Return to the Odd

Bastion stands as the world’s largest city, an industrial powerhouse whose factories pour out guns, chemicals, manufactured goods, and even newspapers that ships carry from the city’s wharfs. Citizens flock to the city for work—the factories chew up their employees almost as much as they take them on! Expeditions leave the city travelling far and wide, many returning with tales of places weird, wonderful, and worrisome, often too far to even map given the size of the world. Yet there are wonders and secrets to found closer to home. The Underground lies beneath Bastion, at first the sewers, then tunnels, and caves below, full of long-lost secrets and ancient vaults. Cultists plot the return of their strange masters, unions counter plot even as they try to protect workers’ rights, and the mill bosses squeeze more and more out of there employees heedless of the religious fervour that undo their industrial empire. Scattered and across these cities and the darkness below are the Arcana, devices from ages past that grant fantastic powers, from pieces of jewellery to almost unmoveable statuary. There are men and women who search for these Arcana, knowing they can make a name for themselves, make themselves rich, if they can find the rights ones and find a buyer. They are Explorers.

This is the setting for Into the Odd Remastered, an Old School Renaissance rules light microclone originally published in 2014 that has been beautifully redesigned and re-laid out and published by Free League Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It promises fast character creation, minimalist rules, strange things to encounter and be found, a complete hexcrawl and dungeon, and quite possibly the most fun set of tables available for any roleplaying game. However, it is very light in terms of setting, combining elements of cosmic horror, heavy industrial squalor, weirdness and wonder in the ruins of the past—above and below ground. Into the Odd Remastered is both a precursor to the author’s Electric Bastionland and an expanded version of the original, primarily in terms of supporting content.

An Explorer—or Player Character—in Into the Odd Remastered is lightly defined. He has three Abilities: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, which range in value between three and eighteen. He also a six-sided die’s worth of HP, or Hit Protection, rather than Hit Points, a Starter Package, potentially a Companion, and some silver shillings. To create an Explorer, a player rolls three six-sided dice each for the Abilities and one die for the Hit Protection. Then by cross-referencing the value of the Hit Protection with the Explorer’s highest Ability, he receives a Starter Package. An Explorer with either low Hit Protection or a low Ability will receive a more powerful Starter Package, including an Arcanum, whilst an Explorer with a high Ability or Hit Protection, will receive a more mundane Starter Package. Thus, an Explorer with six Hit Protection and a high Ability of twelve would start play with a Maul, a Dagger, and a length of chain, whereas if the Explorer’s highest Ability is nine and he only has two Hit Protection, he begins play with a Musket, a Sword (d6), a Flashbang, and the ability to ‘Sense nearby Arcana’. The process is incredibly simple and incredibly fast—two minutes if that!

Hattie Tuggery
Strength 8 Dexterity 10 Willpower 15
Hit Protection 3
Starter Package: Club (d6), Ether, Crowbar, Flute

Mechanically, if an Explorer wants to undertake an action, his player rolls a twenty-sided die against the appropriate Ability, aiming to equal to or under to pass. Initiative in combat is handled with a Dexterity save if needed. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much might damage be inflicted. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Protection and then his Strength. This necessitates a Strength Save and the possibility that the Explorer will be unable to act. Should a character lose all of his Strength, he dies. It takes only a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Protection, but a Long Rest lasting a week to recover lost Ability points. Saves against Willpower are used for several things, maintaining morale of course, but also in a pinch, maintaining civil discourse with others, and more interestingly, to manipulate the powers of Arcana.

Arcana are the motivating force of Into the Odd Remastered and are categorised into three types. Base Arcana are ‘Powers You Cannot Understand’, Greater Arcana are ‘Powers You Can Barely Control’, and Legendary Arcana are ‘Powers You Shouldn’t Control’, but any Arcanum does one specific thing and does it well. For example, a Soul Chain is a base Arcana which forces a Dexterity Save on a target lest he loses points of Will and gives away a glimpse of his current desire; the Book of Despair is a Greater Arcana that fills a floor area with tentacles that grab and constrain unless a Strength Save is made; and a Space Cube is a Legendary Arcana which transports the user and a companion to a location they have been to before. Some one hundred or so Arcana are detailed in Into the Odd Remastered, but there is scope for the Referee to create yet more and there is advice in the book on how they woke and should be handled.

