[Fanzine Focus XXVI] The Grognard Files – Annual 2019

On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry.

The Grognard Files is a fanzine born of The Grognard Files, a North of England-based podcast dedicated to the games of the late seventies and early eighties, in particular, RuneQuest. It is available only to patrons of the podcast—or alternatively to attendees of Grogmeet a one-day convention in Manchester, again in the North of England. It is also put out just once a year. Published by The Armchair Adventurers, the first issue, The Grognard Files – Annual 2017, is available as a ‘Pay What You Want’ PDF available to download with the proceeds of the sale of the fanzine being donated to continue the running of Yog-sothoth.com, the best site dedicated to Lovecraft and Lovecraftian investigative horror. More recent issues, The Grognard Files – Annual 2018 and The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 have sadly not followed suit, but for members of the ‘Grog Squad’ and attendees of Grogmeet, both issues continue to serve up thick, syrupy wodges of nostalgia and gaming inspired by their youths in the nineteen eighties.

It would seem remiss to be reviewing The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 in the summer of 2021 rather than more recent issue, but in truth, circumstances mean that there was no Grog Meet in 2020 and no The Grognard Files – Annual 2020 either. So The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 it is then. Previous issues have taken their design cue from gaming magazines of the nineteen eighties, White Dwarf being the most obvious. With The Grognard Files – Annual 2019, the design cue is taken from DragonLords, the British role-playing game fanzine published between 1980 and 1983. It thus moves The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 to a digest format rather than the magazine size of White Dwarf or Imagine and it comes crammed full of the type of content that middle-aged men that will shut themselves away with a cup of tea and wallow in the gaming years of their yesteryear before being asked to put the bins out/do the washing up/take one of their offspring to football, music lessons, and the like.

Opening with an editorial which highlights the role of fanzines in providing a community for gamers—they were the Internet before the Internet—The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 gets down to gaming goodness. It opens Neil Benson’s ‘OSR this, OSR that, but what is it?’, which provides an explanation of what the Old School Renaissance is and what it sets out to do. It points to the source for the Old School Renaissance, that is, early Dungeons & Dragons, and explains the key points of creating and playing in the movement. So simple, quick Player Character generation; freedom of play in terms of hexcrawls and sandcrawls, and the like; emphasises player agency in solving problems rather than relying on skill rolls, and so on. There are eight of these points, but Benson does not simply list them, but sets them out as a quest undertaken by an adventuring party to learn what the OSR. This makes the piece much more entertaining than a simple explanation of what the Old School Renaissance would otherwise have been. It includes a short list of sample retroclones and is accompanied by a thumbnail review of Chris Gonnerman’s Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, written by Shannon Ferguson.

A similar convention is used to explain what one of the oldest roleplaying games is. ‘A Bluffer’s Guide to Tékumel’ is actually written by me (and in truth, I had forgotten I had written the piece) and is presented as an in-game monologue delivered by a minor bureaucrat to a barbarian who knows nothing of the setting for Professor M.A.R. Barker’s Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne. It is all a bit knowing and po-faced, but provides a simple enough introduction.

The nostalgia in The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 begins in earnest with Cris Watkins’ ‘Games Master Immortality’. It is about bad, but funny memories of Player Character deaths brought about by the Game Master simply getting it wrong. Part-Game Master advice, part-hoary old war stories, such as over the course of a campaign driving the Player Characters so paranoid that when a new player turns up with a new character, their first reaction is to not trust the character and then turn on him when his player seems to confirm their suspicions. Yes, it is cruel, but at the same time funny, though ultimately best not necessarily implemented in a Game Master’s campaign as not every player may see the funny side.

The nostalgia continues with both Nick Edwards and Alan Gairey taking a look back at Judges Guild. First with Nick Edwards’ ‘The Guilded Age – Thoughts on Judges Guild’ which examines the delights of City State of the Invincible Overlord which forced him to create his own content, in the main a thief and crime-based campaign much like the Lankhmar setting of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novels. Although the author would make further purchases of Judges Guild titles, and praises those that he likes, he has since returned to the City State of the Invincible Overlord for other campaigns and City State of the Invincible Overlord would also influence his preference in gaming for cities rather than dungeons! Alan Gairey also focuses on the one title from Judges Guild with ‘An Ode to Inferno: Abandon hope all ye that enter…’, which is the 1980 module, Inferno. This presented the first four circles of Hell as a challenging dungeon and the author ran it several times, each time nearly ending in the death of the whole party. The article comes to rather droll end, but is accompanied by a list of some of the other better titles published by the prolific Judges Guild, all of which in their way, would be worthy of articles such as these two. 

The feature piece in The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 is ‘Steel Hearts & Straight Razors’. Written by Roger Coe, this is a scenario for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but not the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay of the nineteen eighties. Rather it is for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment. Almost thirty pages in length and thus almost half of the fanzine, ‘Steel Hearts & Straight Razors’ is a convoluted murder mystery and conspiracy thriller, involving guild rivalries, hair stylists, cultists, and ecumenical matters, all specifically designed to be set in the city or large town of the Game Master’s choice. It opens with a dangerous encounter chanced upon by the Player Characters between a blue glowing demon-man-thing and a poorly victim. The scene ends with both demon and victim dead, which leaves the Player Characters with a problem or two. The demon was once a man, so who was he? Who was the victim and what was the meaning of his dying words? Investigation will reveal more and more, perhaps initially with the Player Characters attempting to avoid the City Watch—especially if they happen to be carrying either of the corpses with them, then finding employment from a surprising quarter, and more. There is a fair bit going on in this scenario and the Player Characters will really need to dig deep to discover some the city’s secrets, but in true Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay fashion, their investigation will take them from lows of society to the heights and back again, revealing perfidious goings on. Although it does feel a bit crammed in, ‘Steel Hearts & Straight Razors’ is a gem of a scenario, offering lots of opportunity for combat, investigation, and roleplaying, adeptly hitting all of the signature notes you would want in a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay scenario, but without being location specific.

Sean Hillman gets systems specific with ‘A Short History of the Long Dice – The story of percentage based games’. It is more of an overview than anything else, too brief to provide any real insight. A better article might have explored more of the nuances between the various roleplaying games to have used percentile dice. Newt Newport details the history of his own company with ’10 Years of D101 Games’, the article sadly missing some text in true fanzine fashion, but nevertheless an enjoyable and informative piece. Perhaps it could have done with a bibliography, though that would have made it less personal.

