Friday Fantasy: 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025

A calendar is useful, if boring. Start of the month, check for appointments and things you are planning to do. Cross off the days as they pass, and when you get to the end of the month, flip over the page and start on the next. Either that or you are ripping off one page, day-by-day, month-by-month, all the way to the end of the year when you will start all over again with a fabulous new calendar. Of course, a calendar can be themed or display pictures from your favourite series of books or television series, or whatever you like, as there is probably calendar for it. What though if you wanted to go an adventure, fight monsters, find treasures, be a hero? Well, you would think that you were out of luck, except that is for the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025. This is a calendar on which you can face challenge nearly every day, whether it is battling goblins, facing mushroom men, avoiding a trap, and fighting a boss like a two-headed giant or a minotaur! As you play from one month to the next, there will be rewards, but also greater challenges, and as you cross one defeated monsters or overcome challenge after another, you can keep track of your score on the 365 Adventures app, compare your score with others, and at the end of the year find out what your overall score is for the year.

Published by the amusingly named Sorry We Are French, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a desk calendar that you can play once a day for two minutes for the whole of the year. Alongside the fliptop calendar itself, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 comes with a rules leaflet, five six-sided dice—four red, one blue, and Marlow. Marlow is the hero of the story, a brave and mighty warrior, ready on January 1st, to enter the dungeon labyrinth of monster-infested rooms and trap-laden corridors, fight monsters big and small, face down bosses of increasing toughness, and put what treasures he can find to use to defeat yet more monsters! Marlow is represented by a flat metal enamelled figure, armed with sword and shield, and always moving to the right, deeper into the wing represented by the current week, and down to the next level, each one represented by a whole month. There is a challenge every day and a boss monster to defeat on Sundays! Marlow does not have to defeat every monster to keep moving forward, but the more he defeats, the greater his score at the end of the year.

Each day player gets to roll the dice to defeat one monster or the boss monster at the end of the week/wing. The have a value of between one and six, whilst the boss monsters have values ranging from sixteen to thirty, the values for the boss monsters varying across the week. The values for both monsters and boss monsters rise over the course of the year. Each day, the player rolls the dice up to three times, the aim being to roll slightly different whether facing a monster or a boss monster. To defeat a monster, a player has to roll three of the same value as a monster. Thus, for monster rated as a four, he must roll three dice with the number four on them. To defeat a boss monster, the total number on all of the dice must equal or be greater than the value of the boss monster. The player does not have to select the monster he wants Marlow to attack prior to rolling, which means that he can match the dice results to any monster for the week. If a player fails the roll for any monster, nothing happens, but if defeats a monster or the boss monster, he crosses that monster’s shield out, and will add it to his total for the month. A player does not have to defeat everything in a week/wing and Marlow is going to go onwards anyway, just as the days are going to pass. However, the fact that a player can attempt to defeat any monster and/or the boss monster at any time in a week feels like Marlow is moving back and forth through a wing rather than constantly moving forward.

So far, so good. At the end the month, the player gets to flip the month over and move Marlow down into a new level of the dungeon. What this reveals is a nice piece of colour text as well as a new element to the game play of 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 added for the new month/dungeon level and going forward. For example, February adds a new rule. This is for traps which can only be overcome by rolling numbers that do not match the value of the trap. For March, Marlow discovers a magic sword, which once a month, allows the player to flip the blue die to its opposite face, and there is a magic sword box at the top of the month to remind the player that he has used it. Later months and levels add elite monsters, invisible monsters, monsters that provide a bonus score and reduce a boss monster’s value, and so on, all the way to December, where everything gets much tougher!

365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a day-by-day monster beat ’em. Like any commitment for a year, a player is going to start out strong, playing it and rolling dice day-by-day, but whether he can stick it out for a year is a matter of his willpower. Likely he will lapse occasionally and race to catch up. Beyond tracking the passing of the days, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is not much use as a calendar as the boxes for each day is occupied by a monster or trap, but it is not designed as such, being more game than calendar. The game play is not particularly detailed or deep, and so not particularly challenging either.

Physically, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is nicely presented, full of colour and detail that make you wish some of the creatures were available as card standees for your proper roleplaying game. There is a touch of humour to the art as well, like the cap-wearing pink teddy bear with dynamites trapped to its belly and the generally cranky monsters. Both the basic rules and the monthly additions are clearly written and easy to understand. The only problem is Marlow. Marlow is meant to adhere to the calendar with its magnet, but this does not work, making tracking Marlow’s position day-by-day difficult.

365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2025 is a silly product, what you would call a ‘stocking filler’. However silly it is, it is well executed and actually quite clever in its design. For the player prepared to stick it out, it offers a little respite from the world everyday with a little dice rolling and some monster bashing.

