Not Broken, Don't Fix

Short Review:

Break!! is a well-designed game that reminds me a lot of Redbox Hack, and a little of 13th Age, and as I like both of those games a lot, I'm quite well-disposed towards Break!! too.

(Much) Longer Review:

This is going to be mostly positive, so let's get what I don't like out of the way first.

The book is massively overwritten. Every little bit and process -- except, oddly, the d20s on the page edges -- is explained in exhaustive detail. It's 470+ pages and it doesn't need to be 470+ pages.

BUT.

If Break!! were my first role-playing game, if I were new to the hobby and needed explanations for how to do things or how rpgs worked, then all of this extra detail and instruction would probably be quite useful. So yes, to my old brain and eyes it's Too Much Writing, but I'm not everyone, so I can let this one go.

I would have liked a bigger monster section. What we do get is good and explains how monsters work, and even how to reskin them to make new, different creatures, but I would still have liked seeing a few more examples. One notable gap is a Level One Sword Fodder type creature. A goblin/kobold/skaven type. Again, there are a couple of creatures that could be modified into that role, but it would have been nice to have one to use out of the box. Not that there is a box.

Something else there isn't is a Frog condition, which seems like a terrible omission, but I suppose you could hack that back in.

And that's it. That's everything negative I have to say about Break!! Now on to the positives. You may want to get a cup of tea or your local equivalent.

The classes callings are all interesting and look exciting to play. They have enough similarities with classic D&D types that they are familiar, but also have enough differences or twists to feel fresh and exciting. The Raider is sort of a D&D ranger, and sort of a D&D monk, but also quite unlike either. The Champion is more or less a fighter, except they are also good at cooking! Cooking the organs of slain monsters, yes, but cooking nonetheless! The Factotum is probably the most unique, a sort of support class calling upgraded to a full player class calling, part skills expert, part tactician, part pack mule, and like nothing I've seen in a fantasy rpg before. It's these classes callings and their unique abilities that make me think most of Redbox Hack and 13th Age; I like them a lot.

The mechanics seem good and robust. There are lots of options, but the basic rules are quite simple, based around single d20 rolls with only a couple of modifiers; like 13th Age the players will have more to remember and track than the GM will -- although some of the monsters can have complex abilities -- which should let the GM get on with running the game. Although not complicated, there is a lot of content, but the organisation is excellent; sections and subsections are clearly and intelligently marked and finding things in the book should be quite easy. Everything is in one book too, which will always win points from me.

There are WFRP-like damage charts (like!), magical corruption for spellcasters (like!), and a magical allegiance mechanic (like!) similar to that found in Elric!/Stormbringer (like like!). There's even a section on colossal enemies -- as in Shadow of the Colossus (very much like!) -- with evocative but simple rules for climbing on and fighting such huge creatures.

(That's it over there. One page. That's all you need to explain a whole sub-system. Imagine that, Call of Cthulhu 7...)

The GM section is very good, full of basic -- see above -- but solid advice on running games, and also what look like excellent tools for generating adventures and setting, with some examples to get you started, or to just rip -- not literally, please -- and run from the book.

Break!! also looks great. Grey Wizard's anime style art is lovely and does an excellent job of conveying the intended feel, although I should point out that if anime's not your thing then there's almost nothing baked into the game itself that forces that sort of style. You could run this as a depressing and obstinate Dark Souls type game with no problem. If you wanted. Anyway, good art! There are also plenty of narrative comic-style pages, which is something I always like to see. More rpgs should have them.

(I am available.)

Grey Wizard's book design is also good and clear. It does feel a tiny bit like a school science textbook -- smells a bit like one too -- but the art does take the edge off that. And there's nothing wrong with science.

In Conclusion (thank fudge for that):

Anime and computer game fans will of course find Break!! right up their alley, but there's also a lot to like if you enjoy fantasy role-playing games but are looking for something a bit different to the D&D style.

I very much like the look of this game, enough so that it's making me run it, and I haven't run a role-playing game in a looooooong time. That's a recommendation you can take to the bank.

(Don't do that.)

Arbitrary numeric score: 4 chocolate wafer fingers out of 2 chocolate wafer fingers.

You can buy Break!! here and follow the Break!! blog here.

Kangaroo Pills

RUINATION PILGRIMAGE is Donn Stroud's new role-playing game of wandering troubleshooters/troublemakers in a mediaeval setting a couple of steps sideways from ours, where angels and demons and saints are real and mostly deadly. It's a little bit like Pendragon and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had an unholy baby; regular readers -- or people that can click on links -- will know that I like both of those games, and I like this one too!

Before we get to the good bits let's look at some wonky bits, of which there aren't many. I'm reviewing a Kickstarter pdf, so some of these may be ironed out in the print release.

• Ruination Pilgrimage uses a d5 now and then. That's just a d10 halved and is easy enough to work out, but I've never liked it. For no valid mechanical reason, I'm just not fond of halved die rolls in general, and there's no compelling reason for it here as far as I can see; the overall system is d10/d100 based, but it also uses d20s, so I don't think it's out of a desire to use only one die type. I would have just used d6s there.
• The organisation is a bit off. For example, combat ranges are not in the combat section, but next to the wilderness travel and survival section. Natural healing is explained in the chapter on downtime activities, which makes sense, but isn't mentioned at all in the part about healing, which makes less sense. It's not a massive problem; all the information is there, it's just sometimes in odd places.
• The rules on conditions and survival are rather more detailed and complicated than I would have expected. We're not talking Fantasy Games Unlimited levels of crunch here, but given that the rest of the game is simple and robust, the detail in this part seems excessive and in places redundant. It almost feels like it's from a different game.

On the other hand, there is quite a lot to like! Exclamation point!

• As mentioned above, the main mechanics are robust and simple -- which I like -- and are based on d100 -- which I also like -- so that's all good. RP is apparently based on the Mothership rpg, but I've not played that. If it's close to this I'd probably like it.
• The mechanics are explained well and while some rules may be unnecessarily complicated or in odd places, there's never any confusion about how they work.
• There are some great, evocative tables used for critical hits, diseases, and character backgrounds and histories. Randomness is used well, and the tables are full of flavour. Usually flavour that's inimical to the player-characters, but good flavour nonetheless.
• The despair and sorrow system adds a "lovely" doom-laden feel to the game, making every action risky. Not all the despair results are negative, which is a nice touch. Having played rpgs with despair systems before I am a tiny bit wary of how this will work in actual play -- as they can sometimes lead to un-fun doom spirals -- but I'll wait and see.
• There's a table of replacement body parts! Some have built-in weapons! Excellent!
• RP ties character progression to a formal downtime system, and offers a variety of activities to improve and restore characters. I'm quite fond of the Making Friends one, which is a warm bit of simple wholeseomness among all the gore and mud.
• 
  The supernatural side of the game looks like it's got lots of toys with which to play. There are some fun-looking exorcism mechanics, and prayers and saint blessings also look like they will be interesting in play.
• Angels are all wings and eyes, and not only have specific abilities and roles -- they aren't just generic combat summons -- but also cause distress and terror when they appear. It's a bit Call of Cthulhu, another of my favourites. Demons are less interesting, but the angels more than make up for it.
• Adam B Forman's art is bold and evocative, and captures the mediaeval feel well. I would have liked more of it but what's there is excellent, and there are plenty of text sidebars to convey the mood of the setting.