Other advice for the Referee covers understanding how the game is played, handling obstacles, tricks, and hazards, monsters and encounters, money and treasure—including options for the Explorers to invest in enterprises and war, and how to award Experience Levels based on Expeditions completed. They are thus awarded on a narrative basis. Beyond Novice, there are only five Experience Levels and each gains an Explorer Increased Hit Protection and the possibility of an increased Ability. Notable of these is that hazards and traps can invariably be spotted unless an Explorer is running, locked doors can always be picked, and so on. Saves or rolls are required in these cases where there is a time factor involved or the course of action an Explorer is about to take might trigger the trap. In effect, this places the agency with the player and his Explorer and takes into account that when exploring, the Explorer is by nature being careful. Several sample hazards are provided as well as sample monsters. This is all accompanied by a lengthy example of play to help both player and Referee get the feel of how Into the Odd Remastered plays.

However, Into the Odd Remastered is not necessarily a forgiving system. Combat in particular, is deadly as every attack succeeds and what matters is the amount of damage rolled. So, hirelings or playing with multiple characters might be an option if a group wants to avoid a total party kill. That said, it does favour the players and their Explorers when it comes to the exploration and the discovery of obstacles and traps. Here in Into the Odd Remastered, the Explorers choose to engage with obstacles and traps and risk the consequences of doing so, rather than having such obstacles and traps sprung upon them as is the norm in other roleplaying games. Nevertheless, the unforgiving nature of its mechanics and play means that Into the Odd Remastered may initially have the feel of a Character Funnel as in Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, with its set-up of multiple Zero Level characters per player.

In terms of setting, Into the Odd Remastered gives its various locations—the city of Bastion, the Underground, Deep Country and other cities, and beyond civilisation to the Golden Lands and Polar Ocean little more description than a paragraph each. In this it does not expand upon what was in the first edition of the roleplaying game, and is in some ways its biggest disappointment. The Referee is definitely left wanting more flavour and detail about Bastion and the wider world. Some of that though, is covered in the ‘Oddpendium’ a set of tables at the rear of the book for name generation, occupations, abilities, manner, connections, and important little life events, all for quick NPC generation. Others generate city locations, routes, locations, weird creatures, cults, borough decisions and the reaction to the mob of this and anything else, whether or not a thing is an arcanum, and more. There are options for different character groups such as Mutants from the Underground and Simple Folk from the Deep Country unused to city ways, and alternative Starter Packages. These table are pointers, elements that the Referee can use to develop the world of Bastion and beyond around the Explorers.

In between the rules and advice for the Referee and the ‘Oddpendium’, Into the Odd Remastered details three locations as play environments. These are the scum-encrusted fishing town of Hopesend Port, the Last Port of the North; a dungeon, The Iron Coral, which lies off the coast off Hopesend Port; and the hexcrawl, The Fallen Marsh, the soggy stretch of coast which lies between them. Now these are presented in the order of The Iron Coral, The Fallen Marsh, and Hopesend Port, which feels counter-intuitive if the trio is run as a campaign, with the Explorers starting out from Hopesend and then travelling through The Fallen Marsh to The Iron Coral. That said, the inclusion of The Iron Coral first essentially means that it is good for getting straight into play as it can be run with very little preparation upon the part of the Referee.

This new edition of Into the Odd expands upon the original dungeon, The Iron Coral, adding depth and detail, but still presented in a succinct series of bullet points. There is plenty of detail packed into this strange, often random complex of rooms. Expanding out from this is The Fallen Marsh and then a point of civilisation, Hopesend Port, providing all together a complete hexcrawl campaign driven by exploration and rumour. As good as this is, it still leaves Bastion itself untapped and unexplored and even with the tools of the ‘Oddpendium’, a great deal of effort upon the part of the Referee will be needed if she is to do something with the greatest city in the world and actually bring it into play.

Physically, Into the Odd Remastered is as lovely a book as you would imagine given that Free League Publishing is releasing it and Johan Nohr—best known as the ‘Artpunk’ designer of Mörk Borg—did the graphic design. The result is a genuine remastering, elegant often subtle, but always hinting at a clash between the baroque and a lost modernity. The writing itself is succinct and always to the point, although that succinctness does not always help the Referee as it should. Primarily this means that as minimalist as Into the Odd Remastered is, it is not really suited to be played or run by anyone without some experience of doing either.

There is an undoubtable elegance to the highly economic combination of Into the Odd Remastered’s minimalism and its new presentation. Both the rules and the setting of Bastion are very light and very much open to interpretation by both players and the Referee, yet arguably, Into the Odd Remastered all but leaves the city itself and much of the setting begging be to be expanded upon and explored. Room perhaps for a city and underground book for the setting of Bastion? In comparison, Electric Bastionland, the sequel to Into the Odd, is far better at its implicit world building. Yet in comparison to other microclones, Into the Odd Remastered does present somewhere to start playing with The Iron Coral and its associated hexcrawl.