The nostalgia continues with the memories of Niall Hunt and others of their gaming youth with ‘Gaming in the Shire’ and the founding and running of Evesham Roleplaying Association. There is a certain pleasure to be had here in reading reminiscences similar to your own—and of course those of The Grognard Files podcast files hosts—and of course, having them in print. Back in The Grognard Files – Annual 2018, ‘Keharr’ presented ‘Pendragon: City of Legions’, a fascinating exploration of his Pendragon PBEM set in the northwest of England. For this issue he provides not so much an update, but a sort of guide to running such a thing with ‘How to Fry your Fish-Fingers – Lessons learnt from running a Cheshire Pendragon Play By Email’. The advice is both applicable to Pendragon PBEM games and non- Pendragon PBEM games, such as taking disagreements offline, be clear about the rules, listen to your players, and much more. There are still some personal touches and it is clear from the article that the author and his players continue to enjoy running and playing the PBEM.

Lastly, ‘All That Glitters…’ by Jerry Nuckolls, compares and contrasts the two versions of the classic superhero roleplaying game, Golden Heroes, by Simon Burley and Peter Haines. One is their self-published version from 1982, the other the Games Workshop version from 1984. The review as such, does lack illustrations, barring a suitably fanzine-ish cartoon that has a sly dig at Games Workshop, but is a fascinating read because it is often forgotten that there even was a self-published version. What the article highlights is that the differences between the two are relatively minor. Which only goes to show how good the self-published version was that the authors and Games Workshop did not have to do a great deal to bring the version we know to print.

Physically, The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 has a rough quality to it, by design as much as by accident. It needs an edit here and there and feels alternatively cramped and overly spacious in places. It is lightly illustrated, but they are generally well handled, and the cartography for the scenario, ‘Steel Hearts & Straight Razors’, is excellent. Similarly, the wraparound cover from Russ Nicholson is superb.

As with previous issues, The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 delivers a good mix of nostalgia, opinion, and a little bit of gaming content. Indeed, pride of place goes to that gaming content, the scenario, ‘Steel Hearts & Straight Razors’, which is worth the price of the fanzine alone. It is a formula which The Armchair Adventurers have followed before—and it works. It would be fantastic to see this issue made available to the wider gaming hobby, perhaps for a decent cause much like The Grognard Files – Annual 2017, but in the meantime, The Grognard Files – Annual 2019 and further issues are bonus for supporting The Grognard Files podcast.

Cthulhu Classics IX

From one week to the next, Reviews from R’lyeh writes reviews of new games and supplements with an emphasis on Call of Cthulhu and other games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. This series concentrates on Call of Cthulhu and other games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but not those recently released, but those of the past. There have been innumerable titles published over the years and this is an opportunity to appraise them anew, often decades after they were first released.

Having looked at the releases from Games Workshop, culminating with Green and Pleasant Land: The British 1920s-30s Cthulhu Source Pack, Reviews from R’lyeh now moves on to another early licensee for Chaosium, Inc. This is T.O.M.E. or Theatre of the Mind Enterprises, a publisher best known for the titles it released for use with Call of Cthulhu and Gardasiyal: Adventures in Tékumel, the 1990s roleplaying game set in the world of Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne. Between 1983 and 1984, T.O.M.E. would publish five collections of scenarios—The Arkham Evil, Death In Dunwich, Pursuit To Kadath, Whispers From The Abyss And Other Tales, and Glozel Est Authentique!—for use with Call of Cthulhu, Second Edition. It is the third of these titles, Pursuit to Kadath,  which is the subject of this review.

Pursuit to Kadath consists of two separate scenarios. The longer of the two is the titular ‘Pursuit to Kadath’, whilst the bonus, much shorter scenario is ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’, which can be run after ‘Pursuit to Kadath’. From the outset, the title itself suggests the Dreamlands and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, if not the city located either north or below, the plateau of Leng. However, Pursuit to Kadath has nothing do with Kadath, the title here referring to a fictional location in Turkey. The use of the title then, is symptomatic of many of the early campaigns and anthologies for Call of Cthulhu, which would include Lovecraftian references in their titles, but not make use of them in their actual content. That said, apart from Horror on the Orient Express, the two scenarios found in the pages of Pursuit to Kadath are some of the very few to be actually set in Turkey. Title issues aside, the very good news is that Pursuit to Kadath is very much a huge improvement over the first two titles from the publisher. Both The Arkham Evil and Death in Dunwich have deservedly poor reputations because essentially, they are early attempts at writing scenarios for Call of Cthulhu, which simply do not work. Or at least, require a great deal of effort to make work and even then, not necessarily work to the greatest of effects. In comparison, Pursuit to Kadath is a huge improvement because it has a plot which makes sense. It is far from a perfect plot, but it makes sense. It also has an intriguing beginning and it also comes with a lot of historical background and information. However, like its forebears, Pursuit to Kadath is not without its issues. 

Set in 1923, Pursuit to Kadath casts the Investigators as students at Miskatonic University, who are also members of The Sunday Group, a prestigious social club. They may be rich enough to be members, but if not, they may have been sponsored for membership on academic merit. The scenario opens with the Investigators in the library when Darryl Stewart, a fellow member, shows then a weird photograph which has appeared on the front page of a newspaper. The caption on the photograph reads, “FLYING ARM!” and purports to show a bloodied arm which seems to have been brutally ripped from the shoulder of a policeman who subsequently died and is now floating the air. Several witnesses, including the photographer, have sworn that this is what they saw, but both Darryl and the Investigators can see another figure in the photograph and instead the arm floating in the air, it is firmly in the grasp of this figure, a figure which looks awfully like Nils Lindstrom, fellow student and Sunday Club member, and son of a Chicago senator. Further, in the photograph, Lindstrom is holding a bag used by 1st National Bank to transport money and there is a separate report of a bank robbery on the front page. So did the normally shy, mild-mannered Lindstrom rob the bank and if so why? And what drove him to commit such an act of sheer bloody violence? And why can the Investigators see him in the photograph and not others?

In addition, as fellow members of the Sunday Club, the Investigators have attended the same social events as Lindstrom, including a party at which they will recall strange events took place. Many of the attendees, including Lindstrom and the Player Characters, were hypnotised, and Lindstrom had a strange reaction. This was followed by a seance. Could this account for his now apparently even stranger behaviour? As they look into his strange behaviour and track his activities, the Investigators will find themselves following his trail from Boston to New York, where he seems to be inveigling himself into local high society and perhaps courting a young lady his family regards as a suitable match. Mundane help comes in the form of Lindstrom’s father who also wants to know what his son is doing, whilst Mythos help—or at least advice—comes from a strange dream with the Serpent Man who previously appeared in The Arkham Evil. Ultimately, Lindstrom does not tarry in New York for long, setting sail across the Atlantic towards the Belgian Congo with the Investigators on his tail. The Investigators are expected to follow, but towards the end of the crossing, the captain of Lindstrom’s vessel urgently broadcasts a message warning that he has been forced to divert to Turkey.

