Solitaire: Be Like a Cat

There is a world out there for every cat to explore—gardens to laze in, rooftops to laze on, trees to climb, sheds to investigate, fences to scamper along, other cats to scowl and yowl at, humans to run away from and humans to properly socialise, and all in territories to mark and make that cat’s own. Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game offers the opportunity for a player to explore that world from cat’s own eye level and tell the story of that exploration in a journal. By default, that story will be one set across the urban world that we are all familiar with, but options included in Be Like A Cat can take the player and his cat into other genres, including a dystopian future, ancient Egypt, the far future aboard a space station, and  even aboard a pirate ship! If this sounds familiar, then it is because it follows the format of Be Like a Crow: A Solo RPG, in which the player takes the role and tells the story of a Corvidae—crow, magpie, jackdaw, or rook—over multiple landscapes and differing genres. Indeed, Be Like A Cat is by the same author and from the same publisher, Critical Kit Ltd. Where Be Like a Crow requires a deck of ordinary playing cards to play, Be Like A Cat requires a handful of dice.

Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game casts the player as either a Feral, Stray, or Domestic Kitten. The Kitten will explore a world mapped out on a Territory Tracker, adding rivers, parks, houses, trees, shops, businesses, restaurants, churches, street markets, and more, encountering all manner of creatures, including other cats, dogs, pigeons, rats, humans—old and young, and goats and llamas! Some of these encounters will be resolved with a fight, but not all of them, and as the Kitten moves from one type of territory to another, it can mark it as their own, hopefully permanently. As a Kitten explores, it will age, first into a Young Adult, and into a Mature Adult and a Senior. It will improve many of its skills when it does so at these stages of its life. The play of the game continues until a scenario’s goals have been fulfilled, all of the Territory Tracker for a scenario has been mapped out, the Kitten has reached the age of a Senior, or when it has run out of Lives.

A Kitten—and thus a cat of any age—is defined by sixteen skills, grouped into four categories. The skills are rated between one and six. The Kitten will have a Background— Feral, Stray, or Domestic—which will determine its appearance, behaviour, starting location, and bonus and weakness. For example, a Feral Kitten takes good care of itself; is unsociable and prefers to retreat or aggression; has a starting location of woodlands, countryside, a farm, or park; as a Bonus, rolls Prowl and Hunt skill checks with courage; and as a Weakness, rolls Cute and Signal skill checks with timidity. Of course, a Kitten has nine lives, each of which is lost when a Kitten loses all of his Health.

Hercule
Lifecycle Stage: Kitten
Background: Domestic
Starting Location: Back Garden
Bonus: All Social skill checks
Weakness: Balance and Jump skill checks
Health: 5
Lives: Nine
SKILLS
Survival: Prowl 1, Hunt 1, Mark 3, Preen 1
Social: Cute 3, Scare 1, Play 2, Signal 2
Travel: Jump 1, Climb 3, Balance 1, Land 1
Combat: Claw 1, Bite 1, Pounce 1, Evade 1

Mechanically, Be Like A Cat is a dice pool system. When a player wants his Kitten to undertake an action, he rolls the dice for the appropriate skill. Results of four and five count as one Success, whilst six counts as two. Rolls of one count as minuses and reduce the number of Successes rolled and if the total number Successes is negative, the Kitten loses Health. One or two Successes counts as a successful action, whilst three or more Successes is an outstanding outcome and the next roll is made with Courage. If the roll is made with Courage, a player can reroll any die that did result in a one, whilst rolls with Timidity means that results of four do not count.

Combat use the Claw, Bite, Pounce, and Evade skills. Claw and Bite are used to attack and inflict damage, whilst Evade is used to avoid attacks. Pounce is rolled to pin the defender down and if this can be done for three rounds, the defender will yield and if the defender holds territory, it also gives this up to the attacker. Social encounters are set up using the reaction table and the encounter verbs in the ‘Urban Cat’ scenario. In addition, a Young Adult and Mature Adult suffer a ‘FRAP’ or ‘Frenetic Random Activity Period’ or a ‘zoomie’. It occurs when two sixes are rolled for any action, and then the Cat rushes off in random direction.

The structure of Be Like A Cat consists of four phases. These are to move or stay, check for and resolve any encounters and any events, and then potentially take control of the location. The roleplaying game includes a cheat sheet and each scenario includes tables for locations, encounters, ‘Yes, and…’, and genre appropriate tables. The ‘Yes, and…’ table gives events that help the player add depth and detail. The genre scenarios also add objectives. For example, for ‘Brave Mew World’, the Kitten is uploaded to a corporate mainframe and sent to locate and copy eight databases, equipped with augmentations that can be salvaged from opponents the Kitten defeats, whilst the Kitten is searching for scrolls under the temple of Rameses II in ‘The Book of Bastet’, from which it can gain Boons, ultimately leading to a showdown with Bastet’s sworn enemy.

In addition, Be Like A Cat includes options for two players instead of one. These include taking it turns to control the actions of the Kitten; competitively, with each player controlling a different Kitten; and finally with a Game Master. The competitive option shifts Be Like A Cat towards being more like a board game, with the players competing for territory, whilst the option with the Game Master makes Be Like A Cat more of a traditional roleplaying game.

Physically, Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game is a clean little book with some decent artwork. It is an easy read.

Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game enables a player to explore the world (and other worlds) from a cat’s eye view. Some worlds are more fantastical than others, but the point of view has its own magic, that of an animal whose life we as owners and passersby we only see parts of. Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game lets us imagine all of that world and in some cases, more. Be Like A Cat: a solo/two-player roleplaying game is perfect for the cat lover who roleplays and for the cat lover who wants to try something a little different.

Jeffin’ Chaos

In 1994, Earth was under attack. A sociopathic physicist from World War II was sending creatures enhanced with psychic and biomechanical powers from the planet she had made her home, to wreak havoc and take control. Earth responded by psychically sending its own agents to strike at the physicist’s operations. However, due to the inaccuracy of the technology, the agents found themselves not in control of an alien body each, but rather in control of a single body collectively, constantly vying for control as they took the fight to the enemy. In 2026, the Earth is still under attack and under threat of invasion—and not all of the hive-mind aliens beamed from another world are not happy about it. They occupy the same body, they all have different objectives, but some want to go home and some want to stay once they have completed their missions. The body is called The Jeff. They do not have exact control of The Jeff and they do not fully understand the world where they have been sent. There is the possibility that the Humans around The Jeff will realise that The Jeff is not Jeff, but something else. Especially once Jeff starts using alien powers. Then chaos will happen. Humans will panic. Alien hunters will appear. The Jeff might fail.