Ultimately, Into the Odd Remastered is a lovely re-representation of a world that is accessible and all but instantly playable mechanically, but remains strange and elusive, oddly Dickensian and technologically fantastical, in terms of setting, and that is by design.

The Other OSR: Electric Bastionland

Imagine a roleplaying game which gives you two hundred pages of character options. Imagine a roleplaying game with a large expansive setting. Imagine a roleplaying game which builds the details of its setting from its character options—all two hundred pages of them. Imagine that Player Character generation in such a roleplaying game—with all two hundred pages of its options would take a mere five minutes. Actually less. Imagine a roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are adventurers and treasure hunters across this large expansive setting. Imagine that such a roleplaying game has Old School Renaissance sensibilities in terms of its simple mechanics—simple mechanics which are explained in four pages—and the dauntingly dangerous nature of its world. Combine all of these aspects together and what you have is Electric Bastionland, a roleplaying game of failed careers, debt and treasure hunting, and exploration and survival, across, under, and beyond a vast metropolis which is created and improvised through play and from tables.

Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd is published by Bastionland Press, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. As its title suggests, it is an expansion to the author’s earlier Into the Odd and Bastion Ein Sof, but a standalone expansion, one that takes the seemingly formerly wretched city of Bastion into the Electric Age and sees it glow with the fierce yellow of Electricity and grow and encroach upon other cities, to become a modern metropolis of bright lights and possibilities. It is a city that juxtaposes the familiar and the odd, the latter making those that engage with the oddness also odd. It is a city without a council, but many councils and many boroughs. It is a city which is constantly being built, but nobody claims to have built. It is a city of modernity with the sensibility of the past. It is a city of electricity and the consequences of that electricity—strange transmissions on the Radio, unnerving headaches near power stations, and machines that serve themselves. It is a city without a history and a city whose history has become a physical thing. Bastion is the present. Deep Country, beyond the limits of the city where everything was better, but simplistic and inconvenient, is the past. The Living Stars are the future. Connecting the three—Bastion, Deep Country, the Living Stars—is The Underground. It connects everything, tests everyone, and lies beneath reality, but it will get you where you want to go—eventually. Bastion as a city and a setting has the feel of La Belle Époque and of La Ville Lumière, and then hints of the Jazz Age verging on an ecumenopolis, but stranger, weirder, and odder the closer you look. Just how strange, just how weird, and just how odd, begins with the Player Characters.

Each Player Character begins play in debt, their career a failure, desperate to pay off this debt such that they embark on ‘great’ treasure hunts. Working with a fellow band of Debtors, they know that if they can find it, the treasure will surely be enough to pay off their debts. Yet they have a rival, and he also knows of the treasure. Tarry long in their expedition and the rival may retrieve the treasure and so their debt remains, grows even. In working to retrieve the treasure the Debtors will encounter the oddities and the weirdness of Bastion. Both will rub off on the Debtors, leaving also weird and odd, and that is in addition to the scars and bruises they may gain along the way. If they survive, they may also become Grizzled as well as scarred.

A Player Character in Electric Bastionland has three abilities—Strength, Dexterity, and Charisma. These are rated between three and eighteen. He has a six-sided die’s worth of Hit Protection and a six-sided die’s worth of New Pounds—this is not a lot of money. Together with his fellow Debtors, he owes £10,000. The exact nature of the debt is determined by the Failed Career of the youngest player. For example, a Fashionista owes The Lion Council—a literal council of lions—£10,000 and its members want the debt to be repaid in interesting meat, whilst a Petty Officer simply owes The Petty Court that amount, but can pay off half that amount by personally attending The Petty Court and representing himself in a tediously long trial of trivial affairs. Every Debtor has a Failed Career. Exactly what is determined by cross matching the Debtor’s lowest Ability score with his highest, and that gives a page number.