The big question is: would I play Ruination Pilgrimage? The answer is a big mud-spattered, many-eyed, limb-lopping "yes!" If you like WFRP but prefer an "earlier" setting, or you like Pendragon but want more blood and mud, or you like Vampire: The Dark Ages but think vampires are dumb, then this may be right up your mediaeval twitten.

Arbitrary numeric score: 3d10+10

Masque Crusaders, Working Overtime

There is a half-decent idea here.

Let's take Ravenloft...

Wait, what's a Ravenloft?

Right, so it's Dungeons & Dragons does Universal -- or if you have excellent taste, Hammer -- horror. It's a patchwork world in which each of the classic horror archetypes rules over a little fiefdom, terrorising the locals, and the players go around staking vampires and shoving silver up werewolves, while trying not to draw the attention of the evil Darklords. The twist is that the bad guys are trapped there too, for Reasons, so if you wanted to you could examine concepts of destiny, responsibility, and enforced roles, but it's D&D so of course you don't do that.

I will say this, it's a great cover.
Do we ever find out who the Skull Guy is
or why he's on a train?
No. We do not.

Anyway. Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales backports the Ravenloft mechanics and setup to Earth in the 1890s, so instead of Tesco Value Dracula, you can fight actual Dracula, which is nice. All of the classic bad guys -- and some good guys, like Sherlock Holmes -- are running about, and ruling over the whole lot is the Red Death. What the Red Death is or does is not defined, which as we will see, is a bit of a recurring problem.

(The Red Death is more or less Nyarlathotep, but is never named as such, probably because of licensing reasons.)

I like the basic idea, I even admire the attempt to use AD&D2 for a near-modern setting, but the whole thing is a mess, veering from cack-handed to half-hearted and back. It's a shame.

Some examples:

It's unwieldy from the start. To play you need the AD&D2 books, this boxed set, plus the Ravenloft boxed set, and the Ravenloft: Forbidden Lore boxed set. The latter two you need for a couple of rules mechanics that could have been reprinted here -- as we will see, it's not like the space was needed for anything else -- but ah, then you'd be buying only one box, not three and how then would TSR avoid going bust?

Oh.

Imagine playing this in 1994, before everyone had pdfs. Imagine you were the GM but you were running the game at someone else's house, and you'd need to lug three boxes plus rulebooks plus whatever else over there. Crikey.

The setting-specific rules -- the ones that you don't have to go and find in other boxes -- are a bit of a mess too. AD&D2 for the 1890s was always going to be a fudge but it feels like they just gave up after a first draft. Fighters/soldiers are the only viable character type; magic use has interesting drawbacks -- corruption, insanity, attracting the Red Death -- but they are also probably too punitive to make playing a magician worthwhile, although I love that sort of thing in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay so (shrugs).

Thieves become "tradesmen" and lose their thief skills, but get them back as Non-Weapon Proficiencies, the effectiveness of which are based on the character's -- random -- statistics, and must be bought from a pool of points of which the magic users will in most cases get more, AND the tradesman doesn't in fact get default access to the thief skills -- no one does -- so has to spend more of that pool of points to get them.

"You can play these other classes," TSR seems to say, "But they are crap, so don't bother." Soldiers for everyone! Which is fine, I suppose, if that was the intent, but if so why bother with the other classes -- the tradesman in particular, who is crippled by these rules -- at all? I can imagine that further development could fix the issues with the other classes, or even shift to a classless variant, but that didn't happen.

There's a section on explosives, because blowing monsters up is great! It has three tables, two of which are identical, and the third is different in only one place. Why do these tables exist? I'm not picking on one section; it's all like this.

In fairness some parts work better than others, and you could probably fix the rules, but once you've done that, what do you do in Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales? How are you supposed to play? Excellent questions.

You can't use most D&D adventures because it's Earth in the 1890s. You could use Ravenloft adventures because they at least have the right mood and are similar in setting, but for some odd reason that's never floated as a possibility. There are three adventures in the box, one of which isn't bad, one is an interesting idea executed as a linear series of fights, and one is dead in the water -- literally -- and wastes a major character.

Well, you don't need example adventures, not if the setting guide is full of evocative plot seeds and compelling adventure ideas.

(Spoiler: it is not.)

The setting is vague and underwritten in that annoying style that was everywhere in the 90s, all "rumours" this and "unconfirmed" that. It's all quite terrible, but this is perhaps the best/worst example, from the Australia section:

The arrival of the Europeans has resulted in the violation of old taboos and the disruption of countless traditions. The exact nature of these trespasses and their repercussions may not be known for decades to come. Interviews with the native population of Australia tend to be less than informative, for many of the taboos forbid even the discussion of them.

Whahuh? I can see words there, but I see no actual content. Someone was paid money to write that. This particular idiot paid money to read it.

Look, I know you can't cover everything in an introductory box, but this sort of non-committal nothingness is of no use to anyone. I would have put in some concrete examples, perhaps mentioning specific D&D monsters that could be used for the basis of an adventure, even mentioning published adventures that could be slotted in. Anything other than the "I dunno, you sort it out" we get.

(There is one weird exception. Singapore gets a few lines about a very specific incident involving tiny creatures that make people disappear. There's not much more than that, and no suggestion of what the things are, but it's something.)

The Red Death, the Big Bad of the setting, is left completely undefined, except that it might be living in Vienna, except that's probably just -- wait for it -- a rumour. Okay, fair enough, I understand not specifying what the Red Death is, but maybe offer three examples, Dracula Dossier style, of what it could be. That way the GM can take one and use as is, or use the three as examples to develop their own Red Death. This is not difficult, and my gosh, it's not as if the page space is being used for anything important.

I'm not sure why this box exists. I can't imagine fans were clamouring for a Ravenloft-but-the-1890s product and it seems like an odd thing to release as a boxed set, although 1994 was in the era of TSR spaffing out as many boxed sets as they could. My guess is that it's an unfortunate confluence of someone making a joke pitch over lunch in the TSR canteen, and a sudden box shaped gap in the production schedule; the pitch got commissioned and then everyone scrabbled to get the thing out. It feels like an initial idea shoved out the door before it was ready. Perhaps it was an attempt to compete with Call of Cthulhu, but if so it's the most lacklustre attempt imaginable.

Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales is a broken product that requires umpteen other products to use, it feels unfinished, and what is included is of little use, so I wouldn't recommend tracking this one down. All that said, there is still something compelling about the basic concept, something that got me to buy it in the first place.

(I think; I don't remember when I got my copy or even if I bought it at all. It may have been a gift.)

With quite a lot of further development -- which it is obvious never happened with the published box -- Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales could work. Maybe. Ish.

I give it two Draculas out of five.

Dunwichin'

Chaosium was clearing its warehouses at the end of July -- some bargains seem to be available still! -- and I decided to spend some royalty money on H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich for Call of Cthulhu. I'm not sure why I picked that one out of everything available, but I'm glad I did. Allow me to tell you why.