So, this is not actually a description of the same roleplaying game. The first is a description of Khaotic, published in 1994 by Marquee Press. The second and more recent is The Jeff Paradox. This is a weird, alien invasion roleplaying game published by Critical Kit Ltd, best known for Be Like A Crow – A Solo RPG and Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG. In The Jeff Paradox, the players each controls a Node, a fragment of an alien hive mind, but with their own goals, hidden skills, and some of Jeff’s alien powers, such as Shape-Shifting, Enhanced Strength, Speed, and Memory Wipe. The Jeff has been sent to explore the Earth and finds itself in an area where there are a lot of Humans—a shopping centre, a railway station, a high street, a theatre, and so on. Each player will set his Node’s own secret agendas and from those the Game Master will sketch out an environment where those agendas can potentially be achieved. The Jeff Paradox is designed for three or more players, one of whom will be the Game Master, a six-sided die, and twenty-five Influence Tokens per player. The Jeff Paradox concludes when The Jeff dies, is fully exposed as an alien construct, returns home or permanently settles on Earth (as decided by the Game Master), or the players run out of Influence Tokens. It is possible for a player to win in The Jeff. This is based on the number of goals achieved by his Node.

A Node is simply defined. It has a mundane skill, an Alien ability, and is allied with a faction—Homeward or Earthbound—set by the Game Master. The Node also has three goals, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. These are worth three, two, and one points when completed respectively, and can actually be achieved multiple times, by any player. Which means that a rival Node can score points for another!

Node X&P*%X9

Faction: Earthbound

Alien Ability: Telekinesis

Skill: Administration

Primary Goal: Find out what the Chester-Perry Conglomerate actually does

Secondary Goal: Track everyone who goes into the stationary cupboard

Tertiary Goal: Eat Maccaroni Cheese

The Jeff also requires some set-up by the Game Master, who defines the environment which The Jeff will be exploring. This is based upon the goals that the players have set for their Nodes. The environment should be relatively small, but have scope for the goals to be achieved, hopefully with some crossover between the Nodes. In play, the Game Master tracks three factors. One is the Faction Alignment Slider, which tracks which faction is winning and done is in secret. The other two are the Chaos Counter and the Alien Exposure Level. The Chaos Counter increases for failed actions and when it reaches ten, The Jeff has a chaotic breakdown and the Alien Exposure Level increases. The Alien Exposure Level also increases when Humans witness the use of Alien Abilities or odd behaviour by The Jeff and may ultimately trigger the appearance of the Men in Black hunting aliens…

The Jeff Paradox is played in a series of scenes. Each scene, the players will bid for control of The Jeff with their Influence Tokens. The winner narrates what he wants The Jeff to do in that scene. If it requires a die roll, a roll of six automatically succeeds; a roll of three, four, or five only succeeds if it involves the Node’s Mundane Skill or Alien Ability; and a roll or one or two always fails—humorously, the Chaos Counter increases by one, and the Game Master narrates the outcome. Then the players bid for control again. Notably, unsuccessful bids do not mean that Influence Tokens are lost, so that players who do not take control early on have a greater chance of doing so later in the game.

As much as the players and their Nodes want to succeed, failure will push The Jeff Paradox forward. It raises the Chaos Counter and subsequently, the Alien Exposure Level. When the Chaos Counter is filled, the Game Master is encouraged to alter the situation, introduce chaos, increase the consequences, and so on. This is, of course, where much of its humour will come from.

Although The Jeff Paradox includes advice for the Game Master on set-up, there is little in the way of advice on running the game. It is a fairly simple storytelling roleplaying game, but the lack of advice here still makes it better suited to the experienced Game Master. The other issues with The Jeff Paradox are to do with game set-up. There is a break in the flow of the game between players creating Nodes with their goals and the Game Master sketching out an environment where those might be achieved. An example, ready-to-play environment (or two), complete with goals for the Nodes might have been useful and would have made game set-up faster. However, an experienced Game Master should be able to overcome these issues. For convention plays of The Jeff Paradox, the Game Master might want to prepare Nodes with goals, skills, and Alien Abilities and an environment ahead of time.

Physically, The Jeff Paradox is an easy read and cleanly laid out. It is printed white on black, so may not be easy to read for everyone.

The Jeff Paradox is an entertaining roleplaying game in which the players need to explore the Human world whilst balancing the need to hide his alien nature and continue appearing Human, but perhaps needing to use his alien abilities to achieve his goals. It is good for the occasional play through and with some preparation good for conventions too.

—oOo—

Critical Kit Ltd will be at UK Games Expo which takes place from Friday, 29th to Sunday 31st of May.

The Air is Ours

It is 2045 and the biggest difference between the haves and have-nots is access to clean air. The air is so contaminated that everyone in the city must wear a filter mask fitted with daily does of ‘Hexi’, a compound derived from the Hemigraphis Exotica plant in order to breathe. Only the rich and powerful live their lives above the contamination which poisons the air and sits like fog, quite literally so in the city’s central megascrapers. Four MegaCorps control the city, holding monopolies on the manufacture and sale of respirator masks and industrial filters, agriculture including the growing and manufacturing of Hemigraphis Exotica, communication and media. Most of the inhabitants of the City live a downtrodden existence with little hope of advancement or improvement, yet there are those who resist the control of the MegaCorps over their lives. ‘Breatheless’ is a resistance group dedicated to removing this control over the lives of the masses, conducting acts of computer hacking, vandalism, and sabotage to both take back control and prevent further ecological damage from the production of Hemigraphis Exotica. Cells of ‘Breatheless’ operatives work in secret to avoid coming to the attention of the Stewards who police the city.