Every Failed Career is given a two-page spread and with one hundred Failed Careers in Electric Bastionland, that is the aforementioned two hundred pages of character options and a third of the book already taken up! However, each Failed Career is described in relatively broad detail. Along with an illustration, each Failed Career is accompanied by a simple explanation, some sample names, and the reason for the Debtors’ debt. Besides one or two items of equipment, each Failed Career gives options which add further detail and flavour. Exactly is determined by many New Pounds a Debtor has and how many points of Hit Protection he has. For example, the Necro-Engineer specialises in the most modern means of dealing with the growing industry of corpse production. His name might be Do, Jincey, Gognon, or Zephryne; he owes money to The Jolity Engine, a sentient, building-sized gambling machine; and he owns sombre formal wear and a shovel. A pair of tables ask two questions—‘how did you get your start in the corpse disposal industry?’ and ‘what was your great project? (you couldn’t get funding)’. If Necro-Engineer begins play with £6, then the answer to the first question is, by ‘Chasing Scavengers Away’ and he is accompanied by a barely-domesticated hyena which sticks with him. If he begins play with £2, he was a ‘Professional Grave Visitor’ and has a lifetime’s supply of bouquets from various florists around the city. As to his greatest project, if the Necro-Engineer only has the one point of Hit Protection, it was The Incineration Dome and he has a fire-proof protective suit which fits over his formal wear, whereas if he has four points of Hit Protection, it was The Protein Reclamation Initiative and he has a jar of flavour-masking rub, which makes anything palatable! Each of these tables is different for each Failed Career, but each balances the amount of Hit Protection and New Pounds with a piece of equipment or a power or other benefit. The lower the amount of Hit Protection and New Pounds, the potentially more powerful the piece of equipment or power or other benefit—and vice versa.

Name: Slipper
Failed Career: Academic Debater
Strength: 13
Dexterity: 13
Charisma: 11

Hit Protection: 5
£5

Debt: Conglomerated Taxes (You are exempt from certain taxes, gaining an effective 50% discount on pets, hair products, and offal.)

Possessions: Cane (d6), pocket-watch

What Can You Debate Forever?: Formal Wear (Headgear)
What Did Your University Provide As A Leaving Gift?: A Novelty Umbrella (also a clarinet).

Go through the list of Failed Careers and what Electric Bastionland is doing is not just providing the means to create characters, but detailing aspects of the world. Thus, Gutter Minder Failed Career might establish that the Debtor is Rat given human form in a lab experiment or a former High Society member, the only survivor of a mob uprising. The first establishes that somewhere in Bastion, someone is experimenting on animals, and that perhaps there might be a laboratory where they might be working on more, that there might be other, similar creatures out there, and so on. The second that of an uprising which could be any number of reasons. From the Trench Conscript which suggests a war and a battle and a Criminal Bureaucrat who specialises the legal loopholes which make every crime legal to the Wall-Born which suggests Bastion is surrounded by walls to the Integrated Alien passing as human which suggests a Science Fiction aspect to the city and the Un-Revolutionary, who seeks to prevent, even undo change in a city that is changing, the Failed Careers each hint at and add aspects to Bastion. Of course, not all of them will come into play necessarily, though those pertaining to the Debtors currently being played, certainly should.

Mechanically, Electric Bastionland shares much in common with the earlier Into the Odd. If a Debtor wants to undertake an action, his player rolls a twenty-sided die against the appropriate Ability, aiming to equal to or under to pass. For initiative in combat is handled with a Dexterity save. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much might damage be inflicted—there is no ‘to hit roll’. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Protection and then his Strength. Once damage is inflicted upon his Strength, a Debtor must make a save against his Strength in order to avoid being debilitated—which of course gets harder and harder the more Strength lost. Lastly, should a Debtor be reduced to exactly zero Hit Protection without suffering damage to his Strength, then he also scarred, which can be anything from an actual scar to doomed to die! And that is it in terms of mechanics, which are fully explained in just four pages! They are mostly player-facing, meaning that the players will probably roll more than the Conductor—as the Game Master is known in Electric Bastionland, and combat is in general, short and nasty, and best avoided if possible.

The last third of Electric Bastionland is for the Conductor. Advice, even direction for the Conductor, is to the point and laid out in short, easily grasped bullet points in ‘Preparing The Game’. The point of the roleplaying game is to find the treasure which will lift the Debtor out of penury, and so the treasure should be valuable rather than useful, there should be an explanation as to why it has not been found yet, and it should be thought-provoking. In a series of three bullet point blocks, the Conductor is guided through a range of subjects covering preparing and conducting the game, essentially presented as the principles behind the game. In turn, Bastion, Deep Country, and the Underground are presented in the same fashion, looking at how to understand, map, stock, and conduct (or referee) each of these weird and wonderful locations, often accompanied by tables that the Conductor can use as inspiration.

