The Other OSR: Pitcrawler

If you opened the pages of Pitcrawler and wondered if you had wandered into a ‘choose your own adventure’ path book a la the Fighting Fantasy series of solo books, then you might be forgiven for being confused about what you are holding in your hand. Once you get past it, you actually find out what Pitcrawler is and why it had to start with ‘choose your own adventure’ path book. This is because the whole ‘choose your own adventure’ path book is designed to introduce the reader to the concept of roleplaying and what a roleplaying game is, and so actually prepare the player for what Pitcrawler actually is. Which is a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by classic Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf solo adventure books, but instead of being a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ game, it is designed to be played by two players. One is the Adventurer; the other is the Games Master. It is as simple as that, but also a lot more than that and lot less than that—and none of that is bad.

Pitcrawler is published by MacGuffin & Co., which is best known for the superlative Odd Jobs: RPG Micro Settings Vol. I, the anthology of genuinely good systemless campaign settings and ideas. Pitcrawler is both a storytelling game and not a storytelling game, in that both player and Game Master are working together to create a story and world with the player encouraged to make suggestions, but whilst the Game Master is most definitely not competing with the player, she is making the game and world challenging for the player and his character. Pitcrawler is both a traditional fantasy roleplaying game and not a traditional fantasy roleplaying game. There is hero who will have adventures and may even go on a great quest (or just a little one), and may delve into ‘Pits’ as it calls dungeons. However, there is no given world or world lore in the Pitcrawler. It is presumed to be over-the-top grim fantasy, but one which eschews traditional ‘Old School’ elements with its traditional treatment of females and races, alignments, and its play styles. The only background element that will be consistent from one play through to another is the world has Wizards who are powerful magicians capable of changing the world around them, not always to the benefit of the inhabitants. Wizards are also very rich and their tombs are often worth plundering. Wizards are sufficiently powerful that as a group they could destroy a minor god and even face down a major one!

Pitcrawler does not just eschew traditional ‘Old School’. It goes further in describing itself as having “Progressive Lefty Values”. And to be clear, this is not a bad thing either. After all, there are plenty of roleplaying games, almost all of them under the ‘Old School’ banner which do have those traditional elements if you want them. Pitcrawler is simply a roleplaying game that offers a different perspective and greatly widens—even if only by one roleplaying game versus hundreds of traditional roleplaying games—the choice for the player who wants to play what is a self-confessed progressive fantasy roleplaying game.

A Player Character in Pitcrawler is an Adventurer. An Adventurer is not a Wizard as Wizards are evil and an Adventurer cannot perform magic (though he can use artefacts). An Adventurer has five qualities. These are Face, Feet, Fingers, Fists, and Heart. Each is rated by a die type, from a four-sided die to a twelve-sided die. The die type attached to each quality is determined randomly. He starts play with seven Hit Points, a Background, three areas of Expertise, a Companion, and some equipment. The Backgrounds, which indicate what the Adventurer did before he came a Pitcrawler, include Animal Farmer, Bookkeeper, Entertainer, Gambler, Midwife, Tax Collector, and more. Each Background provides two items of equipment and two areas of Expertise, one of which is mandatory, the other the player can choose. A third s determined randomly. The Background also provides some equipment, two other items are determined randomly, and the player choses a weapon. What is not on the character is anything akin to Intellect, Perception, and Defence. This is because the Adventurer is as intelligent as his player; instead of rolling for Perception, the player is expected to ask questions and the Game Master is expected to answer them honestly; and Pitcrawler is a player-facing roleplaying game. That is, he is the only one rolling dice whereas the Game Master will not—except for random chance or contests between NPCs.

To create an Adventurer, a player rolls for his Qualities, Background, extra Expertise, and selects a Companion. The Companion assists with particular types of tests and can perform a particular ability once per scenario. For example, the Priest can assist with tests of willpower and pass a Complicated Heart test for the Adventurer once per scenario. The player should name the Companion and explain why the Companion is accompanying the Adventurer. The process is quick and easy, which makes it good if an Adventurer dies. If he does, one of the features of Pitcrawler is legacies in which the new Adventurer is somehow related or linked to the one that died and will gain a benefit as a result.

