The optics, they’re bad.
So…I indulged in a lot of retail therapy when the lockdowns started. I backed many games. Too many, one might argue. But if you’ve ever participated in a crowdsourcing campaign, you know how it diabolically gives you multiple serotonin hits: first when you back it, later when you spend the money, every time you get an exciting update, when they charge for shipping, then the tracking number, then actually receiving the thing. It’s a tiny bit like a gift-giving holiday to yourself over and over.
It turns out I gave myself a lot of gifts. I’m sure many of you know the feeling. You also know that supply chain struggles and multiple shutdowns in China meant that a whole lot of projects got stalled out. And now here we are, the first quarter of 2023, and a veritable avalanche of games has started pouring into my house. And even though I told my spouse, the reality of it didn’t really land until box after box, envelope after envelope, started arriving.
I haven’t had time to play everything that’s showed up, but I do want to talk about what’s arrived. It’s too much to do at once, so I’ll break this up across several installments. As always, these are reviews from reading, not play. (And, yeah, I’m still doing this sort of thing, even though my Echo Sedano fiction project has been a ton of fun and you should be reading it.)
So, going from left to right, let’s begin.
City of Winter
Sort of a sequel to Ross Cowman’s Fall of Magic, City of Winter is another storygame built around a scrolling scene-setting device, narrative prompts, and jaw-dropping table presence. You “can” play these kinds of games online, but this style of game I feel like benefits so very much from the physicality of the thing. The map has texture and color that does a lot of lifting to convey vibes.
City of Winter is a bit more mechanically elaborate than Fall. In addition to the scroll, there are several decks of cards, a second, more static city map, a die, and a separate city location that appears to move in the course of play. The focus is generational this time: as players move from location to location, they’re drawing cards keyed to each location that represent traditions. Later, they put those cards into play to show how their characters are changed by where they’ve traveled. Every character is also marked by their age, and will eventually die in the course of play as the years tick over.
Besides the cards and the scroll, there’s also a flat, non-scrolling map of the city itself. Once the family arrives in the City, they’re exposed to the City’s particular traditions as they explore their new home. Since it’s not a scroll, I think you’ll feel the static-ness of the City’s locations. There’s even a moving location printed on its own card, nifty and mystical.
City of Winter looks thoughtful and reflective and I’m very much looking forward to playing a campaign of this with the right crowd.
Atlas of the Latter Earth
I think I’m not alone in reading and buying OSR material more aspirationally than practically. To be clear, Kevin Crawford’s work clicks best with me, and I have put his stuff to use in other, non-OSR games. But other than a run at Godbound a few years ago, I’ve been buying his books with little hope of running them as-written. Atlas of the Latter Earth is on that list.
My favorite Sine Nomine book is Stars Without Number, revised edition. I ran a short campaign of SWN many years ago, but my GMing style just doesn’t gel with his OSR house system. The sector generation, though, that gave me terrific Traveller vibes. Traveller was the first RPG I personally owned, way back in 1980 or so, so I’ve always had fond feelings for the format.
When he released Worlds Without Number, the fantasy version of SWN, once again the aspirations bubbled up in me. The faction game from Godbound and the setting creation system from Stars? Gorgeous, love it. It’s been a few years and other indie shinies keep distracting me.
Atlas of the Latter Earth is a complete setting book for Worlds Without Number. Honestly, I’m not sure how best to use it since my personal interest in WWN was in generating my own setting, my own factions. As an example of a fully functional deployment of a WWN game, Atlas is nice to read. WWN, straight out of the book, is not generic fantasy mind you. It defaults to fallen future fantasy, real Dying Earth or Suldokar’s Wake vibes. On those grounds, Atlas is a fine example of the form.
I mean, to be clear, Atlas is as good as anything Crawford puts out. It’s lavish, thorough, probably more raw ideas per page than you’ll ever be able to use. His setting, extra rules, monsters, all of it: chef’s kiss, no notes. Pleasantly old-school layout, which these days comes as a surprise to me given the preponderance of elaborate layout showing up in the OSR space these days. But actually using it, I think, means you’re barely using WWN at all. At least not the world-building stuff, which, well. Why bother, the world is built: thirty eight distinct regions/nations, any one of them ripe for loads of gaming. And it’s built more carefully than what I’d do.