When the Investigators reach Turkey, they encounter one of the great set pieces in ‘Pursuit to Kadath’. This is the fishing port of Selefko, located on Turkey’s southern coast, Lindstrom’s vessel beached and broken on the shore, the town seemingly abandoned, but with the sound of the call to prayer emanating from the town’s mosque. The only inhabitant is Ahmed Mohammed Mohammed, a mighty, Anglophobic, scimitar- and musket-wielding warrior, who has been sent to deal with the devils who came ashore in Selefko and began preying upon the town’s inhabitants. He will brook no interference from the Investigators, but potentially, could become an ally, if only temporarily, in tracking down the source of the threat which befell Selefko. Ultimately, the Investigators will climb up Alacadaq Mountain on Lindstrom’s trail and descend into the mountain to face him before he can bring about final plans.

At its heart, ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ is a chase scenario. The Investigators start the scenario on Lindstrom’s trail and follow it all the way to Turkey, only catching up with the oddly behaving student in the scenario’s final scene inside Alacadaq Mountain. And what a richly detailed trail it is! Strange behaviour, a bank robbery, missing memories, bloody murder after bloody murder, an odd artefact, a diplomatic incident, and a vampire showdown on the streets of Selefko! Which makes for a very heavily plotted scenario. In fact, Pursuit to Kadath is not only a very heavily plotted scenario, but a scenario which is heavily plotted twice—and heavily pre-plotted at that! 

The issue is that the first half of the scenario is devoted to explaining both plot and background, along with any necessary stats, and so is much of the second half—though to a lesser extent. Further, a fair degree of the beginning investigation is done as a flashback, which involves a fair degree of exposition. What the Keeper is meant to do is follow the plot in the second half, but draw heavily from the first, but what it does instead, is effectively double the effort required to run Pursuit to Kadath. Especially in its preparation.

The heavy double-plotting of ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ is not the scenario’s only problem. The second is getting the Player Characters involved. There are no hooks except, ‘a fellow member of the society you belong to, is acting oddly, so why not for the good of the society, investigate?’ Which is essentially asking the Investigators to investigate because there is a plot there. Later on in the scenario though, NPCs contact the Investigators directly to ask them to continue their enquiries, at which point they have much more motivation. 

Third, in terms of plotting, the scenario’s denouement is severely underwritten with no explanation as to exactly what the Investigators are expected to do to thwart Lindstrom’s plans. A strange artefact would also appear to play a role in the scenario, but no proper explanation of what that role is given, certainly as far as the denouement is concerned. At best, it would appear that the Investigators are expected to rush in, all guns blazing, which feels more Pulp action than Lovecraftian.

The fourth problem is the poor handling of the Mythos in ‘Pursuit to Kadath’. The primary entity involved is Yig and his servants, a set of eleven Dragon Warriors that the Father of Serpents created to fight the other gods. Lindstrom has been possessed by one of these Dragon Warriors—who also appear on the artefact—and cuts a bloody trail from Boston to New York and then onto Turkey in an attempt to prepare himself to summon his master in an underground temple. With the benefit of hindsight and numerous scenarios for Call of Cthulhu and other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, this does not feel like any depiction of Yig and his servants seen anywhere else. Even at the time of the publication of Pursuit to Kadath though, it was noted how much the depiction of the Mythos and its entities differed from that seen in the source fiction and in Call of Cthulhu itself. Elsewhere the inclusion of a Serpent Man makes sense, but a scene involving both Ghouls and a Nightgaunt feels just too much, whilst the creation of vampires feels more Hammer horror than Lovecraftian.

That said, the scenario is very well supported. There is a quick guide to creating students at Miskatonic University, very basic, but years before 1995’s Miskatonic University: The University Guidebook and 2005’s Miskatonic University. This is accompanied by a list of the degree requirements for numerous academic courses at the university, which whilst interesting, is difficult to bring into play and looks wholly arcane to anyone who has not been to an American university. There is a good mix of handouts, some very plain, others made to look like period documents. Some of them though, like a local railway timetable feel superfluous. In addition, there is a sensible guide to hypnotism and what was widely believed about it in the nineteen twenties, a guide to handling languages, and a guide to Turkey in the early nineteen twenties. Overall, lots of useful and interesting material.

Despite these faults, ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ is a big improvement upon the earlier The Arkham Evil and Death in Dunwich. The plot is almost coherent—twice, and the background material is solid and useful. It could be run today, but only with some effort. Not because it is necessarily bad, but because the two plots need to be deconstructed and put back together as ‘a’ plot to provide some much-needed clarity. The Keeper might also want to rework the elements of Mythos, again to add clarity, and then perhaps decide what to do about the vampires. One option would be to push the Pulp elements of the scenario, perhaps enough to use it with Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos. It would require no little effort upon the part of the Keeper, and it is debatable whether that effort is worth it, but ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ is probably the first scenario from T.O.M.E. which has the potential to be worth it.

The bonus scenario in Pursuit to Kadath is ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ by E.S. Erkes. Much shorter than ‘Pursuit to Kadath’, it is again set in 1923 and where ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ ends in Turkey, ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ begins in Turkey. Thus, it could be run as a sequel to ‘Pursuit to Kadath’. The Investigators are hired by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, the leader of Turkey—he would only add Ataturk to his name in 1934–to locate a missing British archaeologist, Quentin Halward. Halward is an expert on Troy and the Turkish government fears that word of his disappearance will cause it undue embarrassment. Halward was last seen in the company of two Russians. This should push the Investigators to make enquiries amongst the Russian community in Istanbul, which quickly involves them in a web of intrigue between the White Russian emigres and the official and unofficial Soviet personal in the city, as well as a strange Islamic sect with a reputation for having worshipped demons. Ultimately, the Investigators’ enquiries should lead them from Troy to the Crimea and Halward’s whereabouts.

‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ is shorter and more direct than ‘Pursuit to Kadath’. It is also very much better written and would be easy to run today, just as it would have been at the time of publication. Its use of the Mythos is better, if only because it is greatly reduced. Really all it does is add a new Mythos race, one which was the basis for the Cyclops legend. Unfortunately, ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ does end in a fight, which is not particularly interesting. However, all of the running around and intrigue in Istanbul with the Russians should be fun to roleplay.

Physically, Pursuit to Kadath is decent enough, or decent enough for 1983. The cover is uninspiring, but the artwork inside—apart from the random skulls used to separate sections, is not too bad. Similarly, some of the handouts are not too bad either, and whilst the maps merely okay, they at least clearly depict what was intended. The use of period maps adds an element of verisimilitude, but are either too small or too dark to really make use of effectively.

—oOo—

Reviews of Pursuit to Kadath at the time of its release, were surprisingly positive. Writing in Fantasy Gamer Number 4 (Feb/Mar 1984), Warren Spector said, “Pursuit to Kadath gets an almost-unqualified rave. TOME has offered so much background material, you don’t even have to play Pursuit to Kadath to get your money’s worth – you can just incorporate all the background information into your own campaign. And they’ve even included a second – albeit brief – scenario in the back. You just can’t ask much more in an RPG module.”