Pallavi Iapheth
Level: 1
Face d10 Feet d12 Fingers d8 Fists d6 Heart d4
Hit Point: 7
Background: Tax Collector
Expertise: Accounting, Haggling, Gambling
Items: Book, fake jewels, measuring tape, weighing scales, pistol
Companion: Bruiser (Bob)

To have him undertake an action, the Adventurer’s player rolls an appropriate quality die and aims to equal to or higher than a Difficulty set by the Game Master. The Difficulty ranges from three or Simple to eighteen or Inconceivable. When a quality die is rolled, it can explode, which means that it is possible for the Adventurer to overcome a challenge even if the die type is low. In addition, the difficulty of the test can be lowered one step if the Adventurer has a relevant Expertise, a Useful item, or is Assisted by a Companion or NPC willing to help. A critical success, equal to double the number needed to succeed, grants the Adventurer an extra reward. Failure can lead to loss of Hit Points and/or a consequence which will send the scenario in a different direction.

If failure is likely, the Adventurer can instead ‘Put his heart Into It’ and his player roll the Heart quality die and add it to the total. If the roll is a failure, it is counted as a critical failure. One clever mechanic is that of ‘Thumbs’, which apes the keeping of the thumb on a previous page in a solo adventure book as the player explores the story on another. In effect, this allows the player to turn back the clock in the scenario to a reset point and there make a different choice. A player can have up to five Thumbs depending upon the difficulty of the play.

As with other player-facing roleplaying games, in combat, a player will be rolling to have his Adventurer avoid damage. It can be kept as simple as that, but it can be made more complex and detailed with the rules for advanced fights. These add more detail to opponents, allows for multiple opponents, range, the Adventurer or the enemy gaining the upper hand (whether through preparation, observation, or research), more detailed Companion involvement, and so on. The added complexity has its advantages in work, providing more mini-prompts with which to narrate the combat, but does slow game play down comparatively.

Beyond the simplicity of the rules, there is advice for the Game Master on easing the player into his first scenario and onto the next, as well as creating scenarios. These are effectively outlines or prompts that provide a foundation from which she can improvise from, consisting of a concept, objective, antagonist, location, complication, factions, and twists along with a hook that the Game Master can use to bait the Adventurer. The setting for Pitcrawler is described in broad detail—Wizards rule everything, dangers are everywhere and there are rewards to be won; and no thinking creature inherently evil, but that does not mean that they are necessarily good; and whilst there are a lot of gods, they are not necessarily going to be helpful. Particular attention is paid to the nature of Wizards, that they are ambitious, respect other Wizards only, are otherworldly and nerdy, and are egotistical. This is accompanied by a quick guide to creating a Wizard.

Two thirds of Pitcrawler consists of ten appendices. Some of these support Adventurer creation, but others provide lists of equipment, magic potions, and magic items to buy (the Adventurer can buy one of each of the magic potions and magic items between scenarios). The ‘Tome of Foes’ gives lots of suggested foes, ready to throw into the path of the Adventurer, whilst ‘Iconic Wizards’ describes some twenty-five different Wizards. These include An’Nimat the Dancer who is fascinated with music and sound and uses spells to make others move to the music including everyone in her domain the new moon; Bombatel the War Wizard, who resides in a cratered and battered domain, and is often hired by other Wizards to fight for them; Malsain the Rotmonger, who studies decay, disease, and entropy from her domain mired in slime and plague, and is shunned by other Wizards as a consequence; and Salvia the Chef, so enamoured of good food and the artistry of cooking, that he gave up his studies and made his mansion into a bistro, using magic to develop new ingredients, but not actually cook with. This is accompanied by ‘A Pitcrawler’s Progress’, a complete ten-part campaign, which takes the Adventurer from saving someone important to him in a fishing town that is being attacked by leviathan to delving into tombs, climbing mage towers, and more as he chases down The Sunless, a cult dedicated to awakening its dead god of darkness. Each of the parts has been opened up beyond simple prompts, but the structure does not limit the Game Master or the player in developing the world how they want in play, working from the prompts that the individual scenarios give. What is made clear is that ‘A Pitcrawler’s Progress’ is not a default setting for the roleplaying game, but something to define during play. Overall, ‘A Pitcrawler’s Progress’ provides the Game Master and player all that they need to get playing bar their creativity.

Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of pits or crawling in Pitcrawler. Despite all of its efforts to create a roleplaying game that treats a traditional roleplaying game style and concept in a non-traditional fashion, it seems odd that it does not talk about how to create and play dungeons in Pitcrawler. Given how much this is part of the traditional play that Pitcrawler is emulating, it is a major omission. The other is that for a roleplaying game that works from prompts and wants to push the imagination of both Game Master and player, it seems short of smaller, more general tables to help with that.

Physically, Pitcrawler is well presented. It is an easy read and the artwork constantly echoes the look of the Fighting Fantasy series.