If you’re reading this and feeling frustrated at my ambivalence, imagine how I feel! For real though, if I ever do pull together a WWN game, I’m going to need to think long and hard about what to leave out of Atlas more than what I would want to include. Personally I find the process of creating a bespoke setting and rules and table best practices exhausting to think about. Maybe it would be less exhausting if I had an eye toward setting up play for years, not sessions. It’s a big cultural gap between the OSR and indie worlds, I think. I could be playing a complete game of, say, Apocalypse Keys all in one book! Or I could spend months tacking on bits and bobs of rules from a dozen takes on the D&D meta-framework to create a just-so edition that won’t make any sense at all beyond the half-dozen people at the table.
Yeah…that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? Hilarious and exhausting.
The Terminator
Come with me if you want to live…in circa 1998 design land.
I confess, I love The Terminator franchise and time travel in general. Seen the movies, seen the TV show, I’m all in on the big Arniebot and the whole twisty-turny alt-future timeline that sort of makes sense if you squint hard enough. The first two movies are one of the few places I’ve allowed myself the pleasure of nostalgia. So I bought the RPG when it showed up on Kickstarter, right in the middle of a slew of other time-travel stuff I also backed.
The Terminator RPG from Nightfall Games is, to be sure, really fun supplemental material for fans of the movies and show. There’s a good breakdown of the timeline and setting details, endless pages of technical breakdowns of every kind of robot you’ve ever seen on screen, bios about the major characters. And it’s a game I just can’t see playing.
System wise there are few surprises. The game bowls straight up trad alley: skill tests versus target numbers, some variation of success and failure types (messy, solid, exceptional, etc.), an elaborate combat system, gun porn. You know the game design I’m talking about, if you’ve played any sort of trad game since the 1990s. Kind of perfect, really, given the era from which the first two movies came out.
Besides gradients of success and failure, the most forward-looking rules in the game are about “hope points,” a hero point system where you get points for top-tier successes and bottom-tier failures. There’s a big menu of stuff to spend your hope on. Seems fine? I do like the range of options, they’re all cinematic and fun.
Yeah…this didn’t spark joy for me. Maybe it’s because I can envision such an interesting game based on the Terminator premise. What The Terminator RPG needs, really, is strong guidance on how to design compelling scenarios that leverage what made the movies special. Yes, sure, the movies featured terrific stunt work and bravery in the face of an implacable machine. For me, though, the excitement was the potential of the present being in dialogue with the future: what happens if Skynet does the thing? How will Skynet change if you defeat a version of it in the present? None of that is in this game. There is literally no chapter or writing at all about what makes a good session in this game, or what campaign might look like. What it does have is campaign seeds and a few scenarios.
The Terminator RPG was my most retail-therapy-y purchase of this batch. I still page through it to look at robots. And the accompanying campaign book, written by a lot of different folks with very different voices and organizational approaches, has a few nuggets if I really wanted to throw together a game.
Next Week
Next up will be Apocalypse Keys, Blade Runner, and Heironymus.
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Last week I hit the first three of too many games that have arrived, quite suddenly, on my doorstep. This week I continue working through the pile. I’ll keep going until someone stops me.
Apocalypse Keys
Apocalypse Keys is a PbtA-based game inspired by Hellboy/BPRD but over the years of development has grown into something much bigger, stranger and honestly a lot more fun. You play Omen class monsters working for a secret organization called DIVISION (it’s a complicated backronym) in a world full of magic, weird technology, parallel universes and all that. Omen class monsters have the capacity to become Harbingers, which are the big bads that threaten the world, over and over again. You won’t be surprised to hear that being an effective Omen class monster and beating Harbinger ass more or less guarantees you will eventually become the next Harbinger. And so the cycle of world-ending violence continues.
The mechanical innovation author Rae Nedjadi has introduced is that rather than the typical miss/soft-but-complicated success/success bands you get in most other PbtA games, instead you’re rolling a miss/success/oh-shit-you-succeeded-too-hard range. You do this by directly cashing in Darkness Tokens every time you roll. No stats! Sometimes you roll too well and/or spent too many Darkness Points and badly overshoot your intended effect.
Every playbook has its own method of generating Darkness. And if you hold on to too many of them after you make moves, you also probably do something bad. Oh and you’re also getting closer to becoming an Harbinger all the time by unlocking Ruin moves (think Corruption from Urban Shadows). The design is unsubtle and clear and eminently playable.
My big takeaway from looking through Apocalypse Keys is that it’s a delirious froth of exciting playbook moves designed for maximum chaos as they crash into each other. You’re either doing grievous damage to others and the environment, or creating melodramatic moments with those around you. Everything is dialed up to 10 all the time.