However, when reviewing ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ in particular in White Dwarf 54 (June 1984), Nic Grecas wrote that, “There is one other aspect of this scenario which caused me some disquiet — the background mythos which is presented in this scenario in respect of a certain deity (to say which one would, of course, spoil a rather large amount of the scenario’s mystery) seems to me to be at odds with Lovecraft’s own writings and also with some of the information in the main rules. Fortunately this forms a part of the background for the keeper only and with very little work can be reconciled with Lovecraft and Chaosium. This was a regrettable lapse on the part of TOME, but in a game system which was written as a ‘labour of love’ by a group of people who strove to recapture the atmosphere of brooding terror found in  Lovecraft’s work, it is fortunate that these misconceptions do not intrude into the body of the scenario.” He concluded though, that “These points apart, Pursuit to Kadath is a fine scenario which, if well managed, can produce and excellent ‘crescendo of terror’, but beware; the final scene could be a terminal experience for many of the investigators!”. He was equally as positive about ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ and of Pursuit to Kadath in general that, “All in all, both scenarios are most creditable.” before awarding it eight out of ten.

Similarly, William A. Barton would highlight the differences between the Mythos of Pursuit to Kadath and its portrayal elsewhere, when he reviewed all five of the Call of Cthulhu titles from T.O.M.E. in Space Gamer #71 (Nov/Dec 1984) with ‘Whispers of Things Lovecraftian: TOME’s Cthulhu Modules’. In providing an overview of the line published to date before reviewing, the fourth release from T.O.M.E., Whispers from the Abyss and Other Tales, he wrote, “TOME’s offerings are all intended for CoC, though, in some instances, the Cthulhoid connection has been tenuous at the best. … This is a tendency for which TOME has received some criticism.” before continuing with, “Pursuit to Kadath was TOME’s worst offender in this regard. While the main scenario and shorter bonus, The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali, did have more Cthulhian references than their predecessor — including Nyarlathotep, the Al-Azif, Yig, Father of Serpents, and a new Cthulhoid race, the Alskali (one-eyed giant cyclops) —  the mix of non-Mythos occult materials were even more pronounced. Yig, in particular, was distorted beyond almost beyond recognition as far as any past references. The greatest criticism that can be leveled against this scenario, however, is its name: In the stories of Lovecraft and his imitators, Kadath was the mythical land of dreams — or a blasted plateau in the cold waste — as noted in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Yet in Pursuit, the Kadath of the title is a town in Turkey, not the Lovecraftian Kadath at all. According to Rawlings,*TOME felt that a scenario set in the surreal Kadath of the Mythos would be too difficult to do right, so they opted for the more concrete setting of the “real” Kadath. The title was not an intentional deception.”

* Presumably Steve Rawling, who provided extra content for Pursuit to Kadath.

Pursuit to Kadath was awarded three out of four stars by Steve List in Different Worlds issue 38 (Jan/Feb 1985), who wrote, “In Pursuit To Kadath, TOME has produced an excellent package of material for Cthulhu players and added some interesting lore to the ‘things Man was not meant to know.’ It is well worth acquiring.”

—oOo—

It is surprising that Pursuit to Kadath received so much praise at the time of its publication. Perhaps we have become spoiled by the quality of the content which is being written for Call of Cthulhu, and has been written for Call of Cthulhu over the years. Even so, better content was being written than Pursuit to Kadath in 1983. Of the two scenarios in this volume,  ‘The All-Seeing Eye of the Alskali’ is merely okay, but ‘Pursuit to Kadath’ is a double-stranded suety mess that is overly plotted, suffers from a Mythos mélange, and is underdeveloped where it counts. And yet, Pursuit to Kadath is not irredeemably terrible, just not irredeemably bad enough that its potential can still be seen and that you wish it could have been better.

Halloween Horror '86

The Dare is a Call of Cthulhu scenario which very much wears its influences on its sleeve. It is a horror scenario of Cosmic Horror, so obviously H.P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu. It is a haunted house scenario, so obviously any number of haunted house horror films and short stories, but also—just a little bit, ‘The Haunting’, the classic introductory scenario for Call of Cthulhu, which goes all of the way back to 1980 and Call of Cthulhu, First Edition. It is inspired by Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition, Call of Cthulhu, Fourth Edition, and Call of Cthulhu, Fifth Edition—certainly for its look. It is inspired by the horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s, including Halloween, Poltergeist, Evil Dead, The Lost Boys, and more. Above all, it is inspired by the kids’ adventure and kids in peril films of the 1980s, so The Goonies, Stand By Me, Monster Squad, E.T., and more. This rich source of inspiration has been mined in recent years by Roleplaying Games such as Free League Publishing’s Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was, Renegade Game Studios’ Kids on Bikes, and Bloat Games’ Dark Places & Demogorgons: The Roleplaying Game, but also most obviously on the silver screen by Stranger Things.

So The Dare is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, in which the players take the role of preteens who are dared by a school bully to enter a haunted house on Halloween. Published by Sentinel Hill Press—best known as the publisher of the Arkham Gazette, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, The Dare is written by Call of Cthulhu veteran Kevin Ross. Designed as a one-shot, ideally for four or five kids and ideally to be played on Halloween, it began life as a tournament scenario, which has now been updated to be run for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. As a one shot set in the eighties, The Dare works as a palette cleanser for veteran players, likely going all in on the period motifs—Sony Walkman, leg warmers, genre knowledge gleaned from video nasties, and so on, but it also works as an introduction to Call of Cthulhu for new players, made all the easier by its parred back ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ mechanics designed to fit the genre. It could in fact, be the defining experience with Cosmic Horror for the kid investigators, who as adults grow up to become investigators into the Mythos in the nineties, noughties, and beyond!

The set-up for The Dare is simple. School bully Roger Simmons has dared several of his victims to enter the Barnaker House, an abandoned and dilapidated home on the edge of town, and spend not just any night there, but Halloween! As the house wheezes and groans around them, their senses assaulted by the stench of mould and decay, of animal urine and faeces, the sound of scuttling in the walls and from room to room as the light from their torches skitter about them, a storm blows up and it looks like the investigators are there for the long haul… As they suffer the taunts and jibes of their bully, will the investigators find out if the house is really haunted? What horrors await them as they try to last the night?

To support this, The Dare is fully plotted out together with floor plans of the Barnaker House, stats and descriptions of all of the NPCs and the monsters. This includes suggestions as to what the NPCs will do location from location, but also gives suggestions as to how to adjust the tone of the scenario from location to location. These are set at the US film ratings of PG and R, the former minimising the violence, the gore, and the death, emphasising menace and anxiety, the latter being more visceral in its inclusion of gore, violence, and injury. Essentially, the difference between The Goonies and Evil Dead.