This is the set-up for White Sands: A Role-Playing Game the Fight for Clean Air, a game of ecological resistance set in the near future, published by Critical Kit Ltd, best known for Be Like A Crow – A Solo RPG and Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG. The Player Characters are Activists, newly activated members of Breatheless. An Activist is simply defined by six skills—Strength, Speed, Sneak, Shoot, Smarts, and Sway, plus an Area of Expertise. Examples of the latter include Hacker, Driver, Construction, Engineer, Gardener, and Accountant, but the player is free to create his own. Player Character creation is very simple. A player simply has to assign a set of dice types to the six skills, decide on an Area of Expertise, and then flesh out the Activist’s details, including a description of how his respirator mask is decorated and a ‘handle’ rather than an actual name—since they must never reveal their actual names.

Mechanically, White Sands is equally as simple. To have his Activist undertake an action, a player rolls the appropriate Skill die. On a result of one, the Activist fails and he suffers a knock in confidence, temporally reducing the size of the die type attached to the Skill. A result of two is failure without any complications; three indicates a success with a complication; four is a straightforward success; and five or more is a total success with potentially better outcomes. If the Activist has an appropriate Area of Expertise that applies or has the ‘Upper hand’ in this particular situation, then the player rolls two dice instead of one and selects the best result. Combat uses opposed dice rolls, the Strength Skill versus Speed Skill for melee combat, the Shoot Skill versus Speed Skill for ranged combat. Combat is fast and potentially deadly, an NPC or Activist having anywhere between two and nine Injury Points. An unarmed attack will inflict a single point of damage, whilst a melee weapon or a hit by a rubber bullet fired by a riot gun typically used by the Stewards both do two points of damage. The roleplaying game advises that a player create a replacement Activist given how deadly the combat system is. Overall, the rules to this roleplaying game are very simple such that specific outcomes are going to rely on narrative rather than mechanical outcome.

White Sands includes the scenario, ‘Havana Down’, which is intended to provide an introduction and single session’s worth of play. The Player Characters are newly activated Activists living in the former beach resort town of White Sands. They are asked to locate an Activist called Havana who has not been seen for a few days after successfully obtaining a keycard that give Breathless access to important MegaCorp facilities. The Activists must at least find the keycard if not Havana. It is not a complex investigation, but offers a decent mix of action and interaction, and if the players want to carry on beyond the scenario, hooks for possible further adventures.

Physically, White Sands is decently presented. It is actually very nicely illustrated such that you wish there was more to the setting than is given in the text. The book also comes with a location map for the scenario and a map of the city.

There are two ways in which White Sands can be used. One is as a one-shot, the Game Master running the included scenario, ‘Havana Down’. This makes it suitable for use at a convention. The other is as a more traditional roleplaying game, the Game Master running the included scenario, ‘Havana Down’, and then using it as the basis for a continuing campaign. That though requires more effort upon the part of the Game Master, since there is not a huge amount of detail to the poisoned future of White Sands, and she will need to develop more of the world upon which to build her campaign. Either way, White Sands: A Role-Playing Game the Fight for Clean Air feels like a low-budget television series on the Sci-Fi Channel from the nineties—playable, but leaving the reader to wonder what more there is to the world.

The Other OSR: Punk is Dead

Punk is Dead: A Post-Apocalyptic SongwritingTTRPG kicks the punk of Mörk Borg into England’s dreaming. It is a roleplaying game that is both like and unlike 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. Its tone is very much ‘punk’ and punk rock and it is very much like Mörk Borg set on an island lost from the dying world, However, it is a post-apocalyptic world rather than the pre-apocalyptic world of Mörk Borg, and its setting is modern rather than fantasy, but still ‘grim dark’. How exactly this world came about is unknown, but everyone knows that it was the fault of foolish old men, who in the space of seven days expended every nuclear weapon and shrouded the world in grey. Only the Ununited Kingdom remains, a lonely island onto whose shores climbs every nightmare and myth, come in search of power, a feast, or just a seat at the last dying of the world. It has been divided into five realms. In the southeast, The Murk exists Underground, dominated by the organisation known as the ‘LCV’, or Literal Corporate Vampires, and their shareholders, who reside in the Earthscrapers that fork out from the old tunnels of the Underground. Their world is a hell of torture and decadence, dug ever deeper by captives destined to become food. In the southwest, The Whimsy is ruled by an Undead Queen pulled from the grave to enact retribution upon those who killed her husband a thousand years before and unite the kingdom. She covers her realm in a thick mist which hides the monsters she commands and makes travel difficult. In the west, Adain Ddraig is protected from The Whimsy and the rest of the Ununited Kingdom by two gurt wyrms that demand tribute in cattle. To the north, The Grim is scarred by the cracks of former rivers and canals, divided between and vied over by the Petrolhdz and the EquestriPunks, who only come together for a good rave or to trade at the realm’s only building still standing, the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Further north, The Fern Jungle is a labyrinth of towering ferns and forests, where ‘Quantum Fuckery’ has merged nature and humanity as one, the Stag Folk silent and swift, and protective of their Hidden King. In between is The Woe, the workhouse of the Ununited Kingdom, run by middle management for the Literal Corporate Vampires. To the east, somewhere in the poisoned sea comes a signal from a Pirate Radio station, broadcasting news and music, and worse, Emergency Broadcasts that herald the end of the UuK. Few hear them for the Literal Corporate Vampires outlaws the possession of radios. Even as the end draws near, there is hope. Hope that runs like a river. Not of water, but MUSIC! Music that Punks will play to bring hope to the Ununited Kingdom and kick fascist, vampiric arse along the way.

Punk is Dead: A Post-Apocalyptic Songwriting TTRPG is published by Critical Kit Ltd, best known for Be Like A Crow – A Solo RPG and Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG. A Punk in Punk is Dead is defined by six attributes—Nngh (strength for pushing and punching), Deft, Stage Presence (intimidation and charisma), Tough, Yeet (throwing stuff), and Streetwise. These range in value between ‘-3’ and ‘+3’. He has a weapon, such as a steak tenderise, an eight-ball in a sock, or a chainsaw. He will also have a Role, a Class that is his role in the band. These consist of Vocals, Guitar, Drums, and Keys, plus there are three bonus Hip Hop roles, which are Em Cee, Dee Jay, and Breaker. (If there is an eighties version of Punk is Dead, there definitely needs to a ‘Bez’ Role.) Each provides some ability modifiers, how money he has, and a way in ‘Quantum Fuckery’ has affected him. For example, Vocals might have the ‘War Song’ that unleashes a scream twice a day that grants a bonus to the other Band Members’ next actions or ‘Crowd Surfer’, which with running start or leap enables the Band Member to attack everyone in the ‘crowd’, whilst for the Keys there is Sight Reading’ to read the intentions of someone else and ‘Discordant Demo’ that creates an off-key melody which causes temporary brain fuzz and increases the Difficulty Rating of all tests for several minutes.