The Good

• The format is a lovely surprise. I was expecting a sourcebook on Dunwich, with some related adventures, a bit like Chaosium's books on real-life locations like Cairo and London, and that is sort of what you get.
  
  Ish.
  
  It turns out the book is more of a sandbox, akin to an old school D&D adventure. You get a -- long! -- list of locations, the people associated with them, and any events -- eldritch or otherwise -- tied to them, but there is no plot as such. That said, there are some ongoing agendas and schemes, but nothing like the sort of strong plotting one expects from a CoC adventure. Not only is it refreshing, the gazetteer-like approach makes the content easy to read and, probably, prepare. Which is good, because there is a lot of content. Speaking of which...


• So... much... stuff! Every house, building, or other point of interest is listed and numbered. There are almost a thousand locations, although some are empty. I haven't got this to the table -- and I am unlikely to do so since one of my regular players has read the whole lot -- but I imagine you could get weeks if not months of play out of Dunwich and the surrounding area.


• The content is pretty good too. There is a lot of interesting stuff to investigate and poke, some of which is waiting for the players to discover, some of which is carrying on without them. It all seems very playable and it feels like a real, living location. There are plenty of non-Mythos interactions too, which is good, but I'll have more to say about that in a bit.

The Bad

• The d20 Call of Cthulhu rules. Ha. No, I joke. I'm all in favour of 7th-level Librarians.

The Ugly

• There is some... "old-fashioned" terminology used to describe the mental and physical condition of some of the Dunwich residents. This is a 2002 revision of a 1991 book, but even so I was surprised. On the plus side, there are only a handful of occurrences, but beware and be prepared to ignore the Old Ways.


• There are a couple of sections that are a bit dungeony and feel out of place in Call of Cthulhu. These were perhaps less jarring in 1991 but they feel very wrong these days.


• I think there's too much Cthulhu Mythos content. This seems like an odd complaint for a game about the Mythos, but bear with me. Without going into spoilers, there are at least three major Mythos, er, vectors, only one of which has anything to do with the Dunwich Horror. It feels a bit greedy and over the top and moreover, the intellectual, physical, and social decay running through Dunwich is given a Mythos origin, which I feel undermines the Deliverance-like horror of the setting; I prefer to think that the Dunwich Horror happened because the village was already corrupted by human failings, rather than those failings being caused by an alien influence.
  
  (What's worse is that the book is inconsistent on how pervasive this influence is and jumps through unconvincing hoops to explain why some villagers are unaffected.)
  
  I would remove at least one of these Mythos elements, maybe even two, and make the village a bit less of a Cthulhu "zoo". Cthulzoo?


• I am not a huge fan of the cover, as seen above. It's a fine picture and better than anything I can do, but as a cover it tells us nothing about the book, except that there is a wrinkly old man in it. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that there are quite a few wrinkly old men in the Dunwich area.
  
  
  
  The cover for 1991's Return to Dunwich is more overt -- perhaps obvious -- as a piece of horror art -- and to be fair, seems to illustrate one minor possible encounter out of almost a thousand, so I can see why it was changed for the reprint -- but it's also more striking as a visual. It looks like the cover of a dodgy VHS horror film, exactly the sort of thing I would rent in a heartbeat.

That looks like more bullet points for Ugly than Good, but worry not! That first Good point is such a... good point that it more than makes up for the flaws, and most of the issues with the book can be fixed with ease, or ignored without making the adventures more difficult to play.

(I would go into specifics on said fixes, but, you know, spoilers.)

I remember seeing the original Return to Dunwich book in the collection of my old Call of Cthulhu GM Keeper Dave and that cover jumped out at me even back then. For whatever reason we never went to Dunwich in Dave's campaign, but I hope I'll get a chance to run it one day, as it seems like great, degenerate, backwoods, fun.

A Devilishly Good (Evil?) Time

Something has gone wrong and the devils have broken through. Hell has come to earth! Literally! Except devils are Lawful, so this particular colony of Hell turns out to be a functioning, albeit evil, society.

(Just like our own! Lols.)

That's the setting of Perdition, a game I bought back in 2016 and for some reason had not read until Tuesday. This turns out to be my error.

Perdition is a Dungeons & Dragons variant with an Old School feel but some modern touches, and in terms of complexity it feels somewhere between a B/X clone and a lighter version of D&D3. The book itself is a complete game with the setting elements conveyed through rules mechanics; there is no gazetteer of the world here, and only a few major personalities -- all devil lords, of course -- are detailed.

The book is written by Courtney Campbell and Arnold K, with art from Heather Gwinn, Marcin S, Matthew Adams, Michael Raston, Russ Nicholson, and that most prolific of artists, Public D. Omain.

The Good (or maybe The Bad in this case, because Bad is Good)

The setting comes through on every page and in almost every line. It's an implied setting, oh yes, but "implied" doesn't seem strong enough a word. Infused, maybe. Soaked, even. You couldn't use this ruleset to play anywhere else but Perdition -- or a similar devil-infested place -- but then you have countless D&D variants for that.

The classes are evocative. some familiar, some new, some familiar but with new twists, but all flavoured -- soaked even -- with Perdition, er, badness. Each of the 12 (!) classes has a fun ability or mechanic and some feel almost like little games within the game. They are similar to 13th Age in that respect, although they are less elaborate and extensive than some of the classes in that game. Even so, each is like a little toy box and they all look like great fun to play. Yes, even the fighter.

As a D&D cousin, Perdition uses experience points, although here they are transformed into prestige. At a basic level, it works much like it does in most OSR variants; go into dungeon, drag out coins, convert into points and levels. But levels have a special importance in a lawful, hierarchical society like Perdition, and that's reflected in the mechanics, as more powerful characters attract more attention from the devils that run things.

Nor is money the only currency, because devils also trade in souls -- which do have a monetary value if you are desperate enough! -- and infernal contracts are common, to the extent that there's a lovely set of mechanics for handling how such agreements work, turning the negotiations into a neat little sub-game in which even the winner can come away with a bad deal.

(This twisty-turny but logical economy of money, souls, and contractual obligations can drive the game and provide the impetus for characters to adventure together. Why are we going on adventures when the devils have already won? Well, because Geoff owes Maluthraxus 2000gp from his last level-up, and Alice has been promised immortality if the black orcs are forced from Thunder Mountain.)

My favourite concept in the entire book is the Vile Conclave, an extension of this ordered system of agreements, contracts, and transactions. The Vile Conclave is brilliant. The world is ruled by devils, and devils like law and order, so of course, there is an official procedure for dealing with them. I don't know if the writers were influenced by the demonic parliament in Disgaea 4, but it's a similar concept. Rocking up at a devil's fortress and killing the fiend is frowned upon, and will probably get you eviscerated by the Devil Police, but players can instead take their grievances to the Conclave. They can also make requests at the Conclave, or even go to make veiled insults to try and force a devil to make a faux pas and thus face sanctions from its peers. All of this works through betting experience/prestige and while the mechanics are a bit light on specifics, it's a wonderful, fun idea, and I could see enthusiastic groups expanding it through use.