Pitcrawler is different. It brings storytelling elements to Old School Renaissance play without any of its assumptions or traditions and what that means is greater flexibility in tone, style, and nature of the world that the Game Master and player will work together to create and the Adventurer will explore. Some of the elements are not as developed as they should have been, such as ‘pits’, perhaps opening up the possibility of a pit companion to this main rulebook. Ultimately, Pitcrawler opens up classic fantasy roleplaying to players and Game Master who would normally avoid it and allows them to make it their own together. The combination of a lack of assumed lore with it being a one-on-one roleplaying game also makes it easier to get a group—or pair—together and start playing.

—oOo—

MacGuffin & Co. will be at UK Games Expo which takes place from Friday, 29th to Sunday 31st of May.

Quick-Start Saturday: Pitcrawler

Quick-starts are a means of trying out a roleplaying game before you buy. Each should provide a Game Master with sufficient background to introduce and explain the setting to her players, the rules to run the scenario included, and a set of ready-to-play, pre-generated characters that the players can pick up and understand almost as soon as they have sat down to play. The scenario itself should provide an introduction to the setting for the players as well as to the type of adventures that their characters will have and just an idea of some of the things their characters will be doing on said adventures. All of which should be packaged up in an easy-to-understand booklet whose contents, with a minimum of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, can be brought to the table and run for her gaming group in a single evening’s session—or perhaps two. And at the end of it, Game Master and players alike should ideally know whether they want to play the game again, perhaps purchasing another adventure or even the full rules for the roleplaying game.

Alternatively, if the Game Master already has the full rules for the roleplaying game the quick-start is for, then what it provides is a sample scenario that she still run as an introduction or even as part of her campaign for the roleplaying game. The ideal quick-start should entice and intrigue a playing group, but above all effectively introduce and teach the roleplaying game, as well as showcase both rules and setting.

—oOo—

What is it?

The Pitcrawler Quickstart is a quick-start for a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by classic Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf solo adventure books, but instead of being a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ game, it is designed to be played by two players. One is the Adventurer; the other is the Games Master.

The Pitcrawler Quickstart includes a basic version of the full game, but covers rules of Adventurer creation, an explanation of the rules and the roleplaying game’s implied setting, a table for creating scenario titles as inspiration, and four sample scenarios.

It is a twenty-seven-page, full colour booklet.

It is published by MacGuffin and Company.

How long will it take to play?
Each of the scenarios in the Pitcrawler Quickstart can be played through in a single session.

Who do you play?
One player is the Adventurer, but not a Wizard. The other player is the Games Master.

How is a Player Character defined?
The Player Character has five qualities. These are Face, Feet, Fingers, Fists, and Heart. Each is rated by a die type, from a four-sided die to a twelve-sided die. The die type attached to each quality is determined randomly. He starts play with seven Hit Points, a Background, three areas of Expertise, a Companion, and some equipment. The Backgrounds, which indicate what the Adventurer did before he came a Pitcrawler, include Artist, Burglar, Crop Farmer, Gravedigger, Mayor, and Sailor. Each Background provides two items of equipment and two areas of Expertise, one of which is mandatory, the other the player can choose. The third is determined randomly. The Background also provides some equipment, two other items are determined randomly, and the player choses a weapon.

The Companion assists with particular types of tests and can perform a particular ability once per scenario. For example, the Priest can assist with tests of willpower and pass a Complicated Heart test for the Adventurer once per scenario. The player should name the Companion and explain why the Companion is accompanying the Adventurer.

How do the mechanics work?

To undertake an action, the Adventurer’s player rolls an appropriate quality and aims to equal to or higher than a Difficulty set by the Game Master. The Difficulty ranges from three or Simple to eighteen or Inconceivable. When a quality die is rolled, it can explode, which means that it is possible for the Adventurer to overcome a challenge even if the die type is low. In addition, the difficulty of the test can be lowered one step if the Adventurer has a relevant Expertise, a Useful item, or is Assisted by a Companion or NPC willing to help.

Failure can lead to loss of Hit Points and/or a consequence which will send the scenario in a different direction. A critical success grants the Adventurer an extra reward.

If failure is likely, the Adventurer can instead ‘Put his heart Into It’ and his player roll the Heart quality die and add it to the total. If the roll is a failure, it is counted as a critical failure.

One clever mechanic is that of ‘Thumbs’, which apes the keeping of the thumb on a previous page in a solo adventure book as the player explores an option on another. In effect, this allows the player to turn back the clock in the scenario to a reset point and there make a different choice. A player can have up to five Thumbs depending upon the difficulty of the play.