Mechanically, The Dare uses the Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition rules. It presents the core rules to the roleplaying  game, but it also strips them back to present what it calls ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’, a simplified version of the rules. Notably, the rules condense the eighty or so skills of Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition down to just fifteen. So instead of Psychology, Be a Pal, Be Bossy rather than Intimidate and Persuade, Sneaky in place of Sleight of Hand and Stealth, and Spooky Stuff rather than Occult and Cthulhu Mythos. The most notable addition to these skills is Play with Matches, which covers setting things alight, building traps, using chemicals, and so on, all of which should serve as a spur for the investigators’ invention. Overall, these stripped-down rules could easily be used to run other ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ type scenarios, or even slotted into an anthology of ‘Gateway’-type scenarios in which the investigators are kids.

Rounding out The Dare is a short essay by Brian M. Sammons, ‘Grab the Machete or: How I Learned to Stop Going Insane and Love 80s Horror Movies’. It provides a brief overview of the genre and suggests ten films that the Keeper and her players should watch as inspiration. The Dare also comes with ten ready-to-play ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ investigators. These are all designed to be played as girls or boys, and come with alternative names and space for boy or girl photos. There are some thirty or illustrations included in the pages of The Dare—each based upon a photograph submitted by one of the Kickstarter backers, which can be used by the players to illustrate their kid.

In terms of its horror, The Dare really revolves around its PG and R ratings and the classic confined space of the haunted house. Played using just the PG rating and it would even work as a scare ridden one-shot suitable for a younger, even preteen audience. Switched to the R rating and The Dare becomes a more visceral affair, much in the mode of the film It—though without the coulrophobia—and so is better suited for mature players. For the Keeper there are plenty of staging notes throughout, though she will need to handle one NPC with care. One option might be for the NPC to be played as a Player Character Investigator working hand-in-hand with the Keeper, but if not, and the players work out what is going on beforehand, it really is up to them to roleplay within the genre until their Investigators know. 

Physically, The Dare stands out because although written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the layout for it is of Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition. It not only fits the period setting of the scenario, but it fits the scenario’s sense of nostalgia too and gives it a certain, delightful charm. The maps are perhaps a little plain and it needs a slight edit in places, but the artwork is excellent. The theme is applied to the front and back cover, which is done as the cover of a video cassette.

The Dare is a superb one-shot, one that manages the odd combination of being both nasty and charming, all infused with eighties nostalgia, from start to finish. Not just in the style of the story, its tone, and set-up, which can be creepy or horrible depending on the rating selected, but very much with its look. The Dare also suggests a style of play and provides a set of mechanics to support that, both of which deserve revisiting in future releases. Whether you are visiting the eighties for the first time or going back again for another go around, The Dare successfully double dares you with a one-shot of Halloween horror.

Your Loop Starter

As its title suggests, the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is an introductory boxed set for Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was. Published by the Swedish publisher, Free League Publishing, this is the roleplaying game based on the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, in which young teenagers explore the Sweden of an alternate childhood. It is rural small-town Sweden, but one in which its streets, woods and fields, and skies and seas are populated by robots, gravitic tractors and freighters, strange sensor devices, and even creatures from the long past. To the inhabitants of this landscape, this is all perfectly normal—at least to the adults. To the children of this landscape, this technology is a thing of fascination, of wonderment, and of the strangeness that often only they can see. In Tales from the Loop, it is often this technology that is the cause of the adventures that the children—the player characters—will have away from their mundane lives at home and at school.

Specifically, Tales from the Loop is set on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, which lies to the west of Stockholm. This is the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi. In addition, the Iwasaka corporation of Japan has perfected self-balancing machines, leading to the deployment of robots in the military, security, industrial, and civilian sectors and these robots are employed throughout the Loop and its surrounds. Meanwhile, the skies are filled with ‘magnetrine vessels’, freighters and slow liners whose engines repel against the Earth’s magnetic field, an effect only possible in northern latitudes. There are notes detailing the particulars of life in Sweden in the 1980s, but the culture is radically different—especially in terms of its (almost Socialist) government—to that of the USA and so Tales from the Loop includes an American counterpart to The Loop, this time located under Boulder City in the Mojave Desert in Nevada, near the Hoover Dam. Here the particle accelerator is operated by the Department of Advanced Research into Technology and there is an extensive exchange programme in terms of personnel and knowledge between the staff of both ‘loops’. Similarly, the description of Boulder City and its Loop include plenty of notes on life in the 1980s and as much as the two cultures are different, there are plenty of similarities between the two.

Since its publication in 2017, Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was has won many awards and Tales from the Loop itself has been developed into a television series to view on Amazon Prime . The Tales from the Loop Starter Set is released in time to coincide with the release of the television series and is designed introduce roleplayers to the world of the roleplaying game—whether they have watched the television series and want to try Tales from the Loop or are experienced roleplayers wanting to try something different. It comes with everything necessary for the Game Master to present—and both Game Master and players alike—to roleplay a mystery within the Loop over the course of an evening or two.

The Tales from the Loop Starter Set comes in a surprisingly sturdy box. Open up and the first thing you see is a set of Tales from the Loop dice—some ten in all, with the number six on each of them replaced with the symbol for Riksenergi, the Swedish government agency which built and ran the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics or ‘The Loop’. Underneath that is a double-sided map of the region around the Loop. Roughly A3 in size, this depicted the region of Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren on the main side, whilst on the other is marked the area around Boulder City, Nevada. The map is full colour and printed on thick paper. Below that there are five sheets, one for each of the five pre-generated player characters. Marked ‘Kid 1’ through ‘Kid 5’, they are again double-sided and include a Popular Kid, a Weirdo, a Jock, a Computer Geek, and a Bookworm. All five are part of the same gang and have connected relationships, and they have background and illustration on the front and the stats on the back. Like Tales from the Loop, they give suggestions which pertain to both the Swedish and the American Loops. Here this consists of names, so the player character Frederik is given the name Chad when playing in the American setting.