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Sorry We Are French has expanded the range for 2026. There is another fantasy adventure for Marlow, now joined by Mira, with 365 Adventures: The Dungeon – 2026, but 365 Adventures – Cthulhu 1926 expands into a new genre as private detective John Miller discovers mysteries and age-old secrets on the streets of Arkham.

The Other OSR: Candle

The Player Characters know that they are in trouble when they appear somewhere different than to where they were. The Player Characters know that they are in trouble when they appear somewhere to the stench of incense, blood, and burnt hair, and the sounds of screams echoing around the high-vaulted ceiling of the room lit by blood red candles. The Player Characters know that they are in trouble when they appear in a summoning circle, one marked with lines filled with salt and powdered silver, and two of the five cultists in the room dead on the floor, their throats cut. The Player Characters know that they are in trouble when they appear somewhere and towering over them is a devil, skin like blackened iron, his horns craping the ceiling, and steam rising from every one of his pores. He is looking down on them and he is furious. As well as knowing that they are in trouble, the Player Characters have no idea where they are, how they got there, and even if there is a way out of where they are, let alone the reason why the devil is angry at them. And they definitely have no idea that the situation they are in is entirely their own fault.

This is the set-up for Candle: A Reverse Dungeon Crawl. Published by Loot the Room, this is a scenario for Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. Although the scenario can be run at almost any time, it actually requires a bit more set-up, ideally in several adventures run before Candle. This is because of the ‘candle’ of the tile, which is what puts them in their new and terrifying situation. The candle, or Taper, consists of two feet of thin, twisted wax with a goat’s hair wick. When lit it provides light equivalent to a candle visible to the person holding and anyone touching the wielder. Although it burns with the strong smell you would expect from burning hair, the wax never melts and the candle burns indefinitely, and its light is only visible to the wielder and those touching him. The intent is that Player Characters get used to benefiting from it, being able to move in the dark without being seen—although the smell will be a giveaway. At which point, the Game Master runs the scenario and the Player Characters suffer the unforeseen consequences of the Taper’s use and origins.

The devil’s name is Gomduloch. Not only does he hate being summoned, he thinks the Player Characters are somehow connected to his being summoned, and now he hates them. Having butchered some cultists—and definitely willing to butcher more—he is coming for the Player Characters. So not only do the Player Characters have to find their way out of a dungeon filled with cultists, dead bodies, roaming imps and devils, and all the perversity and horrors you would expect of a cultists’ lair, but they have to do that whilst being chased by a very angry devil.

The scenario begins in what would be the last room in any other dungeon, the room where the summoning would be about to take place were this any other dungeon. Then it proceeds to present its rooms backwards, from thirty-three counting down to one, and the exit. Divided over two Levels, one above ground, the other below, the dungeon is relatively linear, but instead of the Player Characters going in and discovering its secrets as they get to towards the end of the dungeon, here they begin by discovering those secrets on the way out. There are plenty of secrets to be found and discoveries to be made. The secrets will help the Player Characters, often to withstand, at least temporarily, the influence and reach of Gomduloch, whilst the discoveries tend towards the gruesome. What else would you expect though, it is a scenario for Mörk Borg after all. The challenge, ultimately, is to discover a way to banish Gomduloch and get away. In the case of Candle, survival is its own reward, so the players and their characters should expect very little reward beyond that.

Physically, Candle: A Reverse Dungeon Crawl is well presented. Each location is given a one-page description and the map for the relevant Level is also included on the two-page spread. Bar the Taper itself, there is no artwork in the book. The only issue with the presentation is in the choice of fount for the sidebars, which is too fine and too light to be read with any ease.

Reverse dungeons are not new. In most cases, they set up the Player Characters as prisoners and expect them to escape their confinement, making them about breaking out, not breaking in, but others flip the dungeon by making the Player Characters the monsters not the heroes. Reverse Dungeon, published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 is an example of the latter, whilst Escape from Astigar’s Lair, published by Judges Guild in 1980, is an example of the former. Of course, Candle: A Reverse Dungeon Crawl is definitely an example of the former, but given the nature of the Player Characters in Mörk Borg, it could also be argued as being an example of the latter. That said, as much as the Player Characters are monstrous in Mörk Borg, they face worse monsters in Candle.

The problem with Candle: A Reverse Dungeon Crawl is the Taper. The Game Master has to set the scenario by luring the Player Characters not only into finding it, but also using it and coming to love. Without that, the scenario is far less effective. There is no advice for the Game Master to ease or overcome that problem. Nevertheless, once set-up, Candle: A Reverse Dungeon Crawl opens with a bang and keeps the horror going with the desperate Player Characters going to be so glad to have escaped their imprisonment in the cultists’ lair, let alone the anger of Gomduloch!

Jonstown Jottings #103: Figurines of Glorantha

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford's mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

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What is it?
Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is a short supplement for for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It is by the same author of GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass.