The campaign system involves unlocking the secrets of an as-yet-unrealized apocalypse by discovering Keys to understanding it. The GM prepares a Mystery Codex at the start of the campaign, an outline of some horrible crisis. But there’s no set answer, and the players will use their Keys to formulate a theory of how to confront the crisis through play. If they’re fast and lucky enough they can keep “the door” from opening. If not, they have to face the Harbinger behind the crisis, and then it’s a boss fight. There are five sample Mysteries and plenty of rules for how to create your own.
Looking forward to rolling this one out at a convention but it’s the kind of title I’ll bet will have a lot of tables offering it.
Blade Runner
I have been a fan of Free League’s Year Zero Engine for many years now. Our Mutant: Year Zero campaign was one of the best games of my life, Mutant: Genlab Alpha was pretty good, Twilight: 2000 is outstanding and I’m hoping to do a deep dive on it at some point, Coriolis is breathtaking even if some of its systems are wonky, Forbidden Lands is my favorite not-D&D adventuring party game, Vaesen is very promising (although my short experience with it was a little flat).
And then there are the licensed YZE games, about which I’m having a harder time getting excited.
To be fair, Alien: the RPG is actually a pretty fun romp. But what you get is a faithful treatment of the movie Alien and/or Aliens: either truckers or soldiers. The first priority is strong fidelity to the license, not necessarily providing the tools to explore the underlying ideas of the setting/license on your own. Their upcoming campaign frame, Building Better Worlds, has me excited all over again because yes I do want to see plain old colonists and science nerds freaking out and getting eaten.
Which brings me to Blade Runner: the RPG. As one of the biggest fans of the movie you will ever meet (and we’re getting thin on the ground as the movie and its fans get older and sensibilities evolve), I can imagine a pretty exciting Blade Runner game. I’m not sure the core rulebook hits the target that, for good or ill, I brought to my initial reading of it.
The killer app of the Blade Runner iteration of the Year Zero Engine is the parallel, sometimes competitive, economies of the game: Procedure Points and Human Points. Yes, that’s right, you’re either good at being a cop or being human. Like the movie, the game is by no means copaganda. (NB: If you think Blade Runner valorizes police, you’ve badly misinterpreted the whole fucking point and please learn some media literacy skills.) You get Procedure Points for getting clues, stopping crime, generally doing cop things. You get Human Points for human things: making connections, feeling things, and critically (if you’re playing a replicant cop, because the game is set after Blade Runner 2049) failing to pass your baseline test. And then you spend those points on different things at different times.
The rest of the YZE system is more or less the same as you find in Twilight: 2000 and onward. Oh and they rate things as “A/B/C/D” — just like in Twilight: 2000 — but they’re really d12/d10/d8/d6. I didn’t like replacing numbers with words in Fate and I don’t like it here either. Not a reason in the world, other than color, to do that.
Cop/human is a pretty provocative tool. (I’m gonna write more about provocative tools in the very near future!) But the rest of the book is 90% setting material, timeline, fake media and, sigh, some gun porn. There is a very slender chapter way at the end of the book that talks about how to create a Case File, i.e. a scenario. And that’s fine I guess. There are some random tables and a general structure, as well as excellent mystery-solving advice that says mysteries aren’t about putting together clues and solving puzzles, they’re about human interactions and consequences with the mystery as the backdrop. If everyone would get on board with that, that would be swell.
The fact of the matter is, is that the core rulebook is real thin on actual rules. There are some neat sections about Los Angeles in 2049. There’s a nice timeline laying out why Nexus 8s (the Dave Bautista models) are on the loose and why your team is tasked with hunting them down. It’s all there. But there’s just not much there there.
Then I get to the boxed Starter Set and man…I feel like I need to recant everything I just said.
Free League has been moving to this format, and I just don’t know what to think about it other than “I’m going to be so poor.” Their core rulebooks feel a little incomplete these days, because they assume you’re getting the Starter Set as well. I also felt this way about Alien: the RPG: the box comes with the dice and the cards and the tokens and the maps. You open up this delicious toy box and it’s like heck yeah, let’s go on a bug hunt! But without all those gewgaws? Ehhh…it’s a little flat. Twilight: 2000 I think was the beginning of this, although it’s only a boxed set. Going forward, I would not be surprised if this is just what you have to buy into if you’re gonna play a Free League Year Zero Engine game: plan on getting the box and playing what it comes with.