Name: Nuclear Trashcan Ned

Role: Drums

Nngh +2 Deft 0 Stage Presence 0 Tough +3 Yeet 0 Streetwise -1

Hit Points: 11

‘Quantum Fuckery’: 808 (inflict double damage on anyone attacking a fellow bandmember)

Weapon: The Truncheon Thing (d6)

Threads: Kevlar Jacket, Kneepads, DMs, leather gloves

Equipment: Fuck all

£23, bottle of water, two days’ worth of food

Clash symbol

To have his Punk or Band Member undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die and adds the appropriate ability score to roll equal to or higher than a Difficulty Rating. The Difficulty Rating ranges from ‘Piece of piss’ and six to ‘No fucking chance’ and eighteen, with ‘You’ve got this’ or twelve being the average Difficulty Rating. A Band Member has a number of Creativity Points that his player can spend to modify rolls, whilst the Band Creativity Points are useable all by everyone as long as they all agree.

Combat uses the same mechanic. Initiative is random, the band members or the enemies going first. Tests are made against Nngh for melee attacks and Yeet for ranged attacks. An attack can be dodged with the Deft test. The rules allow for ‘fuck-ups’ if a roll of one is made. If a Band Member’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, he is broken and may result in him being knocked unconscious, losing or breaking a limb, losing an eye, heavy bleeding, and death. If reduced to negative Hit Points, he is definitely dead.

The songwriting aspect of Punk is Dead is treated with a similar brevity, even though it is part of the title. There are no mechanics to support the process, but rather the players are expected to rely upon their creativity, take a vote on proposed lyrics, and if accepted are rewarded with Creativity Points. There is a quick and dirty guide, which is very in-keeping with the Punk ethos. The other way of earning Creativity Points is performing great gigs. There are tables for a gig’s outcome and for life on tour, preferably in a Ford Transit Van.

For the Band Manager as the Game Master is known there is a plethora of enemies, fascist and otherwise. They start with the Literal Corporate Vampire with sharpest of suits and include the First Wave of undead raised by the Undead Queen in The Whimsey after the apocalypse, Flame Hounds, the Gurt Wyrm, Stag Folk, Splitter made from seaweed, rope, and micro-plastics, Root Blights, Woebots, The Undead Queen of Avalon, and more.

Lastly there is a scenario, ‘London Falling’. The band gets to play at The ePoxy Club in Covent Garden Ruins as a support act. It is a fun little stealth and strike mission which kicks off when the main act gets kidnapped by the local Literal Corporate Vampire. It can be played through in a single session or so, including Band Member creation.

Punk is Dead: A Post-Apocalyptic Songwriting TTRPG is missing advice for the Band Manager in terms of setting up and running a game. Given that, this is not a roleplaying game that really should be picked by the prospective Game Master as her first roleplaying game unless she is definitely a fan of Punk. It is better suited to a more experienced Game Master who will have no issue with the rules or how to play or run Punk is Dead. In the main, the Band Manager and her players will be drawing upon all manner of media depicting band life and going on tour, not just that of Punk, and for the majority of players, they will have some idea of what that is like from having consumed some of that media. Similarly, there is no advice on creating a scenario or campaign, otherwise known as going on tour, and again, the Band Member will likely want to draw inspiration for those media sources and then inject some of the horror of Punk is Dead.

Physically, Punk is Dead: A Post-Apocalyptic Songwriting TTRPG is presented in the rough Punk style that you would expect and as seen on punk rock album covers, flyers for punk concerts ,and punk fanzines, with lots of paste-ups, torn out content, and collages. It fits the genre of the roleplaying game and it work well with the more horrifying style of Mörk Borg.

Punk is Dead: A Post-Apocalyptic Songwriting TTRPG is an entertainingly different treatment of the post-apocalyptic in roleplaying, likely to be a bruising, sweary headbutt of a game. Its presentation of the post-apocalypse of the Ununited Kingdom leans towards breadth rather than depth, and perhaps it could be explored further a full Punk is Dead tour across the Ununited Kingdom?

[Free RPG Day 2025] Wires in the Wood

Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

—oOo—

The world has changed, but whomever changed it, is long gone. The world has been abandoned. This leaves room for the world to be explored and foraged and artefacts found and artefacts upcycled. This is the very simple set-up for Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG. Based on the artwork of Simon J. Curd, this is published by Critical Kit, Ltd, a publisher best known for Be Like a Crow: A Solo RPG, which can be played as a solo journalling roleplaying game or as a two-player game storytelling game. The Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart is the version released for Free RPG Day and as the title suggests is designed to be played solo. It requires a standard deck of playing cards, two six-sided dice, a token to represent the forager’s location, and a means of recording the story.

In Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart, the player controls the story of a Forager, an animal who will explore the abandoned world and undertake ‘Upcycling Tasks’. This involves the discovery of artefacts left behind and combining two or more of them to solve a problem. Perhaps a bridge over a ravine creaks and is missing several planks, leaving dangerous gaps or a set of wild hedgerows form a giant puzzle that is easy to get lost in and some creatures need help finding their way out. The cycle of the game is to explore different locations, find artefacts, discover problems, and transport the upcycled artefacts to the problem to solve it. The locations, artefacts, problems, and the upcycled artefacts are used as prompts by the player record the story of his Forager.

A Forager has only the one attribute, Zeal. It costs Zeal to explore and move from location to location, but is earned by completing Upcycling Tasks. The full game allows a player to choose a different Forager, each with a different skill, but the quick-start only includes the one. This is the ‘Scamper’, a raccoon-like creature with horns or antlers, and the skill, ‘Fleet of Foot’. This enables him to move to a location with the red suite without expending any Zeal.