The advice for creating the inhabitants of Bastion is to make them interesting and memorable. Although they make up the majority, Humans are not the inhabitants of the city and beyond. Others include Mockeries, creatures of felt, wood, and string given life, hated by animals, but loved by children. Each has a particular talent and acts as if on the stage. In Bastion, they tend to be based on animals, Mock People though are loathed and Mock Objects stick to the Underground. Machines, connected to the Underground or a part of it, initiate change and monitor it, creating and modifying rather than destroying—and that can include the Debtors when encountered on their treasure hunt. Aliens are more advanced than the inhabitants of Bastion, but typically just a very specific way, and cannot truly integrate into society. Out in Deep Country, some have become gods or monsters of myth and legend. Monstrosities are each unique, each made rather than born, each mundane before it became what it is now.

The last part of Electric Bastionland is ‘The Oddendum’, a collection of short articles which the Conductor can include in her game. The first of these though, ‘A Player’s Handbook: Strategy Guide’, is not for the Conductor, but the players. It is a two-page spread on how to play Electric Bastionland and explore its city and beyond, and it is very useful. However, situated so very near the end of the book, it feels very much out of place, when really it should have been placed earlier, after the rules explanations and examples, where prospective players could have more readily found it. The rest of ‘The Oddendum’ covers a wide range of subjects, from Oddities, the strange devices and things whose workings defy explanation, but which might be magic or Sci-Fi and which everyone will want to buy or steal to an explanation of why the designer named the Game Master the ‘Conductor’ and how the city of Bastion is not a refuge or sanctuary to come back to from the Deep Country or Underground, but a continuation of the adventure. It includes sections of advice for the Conductor alongside sections of things to put in the game, so ‘The Balancing Act’ examines the balance between mechanics and making things interesting is followed by a list of Noble Weapons. This is followed by ‘Example Content’ such as ‘Unions and Rituals’—cults, clubs, and armies, ‘Dedicated Followers of Fashion’—an emporium of haute couture, and ‘The Bureaucrolabyrinth’, a table for running and complicating any bureaucratic process. All of these can be added to a Conductor’s game as she desires, but these final pieces do feel a bit of a jumble. And that in a way is fine, since Bastion as a setting is not meant to be a coherent whole, it is meant to be cluttered and discordant, part-patchwork, part-tangle.

Finally, the designer steps in with ‘The Last Word’. Here the designer makes clear that Electric Bastionland is designed to be played by anybody, to be played at the table, and to be created at the table. Further, that what it is not is a textbook intended to be studied. For the most part, the designer succeeds. Electric Bastionland is simple enough that it can be played by anyone, and it is definitely not a textbook, but very much more of a toolkit, one set of inspirations after another. Mechanically though, despite its simplicity, Electric Bastionland is not very forgiving—especially in combat where every attack succeeds and what matters is the amount of damage rolled. This is an issue continued from Into the Odd and it may be off-putting for some players. Electric Bastionland does include advice that addresses this—all of it good, but despite the simplicity and the advice, Electric Bastionland is not necessarily a roleplaying game for the beginning Game Master—or Conductor, since it relies heavily on improvisation. Which simply may be too daunting for the prospective Conductor. For the more experienced Game Master, the advice and simplicity will be nowhere near as daunting and should nicely ease her into running her first Electric Bastionland treasure hunt.

One side effect of the improvisation inherent to running and playing Electric Bastionland is that unlike the earlier Into the Odd, there is no traditional adventure or scenario, or in this case, treasure hunt, included in its pages. Into the Odd had a hexcrawl, a town, and a dungeon, and whilst Electric Bastionland has sample boroughs, what it does not have is a sample treasure hunt. Perhaps including one would have pulled away at the degree of improvisation which the designer of Electric Bastionland wants the Conductor to engage in and the lack of proscription that he wants Electric Bastionland to have, but certainly a working example of how treasure hunt can be put together and improvised might have been a useful edition, especially for the new or less experienced Conductor.

Another issue that Electric Bastionland shares with Into the Odd is just how much play can be got out of the roleplaying game. The set-up is simple: the Player Characters are in debt and each having a Failed Career need to find treasure to pay off what they owe. In the process, there is a magical, fantastical cityscape and beyond to explore, interesting NPCs to interact with, interesting other Debtors to interact with, obstacles to be overcome, and more. But what then? What next once the debt is paid off? There is potential in perhaps the Debtors having become part of the city becoming involved in its events and in perhaps exploring further aspects of their Failed Career, but that is beyond the scope of Electric Bastionland. Ultimately, Electric Bastionland is best suited for short campaigns, and since it includes one hundred Failed Careers, each one very different, each one adding to the nature of the city, there are multiple stories to be told and debts to be repaid. Thus, Electric Bastionland is better suited for repeated play rather than long term play.

