn. These are all the stunts and situational modifiers of the game, and tend to reflect teamwork, planning, or the environment.

The upshot of it all is that, by the time you’ve gathered your mittful of dice to roll, you’ve got a pretty good picture in your head of what’s going on.

And that’s just cool.

The Plot Point Economy

This game, like many other modern games, has an in-game mechanical currency called Plot Points. Players can spend these to add extra dice to their totals, or to keep two effect dice, or to activate certain powers, or to capitalize on the Watcher’s ((This is what the game calls the GM.)) bad rolls, or a number of other things. This is not terribly new, but the implementation of the economy – the method by which players gain and spend Plot Points – is smooth, elegant, and well-defined. There are codified rules as to when the Watcher hands over a Plot Point, which is something that is lacking in a lot of games, and there are clear times for characters to spend them, with clear rules for what they get.

I like this an awful lot. As a GM in a number of games that use these kinds of points, it’s refreshing to have a systematic way to determine when a player gets one. Otherwise, I find it’s far too easy to lose track of handing them out in the crush of other things that a Watcher has to manage. The triggers for distributing and using the Plot Points are built right in to the rest of the system, and that makes it a lot easier.

The Doom Pool

All rolls in this game are opposed rolls. When a player picks up the dice to try and do something, the Watcher picks up the dice to try and stop it. If a villain is opposing the hero, the Watcher uses dice from the villain’s character sheet. If there is no villain, but there’s still a chance of failure, the Watcher picks up the Doom Pool.

This is a pool of dice that starts small and grows throughout the session. Normally, it starts at 2d6, though different events may set different starting points depending on how tough the scenario is. Dice get added to the Doom Pool whenever a player rolls a 1 – and the player gets a Plot Point in payment. Alternately, the size of a die can be increased, turning a d6 to a d8, for example. Thus, the tension ratchets up as the session goes on, and things get tougher for the heroes.

In addition, the Watcher can spend dice from the Doom Pool to use almost like Plot Points, adding to a villain’s roll or activating something nasty. These dice are generally gone from the Doom Pool after that, unless the Watcher gives the hero a Plot Point to return the die to the Doom Pool. There are a couple of other little tricks that tie into this mechanic, but I really think the genius lies in the way the players get to watch the Doom Pool grow as a direct result of their own bad luck, and the stakes rise along with the dice.

Balance

I’m a firm believer in the idea that game balance doesn’t mean everyone starts with the same number of points, but that everyone has the same potential to steal the spotlight in play and show off how cool their characters are. This game takes that idea to heart – looking at the heroes included, it is obvious that there was no point-buy formula to indicate how many powers someone had, or even how many die sides they get on any power. The builds in the rulebook are based on what the hero can do, not on how they stack up against each other.

With all of that, though, it looks perfectly reasonable to have Daredevil and Thor in the same session, each of them doing what they do best, and each having the opportunity to shine. Thor won’t necessarily overshadow Daredevil, because even though Daredevil has fewer and weaker powers, each turn gives each hero the same chance and potential to build an interesting and memorable moment in the spotlight. I hadn’t thought this would be the case, but actually playing the game has made me a real believer. The balance in this game exists despite inequity in hero builds.

Turn Order and Teamwork

Fred Hicks wrote a wonderful and detailed account of the turn order and the reasoning behind it here, so I’m not going to repeat it. I just want to point out how it really goes a long way towards inspiring the planning and teamwork aspects of superhero groups without the need of grafting on complicated or awkward co-operation rules. By letting the turn order develop the way it does, the players are encouraged to think both tactically and strategically, and to try different kinds of teamwork combos. It seems like a small thing, but just not having to hold an action in order to take your turn right after a specific other player really makes it more likely that you’ll try to set up some sort of combo, a la the Fastball Special.

Art and Graphic Design

I’m not a real visual guy, but I can appreciate an attractive book, and this is it. Not surprising, given the wonderful wealth of images available from the Marvel archives, sure. But beyond that, the book ((Well, the .pdf. I assume the book will be, as well.)) is striking, colourful, and organized clearly. Indeed, the linked page references in the margins make the .pdf a real joy to use.