(Forms. There needs to be forms. Devilish requisition? That's Form 666B, sir.)

I adore how devils are used in the book. They are evil, yes, but they are reasonable and while you can kill them like your average D&D murderhobo would, there are better -- and more entertaining -- ways to deal with them, and those ways baked into the mechanics and the setting. It's so good. If you're running a game in which devils play a major part, then it's worth getting the book just to steal the contracts and the Conclave.

The Bad (or Good, see above)

Nothing! Honestly, Perdition is full of good ideas, and a handful of average ones, but there's nothing I would call bad in here. Aside from the devils. Ha. There is one extended case where some of those ideas clash and trip over each other, but that's for the next section...

The Ugly

I am not at all fond of the multiple resolution systems. You have attribute tests, which use 2d6 -- or sometimes 2d4 or 2d8, depending on the character -- against target numbers between 5 and 12, depending on difficulty. You also have skills, which are tested against a target of 6, and use a die between 1d6 and 1d12 depending on the skill level of the character. On top of that you have the standard B/X reaction roll, which is a Charisma test, but is a special case that always uses 2d6, and the game also uses a Swords & Wizardry-style saving throw. On top of that there are "struggles" which are opposed tests that involve rolling and totalling hit dice, with the highest total winning. As well as physical hit dice for physical struggles, there are mental/social hit dice for, um, mental and social struggles.

(There's also the good old attack roll and a new social/psychic attack roll, the latter of which works in the same way as the former but uses a different statistic. Some may consider those resolution systems, which they are, but not in the sense I mean here; I don't think it's fair to complain about attack rolls and other task rolls being different in a D&D variant.)

Now, I don't advocate for a universal mechanic here, because like any element of games design, a mechanic is good if it serves a valid purpose, and that's true of a single unified task resolution system too. If there is a good reason for different systems, then so be it.

(The classic example is percentile thief skills in D&D. One compelling argument for them is that switching to a completely different set of dice is a sort of direct, haptic feedback that reinforces the feel that these are a set of abilities unique to the thief.)

The issue I have with the multiple systems in Perdition is that I cannot espy the valid purpose; it feels like a bit of a janky kitbash and I imagine it would be chaotic and confusing at the table. Maybe not, but I can't see any good reason why a unified mechanic -- or at least some streamlining -- wouldn't have been worthwhile, a bit of filing down of the spiky bits.

I've written quite a lot about the task resolution, which suggests that it's a big problem, but in truth it's a minor issue and it's really the only Ugly part of the game. There is so much to enjoy here.

-----

Perdition has lots of great ideas, heaps of fun mechanics that make you want to get to the table and play right away, and a lovely, light, and elegant evocation of setting through rules. It's very good indeed and I am kicking myself for leaving this unread on my shelf for five years. Sorry, Courtney, sorry Arnold!

---

My copy of Perdition is a hardback printed by Lulu.com back in 2016. It doesn't look like it is available any more but you can get a pdf from DriveThruRPG.

Forever Fibbing

I bought Eternal Lies soon after its release in 2013 but Stuart's children were part of our gaming group at the time, and I was aware that the campaign was full of content that wasn't appropriate for them, nor could it be removed without undermining some of the key themes. Almost a decade later, Stuart's kids are far too cool to play with us old fogeys, so I was able to get the campaign to the table at last.

We've been playing since June 2020 -- with a couple of gaps -- but I haven't been posting summaries here because, well, the authors ask that no details of the plot are revealed in reviews or other discussion. I intend to respect that, although it will make this review a bit tricky in places. Bear with me.

I'm going to reverse the usual Good, Bad, and Ugly order here because -- spoilers, dear reader -- this campaign has major problems, and I want to end on a positive note. As much as I can, anyway.

The Ugly

The book is massively overwritten. This is obvious from the first page and was part of the reason why I didn't push to get it to the table earlier, as I feared it would be a lot of work to get it to a playable state. I was not wrong. The book has around 400 pages but there are probably about 100 pages of actual content; the rest is faff, nonsense, guff, and vast swathes of pointless repetition. Also, there's quite a lot of repeated information, and furthermore much of the page count is taken up with repeating what you've just read a few pages earlier.

There's also an issue with the tone of the writing, which I admit may be a matter of taste, in that it comes across as smug, arrogant, and hypocritical at times. For example, there are a couple of places where the very concept of dungeon-delving is ridiculed, but then we get at least three actual, honest-to-Gygax dungeons. Maps are mocked and considered tools of the imagination-challenged, except when they are not. It's a bit sad and almost embarrassing to read.

The Bad

Oh crikey.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the campaign as a whole is that, aside from a couple of places, there's not much in the way of player choice. The overall structure is somewhat similar to the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep -- which I suspect is deliberate -- in that once things get going, the players can tackle the main campaign locations in any order, but that's where the flexibility ends. Each location is a little railroad, literally in one case, which doesn't even have the decency to be a knowing joke.

(A quickish aside: my understanding is that the entire point of the Gumshoe -- I'm not capitalising it until you tell me why -- philosophy is that the players cannot fail to find essential clues, and so the investigation never stalls. To my mind, this means you can design adventures with a rich and -- if you want -- complex structure, knowing the players will not be blocked from accessing that structure because of a failed skill roll. The authors of Eternal Lies, on the other hand, seem to have taken it to mean that they can force players to experience a sequence of set pieces; it's the sort of structure that we all knew was bad in 1990 so it's a bit baffling to see in 2013, even more so in a game line that I thought was supposed to encourage the opposite. Thus endeth the asideth.)

The grand irony is that despite the rigid design, there are holes in the structure big enough to pilot the Alert through that cause some parts of the campaign to be tricky if not impossible to access. The most egregious is the climax of the entire campaign, which happens for reasons the players have no way of knowing, so the authors crowbar in some quasi-flashbacks to get the players there. One of the major non-player-characters is sort of halfway to working it out, so can nudge the players in the right direction, but -- and look at this for a clusterfudge of bad design -- if the players are sensible there is no reason for them to encounter this NPC at all, so the adventure as written has them beaten unconscious, stripped of their equipment, and dumped literally at the NPC's feet.

(I wasn't going to do that to my players, so in my game, the players arrived at the location and did what they came to do, then decided there was no reason to pursue the NPC, and left.)

This isn't something Gumshoe can fix, because the NPC's name and location are clues the players find whatever happens, but you still need a reason for them to meet the NPC, other than "some thugs knock you out", and the GM shouldn't be doing the work that a £40 book should be doing.

What's worse is that the climax only happens as a result of player action. This is supposed to be a final ironic twist, but because there's no way for the players to realise this, it can come across as arbitrary and random. For the GM, who can see the workings behind the curtain, there is a further disappointing revelation: if the players do nothing, nothing bad happens. The bad guys carry on, but they don't "win", indeed the way they are written -- which is one of the good parts of the campaign; see below -- means that they cannot triumph.

Without going into spoilers, for I have made a promise, this is how the campaign works:

In 1924, a cult attempts to do a Very Specific Thing. It is interrupted and although there are survivors, none of them know what the Very Specific Thing was, or even that the cult was trying to make it happen. This crucial bit of data is lost in 1924.