The exploration area has a maximum area of a six-by-four grid. The standard deck of playing cards requires a little preparation. The game is played without jokers, three cards are drawn as trigger cards and three as Upcycling Task cards. Twenty-one cards are drawn to form the locations deck. The details of the trigger cards are shuffled into the locations deck, whilst the Upcycling Task cards are kept to one side. On a turn, the player draws a card from the locations deck, adds it to the grid and notes down the location description determined by the card’s colour and value. If the card drawn is a trigger card, the player can reveal one of the three Upcycling Tasks. This is determined by the value of the trigger card. At the end of a turn, the player rolls for an event or an encounter.

Game play ends when the Forager has either un out of Zeal or completed all three of his Upcycling Tasks. Although Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart is a quick-start designed to introduce the game and therefore does not include all of the roleplaying game’s prompts, it does include enough to enable it to be replayed. There are twenty-six location descriptions, thirteen Upcycling Tasks, and twelve Artefacts awaiting recycling. A player could easily play through it a second time and have a different experience dealing with different Upcycling Tasks, and perhaps even a third time!

Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart is a post-apocalyptic setting, one in which strange, not quite recognisable (mutated?) creatures explore a world left by mankind? The location and artefact descriptions are recognisably that of our own world, although the descriptions of the artefacts leave out their actual name. Thus, “There’s something trapped inside this that looks at you. Lots of pressy things and two skinny little arms that break easily. It also has a tail. It won’t talk to you.” is actually a television! This is classic post-apocalyptic roleplaying, a player completely aware of what an object from the past is, but having to roleplay his character not knowing what it is and what it does.

Physically, Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart is charming little book. Simon J. Curd’s artwork is strange, perhaps a little creepy, and delightful.

Wires in the Woods: A trash-foraging TTRPG Solo Quickstart is a charming and surprising fulsome introduction to the full roleplaying game, one that provides an equally surprising amount of game play. It serves as a decent introduction to journalling roleplaying games and the artwork of Simon J. Curd.

Solitaire: Aces Over the Adriatic

There is something utterly romantic and beguiling as you soar through the skies above the azure waters of the Adriatic, the sun glinting off your wingtips, the wind rushing past your head, and the roar of the engine in your ears. Higher, faster, the dreams of your nation embodied in the sleek frame of the machine in your hands, for a moment you are free. Free of the demands of national pride and prestige, free of expectations, and maybe even free of the memories that you can never truly escape, no matter how fast or how high you fly… And then you turn over and dive. Dive back down to the exaltation of the crowds, to the popping glare of the press, to be amongst the men and women placed on a pedestal who are your peers and like you, know the freedom of flight, and to return to the horrors of your past and the creeping horror of Fascism along the shores of the Adriatic.

In Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG, you are that pilot. Perhaps a veteran of the Great War, mourning the loss of comrades, your skill and experience has put you at the controls of a seaplane, an entry into the ongoing Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider, a biennial race for seaplanes and flying boats. You race for your country, but you also race for the memory of your friends lost in combat and you race for the love and glory of flying. Yet the speed and manoeuvrability of your machine may also see you undertaking missions facing pirates that are a threat the skies over the Adriatic, delivering urgent mail to Milan, or carrying contraband in sealed cases. Published by Critical Kit, Ltd, a publisher best known for Be Like a Crow: A Solo RPG, this is actually a French roleplaying game written in conjunction with the Musée de l’Hydraviation in Biscarrosse, France. It is semi-historical in that in addition to being inspired by the technical innovation and the romance brought about by the Schneider Trophy in the interwar years, it is also inspired by the Studio Ghibli film, Porco Rosso.

A Pilot in Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG is defined by his Nationality, Age, some Personality features, a personal distinctive feature, a distinctive feature for his aircraft, and a Perk. Nationality will also determine the Pilot’s name and possibly the type of aircraft he is flying, whilst age will determine whether or not he served in the Great War. The Perk can apply to the aircraft, such as ‘Military-grade weapons’ or ‘Speed’, or it can apply to the Pilot like ‘Calm’ or ‘Daredevil’. He also has values for Gauge, Glory, and Nostalgia. Gauge represents the amount of damage that both Pilot and aircraft can withstand; Glory is the Pilot’s fame and ambition, as it rises, the Pilot will gain Perks, a nickname, and honorary titles; and Nostalgia is the Pilot’s link to his past and if it grows too high, the Pilot may suffer from melancholy and if it reaches ten, will forces them to hang up his flying helmet and goggles.

Name: Otillie Gottschalk
Nationality: German
Age: 31
Nickname: None
Honorary Title: None
Personality: Clever, Chatty, Clumsy
Distinctive Features: Pet Dachshund, ‘Rudy’
Aircraft’s Distinctive Features: Dark Blue
Perks: Intuition
Gauge: 4
Glory: 0
Nostalgia: 0

Actions and Questions are handled in a straightforward manner. An answer to a question can be determined by a simple roll of a six-sided die, but there is a table of more nuanced answer options included. For actions, A Pilot in Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG employs the ‘Push System’. When the player wants his Pilot to undertake an action, he rolls a six-sided die. This is the ‘Initial Die’. It is impossible to fail on the roll of the ‘Initial Die’. A result of four or less is a ‘Weak Success’, or a success with consequences, whilst a result of five or six is a ‘Strong Success’. It is as simple as that, but what if the player rolls a ‘Weak Success’, but wants a ‘Strong Success’? he can then roll a which can lead to a failure. The results of the ‘Push Die’ are added to the results of the ‘Initial Die’. If the total is still less than four, it is still a ‘Weak Success’ and the player can roll another ‘Push Die’; if it is five or six, it is a ‘Strong Success’; and if it is seven or more, it is a failure. Effectively, the Pilot is constantly pushing the envelope and there is a chance that it can be pushed too far.