Final Thoughts

I’ve played the game, and I’ve read the rules. I haven’t run it yet. But I’m really looking forward to giving it a try. I think that the game is wonderfully focused on what it sets out to do, and can easily be hacked, tweaked, and looted to make it work in a much broader application, as well. Personally, I don’t have a lot of interest in running a campaign set in the Marvel Universe with my players playing Marvel characters, and so I wish that there was more support in the book for doing my own thing with it ((That said, MWP has said that there is downloadable content coming that includes things like random character creation charts, so that’ll pretty much cut the legs out from my one complaint.)).

But the system is dynamic, and fun, and does the best job I’ve yet seen of making play work like you see on the comic book page. The pick-up-and-play aspect of it is appealing for one-shots and limited campaigns ((You know, kinda like the Event books that are coming down the pipe next. Who’d’a thought, huh?)), and the game does comic book action well enough that I think putting in the extra effort to use it with original characters and in an original universe ((I’ve long had an idea for setting a superhero game in the time of the Irish Red Branch tales…)).

My advice is to buy it if you’re interested in cool comic book superhero games. Just don’t expect it to be like Champions.

Mucking Around in Middle Earth: The One Ring RPG

By | | What's he playing?
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Saturday night, I gathered together a group of friends to try out the new The One Ring RPG from Cubicle 7. Over the past couple of weeks, we had created characters, and I had produced a couple of cheat sheets, so when the time came, we were ready to sit down and play through the introductory adventure included in the game.

For those unfamiliar with The One Ring RPG, it’s the latest roleplaying game based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. It comes in a wonderful set of two books ((One for players and one for Loremasters, the game’s special name for GM.)), two maps ((Again, one for players and one for Loremasters.)), and a set of the special dice ((A d12 and 6d6, each with special markings to be used for system quirks.)) needed for the game in an attractive slipcase. It uses a new system developed by Italian game designer Francesco Nepitello that is very straightforward, but has a number of interesting little twists to it that give it surprising depth while not slowing down play. The books and maps are beautiful, as might be expected.

We had a pretty good time, and really enjoyed the game. The rules do a good job of evoking the feel of the world, and reinforcing the kinds of things one sees in the source material. The adventure was paced nicely to wrap up in a single session and offered a sampling of pretty much everything the game has to offer.

For characters, we had a Barding slayer, a Barding treasure-seeker ((Brother and sister.)), a Woodman wanderer, and a Wood-Elf warder. Character creation is a simple templated system: you choose your culture, choose your background, choose your motivation, and then spread around a few discretionary points. It runs quite quickly once you figure out where everything is in the books and how it fits together, but this is a stumbling block that I’ll get to a little later.

There is an actual subsystem for handling the party as a party – what the rules call a Company. It gives the characters each a job to do in the journey system, provides a pool of points to help the characters out, and defines who your most important relationship is with in the group. That was how we started the game, as the characters had been developed independently: defining the Company and fleshing out who the characters were, how they had met, and why they were together.

I’m not going to talk too much about the adventure itself, to avoid spoilers, but here are some general observations:

  • Combat is wonderful. It is fast, cinematic, and deadly. There is a sense of real tactical choice and danger, despite the fact that it doesn’t use minis or battlemaps or anything like that. It abstracts positioning by using stances, where each character decides if they’re fighting on the front line or hanging back and using a missile weapon or something in between. Initiative, chance to hit, and chance to be hit are all determined by choice of stance, and the Loremaster just throws the monsters at the appropriate combatant. It works very nicely, and we all loved it.
  • There is an Encounter system, which is somewhat similar to skill challenges in D&D. It’s used specifically to handle social situations where the characters might or might not impress or offend a person or group. It works fine, but I found the scenes ran just as smoothly through straight roleplaying, taking into account the prejudices of the other party, without making a lot of rolls. I can see mixing it up a bit during ongoing play, but recommend not getting too slaved to the dice rolling.
  • The journey system works well, but it met some resistance in play. Part of this is the fact that I’m not experienced in running it cleanly, so it felt awkward, and part of it is that the roles for the journey were called out in other parts of the game for special tasks. The roles and journey system are there specifically to provide spotlight moments for different characters and to have everyone in the Company contribute to success ((Also to avoid everyone in the group rolling for every single challenge faced by the Company.)), but the rigidity of the roles felt artificial. Running this adventure a second time, I would handle the non-journey system invocation of the journey roles differently, asking who was doing what at a given moment, then asking for the roll.
  • I was very pleased with how easy it was to mix combat with other types of action – such as holding off an attack while escaping. I can’t say too much more about that without spoilers, so…
    Spoiler
    …when escaping the cellar while pursued by the Marsh Dwellers, it was easy to switch back and forth between characters involved in different aspects of the escape – fighting off the Marsh Dwellers, hauling the rescued Dwarves, acting as scout or guard, etc. It flowed very nicely, and created a great sense of desperation and urgency.
  • We only had the one set of special dice for the game, and it got a little annoying to share them. According to the Cubicle 7 forums, there will be dice available without buying the rulebooks in the next couple of months, and I plan on picking up a couple of extra sets ((What can I say? I love dice!)), but it was easy enough to use regular d12s and d6s.

There is one big problem with the game, though: the rulebooks are not well-organized. First off, they are split between an Adventurer’s book and a Loremaster’s book, and the split is not clean. As Loremaster, I need to look in both books to run combat, because combat is asymmetrical between PC and monster. The indices in the books are not true indices, but instead just an alphabetical listing of headings. The character creation leads you right through the process very nicely, except for one piece – Virtues and Rewards – which requires you to jump two chapters ahead to find the details. Without a page reference.

Now, the rules are not all that complicated, but it’s still a big stumbling block for the first few sessions, when the players and GM are having to look up a lot of stuff. The lack of proper index and the split between two books makes finding a specific rule mainly a matter of random chance, and that just slows the game down. A lot.

That said, the game ran fairly smoothly, and worked pretty well. We had enough fun that the players want to try another adventure in the system, following on one of the obvious next steps from the intro adventure. I’ve said okay, and given them the go-ahead to revamp their characters based on what we saw during play this time. We may even add a couple of players. And it means I get to figure out how to build an adventure in the system.

But that won’t happen until after I get back from Ireland.

Cthulhu Purist How-To

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?, What's he reading?
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Graham Walmsley launched a preorder for his book Stealing Cthulhu over on Indiegogo, which is the UK version of Kickstarter. I got in on it, and just finished reading the .pdf version of the book.

I like it a lot.

It’s Graham’s ((Is it all right if I call you Graham? Thanks.)) guide to creating Lovecraftian scenarios for roleplaying games. Now, I bought it to use with Trail of Cthulhu, specifically my Armitage Files campaign, but it’s stat-free, and easily applicable to any gaming system where you want to run the types of adventures it describes. The advice is about how to build the right kind of scenario, and how to tell stories that reflect the ideas within the more purist H.P. Lovecraft stories.

This is important to understand. Stealing Cthulhu focuses on what Trail of Cthulhu calls the Purist mode of gaming. Things are bleak, horrific, deadly, and maddening, and you count it as a win if you run away successfully from the monster at the end of the story. You can’t actually win in Purist mode. You can only survive ((And often not even that.)). The stories that inspire this book are things like The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness,  The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, and, of course, The Call of Cthulhu.

Graham is a perfect person to talk about constructing this style of scenario. He’s written a quartet of Purist scenarios for Trail of Cthulhu, published by Pelgrane Press. I haven’t read them all ((Because a friend of mine is going to run a couple of them, so I’m being a good player and keeping my nose out of them.)), but the ones I have read are solid, scary, and original. So, I’m going to trust his take on the subject matter.

But you do need to know what you’re getting into. This type of scenario is not going to suit all players; some people want more heroic escapism in their games. They want a chance to defeat the bad guy and triumph. If you’re looking for advice for that type of game, while there is some applicable advice in this book, you should probably look elsewhere. This is all about the joys of going mad while being shredded by something with too many mouths and dimensions.