It is a five page, full colour, 3.28 MB PDF.

Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is reasonably presented, but it could have been better organised. It needs a slight edit.

Where is it set?
Dragon Pass.

Who do you play?
Adventurers of all types who could come across these rare items.

What do you need?
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It can also be run using the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure.

What do you get?
Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is a description of seven figurines, or statuettes, which might be found in the world of Glorantha. In comparison to other treasure guides from the same author, it points out that they more common, since they are typically carved or sculpted to represent deities, powerful ancestors, and cult figures. Some of those described in the supplement are rarer than others and some are tied to more obscure deities, which lessens their usefulness in a campaign. They are crafted from a variety of materials—bone, clay, metal, stone, and wood—grant a magical effect that is either linked to a Rune or the purview of the creature or deity represented.

For example, Fast Legs is a rough carving of a horse’s hindlegs with a handle sacred to the cult of Mastakos, Orlanth’s charioteer, the God With No Home. It is dotted with tiny points that represent Mobility Runes. It must be held in the hand to be effective and increases the wielder’s Move score and Kick skill. Gelid Breath is a flat plate of bronze with the arms, mouth, and face of a man. Crafted by Orlanthi priests, if held to the mouth, the user can fire darts of ice through its mouth using his Blowgun skill. However, if character’s player rolls a critical failure of one hundred, it explodes and will inflict damage directly to the character’s head. Perhaps the rarest item is Korasting’s Bless, a dull, but heavy statute of a pregnant Troll female raising her hand to her face in blessing. If broken into pieces and eaten by a Troll female, her next birth will always be of a Troll rather than of Trollkin.

As with the other treasure supplements from the same author, the figurines in Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha vary in quality and usefulness, as well as development. More description of their histories and their legends would have been welcome, especially since they are meant to be rare. However, none of the entries are overly powerful and they feel more thought out and less rushed than in other supplements from the author, making it the best of the series so far.

Is it worth your time?
Yes—Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is an inexpensive way of adding more magic to give Player Characters or NPCs minor powers that will enhance their legends and the entries are some of the best yet.
No—Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is simply too expensive for what you get and the entries too underdeveloped in terms of the setting. Plus, the Game Master could create her own with a little bit of research which are just as good.
Maybe—Runequest: Figurines of Glorantha is expensive for what you get, but entries are far from being poor and the Game Master might want to add a little variety to the treasure found or perhaps take inspiration from the treasures presented here and either develop more of their legend or create new ones of her own.

Miskatonic Monday #397: Operation Bottleneck

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—

Name: Operation Bottleneck

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Chicho ‘Arkashka’ OCARIZ

Setting: World War II Spain

Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-nine page, 20.62 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A rock hunt takes Allied stalwarts from the Rock deep into Spain

Plot Hook: Spain is ‘neutral’ right now, but will it be after Tartessos Suchexpedition?

Plot Support: Staging advice, four pre-generated Investigators, five NPCs, nine maps, two Mythos monsters, and a giant robot.

Production Values: Decent

Pros

# Can be run using Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos

# Sequel to Operation Midnight Sun

# Nicely detailed with lots for Investigators to do in Gibraltar

# Lovely period maps

# Batrachophobia

# Speluncaphobia

# Robophobia

Cons

# Needs an edit

# Initial Sanity penalties overblown

# More military operation than Mythos investigation

# Not clear what the Investigators achieve

# Ends in a big fight with little to discover

Conclusion

# Action and stealth-focused World War II scenario

# Ultimately does not feel as if the Investigators achieve much or push the plot forward very far

Millenarian Mayhem

In the beginning the Immortal made the world and all that was in it. Then made strife by bringing the Amortines, the first beings into the world. They hated their father and two of their number strangled him, and so brought another god into the world, Destruction. Yet the Amortines danced and procreated in their victory, and so begat the Lamentides, the dreadful sons, and the Allurimorns, the sublime daughters, and they in turn begat their own children, the Dreads and the Sublimes. When their passions grew too wild, Life and Death, the eldest of the Allurimorns and Lamentides, invited them all to a great banquet in Heall where they captured them and sealed them in Life’s urns. It is said that when the Amortines’ prodigy escape their prisons and are once again abroad in the world, then the Last Day will begin in earnest. In Painyme, it is both said and feared that this day draws close, for Death has already closed the First Gate to Heall and turned the dead away, leaving the unquiet dead to wander… Five of the twelve border kingdoms surrounding have been consumed by the Weald surrounding the Petty Baronies before the great city of Assartum, home to the Ecclesiarch, His Excellency Boniface Pontfex IV. A crusade has been declared against the Traitor Gods and the Templars have already killed their first Traitor God. Day by day, more and more heretics give themselves up to or are thrown on the Pyre, but even those who have been given a chance for absolution for their heresies upon joining a guild by the Church of the Divine Corpse are being tempted once again by the gifts that Traitor Gods promise. Just as those who seek absolution join guilds for the safety in numbers they offer, so too do those who accept such gifts join cults for the protection they offer.