The play of the games flows back and forth between Missions and Memories. A mission might be to ferry a wealthy passenger to Venice or help cover the story of another famous pilot for the Pilot’s national press. A Memory can come from any activity, such as visiting a city or whilst a Pilot repairs his aircraft, and might be about the war, friends, past loves, and so on. Both require a roll to succeed. Each Mission has four Challenge Points and the player rolls to reduce these, a ‘Strong Success’ reducing two, ‘Weak Success’, and a failure, none. The faster a player can reduce the Challenge Points, the more Glory his Pilot will be rewarded. Glory can be spent to gain more Perks and as the total Glory accrued rises, the Pilot will gain a Nickname and an Honorary Title. However, results of a Failure and a ‘Weak Success’ both reduce ‘Gauge’ the joint measure of damage that a Pilot and his aircraft can suffer. Pilot and aeroplane can keep flying as long as their Gauge is one or more, but if it is reduced to zero, they will crash.

A Memory takes place between Missions. If successful, it can restore Gauge and refresh Perks used. However, in the process of reliving a Memory, a Pilot gains Nostalgia and if that ever rises to ten, the Pilot will retire. In addition, it is possible to have a Flashback during a Mission, which works similar to a Memory and also increases Nostalgia. So there is a balance here between keeping flying and succeeding and getting lost in reminiscence. And of course, throughout, the player is writing a journal—or is that keeping a logbook?—of the story of his Pilot and his aeroplane over the skies of Europe. It is here Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG that comes into its own in supporting the Player.

Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG is rich in background detail. There are descriptions of Europe in the interwar period, Fascist Italy, seaplanes and flying boats, the Schneider Trophy, and more. These descriptions are more overview than detail, but they are enough for the player to start with. Besides the table of Missions, there is ‘The Control Tower’ which provides tables for weather conditions, iconic places, NPCs including historical pilots and sponsors, generating pirate group names, and more. All of which the player can use to generate details and elements of his Pilot’s life in and out of the cockpit and as it is logged. There is advice too on how to play Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG, the author suggesting, for example, that the player control and tell the stories of multiple Pilots at once as if writing a drama, and on how to make the play harder or easier.

Unlike many journalling games, Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG has the scope to be more than just a solo game. The rules are simple and straightforward and the content in terms of setting and support is potentially more than enough for a Game Master—Air Marshal?—to run Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG as a storytelling game for a small group of players, whose Pilots could simply be rivals, members of a squadron, or even an aerial circus.

Physically, Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG is a beautiful little book. There are plenty of period photographs and the book is well written. The character sheet is a little busy, but it has everything on there that a player needs to know, including the basics of the rules.

Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG does over romanticise its setting a little, content to let the spectre of Fascism hang in the background rather than engage with it and so leaving the darker elements of play to the Memories of the Pilot and thus in the past rather than in the now. Thus, despite being based on the history of the Interwar Period, it leans more towards the fantasy of its other inspiration, the Studio Ghibli film, Porco Rosso, in its play. To be fair though, bringing that into play would have been challenging and since the player is telling the story of his Pilot, he is free to bring those elements into play if he wants to. Nevertheless, Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG is an utterly charming roleplaying game and an utter delight for fans of history, especially aviation history.

Solitaire: Death in Berlin

Between 1961 and 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by more than ideology. It was divided by the Berlin Wall, built in August, 1961 by the Deutsche Demoktratische Republik to stem the flow of citizens from the East to the West. It focused the world’s attention upon the divide between East and West Germany, between the capitalism of the West and the Communism of the East, embodied by the permanent border constructed of brick, explosive mines, sentry posts, machine guns, and so on. The ‘Grey City’ had been divided between the four Allied powers since the end of World War 2, but the Berlin Wall extended the Iron Curtain between East and West through the city rather than just around it. Both sides—the Soviet and the Allies—operated networks of spies and conducted operations in each other’s territories in an effort to discover what the other knew and what secrets they held, and in return, attempted to prevent secrets and other assets from falling into the enemy’s hands. This secret conflict between the NATO Allies and the Soviet Union and its proxies in the Warsaw Pact had been ongoing since before World War 2 and it would inspire films and fiction, such as that of Len Deighton and John le Carré, throughout the Cold War—and since. It would also inspire roleplaying games such as Top Secret, Spione, and Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War. One of the aspects of espionage and the Cold War is the loneliness and that is ripe for exploration in solo roleplaying such as Numb3r Stations – A Solo RPG and Death in Berlin: Spy Games During the Cold War 1961-1989.

Death in Berlin: Spy Games During the Cold War 1961-1989 is a solo roleplaying and journalling game published by Critical Kit Ltd., best known for its solo journalling game, Be Like a Crow: A Solo RPG and its scenarios for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, such as A Yuletide Snowball Massacre: A Ridiculously Festive Battle Royale for 5E and The City of a Hundred Ships. In Death in Berlin, the player will be telling the story of a spy in service to one of the agencies from either the Western Bloc or the Eastern Bloc. Thus, he can be a member of the Central Intelligence Agency or MI6 as much as he could be a member of the Komitet gosudarstvennoï bezopasnosti or the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. His role is counter-espionage, uncovering conspiracies and operations conducted by the other side.

Death in Berlin is really divided in two parts. The first part is a source book which describes the setting for the game, Berlin and the Cold War. The latter begins with George Orwell’s first use of the term and runs through the history in brisk fashion, and is accompanied by a guide to Berlin across all four sectors. There are maps too, showing the various checkpoints through the wall—there were far more than just Checkpoint Charlie—and the city’s various districts. There are cultural elements covered too, such as the Trabant and the symbolic figures known as the Ampelmännnchen on the pedestrian crossing lights. There is discussion as well of the various agencies, equipment that the player and his opponents might wield in the field, and the language of spycraft. The discussion of the espionage world is shorter than the coverage of the city though. The author states that this material is not designed as a sourcebook for the period and even suggests further reading for the benefit of the reader. However, this potentially still leaves a younger player with more work to do to familiarise himself with the period.

In terms of game play, Death in Berlin requires a full set of polyhedral dice and an ordinary deck of playing cards, of which, only cards valued from seven to Ace are used. An Agent is simply defined. He has two stats, Rank and Heat. Rank represents his progress through the agency and starts at one, raises by one for each conspiracy he foils (that involves a Queen, King, or Ace card), up to a maximum of five. Heat is a measure of how many risks the Agent has taken and how much of a liability he is becoming. It ranges in value from zero to six. It rises by one each time the player identifies what connects two members of a conspiracy. Should it rise to six, the Agent’s cover is blown and the game ends. An Agent also has a Motivation, such as Ideology or Ambition.