Physically, it feels odd that a roleplaying book as large as Electric Bastionland is not in colour, the use of one artist—Alec Sorenson—and the judicious use of yellow colour palette as a highlight gives the book a uniform look throughout. Further, the illustrations impart a strong sense of the ordinary and the outré which pervades the city of Bastion and beyond. In terms of look and layout, Electric Bastionland is notably spacious, which when combined with the three-bullet point motif which mostly runs throughout the book, makes everything accessible and easy to find. If there is an issue with Electric Bastionland as a book, it is that towards the end it becomes a little disjointed, a collection of things, and as much as that fits the tone of the roleplaying game, it may not be to everyone’s taste. Otherwise, the book is well written, it is engaging, and it is well presented.

There is an elegance which runs throughout Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd, from the simplicity of its mechanics to the delightfully evocative nature of the Failed Careers which build story into a campaign and across the sprawling metropolis of Bastion. The city itself has a surreal, almost ethereal feel to it that is just waiting for the Conductor to improvise and work with her Debtors to explore and perhaps make a little more real. Ultimately, Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd is a roleplaying game whose every page is begging you to be played and explored, and just for a little while, you really should.

The Other OSR: Bastion Ein Sof

Although perhaps initially opaque in terms of what it is, Into the Odd turns out to be a terrifically simple, stripped back, player-facing post-apocalyptic near fantasy, steampunk, roleplaying game. Published by Lost Pages, it is surprising that in the years since its publication, that there has been very little support published for it. Bastion Ein Sof, meaning “Bastion ‘unending’ or bastion ‘infinite’”, is one of the very few examples, building on the previous supplement Electric Bastionland. Running to just twenty-eight pages—and small pages at that—Bastion Ein Sof describes a setting that stands and falls before the monstrous.

Bastion has fallen. The Angels destroyed Bastion. In turn the Giants defeated the Angels. In the wake of this calamitous conflict stand ten cities, humanity’s final sanctuary, each one lying within a Giant’s shadow. Each of the ten cities stands in the shadow of one the giants, each no more than a be-halo’d wraith of its former self. Yet their vigil leaves them vulnerable to the Angels and it is up to bravest of the survivors to venture out into the ravaged wastes beyond the cities where they can ensure that none of the Angels are made whole again. Such stalwart men and women are known as Hunters and it is their task to defeat the Angels and return the secrets of Bastion to humanity’s last refuge. At the heart of Bastion Ein Sof are four questions—All is lost, but what has been found? Bastionland is a void, but what fills it now? The Giants keep Humanity safe, but what is their price? The Angels must be contained and what happens when the containment fails?

As Hunters, the player characters venture forth from the city to take the blood of the Angels and scavenge the relics of the past. Each Angel has a lair. Each is a dangerous place, the reality of which, as well as the lands around, is twisted by the nature of the Angel. The blood is required to pay a tithe per Hunter to the Giants for their service upon the return of the Hunters to the city, though the payment can take other forms, including the flesh of the Hunters. There is one other thing that can be taken from the Angels. Once they are reduced to a benign form they leave behind—Dæmons! Loathed by the Giants, for they see Dæmons as a corruption of nature, they are desired by Hunters for the powers and great abilities they grant. In times past, they were known as Arcanum. Yet should a Dæmon be destroyed, it turns back into an Angel, so any Dæmon wielded by a Hunter is a holy time bomb waiting to go off…! Not paying the price of returning home or being found wielding Dæmons risks the danger of angering the Giants and should their ire be raised, it threatens not only the Hunters, but also the safety of the city… Relics from beyond the Giants’ shadow are needed if the city is to survive and Dæmons may well be the only way in which Hunters can survive beyond the Giants’ shadow.

Bastion Ein Sof includes a stripped down version of the character generation rules from Into the Odd to reflect the desperate nature of post-Bastion world. No character begins play with any Arcanum as in Into the Odd, as after all, their true nature is revealed here. Our sample Hunter is the scrawny, scabrous Tipp Potterworth, a former sexton turned grave scourer to survive and to feed a terrible Ether habit. He has become a Hunter to find more goods and so feed his addiction. 