Lastly, there are two books in the Tales from the Loop Starter Set. These are the ‘Rules’ and ‘The Recycled Boy’ booklets. The former presents the game’s rules and explains how Tales from the Loop is played, and is marked, ‘Read This First’. The latter contains the scenario and is marked ‘For The Gamemaster Only’. The ‘Rules’ covers everything in four chapters—‘Welcome to the Loop’, ‘The Age of the Loop’, ‘The Kids’, and ‘Trouble’. The first of these, ‘Welcome to the Loop’, introduces the setting of Tales from the Loop and explains what roleplaying is. It does decent job and is backed up in the examples of play throughout the book. It also gives and explains the ‘Principles of the Loop’, essentially the six fundamental elements of the setting which set it apart from other roleplaying games. These are that ‘Your home town is full of strange and fantastic things’, ‘Everyday life is dull and unforgiving’, ‘Adults are out of reach and out of touch’, ‘The Land of the dangerous, but kids will not die’, ‘The game is played scene by scene’, and ‘The world is described collaboratively’. These nicely sum up the world of the Loop, that Kids will explore a world just outside their homes which is full of scientific marvels and mysteries, one that the Adults are unlikely to really appreciate, being wrapped up in their problems and dramas—problems and dramas which are likely to have an impact on the Kids on an ongoing basis. Although dangerous—the Kids can be robbed, beaten up, mocked, and so on, they cannot be killed (though they can be forced to leave the game due to trauma). The collaborative element of play means that not only can the Game Master set scenes, she can ask her players to do so too, and she can also ask the players to describe and add elements to the setting too. What this means is that Tales from the Loop is a game in which the story is played out together, some of the setting elements are worked out together as well.

 ‘The Age of the Loop’ describes the setting for the Swedish and the American Loops. As such, anyone familiar with the contents of Tales from the Loop will recognise the much shorter descriptions given here. Here though it sets the scene for the scenario to come rather than the full game, so is done in broader strokes. For anyone new to roleplaying or new to Tales from the Loop, perhaps what is interesting here are the cultural and political differences between Sweden and the U.S.A. Of the two, the Swedish Loop is the more interesting because it is different, the outlook and attitudes of its inhabitants presenting more of a roleplaying challenge because of the differences. Essentially, despite the presence of the Loop making many things different, the American Loop still feels too familiar from film and television, so too easy to fall into clichés.

The shortest chapter is ‘The Kids’. This describes what the various elements on the character sheets are—age, attributes, skills, Luck points, items, Drives, Problems, Pride, Relationships, and Conditions—and how they affect game play. Each Kid has four attributes—Body, Tech, Heart, and Mind—and each of these has three associated skills. Both are rated between one and five. Luck points are used to reroll dice and younger Kids have more Luck points than older Kids as they are simply luckier. Items can dice if appropriate to the situation, a Drive pushes a Kid to act and to investigate mysteries, a Problem is a personal thing related to a Kid’s home life and will get him into Trouble, Pride is what a Kid values and can get a Kid into Trouble as well as help him, and Relationships are between the other Kids in the gang as well as another NPC. So Dave or Isak might have the Drive of ‘I am fascinated by self-balancing machines, I’ve always wanted a robot of my own’, the Problem of ‘My parents are getting a divorce, but my dad hasn’t moved out yet’, and the Pride of ‘I know how that works’. Dave’s item might be an electronics toolkit. All of the various elements of a Kid are clearly explained and easy to understand.

Lastly, almost a third of the ‘Rules’ is devoted to the last chapter—‘Troubles’. This explains how the dice work and the dice pool mechanics in both Tales from the Loop and Tales from the Loop Starter Set. Known as the ‘Year Zero’ mechanics, dice pools are formed from a combination of a Kid’s attribute and appropriate skill, or just the latter if no skill applies. The player rolls the Tales from the Loop dice and if a six—or a Riksenergi symbol—comes up, the Kid succeeds. Failures can complicate situations or impose a Condition upon a Kid, like Upset or Exhausted, but a player can push a roll and get a reroll, though this is not without its consequences. Typically, only one Riksenergi symbol is needed for a Kid to succeed, but more challenging Trouble may require more. Sometimes extra successes can be used to add further narrative elements to play, such as to find out more information about a machine and its maker, not only beat a bully, but upset him, and so forth. Lastly, the ‘Troubles’ explains how the game’s skills work and give some bonus effects for those extra Successes.

‘The Recycled Boy’ is half the length of ‘Rules’ and contains the scenario of the same name. It presents a four or five scene mystery which can be played out in a session or two. Written to be run in either the Swedish or the American Loop, it concerns a fellow student at the pre-generated characters’ school who has begun acting oddly. Its plot feels suitably eighties, being too dissimilar to films of the period, though perhaps the title of the scenario might be a bit knowing. Either way, it is a good first scenario for Tales from the Loop, presenting a problem which can be best solved through roleplaying rather than other means and it would be easy for a Game Master to add it to her campaign.

Physically, the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is well presented. Notably both books are presented on glossy paper rather than the matt paper of the Tales of the Loop core rulebook. The package as a whole does need a slight edit in places, but throughout, is illustrated with Simon Stålenhag’s fantastic artwork. Everything is of a high quality and presents an attractive product, especially if you have not looked at a roleplaying book before.

However, there is a problem with the Tales from the Loop Starter Set and it is very simple. There is just the one scenario. What this means is that there is not the easy, next step to take after playing ‘The Recycled Boy’. Now of course, there is the Tales of the Loop core rulebook and Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries, but another scenario would support the continued interest of the Game Master and her players more immediately rather than forcing them to cast around for their next scenario. As good as the scenario is in Tales from the Loop Starter Set, it is difficult not to compare it with other recent starter or beginner boxed sets and be somewhat disappointed because they offer more value for money. Similarly, if a gaming group already plays Tales from the Loop, then the Tales from the Loop Starter Set only provides the one scenario—though one which is only available in the Tales from the Loop Starter Set—and so does not offer as much value for money as it could. That said, it comes with another set of dice for the game and good maps of each Loops, as well as the scenario.

Yet the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is a solid, well-presented package. As an introduction to the alternate, fantastic world of Simon Stålenhag’s artwork and the roleplaying game based on it, the Tales from the Loop Starter Set is enjoyably accessible and attractive, presenting a good first step into an eighties that never were.

Tales from your Teenage years that never were

By the 1980s, Sweden had become a world leading centre of science and technology, centred on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, east of Stockholm which are the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi. The Japanese Iwasaka corporation had perfected self-balancing machines, followed by Soviet advances in Artificial Intelligence in the late eighties, leading to the deployment of robots in the military, security, industrial, and civilian sectors and these robots were employed throughout the Loop and its surrounds. Meanwhile, the skies were filled with ‘magnetrine vessels’, freighters and slow liners whose engines repel against the Earth’s magnetic field, an effect only possible in northern latitudes. These robots, the Loop, and the Mysteries associated with it are sources of endless fascination for the young inhabitants of Mälaröarna, just as the robots, the Loop, and Mysteries of its sister facility operated by the Department of Advanced Research into Technology in the USA are for the young inhabitants of Boulder City in the Mojave Desert in Nevada, near the Hoover Dam. All of this is the set-up for Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was, the Swedish roleplaying game based on Simon Stålenhag’s artwork, and published by Free League and distributed in English by Modiphius Entertainment, which would win the ENnie award for Best Game, Best Setting, Best Writing, Best Internal Art, and Product of the Year in 2017!