In addition, the Game Master is advised to present actual physical or mental puzzles that the player as the Adventurer must solve at the table.

How does combat work?
Combat uses the same mechanics. Most weapons use the Fists quality to roll attacks, except where greater finesse is needed, in which case it is Feet instead. Fingers is used for missile attacks. If the quality roll is successful, the Adventurer inflicts a point of damage, more if it is a critical success. Failures mean that the Adventurer suffers damage. Enemies typically have one Hit Point each, so will be killed on a successful attack. Critical damage is inflicted against multiple opponents. 

How does magic work?
The Adventurer cannot cast magic in Pitcrawler. It is entirely the province of Wizards and their potentially world changing powers. The Adventurer can use arcane items.

What do you play?

There is no given world or world lore in the Pitcrawler Quickstart. It is presumed to be over-the-top grim fantasy, but one which eschews ‘Old School’ elements with its traditional treatment of females and races, alignments, and its play styles. It instead replaces these with Wizards who are powerful magicians capable of changing the world around them, not always to the benefit of the inhabitants. Wizards are also very rich and their tombs are often worth plundering. Wizards are sufficiently powerful that as a group they could destroy a minor god and even face down a major one!

The Pitcrawler Quickstart includes four sample scenarios. These include a raid on a tomb, an attempt to escape a murder-dungeon, a retrieval mission to recover a clockwork device from a swamp, and a retrieval mission on an island surrounded by a rainbow sea with the different colours having different magical effects.

Is there anything missing?
The Pitcrawler Quickstart could have done with more advice for the Game Master on running the individual scenarios and presenting the content to the player as well as mixing in the puzzles and traps, and giving the player meaningful choices.

Is it easy to prepare?
The rules are easy to grasp, but the preparation required by the Game Master could have been supported better.

Is it worth it?
The Pitcrawler Quickstart provides plenty of content to play with and it does something that few roleplaying games do and that is present a roleplaying game for one-on-one play. It is underwritten in terms of support for the Game Master, who will need to work a bit harder to prepare it for her player.

Where can you get it?
The Pitcrawler Quickstart is available here.

Magazine Madness 12: The Warlock Returns Issue #01

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickstarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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Back in the nineteen eighties, at the height of the popularity of the solo adventure books which had begun with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Fighting Fantasy in 1982, there not one, but two solo adventure magazines. Warlock, published between 1984 and 1986 by Penguin and then Games Workshop, ran for just thirteen issues. Its counterpart, Proteus, was published by IPC Magazines Ltd. and then Wimborne Publishing between 1984 and 1988, and ran to nineteen issues. Although both published solo adventures, Proteus was not a Fighting Fantasy-oriented magazine, but a ‘A Complete Fantasy Adventure Game Magazine’, whereas Warlock definitely was. The focus of Warlock was fantasy with an emphasis on the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook series. The focus of its successor is much broader. Published quarterly by Arion Games, The Warlock Returns is devoted to Advanced Fighting Fantasy, the full roleplaying game based on the Fighting Fantasy solo adventures series and its Science Fiction equivalent, Stellar Adventures.

The Warlock Returns #01 was published in September, 2020. It presents a medley of things, from monsters to scenarios, from weapons to cartoons, from advice to settings, and more. It opens with Andrew Wright’s entry for the ‘Denizens of the Pit’ column. He details three types of Chaos Dragon—the swamp-dwelling, acid-spitting Yellow Dragon; the wilderness and ruin-dwelling, superheated wind exhaling Orange Dragon; and the jungle and ruins-dwelling, green slime breathing Purple Dragon. These are nicely detailed and tied into the history of Titan—the setting for Advanced Fighting Fantasy—when Death walked the lands and breathed Chaos into the hidden places where dragons were sleeping, mutating some of them into these three forms. They suffer from mutations today. All three are fearsome great beasts and not something that an unprepared adventurer would want to encounter.

The issue includes two lists of equipment. The first is ‘Jungle Mania’, by Stuart Lloyd. Just a page in length, it lists the sort of equipment that adventurers’ might want to prepare themselves with before setting out into the jungle. They include mosquito netting, mosquito repellent, the machete, blowpipes, darts, and poisons. All fairly serviceable, but with little tweaks here and there. For example, the machete is treated as a shortsword which is more effective against plants rather than creatures. Similarly, the weapons listed in Terry d’Orleans’ ‘Chinese Inspired Weapons for the Isles of Dawn’, are also tweaked. They range from the Gong (bow) and the flexible Qiang (spear) to the Liuxingchui (meteor hammer) and the Hudie Shuangdao (butterfly swords). For example, the Liuxingchui can be used to disarm an opponent rather than inflict Stamina damage and the Shengbiao (rope dart) to inflict a penalty to all physical actions rather than damage.