This is the set-up for Doomsong, an eschatological, pre-apocalyptic roleplaying game of heretical temptation and divine punishment and survival horror. Published by Cæsar Ink., it is described as a ‘Roleplay Macabre’, which places it in the ‘grim dark’ genre. The players roleplay characters who have either committed heresy by accepting a gift from one of the Traitor Gods or have committed various crimes, and sort absolution by joining a guild, or joined a guild to serve. The guilds can be gravediggers’ guilds, philosophers’ guilds, signmakers’ guilds, ratcatchers’ guilds, woodcutters’ guilds, and Wyccefinders’ guilds. Understandably, gravediggers’ guilds have become common since the First Gate to Heall was closed. Members of the Wyccefinders’ Guilds are allowed to truck with the Dread or the Sublime in return for the Occult abilities they grant, but this does not mean they will be absolved. Over the course of the game, the Player Characters will work to achieve their aims, serve their guild, avoid being accused of heresy, and if they do give into the temptation of the Traitor Gods’ gifts, keeping them hidden.

Prior to character generation, the players decide upon the nature of their characters’ guild and what it does. The guild is the focus of the campaign and provides a ready source of NPCs in the form of guild officers (positions which the Player Characters can also fill), equipment as well as a base of operations, and when the Player Characters begin recruiting, replacement Player Characters. In addition, the players, their characters, and their guild will have access to a calendar which can be used to track days, particularly the holy days and holidays, as well as the progress of any wounds that have to heal, activities that the Player Characters might want to do day-by-day, including cooking, crafting, foraging, keeping watch, engaging in a hobby, recruiting, working on a project, and more. It also includes Advancement, the spending of Experience Points followed by a Player Character training, the result of which is primarily random.

A Player Character in Doomsong is defined by his Origins and his Traits, and the path by which he came to be a member of the Guild. In combat, he also has Toughness and Footing. Toughness represents how difficult it is to harm the Player Character, whilst Footing is expended to defend against attacks. In addition, he will have Protection if he wears armour, which adds to his Toughness. If a Player Character is very lightly defined, the creation process does a lot of heavy lifting in adding depth to him. It uses a lifepath system which first gives him an Origin and then takes him through his youth to adulthood and perhaps beyond, pushing him towards the decision to join the Guild. At the end he will likely be presented with a choice between giving himself up to the Pyre or joining the Guild. The former means being burnt as a heretic, whilst the latter gives him protection from the ecclesiastical authorities and a possible path to redemption.

There are six Origins—‘Wild Thing’, ‘Guttersnipe’, ‘Farming Family’, ‘Middle Class’, ‘Wealthy Elite’, and ‘Star-Crossed Babe’ and multiple options in the Lifepath. Each step in the Lifepath process gives a player a choice of traits to pick from, a table of events with entries that will give him another trait or an exit to another step. Some entries determine a particular aspect about the Player Character, most represent jobs of some kind, others might give the gift of a relic, whilst others will tempt a Player Character into acts of heresy that will lead either to the Pyre or the Guild. The process is relatively quick and definitely easy—and it has to be. Player Characters are fragile. Life in Doomsong is short, brutal, and bloody. In other words, they die fast and they are fast replaced. What is interesting here is how it feels, which is like a cross between the complete career path for a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Player Character and Player Character creation for Traveller, but done at a gallop!

Name: Maub
Toughness 4 Footing 4 Protection 0
TRAITS
Wealdean, Tracker, Swift-footed, Avowed, Ruthless
ABILITIES
Canine Familiar
ORIGIN – Welcome, stranger. The Guild takes anyone seeking sanctuary within its walls. We have high-born and low, the scum of the earth and those who would turn their backs on the dull existence of daily life. Whatever has brought you here will not surprise us.
WEALD – Growing up beyond the border castles brought as much peculiar freedom as it did danger. Concepts like law and ownership were foreign to you.
THIEF TAKER – You were tasked with hunting criminals to the Petty Baronies and beyond.
JUSTICE – A stony voice commanded you use the blood of a foe to daub your hate on unworked stone.
DO YOUR DUTY – Those who join the Guild for selfless reasons are its greatest and most ill-spent asset.
JOIN THE GUILD – You stood at the threshold of the Guild, throwing the rest of your life away to the vagaries of fate. Whether you felt relief or fear when they accepted you, we do not know.