Now, in addition to his advice, he also passed the book around to Gareth Hanrahan, Ken Hite, and Jason Morningstar, three other folks with mad Cthulhu cred, and had them annotate it for him. So, you get Graham’s take on things, coupled with a very knowledgeable peanut gallery tossing in their opinions. It makes for a good read.

Now, in talking about a book like this, it’s hard to keep from just paraphrasing bits of advice from it, so I’m going to talk about it at a pretty high level. If you want more details, go buy the book ((If the ideas I’ve outlined above sound at all interesting, you really should just go buy the book.)).

The main advice in the book is to steal from Lovecraft, but to then twist it to make it fresh again. Now, that doesn’t sound like something you need a whole book to say, but it’s the discussion behind that simple statement that make up the meat of the book. Graham talks about what it is useful to steal – creatures, scenarios, locations, patterns, and descriptions – and how to twist them to make them seem new without sacrificing the Lovecraftian bleakness and horror of the original. To do that, he ((And his annotators, as well.)) talks a great deal about what each of the things discussed mean: what they symbolize, what makes them horrific, and how to strip them for parts. It also talks about how to work in things that gamers like but that don’t often show up in Lovecraft’s Purist stories – things like gunfights, actual mysteries and investigation, magic use, and cultists.

This section leads off the book, right after the introduction, and makes up a little less than half the page count. It is filled with examples and references, and is a thoughtful discussion of how all the moving parts of a story fit together to produce the effect you’re looking for.  Graham points out not only what works, but some common pitfalls to avoid. The tone is somewhat scholarly, which is kind of fitting for a Cthulhu resource, and is offset by the more chatty tone of the annotations ((And kudos to Graham for keeping in the stroppy, argumentative ones. I enjoyed the contrasting ideas presented, and think it ultimately reinforced your theses.)).

The next section of the book cherry-picks some of the best elements of the mythos and shows how to ring them through the changes described in the first part of the book. It’s not exhaustive ((I was sad to see Ghoul left off the list, though the reason for that is explained in the Afterword, and I accept it.)) – there are only fifteen entries – but it illustrates the ideas in the book wonderfully. More than that, you wind up with the skeletons for two or three different scenarios for each entry, ready for you to flesh out and add the stats from your favourite system.

Graham finishes off the book with three appendices: Miscellany, where he lists the notes that don’t fit anywhere else in the book; Bibliography, which again is not exhaustive but very focused; and Cthulhu Dark, his rules-light system for running Lovecraftian roleplaying games.

Final assessment? The book is very focused on producing one type of play experience. That’s not to say that it’s not useful if you don’t want to create the kind of adventure where your investigators die horribly in the ancient catacomb of a bizarre church, but that you will find less useful stuff if you’re trying to do something more heroic. I don’t think this is a bad thing, any more than I think a hammer is a bad tool because it doesn’t tighten screws well. The book sets out to do a very specific thing, and succeeds in doing it very well. But with so many games trying to encompass a multitude of play styles, it’s important to know that Stealing Cthulhu doesn’t follow that path. Buying it with the wrong expectations will lead to disappointment.

I do have one little niggle. I’m hoping the .pdf version I’ve got is going to get another editing pass before it heads to print. There are a couple of typos, and some missing or inaccurate footnote references in it that I’d like to see cleaned up. In general, though, the text is pretty clean.

***Edit***

I have just had a brief exchange with Graham Walmsley. He informs me that there are hidden things in the book, and the typos I have noticed may be part of that. So, it looks like my little niggle, cited above, may just be me not getting the hidden stuff. I shall have to reread with an eye to that.

Thanks, Graham!

If you like the stark, eerie horror of Purist Lovecraftian games, this is the book for you. The advice is useful, and the scenario skeletons littered throughout the text are a gold mine of ideas, assuming you don’t just lift them outright and hang some stats on them. If you want to run a Purist Lovecraft game, in any system, this book will fill you with joy and your players with dread.

Which is how it should be.