Tipp Potterworth
Profession: Ex-Grave Scourer
Strength 4
Dexterity 10
Willpower 12
Hit Points: 8
Equipment: Rifle, Flask of Ether


The three major elements of the setting—the Giants, the Angels, and the Dæmons—are covered in broad detail, essentially pointers for the Game Master to develop the post-apocalypse herself. Rounding it out is a short scenario, ‘Illustrious Hod’, which takes the Hunters in search of lost ship and into the lair of an unknown Angel. It should provide a session or two’s worth of play, including character generation.

Physically, Bastion Ein Sof is simply and cleanly presented, and is illustrated with some excellent public domain artwork. It comes with some pointed advice for running a game set in this post-apocalypse, essentially that every roll should have a point. 

Bastion Ein Sof takes the baroque world of Bastion and Into the Odd and casts it into an unknown future of humanity clutching literally to shadows, forced to make a pact that levels a great price. It presents an unreal setting, a sliver of something more begging to be developed into a richer, deeper world. There is enough to get started in the slim pages of Bastion Ein Sof, but please give us more. In the meantime, Bastion Ein Sof possesses huge scope for the Game Master to develop its weird, desperate future, one that seems without hope, even if only providing a taster of that future.

The Other OSR: Into the Odd

From the outset, it is difficult to tell what Into the Odd actually is. Any other roleplaying game would give you a blurb or an explanation or a setting or some inspiration—or two, three, or all of these. Published by Lost Pages, its starting point is character generation followed by an explanation of the core rules. The former is done in two pages, whilst the later is done in one. So literally everything a player needs to know to get playing is done within three pages. All a player does is roll three six-sided dice for three Ability scores—Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, a six-sided die for Hit Points, and three six-sided dice to determine a character’s Starter Package. This can be equipment, weapons, armour, weird powers, an appearance, or an Arcanum, the latter a magical and highly sought after device like Pain Sign, Heat Ray, or Phase Key. Rolling for type of Arcana is a separate roll. A character can rolled up in minutes.

Reginald Cremson
Strength 10
Dexterity 13
Willpower 16
Hit Points: 4
Equipment: Pistol (d6), Knife (d6), Unarmed (d4)
Ability: Telepathy if target fails Will save

Mechanically, if a character wants to undertake an action, his player rolls a twenty-sided die against the appropriate Ability, aiming to equal to or under to pass. For initiative in combat is handled with a Dexterity save. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much might damage be inflicted. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Points and then his Strength. Should a character lose all of his Strength, he dies. It takes only a Short Rest to recover lost Hit Points, but a Long Rest lasting a week to recover lost Ability points. Saves against Willpower are used for several things, maintaining morale of course, but also in a pinch, maintaining civil discourse with others, and more interestingly, to manipulate the powers of Arcana. Each Arcanum does one specific thing and does it well. Binding Strands for example, creates strands spreading between two surfaces twenty feet apart. A Dexterity save is required to move through them. To use a Binding Strands Arcanum in this way is automatic, but if a character wants to do something different, for example, to tie up and gag a recent captive using Binding Strands, then a Willpower save is required. Arcana come in three types of increasing magnitude—‘Powers You Cannot Understand’, ‘Powers You Can Barely Control’, and ‘Powers You You Shouldn’t Control’.

It is at this point that we begin to see what the point of Into the Odd is—to go on an Expedition, perhaps to explore a mysterious environment, to confront or escape a powerful threat, or to find ever more powerful Arcanum. The aim being at least to be successful, return to civilisation at least with a great story, if not an amazing artifact or a dangerous secret. By going on expeditions and surviving a character gains Experience Levels and thus more Hit Points, a reputation, and possibly increases to his Abilities. A character needs to survive an ever increasing number of expeditions as he rises in Levels. In between expeditions, a character might set up and run a business or establish a mercenary company. Quick and easy rules are provided for handling these, both of which can generate income for the character as well as create story and scenario ideas for the Game Master.

All of which is covered in barely a third of Into the Odd and that also includes a good example of play. The other two thirds of the book are for the Game Master. The main rule for the Game Master is the Luck roll for when a degree of randomness is required. This is a roll of a six-sided die with higher results favouring the player characters. Beyond this there are discussions of monsters to be encountered, treasure to be found—including some new Arcana, and traps and obstacles to be overcome. What is interesting about traps and obstacles in Into the Odd is that unless a character is in a rush, then he will always spot them. This is because the challenge for the character is not spotting them, but overcoming or avoiding them. So for example, a pit trap is easy to spot and with a bit of effort and time, easy to work around without the danger of falling in, having got past the pit, the characters later have to return past in a hurry. Now their players need to make Dexterity saves in order to get past safely in a hurry.