Mechanically, Doomsong is relatively simple. To have his character succeed at a Standard Check, a player rolls a single six-sided die and attempts to roll five or more. A Player Character’s traits, equipment, conditions, and allies can add modifiers, ranging from ‘-1’ and Hindering to ‘+3’ and Defining and Perfect, though the latter is rare. If the task is Focused, then the player rolls two six-sided dice and keeps the highest, but if Hasty, the player rolls two six-sided dice and keeps the lowest. If the result is under the target number, the Player Character has failed with cost; if equal to the Target Number, it is success with a cost; and if over the Target Number, it is a straightforward success.

In addition, a player can choose to flip the Doomcoin (an ordinary coin will do, but the roleplaying game does have its own coin as an accessory). If the result of the flip of the Doomcoin is a Skull, the result of the Standard Check is one step worse, but one step better if result of the flip of the Doomcoin is a Crest. Either way, this is the only means by which a Player Character can achieve a critical success or a critical failure. Further, once flipped, the player keeps the Doomcoin in front of him. His character is now doomed and the Game Master can force the player to flip it on any test, but can only do this once. It then passes back to the Game Master and can be picked up by another player. Whatever the result, failure is permanent and the task cannot be reattempted; the cost of failure is permanent; critical results are spectacular; and a Player Character with a particular skill or trait does not fail because of a lack of knowledge or expertise, but because of the uncertainty of the situation.

Combat is slightly more complex. Each Player Character has two actions in a round represented by two six-sided dice, or Action Dice, whilst NPCs have one action and thus one six-sided die. At the start of the round, each player sets his character’s Action Dice according to the actions that he wants him to take. He will set an Action Die at one if he wants his character to ‘Aid’ another or ‘Draw’ gear; at three if he wants his character to carry out a ‘Light Strike’ or hasty attack with a non-heavy weapon or ‘Recover’ and regain Footing; or to five if he wants his character to perform a ‘Heavy Strike’, a focused attack with a non-light weapon or ‘Set Up’ a ‘Standard Action’ or ‘Standard Strike’ whose trigger the player can also establish. There are two Actions per die face and a player is free to choose from them as he wishes, even performing the same action twice, though the same weapon cannot be used for more than a single attack in a round. The Game Master counts up from lowest numbered to the highest, from one to six, completing all of the actions for one face of the die before moving onto the next. Ideally, this is set up with each player placing his two dice on the two choices he has made in the Action Block on his character sheet.

The actual attack roll in Doomsong is not treated as a Standard Check, but a Special Check. The difficulty number varies, being based on the defender’s Toughness, which can be modified by his player or the Game Master spending Footing to have his character or NPC dodge or block the attack. As with Standard Checks, the results be under, equal to, or over the difficulty number. If under, the attacker is off-balance and will lose Footing; if equal, the attacker delivers a graze and will also lose Footing, whilst the defender will lose Toughness; and if over, the attacker will inflict more damage, reducing the defender’s Tougher even more, as well as inflicting other effects, depending upon the weapon type used in the attack. For example, a bludgeoning attack might leave the defender staggered, battered, or with a smashed face, whilst a slashing attack might leave the defender grazed, scarred, or with a sliced face. Flips of the Doomcoin can also increase the result of an attack roll and potentially inflict even greater damage.

In terms of background, Doomsong provides details of the ecclesiastical calendar of Painmye, along with overviews of its geography and social hierarchy, and also the hierarchy of the Church of the Divine Corpse. The most attention is paid to its pantheon of The Immortal and The Immortal’s misbegotten progeny, detailing each of his children and his children’s children and so on, including their prayers and the cults devoted to each of them. Twelve of the Traitor Gods—Chance, Feast, Frenzy, Honour, Hope, Justice, Oblivion, Panic, Perception, Rot, Toil, and Vorcacity—grant occult gifts to their followers and so give the opportunity for the tempted to become a Wycce, an agent of one of the Traitor Gods. Familiars—canine, laceworker, or rat—are the most recognisable of the occult abilities granted by the Traitor Gods. For example, the Sublime called Feast gives his patronage to those that give generously to others, especially of their scraps of food, his familiars being vultures, boars and gowenflies, and his vow being to feed the hungry. In return for feeding the starving, his Wycces learn abilities such as ‘Attuned Forager’, enabling them to sense food stores, ‘Nature’s Bounty’ which cures food of any rot, or ‘Amphora of desire’, by which they can enchant a jug or bottle of alcohol that is so enticing, anyone who drinks it is likely to fall unconscious should he try to stop. All of the abilities have three and many actually have positive effects despite how the Church of the Divine Corpse might regard them.