Terry d’Orleans also offers advice for the Director—as the Game Master is known in Advanced Fighting Fantasy—in ‘Sizing Up Monsters’, which explores ways of making encounters and combat more interesting and enjoyable by unbalancing them for and against the adventurers. The aim here is not to make them extremely easy or extremely challenging, but appropriate to the situation, perhaps to make a fight against minions slightly easier and that against their villainous master or mistress that much harder. It is a well thought out article, and solid advice for the new Director and experienced Director alike.

Adrian Kennelly provides two lists of twenty things to be found and read. ‘For the Bookworms’ is a list of books which can be used to flesh out bookshelves, so as to hide that all too important tome which the Player Characters might need to find, which ‘Notes and letters from Arion’ is a list of notes and missives which might be found in pockets (whether their owners are dead or alive) or dropped on the floor, and which might spur an encounter or adventure. There is a certain mundane to some of the latter, but both articles, written for the setting of Arion, would an extra degree of verisimilitude to any Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign. They could easily be adapted to other settings if necessary.

The Warlock Returns #01 contains two specials. One is a new character sheet for Advanced Fighting Fantasy designed by Dyson Logos, whilst ‘In Their Element’ is a one-page dungeon designed around the elements and their alchemical symbols, along with those for the metals copper, silver, gold, and platinum. By Peter Endean, it is the first of two adventures in the issue and is serviceable enough, emphasising puzzles as much as combat.

Calfiero Risaliti’s ‘Welcome to Arion’ is the second and much longer adventure in The Warlock Returns #01. It takes low-experience adventurers from Allansia and the Old World to Arion, from where they plan to explore Khul. It is not suitable to more than the single magic user, and requires Travels in Arion as well as the standard rulebooks as necessary. It takes a while for the adventure to get going in which the adventurers, along with the rest of the city, find themselves under a curse. To solve the curse, the adventurers have to race round Arion to find and solve a series of riddles. It feels rather lengthy and could have done with editing for clarity. One notable issue is that it does not actually state what is going on for the benefit of the Director until three pages in, which is just too late.

The Warlock Returns #01 has its own comic strip in the form of ‘The Legend of Gareus: The Hero of Karn’. Written and drawn by Shaun Garea, this tells of the adventures—or rather, not-adventures-of the cowardly anti-hero, Gareus. This is quite fun and nicely done, and Gareus is a chancer and a git. Hopefully in future issues, he might even be loveable! Gareus returns at the end of the issue as ‘Agony Aunt Gareus’ with the sort of useless titbits and pieces of advice that you would imagine that only he could offer.

After all of that fantasy, Martin Proctor offers some Science Fiction with a setting for Stellar Adventures. ‘Tora’ is the first part in a series describing the desert world of the same name. Most of its inhabitants reside in clusters of cities where they toil in a strict class system maintained by the wealthy and the Enforcement, which imposes law and order. Travel between the cities—even the clustered ones, is limited; protests and riots by the poor are common; and any potential rebellion made all the difficult by limited access to arms and armour. However nomads do survive in the desert wastelands and smugglers conduct trade off world and between the cities. Guidelines are suggested for finding a home base for the Player Characters, hiring followers, income and prices for vehicles and other equipment, and multiple group combat. The inference here is that the Player Characters establish a base on world and then attempt to overthrow the various cities’ governments or become a criminal network, and so on. It is an intriguing campaign set-up, although not fully realised in terms of the setting here as descriptions of the world’s factions are saved for the next part of ‘Tora’. This though is a solid introduction which has a Mad Max/Blake’s 7 feel and it should all come together with the next part.

Physically,The Warlock Returns #01;is a bit rough around the edges. Although the layout is okay, much of the magazine would benefit from better editing—why every occurrence of the letter ‘l’ is in bold boggles the eyes, let alone the mind. The artwork is decent though.

The Warlock Returns #01 sits at that point between fanzine and proper magazine. It is more a ‘prozine’ than a magazine. There is a certain scrappiness to it and much of it needs an edit to really make the contents easier for the Director to use. It is though a first issue, and its problems can be put down to that. Hopefully, The Warlock Returns #02 will be better in terms of design and presentation. Nevertheless, The Warlock Returns #01 is worth the time to read through and check out its content if you a fan of Advanced Fighting Fantasy and especially so if you are a Director of Advanced Fighting Fantasy.