↓

In 1934 -- or maybe 1937, because the campaign isn't sure when it is set (sigh) -- the players go around tracking down splinters of the original cult and dealing with them.

↓

?????

↓

The players do the Very Specific Thing (oops) and must save the world.

Okay then.

That ????? is a huge narrative and structural gap -- again, a surprise in a campaign which has up to that point forced players along a strict linear path -- and the authors seem to just assume that it will not be an issue. In my game the players decided that yes, they would go and do the Very Specific Thing but they didn't really have any good reason to do so, which strikes me as a problem, and the "twist" that they really shouldn't have done so after all is an even bigger problem, but now I am repeating myself.

(How very appropriate.)

The campaign as a whole is a mess of rigid railroading and massive gaps, which is a worst-of-both-worlds chimera I didn't think was possible.

The Good

There are a couple of terrible non-player-characters in the campaign, but they are not essential and are easily cut. The majority of the NPCs are at least interesting, and the main cast are quite well written, in particular the major antagonists. I am reluctant to call them villains, because while they stand in opposition to the players and represent the traditional Cthulhu cultists, they are far from traditional in their characterisation. Each of the major opposition NPCs is written as complex, with their own goals and motivations, and although the characters are technically on the same side, they have more differences than commonalities.

(The obvious approach is to use these differences to turn the antagonists against each other, but the geographical scope of the campaign does make this difficult and, alas, there is zero support for such an approach in the book. That the potential is there is at least half-good.)

The chief antagonists are layered and interesting enough that they could even be useful to the players under the right circumstances. On the other hand, they are cultists, so even if they are being helpful, the players may not trust them, which of course is fun and interesting. The treatment of these characters is nicely done and by far the strongest aspect of the campaign.

I must also admit that some of the set pieces are effective and fun, so while I can't condone the authors strongarming the players into experiencing them, I can at least understand why they are so keen to show them off. It is ironic and more than a little disappointing that perhaps the chapter with the worst writing is also the one with some of the most fun encounters, and my favourite section of the entire campaign is something of a side trek, optional and not strictly relevant to the main adventure.

I also like the general idea of the big climax, even if it is almost impossible to get there as written.

-----

For the most part I enjoyed running Eternal Lies and I think my players had fun, but my gosh the thing is a janky mess almost from page one, and running it is a lot of work. I don't even mean preparation work of the sort any large campaign needs, but rather a lot of fixing of broken parts and filling in gaps, and even ground-up rewrites in some places. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect a better, more polished, and more complete product for £40.

I would recommend the campaign only to the GM that enjoys going to such effort, or perhaps as a source of ideas, as there are some good sections that could potentially be pulled out and used in other contexts. Otherwise, there are better, and easier, campaigns to run. You may have heard that Eternal Lies is a classic, on the same level as the venerable Masks of Nyarlathotep, but do not listen to such... lies.

Ha ha.

---

I ran Eternal Lies over 25 weekly sessions between the 20th of June 2020 to the 20th of June 2021 (!), with some interruptions here and there. We played it over Roll20 with a modified version of Call of Cthulhu fifth edition, rather than Trail of Cthulhu; I made good use of the official conversion notes here.

(And how cool is it that Chaosium and Pelgrane allowed those conversion notes to exist?)

Also useful was the Alexandrian Remix; Justin Alexander holds the campaign in much higher regard than I do, and I didn't use much of his actual remix material in my version, but reading it was helpful and it confirmed some of my own misgivings about the source and gave me the confidence to make my own changes. Justin's chapter summaries are far more readable than the ones in the book, so I recommend reading them if you're going to try running the campaign.

Good Knight Sweetheart

Just before Chrimble I was sent a review copy of Gabriel Ciprés' role-playing game Space Knights:

Space Knights is a science fiction roleplaying game about alien invasions, mighty warriors and desperate battles in the dark future. The player characters in Space Knights are no individuals but the companies of an Order of Elite Warriors in a time when humankind has spread through the galaxy and fights for survival. Space Knights uses a PbtA-based system and contains everything you need to play.

Space Knights is a pastiche of Warhammer 40,000, in particular the fascist warrior monks of the Space Marines. The game is short, consisting of 10 pages, which includes a cover and a credits/introduction page. It can be purchased at the very reasonable price of Pay What You Want from Drive Thru RPG.

I haven't had a chance to play it, so these impressions are based on reading the pdf. Don't hate me.

The Good

• There are a number of rpgs out there that put you in the power armour of a Marine of Space, but in my experience they tend to focus on individuals. Space Knights instead puts players in the roles of entire companies, which is an interesting approach. (Of course, the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game has the same sort of perspective, but that's not an rpg.)
  
• The system -- which is derived from Apocalypse World -- is simple and leans towards storytelling rather than crunchy detail. It seems like it would be quick and elegant to play, and again it is an interesting approach to a game that is about blokes with guns shooting each other. Roll 2d6, with partial success at 7 or total success at 10, applying modifiers or rerolls based on a company's unique traits. Bosh! That's it!
  
• Despite its length, Space Knights is full of flavour, and the writing captures the theme well. There is not much in the way of fluff or background, but all of the little mechanical bits and pieces capture the feel of doomed heroes -- or perhaps they are religious extremists, or perhaps they are both -- on vast crusades, risking not only their lives but their souls. I suspect that in part the game is relying on evoking my own experiences of the 40K setting, but even if that is the case, there is some skill in that.

The Bad

• The game gives examples of Space Marine chapters Space Knight orders and some sample missions, and there is a section of random table to generate mission details, but the game is a bit fuzzy about what happens in a session and what the players are supposed to do. In other words, how the game works is described well, but how it plays is not. Is it designed for one-shots? Can it be used to run a campaign? You can work this stuff out by reading between the lines but a bit of guidance would be handy.

The Ugly

• There is almost no art in the game, but I can't criticise it too much for that. Space Knights is a Pay What You Want indie rpg based on a well-known setting that already has four decades of art behind it, so it's a very minor issue. You don't need Ciprés to draw a Space Marine, because everyone knows what a Space Marine is and if not it's only a Google away. To be honest, I'm only mentioning it so I have something to put in this section.

All in all, I recommend Space Knights as a fun little game that would fill an evening of play, and brings a new perspective to the experience of playing a power-armoured religious warrior. I have some questions over whether there's anything more to it than a couple of hours of play, but those couple of hours should be fun enough. Assuming the Emperor hasn't banned fun, obviously.

If I get a chance to play Space Knights, I'll update this post -- or write a new one -- about how it went.

With a Little Bit of SKILL/STAMINA/LUCK, We Can Make It Through the Night

This is a review of the new edition of Melsonian Arts Council's Troika! but first, a bit of a digression. It will be relevant, I promise.

Fighting Fantasy is one of my favourite role-playing games, but it is not without its problems. It was designed to run the Fighting Fantasy solo gamebooks and while it's just about fit for purpose for those, the ruleset struggles when taken out of that context.

In the gamebooks there is some freedom of choice -- which is what makes them fun after all -- but it's not like a tabletop rpg, where you -- or YOU -- can take a beating, return to town for a rest, then return to the dungeon for more donnybrooking. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are almost always about forward movement, with branching paths that nonetheless carry you forward.