In addition includes an extensive bestiary of NPCs and monsters. All have their own Action Blocks. Some of the NPCs are simple recruits to the Player Characters’ guild, but others include militia, assassins, duellists, templars, and more. There are stats for normal animals as well as familiars, and also the favoured children of the various Traitor Gods. For example, Laceworkers are favoured by Chance, preternaturally lucky (which means that when the Player Characters are confronted by them, the Game Master can force players to flip the Doomcoin, even their characters are not Doomed, and flip it a second time if it does not favour the Laceworkers) spiders that lay their eggs in partially consumed corpses that can later rise as a Husk of Chance. The Opri are associated with the Sublime Frenzy, birthed by her hatred of the Church of the Divine Corpse after the Ecclesiarch ordered the murder of sister, the Sublime Joy. The Opri hunt the pious and hunger for the bones of the holy, often desecrating churches and villages in the process, whilst their bite turns men into Opri-Falsere, servants that grow to look like the feline Opri with the passing of each full moon whilst dedicating their lives to them in secret. Given that the First Gate of Heall has been closed, it is no surprise that the Unquiet Dead are also detailed. The journey of both body and soul are described in detail, whilst there are descriptions of numerous types of the undead, all pleasingly different to that found in most other roleplaying games. Rounding out Doomsong is a selection of flora and fungi.

Physically, Doomsong is a stunning looking book. Black and white, but with grim and grimy artwork reminiscent of both Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, First Edition and the Fighting Fantasy series. This should be no surprise that its artist also drew the illustrations for Themborne Games’ Escape the Dark Castle: The Game of Atmospheric Adventure and Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space. The layout has an early modern look to it in terms of style and feel, whilst the book has pleasing physicality in that its jacket actually doubles as a Game Master reference, whilst the inside back cover actually has a pocket for the Doomcoin! Another interesting design choice is the use of colour, used in conjunction with the Traitor Gods as if they are offering something bright and enticing in comparison to the sackcloth and ashes that is the everyday existence of Painyme.

There can be no doubt that Doomsong is a fantastic looking book, one that reeks of desperation and fear in the face of an encroaching biblical Armageddon. Yet this is both a help and hindrance. A help because it imparts so much of the roleplaying game’s atmosphere and apocalyptic alarm, but a hindrance because it makes Doomsong look like a more complex and more daunting roleplaying game than it really is. It also hides some issues with Doomsong. One is that there is no advice for the Game Master on how to run the roleplaying game, whilst the other is that there is no discussion of what a Doomsong scenario or campaign looks like. There is the sperate campaign, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, in which the Player Characters are members of a gravediggers’ guild helping to bury the multitudinous Unquiet Dead, and Doomsong leans that way in terms of a set-up, but that requires further purchase followed by long term play and commitment rather than enabling the Game Master and her group to play just from the core rulebook. Yet despite its mechanical simplicity, Doomsong is not suitable for inexperienced Game Masters given its lack of advice as to how the game runs, what a scenario looks like, and what a campaign looks like. Even an experienced Game Master will be challenged to set something up from scratch and whatever that is, it may not be what the designers intended to best showcase their design.

There is a piquant sense of epoch-ending trepidation and existential anxiety to Doomsong. It casts the Player Characters as heretics seeking absolution, but tempted time and time gain with occult gifts that in some cases might actually do some good, more than the simple, extremely fragile mortals that they are, are actually capable of, knowing that to give in to that temptation so is heresy once again. This is the core dilemma at the heart of the roleplaying, one that reeks of dread and despair that might yet be forestalled, but ultimately in Doomsong, leaves it to another book to really show the Game Master how that will play out in the short term, let alone the long term.

Winning is the Name of the Game

Subtitled ‘A Co-operate Roleplaying Game (with only one winner)’, Two Sides To The Coin is a light storytelling roleplaying game that can be pitched as ‘being like a LARP, but played at the table’. It is a simple game, best suited to one-shots and convention games in the players will roleplay through a particular story, whether that is robbing the train coming into town, stealing a painting before it can go on display at a museum, solving a murder at a country house, conduct peace negotiations, or surviving long enough being stalked by a monster from outer space which is slowly killing off your crewmates to escape the spaceship and escape certain death. It is played just like a standard roleplaying game with everyone sat round the table, roleplaying their characters as they work towards a shared objective, but played like a LARP—or ‘Live Action Roleplay’—in that every player and every character has multiple motives and personal objectives. Some in game, some out of game. Achieving some will score a player points at the end of the game, but achieving one, his character’s ‘Ulterior Motive’ will not only score the player more points, but will win him the game. Yes, this is a roleplaying game in which there is a winner, so it is unlike almost any other roleplaying game. However, the group’s overall objective must be completed as well for there to be a winner!

Two Sides To The Coin is published by Osprey Games, better known for its more traditional roleplaying games such as Hard City: Noir Roleplaying and Jackals – Bronze Age Fantasy Roleplaying, so it is different in comparison to the roleplaying games it usually publishes. To play the game, at least one eight-sided die is required as well as ten Coins per player and some pens and notepads, as the players will be passing notes back and forth between each other and themselves and the Narrator. (This aspect makes it more difficult to run online.) The Narrator will decide upon a scenario—there four included in the book—and decide what Motives use and negotiates with her players as to what Motives their characters will have for the scenario.