All that changed in the nineties. In 1994, the northern part of Färingsö—known as the Black Lake Lands—in the Mälaröarna, hot, brown liquid bubbled up out of the ground, forcing an evacuation that would last for years. This ‘Mälarö Leak’ also flooded the Loop, endangering years of research, the resulting scandal leading to the Swedish government to shut down Riksenergi and sell the Loop to the private Krafta Corp. It would be followed a year later by a collapse of the Hoover Dam in the USA and the flooding of the Nevada Loop. Robots at both Loops are then beset by a strange organic cancer and by the time a cause is determined, self-balancing robot production has plummeted and many manufacturers have gone out of business. This was followed by the establishment of Polnaya Solidarnost, an independent nation of robots in the Urals in Russia, subsequently destroyed in a Moscow-directed nuclear strike and anti-AI pogroms. All of which would spur an economic crisis in the West. Meanwhile the inhabitants of Mälaröarna—many of them former employees of the Loop—suffer from depression, personality changes, divorces, gambling disorders, and more… 

Taking place in the mid to late nineties, this is the set-up for Things from the Flood, the sequel to Tales from the Loop, the roleplaying game in which players take the roles of Kids between ten and fifteen years of age who looked out on the landscape of Mälaröarna as a source of fascination, wonderment, and strangeness. For the Teenagers of Things from the Flood, watching The X-Files and MTV, listening to Nirvana and the Wu-Tang Clan, playing the dark roleplaying game Kult, and dialling up for their first foray onto the Internet, that landscape is still filled with fascination, wonderment, and strangeness. Yet not only has that strangeness come home and possibly affected members of their families, the fascination, wonderment, and strangeness is blighted by the horror of what might have happened in the Loop. 

In moving on from Tales from the Loop to Things from the Flood, the new roleplaying game adheres to a set of six principles, the first of which is that as the events of the new decade progress, ‘Everything changes, everything falls apart’. The player characters are Teenagers, so ‘neither kids nor adults’, aged between fourteen and nineteen years old, and their ‘Everyday life is full of demands, boredom, and conflict’. All three elements of the latter principle will manifest in play as part of the Teenagers’ lives at school, at home, and in their exploration of the Loop’s Mysteries. Another principle is that ‘The Mysteries are exciting but dangerous, and only you [the Teenagers] can stop them’. The last two principles relate to game play in that ‘The game is played scene by scene’ and ‘The world is described collaboratively’.

Although Things from the Flood is a sequel to Tales from the Loop, it is not a direct sequel in that a player could take his Kid straight from the eighties of Tales from the Loop and have him become a Teenager of Things from the Flood. He could though,  redesign him as an older Teenager, based on the Kid he played in Tales from the Loop. With either new Teenagers or adapted Kids, both Game Master and players alike will find two things different about Things from the Flood. First, unlike in Tales from the Loop, Teenagers can die in Things from the Flood. They will suffer from a series of Scars—physical, emotional, and mental—first, but investigating the Mysteries of the Loop and the Evacuation Area is dangerous and potentially fatal. Second, the area of the Loop, whether the one under Mälaröarna or the other under Boulder City, can be played out as a Mystery Landscape.

The Mystery Landscape is what the Old School Renaissance would call a ‘Sandbox’. Instead of it being populated by encounters and monsters and villages and so on a la Dungeons & Dragons, in Things from the Flood, the Mystery Landscape is filled with interesting, even intriguing locations and associated hooks which relate to various Mysteries, each of which has the capacity to pull the Teenagers into one of these Mysteries. Once a Mystery is resolved, the Game Master can add more, so extending the life of a campaign. The Mystery Landscape is a more organic device, less constrained than a simple one-shot or mini-campaign. There is scope here for collaborative play—in addition to players requesting the type of personal scenes they want their Teenagers to have with their friends and family, typically at the beginning or end of a scenario—with each player becoming the Game Master for particular locations and running scenes there involving the other Teenagers rather than the Game Master. Of course, a  Mystery Landscape could just be in place as the Teenagers follow a longer deeper plot, with the other Mysteries serving almost as ‘side quests’.

As with the Kids in Tales from the Loop, the Teenagers from Things from the Flood are archetypes or Types—Hacker, Jock, Lone Wolf, Motorhead, Party Animal, Raver, Rocker, Seeker, Snob, or Street Kid—who have two lives. In one they go to school, do homework, spend—not always happy—time with their family, their friends, and so on. In the other, they explore the landscape and its ‘Mysteries’ around them with their friends. As thrilling and as fraught with danger as these Mysteries are, the adults will never believe the Teenagers—until it is too late, of course and either they have solved it or one of their number has been killed (or both). If the Game Master is running a Mystery Landscape, then the Teenager will also have one or two hooks which help pull the Teenager (and his friends) into a Mystery or two.

Each archetype provides a Kid with three key skills, plus options in terms of iconic items, problems, drives, shame, relationships to the other Teenagers and NPCs, Hooks and an anchor. For example, the key skills for the Snob Type are Charm, Contact, and Comprehend. An Iconic Item might be a set of lock-picks or a Frisbee, the problem that my sibling accused one of my parents of terrible things, the drive to collect ideas for a book or movie script, and the shame that you vomit after eating to feel better. A relationship with another Teenager might be that he thinks another is hot or he is tired of being questioned by him, whilst a relationship with an NPC might be that a shady dude is doing something illegal with her dad or the most popular guy in school wants me to deal drugs. Lastly, an Anchor, the person to whom a Teenager will go to for emotional reassurance or support, might be a shrink or an older hacker.

To create a Teenager, a player first chooses a Type and then decides on his age, between fourteen and nineteen years of age—the latter the age when the Teenager becomes an adult and essentially retires from investigating Mysteries. Fourteen points are distributed between the four stats—Body, Tech, Heart, and Mind, with another ten points assigned to skills. The maximum is three for the Type’s key skills and one for other skills. The player then chooses the Teeenager’s Iconic Item, Problem, Drive, Shame, Relationships, and Anchor from those listed for the archetype, or makes them up himself. 

Stina

Archetype: Motorhead

Iconic Item: Modified Moped

Problem: People at school have found out what happened to me and my sister when we were kids.

Drive: I’m an adrenaline junkie.

Shame: I’m the dumbest in the class

Relationships: He thinks she so much better than the rest of us; Johan goes to my school and has shown me a new way to tune mopeds.