It's also rare to have allies, and when someone else does turn up to help, they either hang around for a couple of fights then run off, or they get eaten by a GIANT CRAB (SKILL 10 STAMINA 11) after two paragraphs. I was surprised to discover that the recent Port of Peril features a non-player companion who not only hangs around for a fair chunk of the book, but is also somewhat competent.

All of this means that gamebook characters verge on the superheroic; they have to be to have a fair chance against the individual book's many challenges.

You can perhaps see where this is going. Translate that to a multiplayer rpg and you have problems. Now there's a group of four or five titans -- ho ho! -- wandering about, cutting through monsters and shrugging off traps; there's fun in that -- I ran a short and self-explosive campaign along those lines and it was brilliant -- but it's not sustainable for extended play.

The other issue is -- and I'm aware of the irony here -- that the randomness and simplicity of character generation means that some characters are much better than others. When you have only three player-character statistics and those are generated by dice rolls, you can end up with characters with wild differences in competence and survival prospects. Again, this isn't a problem with a one-off adventure but it can cause problems for a campaign. Advanced Fighting Fantasy makes the issue worse with its advanced skill system; your SKILL score also determines the points you add to your SKILL to determine the value of your special skills, so if you roll well, you get even better, and if you don't roll well, you never catch up.

Fighting Fantasy is a great little game and I love it, but these are major issues that can make it unviable for a long-term campaign, or at least a sensible long-term campaign.

I mention all this because Troika! is more or less an alternate Advanced Fighting Fantasy -- see, I told you it would be relevant -- and is going to be vulnerable to the same issues, unless author Daniel Sell has found solutions.

He has. Sort of. I think.

The SKILL problem is solved by acknowledging the inherent imbalance and randomness in the system and embracing it as a feature; maybe your rolls are crappy but look, you're a space giant with a magic map! It's a gutsy approach; adding even more randomness with the Backgrounds system and sort of trusting that things will balance out, or at least will be more interesting.

If we're thinking in terms of pure numbers then I don't think the problem is fixed -- it may even be worse -- but the strength of the addition of Backgrounds is that they give players interesting things with which to play that are not just numbers to plug into the combat or skill checks or whatever. The other advantage of this approach is that it adds no mechanical complexity, so the game remains simple. I approve.

(A quick aside: I'm playing in a D&D5 game at the moment using the revised ranger class and it comes with a bunch of special abilities that aren't mechanical as such -- they don't interact with target numbers, dice rolls, character statistics, or anything like that -- but still have a significant impact on the game world. It almost feels like cheating and I'm loving it.)

The STAMINA problem is tackled by inflating damage output. In Fighting Fantasy a GOBLIN (SKILL 5 STAMINA 5) with a sword can hit you for two points of STAMINA damage. In Advanced Fighting Fantasy the same GOBLIN can do between one and three points. The Troika! GOBLIN can ruin your day with up to ten points per kidney-poke! It's swingy and brutal and it's not the approach I would have taken but it looks like it should work, and will make for fast and exciting combat.

The other big change to the original Fighting Fantasy is a new initiative system. You add tokens, such as dice, to a bag -- player-characters get two each, henchmen get one, opponents get a varied amount -- and then characters act as their token is drawn from the bag, until the "End of Round" token is drawn and everything resets. This mechanic is tactile and unpredictable and I adore it, but I can imagine that the unpredictability of it could prove too much for some.

Elsewhere the game is much the same as Fighting Fantasy. It's simple, quick, and with the major issues of the original resolved, it seems quite robust. That said, Troika! isn't just a new edition of a venerable classic, as it abandons the generic fantasy of Jackson and Livingstone's Titan for something somewhat more exotic.

The setting is implied through the Backgrounds and the monster list, just enough to give a feel of the world without pages of maps and historical data. It's a strange world, a little bit Planescape, a little bit Book of the New Sun, a little bit Spirited Away. It feels decadent and almost febrile, the same way David Lynch's underrated adaptation of Dune does; I imagine the world of Troika! is hot and sweaty and everyone is struggling under some sort of summer cold.

The light touch to setting elements means that it should be easy enough to switch them for those with a closer match to your own campaign backdrop. I suspect it would be a significant amount of work to come up with d66 new Backgrounds, but I doubt it would be arduous.

Sells' writing style is infectious, arch and playful, without coming across as pretentious: "Notice that [starting Backgrounds] only touch the very edge of specificity." At times, when explaining rules, this dancing, slippery tone can border on obfuscation but for the most part it's entertaining and fun to read.

There is less art than I expected from this deluxe release of the game; there was a fanzine-style edition a few years ago. I would have thought the upgrade to a fancy hardback would have meant the book would be drenched in pictures but aside from the Backgrounds section art is scarce. It's all good stuff though; I'm quite fond of the aforementioned Background images by, I think, Dirk Detweiler Leichty. They have this mad, angular, almost abstract look, sort of like the face cards in a standard fifty-two card deck; the style probably has a name but I'm too much of a barbarian to know it. Now that I think of it, a deck of character generation cards would be a lovely little gimmick.

The book's design and layout are neat and functional and it's quite easy to read and navigate; the use of old-school rules organisation -- "6. Actions... 6.1 Hit Someone... 6.2 Shoot Someone", and so on -- is a bit excessive in a game of this complexity but is a cute stylistic flourish. The book is a sturdy hardback and is presented in A5, the One True Format, so extra points there. I will dock a significant number of points because the character sheet doesn't have "Adventure Sheet" across the top but you can't have everything, I suppose.

While I have some quibbles with Troika! they are minor, and on the whole it's a solid and entertaining update and enhancement of one of my favourite role-playing games; should I be lucky enough to once again run a Fighting Fantasy game in the future, I will probably use Troika! because Troika! is ace.

Arbitrary numeric score: 87

Troika can be purchased in digital and physical forms.

Quiet Hordes

Back in January, Brian C asked me -- because I’m always banging on about how much I like Call of Cthulhu -- for my thoughts on both the new Delta Green role-playing game and Kevin Crawford’s Lovecraftian Silent Legions. I had a look at Delta Green in March and here’s the belated follow-up.

In terms of game mechanics Silent Legions is more or less B/X Call of Cthulhu, although you won’t see that stated anywhere in the book, for legal reasons probably. You’ve got character classes, levels, hit dice, saving throws, and all that classic D&D stuff, only transposed to a modern day horror setting, and with a sanity system bolted on. There is a skill system in there too, and it looks a bit like the one from Traveller, but I don't have a lot of experience with the venerable space game, so I may be way off.

It all looks quite robust but it does little for me. I didn’t grow up with D&D and I’m not one of these people that tries to use one ruleset to fit every genre -- says the person who used Call of Cthulhu to run a Night’s Black Agents campaign -- so there’s nothing here that grabs me and makes me want to play it. It’s not a bad set of rules but I can’t get my head around the idea of 6th level librarians as anything other than a joke, and you’re never going to win me over in the Space Year 2017 with odd artefacts like descending armour class.