A Player Character is simply defined. He has eight stats. These are Academics, Alertness, Close Combat, Dexterity, Ranged Combat, Resolve, Social, and Streetwise. He has ten Coins, one Ulterior Motive, and six Lesser Motives. To create a character, a player divides thirty-five points between the eight stats and rolls randomly to determine what his character’s Lesser Motives. These are in game and out of game Motives. The Ulterior Motive is decided upon through negotiation between the player and Narrator to fit the set-up that the Narrator has created for her scenario.

Ruud van der Aar
Occupation: Fraud Investigator
Academics 5 Alertness 4 Close Combat 4 Dexterity 4
Ranged Combat 4 Resolve 5 Social 5 Streetwise 4
Coins OOOOOOOOOO
ULTERIOR MOTIVE
Prove that the painting is real, because you already replaced it with a forgery!
LESSER PLAYER MOTIVES
Get a player to give you something to drink
Get a player to say the word ‘umbrella’
Get a player to pass a note to you
LESSER CHARACTER MOTIVES
Get a character to sing something
Get a character to give your character something to eat
Get a character to lie to another character

Mechanically, Two Sides To The Coin is simple. To have his character undertake an action, his player rolls an eight-sided die and adds the appropriate attribute to beat a Difficulty Number, ranging from eight for Simple to fifteen for Arduous. A player can expend Stat points to boost the roll and make sure that he beats the Difficulty Number. There are no set means of determining how good or how bad the outcome is, but the Narrator is encouraged to reward really good and punish really bad rolls. In addition, each player begins a session with ten Coins. These can be played heads up to add one to a roll or tails up to subtract one from a roll. They can be played after the roll and after a player has decided to spend Stat points on the roll, but they can only be spent by a player to affect the actions of another player’s character that his character is watching. In other words, a player can use his Coins if his character is in the room with the other character. There is nothing to stop the players negotiating the expenditure of Coins, whether that is for promises of help later on, the lending of equipment, suggesting the formation of an alliance, and so on. The Coins are way to signal a Player Characters intent, as in, “I need you to succeed right now, probably for all our sakes, or least mine” or “I need you to fail, because I need to succeed where you must not”.

Where Coins spent cannot be recovered, Stat points spent can be. This requires the Player Character to fulfil his Motives, gaining two points for each Lesser Motive Point fulfilled and five points when his Ulterior Motive is fulfilled. However, no other player can suspect or have reason enough to point out that a player and/or character is attempting to fulfil either type of Motive. If a Player Character does fail a Motive, whether from a bad die roll or another player pointing it out, the Player Character loses a Stat point. If a player points out that another player is trying to fulfil a Motive and it is not actually true, he will lose Stat points. Stat points can also be awarded for good roleplaying.

There are barely any combat rules in Two Sides To The Coin. Primarily because the focus of the roleplaying game is not combat, but interaction between the Player Characters in their push to achieve their overall objective and then their personal objectives. When combat occurs, the amount rolled above the Difficulty Number, modified by the weapon used, determines how much damage is inflicted. This is deducted from a ten-point track and it gets lower, the greater the effect the damage has on the Player Character.

Lastly, a player can flip a Coin once per session to attempt an action. If successful, the Player Character succeeds and gains a bonus to all attempts to do it again that session. If a failure, a Player Character cannot attempt it again and suffer a penalty to a stat. An alternative rule is the ‘Rule of Sabotage’ which turns one of the Player Characters into a saboteur, attempting to undo or prevent the objective of the other Player Characters being fulfilled.

All four scenarios in Two Sides To The Coin include a main objective and a winning condition, as well as several character concepts and their ‘Beginnings’ or introductions for the players and their characters. Some sample Ulterior Motives are also suggested. The scenario details follow, including plot, maps, NPCs, and so on. There are pointers too—on ‘Post-it Notes’—for the Narrator on how to run each scenario. The four scenarios include ‘Moving a Masterpiece’, in which the Player Characters must move a painting from a museum to a storage facility; ‘Finding Fluffy’ casts the Player Characters as an adventuring band commissioned to find a wizard’s missing pet; in ‘Stranded’, the Player Characters are Starfield Industries recruits assigned to recover a missing merchant starship and her crew; and in the Edwardian-era set ‘The Mansion of Murphy Mahoney’, the Player Characters need to find an heir for Lord Mahoney. The second first two scenarios are lighter in tone than the second two, but show off some of the situations and genres that the roleplaying game can handle.

Physically, Two Sides To The Coin is decently written and nicely illustrated with some cartoon artwork that tell the stories of several capers. There is advice and examples of play for the Narrator throughout, all of it appearing on more ‘Post-it Notes’.