The Blade Runner: the RPG Starter Set is impressive as heck as an RPG production (but get the physical box, the cards and dice are worth it). There’s a condensed rulebook that contains everything except the setting material and “how to create a Case File” chapter. Honestly, it’s all you need if you’re gonna play the Case File it comes with. There’s a stack of cards, a stack of maps, some dope dice, pregens, props! I’m not exaggerating when I say the presentation is on par with Invisible Sun here. The table presence is almost overwhelming. And you don’t need-need the rulebook but also the GM kind of does for the setting and history sections.
While the core rulebook left me thinking I might maybe do a one-shot of this game at some point, the box left me actively considering a campaign. Electric Dreams, the Case File in the box, is the first of what I think will be a three-part campaign series (much like the campaign in Alien: the RPG). It’s an effective marketing thing and I kind of resent how it turns a $60 rulebook in a $110 investment if I want the “full experience.” Then again, I’m $220 in on Alien: the RPG at this point as well (the core book, starter box, colonial marines book, and the Building Better Worlds preorder that will deliver in October). It works. And I hate it.
Heironymus
Honestly? I didn’t know what I was getting into when I backed this Kickstarter. It is far weirder and cooler than I expected it to be.
Heironymus, by Laurie O’Connel and 12 Pins Press, is a Forged in the Dark-adjacent game about medieval people escaping an abstract, existential astral entity known only as The Follower. They do this by hex crawling through paintings by medieval painter Heironymus Bosch. I shit you not. Let me say it again: it’s a FitD-based hex crawl through paintings.
The contents of Bosch’s paintings are dense and weird, which honestly? I’ve seen worse sources of inspiration for OSR-style hex crawls. So yeah, if your band of travelers stumble upon the nun with a trumpet up her butt, that might be an actual and literal musical nun. In fact it’s probably just that, with whatever context surrounds how she might have ended up with this instrument inserted into her body cavity. Or it could be inspirational and symbolic. GM’s choice. But the game wants you to get real fuckin’ weird with it and just see where it takes you.
The playbooks, such as they are, are printed on bookmarks and have room to doodle in “moves” you can earn as you advance across these paintings. There are six — King, Priest, Artisan, Alchemist, Scholar, Poet — and they represent broadly medieval archetypes related to institutions, classes and authority in the European feudal state. There are four skills, there’s a simplified position/effect type evaluation, you can take a Devil’s Bargain to get another die, there’s Stress. It’s all pretty straightforward FitD. It’s just the weird and unhinged setting that really sets the game apart.
I have a long standing affection for Bosch. Here’s my ancient, bleached out print of The Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps my first bit of home decoration ever purchased. Shout out to my fellow Gen Xers who will all remember Z Gallerie.
What struck me hardest about this weird and beautiful book is that there are very, very few art projects in this end of the indie world that are on par with the weird and beautiful work that’s so prevalent in OSR spaces. The only other one on my shelf that jumped out at me was Casketland, a PbtA-ish game that is intensely weird and personal and very artistic. Not sure it actually works! But it’s artistic and provocative. I wish there was more of this kind of experimentation in these kinds of indie games.
Next week: Avatar, Desperation and Claw Atlas!
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“I indulged in a lot of retail therapy when the lockdowns started.” Seconded!
While I don’t get the first two, I did back Terminator and like you, it did not spark joy. In fact, I probably liked it less than you. The text was not well edited and the game in general is uninspired. I was excited when Andrew Gaska was attached to the project as I am a big fan of what he did with the Aliens RPG. Turns out, he was doing some light editing and almost no writing? As least I think that’s what it was. I sold everything on Bay and thankfully broke even. I hope someone out there is enjoying it.
So much potential in The Terminator, so little realized.
Surely the new and very good Free League one and not the janky old Leading Edge one, yeah? Interesting. Completely different approach. I mean heck Jon Hodgson from Handiwork did an adventure in the Terminator adventure book iirc; everyone’s got bills to pay.
Thanks for the response.
No doubt about bills to pay. And in RPG writing & publishing, I begrudge no one for doing what they must to earn a livelihood. But I’ll stand by my assessment of The Terminator. Tremendous potential, but the execution…. I mean, you’ve read it.
Re: Aliens. Yep, definitely mean the new Free League one. It mechanics definitely capture the stress and horror of the films. And Gaska has built out a heckuva fun — if terrifying — universe.
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