It’s a matter of personal taste, it’s probably irrational, and may even be hypocritical; there’s nothing inherent to Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu that makes them any more suited to Lovecraftian gaming than classic D&D, and I’d probably feel different if I had more of a background in the game. I don't, so it all seems a bit odd to me.

I'll stop going on about it now because the rules of the game only take up about a quarter of the book; the bulk of the tome is all about designing a supernatural horror campaign. To be more precise, it's about building a supernatural horror sandbox campaign, and this is what led to me backing the Silent Legions Kickstarter back at the end of 2014. Crawford has picked up a lot of acclaim for his campaign design systems in other releases like Red Tide and Stars Without Number, so I wanted to see what he could do with an investigative horror rpg.

What we get is a big, multifarious toolkit for designing a Lovecraftian setting, complete with gods, cults, monsters, and even alternate planes. There are procedures for designing the region in which the campaign will be set -- this could be something on the scale of Arkham County, or it could be the entire globe if you want to go full Masks of Nyarlathotep -- and the individual locations within that region. There are tools for such fine grade details as individual non-player-characters and even specific scenes.

All of this is presented as dice tables so it is possible to generate an entire random Xhoandhora Mythos. You can even roll up eldritch names, like I just did there. You can of course just pick the bits you like.

This stuff is all gold and while I'm indifferent to the ruleset in Silent Legions, I want to try the campaign generation tools right now. I want to generate cults, their histories, and their plans, I want to design pantheons of gribbly space gods, and I want to populate a map with blighted towns and sinister woods. Then I want to plonk a group of player-characters in the middle of it all and see what happens.

Perhaps the best bit is that aside from a couple of details, this vast chunk of the book is not tied to any particular system and you could use it in any horror game. It screams to be used and its utility is vast, cyclopean even, and it's well worth getting, even if you have zero interest in playing a 6th level librarian.

Delta Green, No Relation

A while ago, Brian C asked for my thoughts on the new Delta Green role-playing game and the OSR not-Cthulhu game Silent Legions. Let's start with Delta Green.

Until Brian requested it, I wasn't going to review the game because I didn't think it would be fair to do so, for two reasons. The first is that it is not complete; as I type this post the rules are available as the Agent's Handbook, and as the title suggests, this is for players. There are rules for character generation, skills, and combat, but nothing on adversaries, magic, or the setting itself. I have a certain distaste for games that split the core rules across multiple books, but it's not a bad idea as such; even so it's worth mentioning that the full game is not available at this time.

The other reason I haven't reviewed the game is that I haven't played it. My current Dracula Dossier game uses the firearms rules from DGAH -- but is otherwise fifth edition Call of Cthulhu -- and I helped my friend Ben modify the rules for his Beyond the Mountains of Madness game, but I haven't used the rules as intended. I don't know if my review can be fair if I haven't played the game, but I'll do my best.

In order to maintain compatibility with older DG material, the new game uses a d100 based system. I was surprised to discover that it's not based on CoC, or even Chaosium's d100 ruleset, but rather it's a modification of Mongoose's RuneQuest 2/Legend with the sanity rules borrowed from -- of all places -- 2004's Unearthed Arcana for D&D3. This strikes me as a bit of a roundabout way of doing things when there's a CoC licence available, but I assume the designers had a good reason. Anyway, the important thing is that it's compatible with CoC and older DG material, albeit with a bit of shoving.

The general approach seems to be to tidy up and modernise CoC's rules; this was also the stated intent of the seventh edition of the venerable rpg, and I think DG is more successful in that regard than Chaosium's own effort, not least because it -- for the most part, anyway -- keeps things simple.

Where CoC7 is characterised by adding more rules -- improvement by way of elaboration -- DG goes more for standardisation and ironing out the weird spiky bits CoC built up over the years. One good example is the firearms rules; CoC has some wonky combat rules in general, and the mechanics for gunfights are probably the wonkiest of all, with all sorts of exceptions "spot rules" and fully-automatic gunfire looking more like Rifts than even the most pulpy Mythos tale.

DG strips this back to a simple mechanic based on at most two die rolls and optional modifiers. There is an argument that it's a bit bland as most weapons more powerful than a pistol will either kill outright or do 2d10 damage, but I will take that over the old clusterfudge of one-fifth chances, multiple fire rates, modified initiative steps, and so on. There are exceptions built into the DG shooting rules, but they make sense; instant kill attacks don't work on supernatural creatures, for example. Otherworldly entities break the rules of the game, which is quite fitting.

Another example is character generation, which in DG is based on packages with defined skill values, so there's none of the fiddly points spending of CoC; I quite like the fiddly points spending bit of character generation but I understand that not everyone agrees and I acknowledge that dumping it makes the process faster and smoother, although again there's a hint of blandness to it.

In general, most of the changes DG makes are in a similar vein but there are a couple of occasions where the game wanders off in the opposite direction; for example, the mechanics for acquiring equipment go on for nine pages complete with little coloured icons that are used only for this subsystem. I can see why the rules exist -- the designers want to model agents pulling in favours or diverting funds and resources, and so on; good thematic secret agenty type stuff -- but when most of the game seems to be aiming for simplicity, if not elegance, it's jarring to slam into a big steaming block of rules for buying a shotgun.

There are a few other odd decisions in there too; the examples of sanity loss include "being fired from one's job", which, yes, is stressful and can indeed have an effect on someone's mental health, but it's a bit weird to see that in a game of Lovecraftian horror, and with the same mechanical significance as "find a corpse". Then there's DG's replacement for the Cthulhu Mythos skill, which works in the same exact way as the original, but is called "Unnatural", a beige word that looks like a placeholder waiting for a more evocative term that never came.

It's not all amending and fixing what came before; DG adds a formal Pendragon-like home phase, in which agents can step away from the current mission and heal, rest both body and mind, research, train, or interact with the game's other main addition, the agents' bonds. These are people or organisations that are important to the character, and can help mitigate sanity loss, but at a cost; they are similar in function to pillars of sanity, one of the better ideas from Trail of Cthulhu. There is a bit of fiddliness and rules-for-the-sake-of-rules in the way bonds and sanity interact, but on the whole these are welcome additions to the game, and I'm a big fan of formal downtime mechanics in rpgs, so it's good to see them in DG.

All in all, I'm quite impressed by DGAH; I do miss some of the eldritch spikiness of CoC, and DG does lack personality, but perhaps that's fitting in a game about anonymous government agents. It seems to be a good game -- although bear in mind my two qualifications above -- but I can't recommend it for the simple reason that I don't think it's good value for money.

The cover price is $39.99 but for that you don't get a complete game; I have no idea how much the inevitable Handler's Handbook will be, but I suspect it will be a similar cost, if not more. What's worse is that DGAH feels padded; it's overwritten and the text size is huge. The book could be two-thirds of its current size without sacrificing anything important and it sort of looks like the only reason it's not is to justify the cover price. For all its faults, CoC7 is only $4 more expensive and you get a complete game, with rules, setting stuff, game-master guidance, and even a couple of adventures.