Death in Berlin uses a set of tables to help set up and run the game. One provides a narrative arc for what is effectively a season, such as the ‘Monitor’ Mode of Operation, ‘An Artist’ as the Target, and ‘Space’ as the Goal. Further tables can provide a yes or no answer to a question—qualified, if necessary, a suspect or two, names for NPCs of various nationalities, as well as places, weather, items, and possible codenames. Some of these will be useful at the start, some of them in play. Either way, the player is free to roll or pick from them as is his wont. The structure of play is formed by a pyramid of the playing cards, representing the whole of the conspiracy with each card representing a Suspect, four wide at the bottom, then three wide, two wide, and lastly the single card at the top. At least one seven is placed on the lowest level and cards are drawn and placed in the pyramid, ensuring that each card’s value is equal to or greater by a few points than its neighbouring cards. Initially, this is only horizontally in the lowest row, but switches to vertical for the upper levels. This creates a pyramid of ascending values. The top, most valuable card will be the big target or Suspect. The suit for each card, Spade for the military, police, and intelligence, Clubs for politicians and civil service, Diamonds for business and finance, and Hearts for the arts and vice, determines the area in which field, a Suspect works or is employed, whilst the value of the card is his rank. A random roll determines if he works for the West or the East.

Each individual card and thus Suspect is a target for surveillance upon the part of the player. The surveillance is rolled against the value of the card. If the player fails, he is spotted and gains a point of Heat. For each Rank at Rank Two and above, a player has a Silver Bullet—narratively, a disguise, a weapon, a sidekick, and so on—that sets the roll to ten plus the player’s Rank or enables him to succeed, but also increase his Heat. Heat can be lowered, but it has its own consequences.

If he succeeds, the player draws a new card and consults the Narrative Prompt table. This card determines the basics of the connection between this Suspect and another, adjacent one in the scenario. Each successful roll, each drawing of a new card, and consultation of the Narrative Prompt table is what pushes the story of the player’s investigation forward. For example, “The suspect likes gambling. And this often gets them in trouble. Someone is acting around them. Who is it? What is their relationship?” and “The target meets with one of the known suspects in the conspiracy. This takes place in a cinema in (West sector). You manage to get close enough and hear a sentence. What is it?” It is in this space, using the prompts, that the player is writing his journal and telling the story of his investigation.

Physically, Death in Berlin is simply and cleanly presented. The illustrations evoke the stark world of Berlin in the sixties and seventies, giving a feel for the city. The maps are decent too.

Play through of Death in Berlin, from the beginning investigation of the conspiracy through to the unmasking of the mastermind at its heart will take an hour or more, being dependent on the depth and detail that the player wants to work into the story. It has a slightly grubby feel, but how grubby is again dependent on the player and the style of espionage he wants to write about. The default is definitely le Carré rather than Fleming and there is nothing to stop a player from pushing into the territory of Mick Herron—at least in tone rather than period. Similarly, how much a player will get out of Death in Berlin in writing a journal is dependent upon his knowledge and appreciation of both the genre and the period when it is set.

Death in Berlin: Spy Games During the Cold War 1961-1989 is a very serviceable journalling game, one whose enjoyment and creativity very much depends upon the knowledge and interest of the player.

Reviews from R’lyeh Post-Christmas Dozen 2024

Since 2001, Reviews from R’lyeh have contributed to a series of Christmas lists at Ogrecave.com—and at RPGaction.com before that, suggesting not necessarily the best board and roleplaying games of the preceding year, but the titles from the last twelve months that you might like to receive and give. Continuing the break with tradition—in that the following is just the one list and in that for reasons beyond its control, OgreCave.com is not running its own lists—Reviews from R’lyeh would once again like present its own list. Further, as is also traditional, Reviews from R’lyeh has not devolved into the need to cast about ‘Baleful Blandishments’ to all concerned or otherwise based upon the arbitrary organisation of days. So as Reviews from R’lyeh presents its annual (Post-)Christmas Dozen, I can only hope that the following list includes one of your favourites, or even better still, includes a game that you did not have and someone was happy to hide in gaudy paper and place under that dead tree for you. If not, then this is a list of what would have been good under that tree and what you should purchase yourself to read and play in the months to come.

—oOo—

The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970 – 1977
Wizards of the Coast ($99.99/£75)
In an exceptional year for books about the history of the hobby, the first entry on the list is the most controversial, but an absolute must for the Dungeons & Dragons fan who has an interest in the early history of the world’s most popular roleplaying game. To help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, this massive volume charts the gestation and development through letters and fanzines of the ideas that would ultimately lead to the publication of Original Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The hefty tome draws heavily on the archives to fully reproduce Chainmail – rules for medieval miniatures and its Fantasy Supplement that were the precursors to Dungeons & Dragons, the very first draft of Dungeons & Dragons, and much, much more, all the way up to the published version and beyond. Were you so inclined, the reproductions in this book are so good that you could actually run a game based on the rules they present! Everything is faithfully reproduced and accompanied by a commentary from Jon Peterson, one of the hobby’s few historians, the result is a superb book, one that genuinely gives the fan of the roleplaying game the opportunity to look at documents and correspondences that they would otherwise never have the chance to look at or read. The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970 – 1977 is like having a Dungeons & Dragons museum of your own, but one that you can pull from your shelf and browse any time you like. If you really have any interest in the development of the roleplaying hobby, let alone that of Dungeons & Dragons, this book is essential.

Eat The Reich
Rowan, Rook, & Decard ($30/£25)
Why bother punching a Nazi, when you can fucking eat a Nazi? Eat The Reich is the all-action roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are a team of crack vampire commandos coffin dropped on Paris in 1943. And then cutting, stabbing, biting, rending, and blood draining their way across the City of Lights and up the ranks of the German occupiers to the top and beyond. And beyond means getting hold of Adolf Hitler himself—currently lurking in his zeppelin moored to the Eiffel Tower, so atop Paris effectively—and drink all of his amphetamine-fuelled blood. If that does not sound like a great hook for a session or three of over-the-top, blood-drenched action, then what the hell are you here for? Eat The Reich is designed to be fast-playing with an emphasis on carnage, blood magic, meaningful flashbacks, and the slaughter of hundreds and hundreds of Fascists. Which is not enough Fascists. All of which is packaged in a swathe of vibrant pinks, blues, and yellows that give the combined roleplaying game and scenario a neon punk energy all of its very own. Play Eat The Reich. Kill Nazis. Drink their blood. Is there anything better?