So far, with inclusion of pistols and muskets and strange powers and Arcanum, Into the Odd implies a strange Science Fantasy version of the early modern age—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The latter half of Into the Odd introduces a setting, that of the Odd World, of which ‘Bastion’, ‘Hub of Mankind’ is the self-proclaimed capital of civilisation. It is a fog-palled city of huge factories, mobs crying out for vengeance, star cults vying for secrets and power, and an underground riddled with tunnels, vaults, and more. There are lands and cities beyond Bastion, even a Polar Ocean, but they are not Bastion. (It should be noted that the illustrations suggest Bastion and thus Odd World is more Dickensian then Georgian or Stuart-era London.)

In terms of specific playing areas, Into the Odd provides three locations. These are the scum-encrusted fishing town of Hopesend Port, the Last Port of the North; a dungeon, The Iron Coral, which lies off the coast off Hopesend Port; and the hexcrawl, The Fallen Marsh, the soggy stretch of coast which lies between them. Now these are presented in the order of The Iron Coral, The Fallen Marsh, and Hopesend Port, which feels counter-intuitive if the trio is run as a campaign, with the player characters starting out from Hopesend and then travelling through The Fallen Marsh to The Iron Coral. That said, the inclusion of The Iron Coral first essentially means that it is good for getting straight into play as it can be run with very little preparation upon the part of the Game Master. All three locations pack a lot of content into as a few words as possible with short descriptions and concisely written details. The designer here impresses with the amount of flavour he brings to these locations with such an economy of words. Both The Iron Coral and The Fallen Marsh are supported by random encounter tables that will help drive the action, whilst Hopesend is supported by table of events. Overall though, the trio form an excellent introductory mini-setting.

The ten or so pages are devoted to the ‘Oddpendium’, set of tables drawn from the designer’s website. They include tables for name generation, occupations, abilities, manner, connections, and important little life events, all for quick NPC generation. Others create the feel and atmosphere of a city street, its sample businesses, links to the Underworld that runs under Bastion, and more. Perhaps the pair of tables that get across the nature of the city the best are the ‘Insane Council Decisions’ and ‘General Public Reaction’ to them tables, which give a sense of governmental chaos, of desperate powers-that-be, and of mob rule.

Physically, Into the Odd is cleanly laid and in general, well written. The art is a good mix of new and public domain, serving to suggest both the weirdness and the banality of Bastion and its surrounds. The content could have been better organised, primarily to reorder the the three scenarios/locations in the book and if there was a second edition, perhaps a guide as to where to start and what to do next would be useful for player and Game Master alike. (In fact, a boxed set for the Into the Odd would be great.) Another issue is that an index would have been useful for finding particular elements of the book, although the book is short enough that it is not too much of a problem.

Into the Odd is quick and easy to play, players able to create characters in minutes and be ready to play. A little extra effort is required by the Game Master, but again she could read through the rule book in about half an hour and be ready to run The Iron Coral straight out of the book. Both the rules and the setting of Bastion are very light and very much open to interpretation by both players and the Game Master. This gives both a lot of freedom in deciding how elements of the setting and the rules work, and the Game Master a lot of freedom in building the elements of her Bastion. The tables of the ‘Oddpendium’ help in this, whether in preparing before a game session or during a game session.

How much play can be got out of Into the Odd is another matter. Certainly, the trio of the town, the hexcrawl, and the dungeon provide material for several sessions’ worth of play. Likewise, the tables will provide details and elements that a Game Master happy to improvise can develop into something more, but that will only go so far. Certainly support in terms of encounters and adventures which can be run with little preparation would be welcome, since that is the type of play that Into the Odd is designed to engender.

Mechanically though, Into the Odd is not necessarily a forgiving system. Combat in particular, is deadly as every attack succeeds and what matters is the amount of damage rolled. So hirelings or playing with multiple characters might be an option if a group wants to avoid a total party kill. In this, Into the Odd may initially have the feel of a Character Funnel as in Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, with its set-up of multiple Zero Level characters per player.

The simplicity of Into the Odd will attract some groups and put off others, the issue being  it not being really suitable for the Game Master who prefers to prepare her game rather than improvise in play. Yet this element of improvisation which provides ready scope for interpretation and judgement by the Game Master along with the unforgiving, often deadly, rules echo the play style of the Old School Renaissance. A brilliant combination of concision and flavour, Into the Odd is impressively easy to pick up and play with minimum preparation.