There is a quickstart pdf available that runs through the basic rules and has a much more sensible price of Pay What You Want. That, I recommend without reservation and, if you like it or you are swimming in piles of cash, then maybe get DGAH. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

I Have a Medusa, and She is So Blue

When I was plugging Forgive Us I remember saying at least a couple of times that I wanted it to be a game book that was also an art book; looking back I can see that this claim was ridiculous because I was nowhere near. With Maze of the Blue Medusa, Zak S and Patrick Stuart have achieved what I could not.

I mean that literally too; the basic concept seems to have been "what if we turned one of Zak's super detailed paintings into a dungeon?" and that's what they've gone and done, the cheeky, talented blighters.

(In a fun self-referential twist, one of the dungeon's main entrances is a magical painting.)

In a way, MotBM is quite a traditional dungeon adventure; at a basic level it is a list of rooms and what's in them, but it's the "what's in them" bit that makes this worth playing. There's something interesting in every location -- even empty corridors or stairways have something to prod or explore -- and by "interesting" I don't mean "1d12 orcish Morris dancers" but rather things like a lantern that projects light from the future, or scattered clues hidden by some mysterious and unseen benefactor who has been through the dungeon before, or a floor map that's also the key to a high-level campaign in itself.

There are monsters, indeed there are a lot of monsters, but almost none of them exist as big jangling bags of experience points to be fought and killed; every creature wants something or has some relationship with another being or object in the maze, and many will talk to the player-characters about it.

The inmates, occupants, and visitors are arch, decadent, strange, or all three at once; there is plenty of odd magic-science and weird energy floating around the dungeon; and there is a general feel of decadence and entropy throughout. It's all characteristic of Patrick's adventure writing style, but it's also characteristic of Zak's; they work together well, and it's difficult to tell where the join is. One could say that the cannibal critics are an obvious Zak creation given his background in art but I would not be at all surprised to learn that they sprung from Patrick's imagination.

The book looks great, not only because it has 250 pages of Zak's artwork, but because of its clever but simple layout and organisation from Anton Khodakovsky. The original painting is sliced up into smaller, more manageable chunks and each double-page spread deals with one of those chunks; on the left you get the chunk in context with the neighbouring parts of the dungeon, then on the right there's another version of the same image with something approaching a traditional dungeon key. Below that, you get a summarised description of the room contents, then the next two or three pages expand that summary into greater detail.

Here's a typical spread:

Then the more detailed gubbins on the following page:

Each of the seven main sections of the dungeon is colour coded to match a little tab at the edge of the page so you can see at a glance which section of the book relates to which section. This is a simple and practical idea that I haven't seen often in game books; the fifth edition of Call of Cthulhu used it to indicate the main rules, and I have a vague memory of other Chaosium products from the same era -- Elric! perhaps? -- using it. What I like is that it's clever but that's secondary to being useful, and such an approach says good things about the designers.

If I had a criticism -- and I am struggling to find anything negative to say about this book -- it's that the writing is a bit wordier than I like; I would have combined the summary and the more detailed text into something shorter, so everything would fit into double-page spreads, but that's just me. Brevity is not always a good thing and you know, it's good writing; it's always fun to read -- not Small But Vicious Dog level fun, but more than good enough to keep the reader entertained for almost 300 pages of room descriptions -- and if I wrote as well as these two, I'd show it off too.

Maze of the Blue Medusa is fun to read, it looks wonderful, and it's designed to be useful; there are plenty of game books that fit into one of those categories, fewer that fit into two, and not many at all that fit into all three, let alone doing so while describing a setting that can provide months, if not years, of continuous play. This is a very good book and I cannot recommend it enough.

Scarface Was a Good One

Remakes are weird. Cover versions of songs are accepted and often applauded but in film -- a few exceptions aside -- the words "remake" or "reboot" are more often than not greeted with an all-consuming dread. Remakes seem to be far more uncommon in the literary world, beyond retellings of the classics, but I could be wrong about that because I am rubbish at reading.

Unless you count new editions of rulebooks, remakes don't seem to be that common in tabletop games either. Yes, there are umpteen versions of Keep on the Borderlands, the D&D people do love to rehash the big name classics every so often, and I have seen a few bloggers dissecting various adventures and offering suggestions for improvement -- one of my favourite things Zak S has done was when he condensed the aforementioned Keep into two one page dungeons -- but I can't think of many instances of an actual full remake of a role-playing adventure.

At this point, I expect the comments to be full of the many rpg remakes I have overlooked in my ignorance. It's okay, I am prepared.

I considered it myself after I played the Pathfinder campaign adventure path Carrion Crown; it has a good central idea but the structure of the campaign adventure path ruins everything, so I thought it would be worth a rewrite. I put that project aside for boring mathematical reasons that aren't relevant right now because I want to look at King for a Day.

(Or KIIng for a Day. No, I don't know why.)

According to the notes by the author Jim Pinto, King for a Day started out as the AD&D2 campaign Night Below, but as he tinkered and tweaked the adventure ready for play, Pinto realised he was more or less rewriting the whole thing and decided to release it as a unique product.

I played Night Below once in 1998, I think. I remember playing a fighter with 10 or 11 in all his statistics and I remember our party getting ambushed by bandits as we crossed a river. I recall nothing else about the campaign, so perhaps that encounter ended in a TPK, or maybe we all decided it was naff and we'd play Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu the next week. As such I can't make a full comparison between the original campaign and the remake, but from what I can tell -- see Charles' discussion of one element of Night Below here for an example -- King for a Day does feature more or less the same individual elements as the original campaign, arranged in a different order, with different connections between them and different consequences attached.

One notable difference is that King for a Day puts much more emphasis on events above ground; most of the book's 300ish pages consists of an exhaustive gazetteer of people, places, and plots in a remote rural valley, but the original campaign devoted only a third of its overall page count to its equivalent.

(This isn't a review as such, but the formatting of the gazetteer is strange because it's written as if it's a web page, with lots of hyperlinks; a location, for example, will have links -- complete with little icons -- to the people that can be found there and the plots that involve the place, but of course none of the hyperlinks work because, well, it's a book. The detail-obsessive part of me appreciates the structure of this even if in practical terms it is bonkers.)

Once events draw the player-characters underground, King for a Day seems to be in a rush; there is a handful of locations -- albeit a couple of them are vast -- and then BOOM! there's the climax and it's done. Again, this isn't a review, but the underground bits do feel a bit underwritten, in particular the finale; I don't know what happens at the end of Night Below but I hope it's a bit more of a meaty finish.

The end result of all of this is that the remake seems broad but shallow; I don't mean this as a complaint, because it would be churlish and inaccurate to claim that the huge amount of content Pinto has generated for the main, above ground, part of the campaign is in any way superficial. Rather it's an observation on the structure of the adventure; it is more of a sprawling rural sandbox with a small but significant jaunt underground, and as such is more or less a total inversion of the original.

That's what I find most interesting about King for a Day. It is still recognisable as Night Below -- even to someone like me who has little knowledge of the original -- but at the same time it's quite different and you could play both and still be surprised. Reluctant as I am to encourage remakes, the success of King for a Day as a proof of concept makes me wonder what else is possible; maybe that Carrion Crown rewrite isn't such a bad idea after all.