Anchor: Retired rally car driver

Age: 15

Body 3 (Sneak 1, Force 0, Move 0)

Tech 4 (Tinker 3, Program 0, Calculate 2)

Heart 3 (Contact 0, Charm 3, Lead 0)

Mind 2 (Investigate 1, Comprehend 0, Empathise 0)

Mechanically, Things from the Flood uses the same rules as Tales from the Loop. This is a simplified version of the mechanics to be found in Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days also published by Free League, to handle what it calls Trouble.  To undertake an action, whether in Trouble or not, for example, slipping out of the grasp of a bully or working out what a machine does, a player adds the values of the relevant attribute and skills together and rolls that number of six-sided dice. Use of an appropriate Iconic Item will add two dice to the pool. Each six rolled counts as a success. In the main, a player only needs to roll one six to succeed. Tasks needing two or three successes are rare and represent almost impossible situations, though some situations, such as overcoming the final situation or bad guy, might require every Teenager to get involved and roll successes. Excess successes can be used to purchase effects, which the player can decide upon with the Game Master.

Failing a task can lead to a Teenager suffering a Condition—Upset, Scared, Exhausted, Injured, or Broken. For example, a Teenager might be Upset if he fails to avoid his stepmother and her taunts, or Scared when hiding from a robot that is acting strangely. If a roll is failed, a player can push a Roll and reroll any dice that did not result in sixes. Doing so will also inflict a Condition on a Teenager. Recovering from Conditions requires spending time with a Teenager’s Anchor. 

For example, Stina is out late at night racing her moped through the back lanes of the islands when something tall and thin leaps into the road and begins to chase her. This is definitely Trouble! To escape whatever it is that is chasing her—actually a Soviet pursuit robot—the Game Master rules that Stina’s player will need to roll her Tech attribute and Tinker skill, and because she is riding her Iconic Item, her souped up scooter, Stina’s player can roll two more dice. This is a total of nine dice. Unfortunately, The Game Master also rules that this is an Extreme Situation and so two successes are required for Stina to get away. Unfortunately, Stina’s player only rolls one six, but still needs two. So he decides to push the roll and attempt to get that needed other six. The Game Master tells Stina’s player that as a consequence, Stina will be suffering from a Condition, which in this case will be Scared. Each Condition inflicts a penalty of having one less die to roll. So instead of eight, Stina’s player has seven. This time Stina’s player rolls two sixes, which together with the first, gives her three. So not only does she succeed, but the extra six means that her player can buy an Effect. In this case, her player selects not needing to roll again should Stina face the same situation again.

As has already been mentioned, one major way in which Things from the Flood differs from Tales from the Loop is that Teenagers can die. It occurs when a Teenager suffers one or more Scars, each a trauma, either physical, emotional, or mental, that has the potential to either kill the character, force him to disappear, move to another town, be taken into foster care, and so on. Whatever it is, it is enough to remove the Teenager from play. A Scar is gained each time a Teenager is Broken, that is, is suffering from all four of the mild Conditions—Upset, Scared, Exhausted, and Injured—and then suffers the fifth Condition, Broken. The player gets to describe the nature of the Scar suffered. A Scar is not necessarily permanent. It can be healed by a character committing a heroic, self-sacrificing action. In general, the acquisition of Scars should not be all that common, and actual death rarer still, but it can happen. 

Given that Things from the Flood shares the same light, unobtrusive mechanics as Tales from the Loop, it should be no surprise that the advice for Game Master instead focuses on creating and running Mysteries. These are constructed just as in Tales from the Loop and divided into five phases—‘Introducing the Teenagers’, ‘Introducing the Mystery’, ‘Solving the Mystery’, ‘Showdown’, ‘Aftermath’, and ‘Change’. There is no limit to the scenes which can be run during each of these phases, but the first and fifth, ‘Introducing the Teenagers’ and ‘Aftermath’ are always grounded in the mundane reality of the Teenagers’ lives at home, counterpointing the reality of the Mystery and the secrets of the landscape around them. A sixth phase, ‘Change’, follows the end of any scenario or Mystery, giving both players and their Teenagers the chance to reflect on the Mystery and their actions in solving it, as well as to spend any Experience Points earned. Again, the advice for the Game Master running Mysteries is excellent, covering mood, nostalgia, and getting the players involved in setting up scenes for their Teenagers as well as the Game Master.

Almost half of Things from the Flood is devoted to a Mystery Landscape and a mini-campaign, ‘The Prophets of Pandora’. The former provides Hooks to various locations and Mysteries across the landscape of the Loop, including a new theme park, a pirate radio ship, and the filming of a new soap opera, that the Teenagers can investigate. There is no order in which these can be looked into, so the Teenagers can look into one Mystery, then perhaps look at another before returning to the first. The danger in doing so is that each countdown of escalating events which will play out as soon as the Teenagers begin investigating them.

‘The Prophets of Pandora’ is a four-part campaign consisting of three two to three session scenarios, capped by a longer, three to four session scenario. Initially, each of the first three mysteries—involving robot reproduction, a virus unleashed upon the teens inside the Loop, and then reality disruptions—do not seem to be connected, but clues soon suggest otherwise, leading to the fourth and last Mystery. The four vary slightly in quality and some are more linear than others, but together they form a solid campaign that showcases the weirdness and the Science Fiction horror to be found within the confines of the Loop and the aftermath of its near abandonment. Together, both ‘The Prophets of Pandora’ and the Mystery Landscape—whether set in Sweden or the USA—should provide a playing group with several months’ worth of play. 

Physically, again just like Tales from the Loop, this is a sturdy hardback, written in a light and engaging style, which benefits from and features the excellent artwork of Simon Stålenhag. Where the artwork in Tales from the Loop highlighted how the technology of the Loop had imposed itself on the landscape, the artwork in Things from the Flood highlights how both that technology and its abandonment has changed, even blighted the landscape.

If Tales from the Loop was any number of Spielberg-style movies from the 1980s, but also any number of films from the Children’s Film Foundation, then Things from the Flood moves it on several years, into a darker, bleaker time, into a decade of mistrust in big government and corporations, mass media growth, conspiracy theories, and within the confines of the Loop, of economic instability and mental uncertainty. The Mysteries presented match the mood and tone, being bleaker, darker, even deadlier, and verging on the horror genre. Yet just like in Tales from the Loop, this is still balanced against the mundane nature of the Teenagers’ lives—and of the scenes capping the beginning and the end of every Mystery. Even those scenes are fraught, though usually with emotional rather than physical peril. Similarly, there is a nostalgia here too—of the eighties for Tales from the Loop and of the nineties for Things from the Flood. 

Ultimately, as much as Things from the Flood is a standalone roleplaying, it is always going to be compared with Tales from the Loop. Both are still very much ‘Indie’ roleplaying games, storytelling games with simpler mechanics and exploration of emotional nostalgia. Both have simple mechanics, collaborative play, and themes—exploration of emotional and scientific investigative horror—in both the mundane and the Mysterious, and so both have the capacity to deliver emotional impact. What makes Things from the Flood stand out are its more mature updating of the setting and its Mysteries, which presents increased physical horror and danger as well as the emotional trauma (which is only heightened because the player characters are Teenagers, after all) you would expect from a game set within the Loop.