Two Sides To The Coin is written to be a relatively easy introduction to roleplaying, taking its time to give an example of play and notes for both player and Narrator as to what they are expected to do. In the case of the Narrator, this includes keeping track of the machinations of both the players and their characters, determining whether their Motives have succeeded or failed, in addition to what you would expect of a Narrator. For the player, the book extolls the pleasures of roleplaying as much as roleplaying Two Sides To The Coin.

Two Sides To The Coin is not quite the perfect introduction to roleplaying as it could have been—as written. It is a better introduction for the player than the Narrator, who ideally still needs some experience of the role, but taking that into account, Two Sides To The Coin is light enough in terms of its mechanics and familiar enough in terms of the stories it is designed to handle, to introduce a player to the hobby. Or introduce an experienced roleplayer to storytelling style roleplaying. In general, experienced roleplayers will be able to pick up and play Two Sides To The Coin without any problems. Light and easy to prepare, Two Sides To The Coin is perfect for one-shots and convention scenarios, and can even be added to a Narrator’s library of pick-up games.

Solitaire: The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon

Your merchantman ship sunk by Imperial German raiders. You captured and held in a cell. There is a chance that you can escape, steal a boat and then… How long will you survive adrift in the ocean waters? Will you row or drift, perhaps you may find yourself coming ashore in the hometown of your ancestors, Kingsport, the mist enshrouded city of dreams or cast ashore in a strange new land where death and madness await. This is opening to The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon, a solo adventure inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular, Dagon, The Festival, and The Hound, as well as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Published by Officina Meningi following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it enables the reader to explore the story from his own point of view and perhaps survive to influence the outcome for a different ending than that suffered by Lovecraft’s protagonist.

As a choose-your own-adventure book, The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon is short at just eighty entries for the main Earth-bound portion of the story with a further ten entries for the sidestep into The Dreamlands. The player will need just a six-sided die and pen and paper to play and perhaps a couple of hours to play through at most. The Player Character is lightly defined. He has three attributes, Force and Will. Force is his physical strength and ability to fight, whilst Will is his ability to withstand stress and the horrors of the cosmos. Resistance represents his physical skills and tolerance to pain. His mental state is tracked by his Madness, which begins at Well-Balanced. As it goes from Stressed to Delerium via Paranoid and Schizophrenic, the Player Character suffers penalties to die rolls, first in The Dreamlands, but later in the waking world too. He can carry some equipment, such as a medical kit that will restore Resistance and a syringe of morphine that will restore Resistance and prevent him from entering The Dreamlands. Throughout his journey, the Player Character will find money, other items, and weapons.

The combat system is simple. The player rolls the die and adds the character’s Force attribute to the roll as well as any bonus from a weapon. The opponent’s Force value is subtracted from the total and the result compared on the ‘Table of Comparison’ on the solo adventure’s combat table. The worse the result, the less damage the opponent suffers and the more the Player Character suffers, and conversely, the better the result, the more damage the opponent suffers and the less the Player Character suffers. It is possible to inflict damage without the Player Character suffering any, but the chances are low. To defeat an opponent, his or its Resistance must be reduced to zero. Although it is possible to avoid some combat situations, when it does occur, it is simple and brutal.

The story of The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon is really one of transition through the three of Lovecraft’s short stories that inspire it. The opening scenes with the Player Character captured are drawn from Dagon, but the scenes in Kingsport are primarily from The Festival with those from The Hound made part of it. What they reveal is the existence of an ancient cult abroad in Kingsport, which at the time of the Player Character’s arrival, is readying to perform an ancient ceremony of Yule, older than Bethlehem. This becomes apparent very quickly if the Player Character visits the home of his ancestors, but he may also learn more from an old friend from college and so play out scenes from The Hound. Unless discovered or he runs away, the story pulls the Player Character into attending the ceremony of The Festival and towards the climax of the adventure book. In the process, the Player Character will learn some of Kingsport’s dark secrets and may be put a stop to the cult’s dread ritual. This will not be easy, for the Player Character will encounter horror after horror and many a deadly encounter, and even though the adventure book runs to less than a hundred entries, there many ways in which he can die or go mad. It will certainly take more than the one attempt to complete The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon.

The majority of the journeys in The Dreamlands are encounters rather than explorations as in the main section of the book, randomly determined by the Player Character’s Madness. The higher the result, the more dangerous and the maddening and unearthly the encounter is, before returning the Player Character to the waking world, likely the worse for the night’s poor sleep. Of course, the Player Character can die in The Dreamlands, but may also return with something that will benefit him in the waking world.

Physically, The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon is solidly presented and the artwork is good. Devotees of Lovecraft’s fiction will likely spot both the breaks and the inspirations, but the player need not be familiar with any of three short stories that underpin The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon to enjoy it. Overall, The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon is a short, but challenging adventure book that exposes the reader to the horrors of the cosmos and secrets lurking in Lovecraft country.