The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh
The Merry Mushmen ($28/£22.50)
The village of Hendenburgh stands in the middle of the Kryptwood, an ancient forest steeped in legend and history recently beset by murderous demon hounds, ripping apart anyone who dares enter its reaches and even snatching lone villagers from the streets of the small settlement. These are the only dangers faced by the villagers: Highwaymen lurk in the forest, ready to pounce on Hendenburgh’s misfortune; a coven of witches wants everything to be returned to normal; the old silver mine stands abandoned, infested with monsters that drove out the miners and sowed the seeds of Hendenburgh’s poverty; a Bridge Troll has gone on strike after a drunken pixie failed to pay the toll; and at its heart, the Tomb of the Tyrant, the last resting place of the Kryptwood Tyrant, a despot who ruled the region a thousand years ago. This is a great set-up for the fantastically well-produced The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh, a story-packed low-Level hexcrawl with lots going on and plenty of plots for the Player Characters to get involved in. It is also a fine sequel to the equally as good Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (and that is worth picking up too) and both are written for use with Old School Essentials, but The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh is a just that much more fun with its combination of Hammer Horror with shades of Monty Python.

Aces Over The Adriatic – A Solo RPG
Critical Kit Ltd. ($15/£12)
Since lockdown there has been a rise in interest in and play of the solo journaling games that rather than tell a story in the choose-your-own-adventure-path of classics like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, provide the situations and the prompts that the player will react to in order to write the story of his character’s experiences and how he reacts to them. Many offer a chance to experience and tell a story of horror or wonder, such as a Thousand Year Old Vampire or Colostle: A Solo RPG Adventure, but Aces Over The Adriatic takes the reader back barely a century to explore the wonders of the age in the gleaming skies over the azure of the Adriatic. In the latter half of the Jazz Age, the cutting age technology and the future of flight lay in the seaplane! In a golden age of aeronautical development, experimentation, and speed, the great nations of the era competed to win the Schneider Cup, awarded to the fastest seaplane in the competition held twice a year. As a pilot, the reader not only gets to fly the greatest aeroplanes of the age and enter the Schneider Cup, but soar into the skies and embrace the romance of the air. However, this is a solo journalling game inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, so the pilot has to deal with air pirates as well as his rivals and the weather! This is a chance for the reader to tell the stories of his pilot’s adventures and encounters with most famous men and women of the time in a glorious epic of another age.

Moria – Through the Doors of Durin
Free League Publishing ($46/£36)
For all the dungeons that the roleplaying hobby has given us in the last half century, there is the one dungeon from literature that inspired them all and lives in our imagination—Moria, from Tolkien’s Middle-earth. In The Lord of the Rings we discover the fate of Balin’s expedition and see Gandalf confronted by the great evil that is the Balrog, Durin’s Ban, but in Moria – Through the Doors of Durin for The One Ring, Second Edition, we get to explore it ourselves. Originally the city of Dwarrowdelf, the seat of a Dwarven kingdom, for centuries it has been infested with Orcs, Goblins, and, of course, much, much worse. However, it has a scope and grandeur that could never be mapped out in a single book, being too large and extensive to map every nook and cranny, so instead, Moria – Through the Doors of Durin details over twenty great Landmarks, each a potential destination involving danger and adventure, and each a major location within the mines. Getting to them is no easy task though, so every trek to and between them these Landmarks, employs the Journey mechanics of The One Ring, so that whilst getting there can be fraught with dread and danger, the focus is what the Player-heroes discover at the Landmarks. Combine this with a hoard of Patrons, foes, encounters, and treasures, and the Loremaster has all the means to take her players and their heroes into the greatest dungeon in literature, whether for a single delve or an extended campaign!

BattleTech Universe
Catalyst Game Labs ($49.99/£45)
Whilst it might be first, Dungeons & Dragons is not the only roleplaying game or game with an anniversary in 2024. BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat was published in 1984 and in the forty years since, through multiple publishers, the game has received numerous sets of new rules, supplements, several ranges of miniatures—both plastic and metal, over one hundred novels, a cartoon series, a collectible card game, and multiple computer games. All of which has constantly developed the setting and background and stories to the Inner Sphere—and beyond—at the beginning of the thirty-first century, so that from the beginning of the Fourth Succession War to capture of Terra by the returning the Clans, the focus is upon one-and-twenty-six years of history! It is however, a rich, detailed, and daunting history, so difficult to fully grasp and comprehend. However, BattleTech Universe is a sourcebook that presents the history to BattleTech is an easy to digest and understand fashion, highlighting the factions and individuals and their objectives, at every juncture and turn of events, all lavishly illustrated drawing upon artwork form forty years of BattleTech games, supplements, and novels.

Dreams and Machines
Modiphius Entertainment ($45/£35)
Most post-apocalyptic roleplaying games present harsh and unforgiving futures, with technology that has to be scavenged and hard fought for, but the future of Dreams and Machines is more positive and hopeful, set on a colony world where everyone can see the signs of the technology that turned on their ancestors and triggered the Builder War. These are the Wakers, the mechs built to serve the Builder, a programme to develop resource and power control, which litter the landscape and everyone fears will react and carry out the instructions of their corrupt programming. This is a world where the Player Characters work to build their community and forge links with other communities, to make lives better and protect them against dangers such as the Wakers and the Thralls, humans wrapped in loops of wire and marked with ash and paint, who up out of the ground to aggressively raid and steal food and technology from the communities. One of the interesting legacies of the technology is the way in which it can be interacted with, through GLIFs, or ‘Graphic Layer Instruction Format’ patterns that that once learned enable Archivists to use them spells to instruct technology and the Wakers, whilst the Spears, dedicated to protecting communities with their vicious Electrospears, mark themselves with Hunter-GLIFs that temporarily conceal them from the optical sensors of hostile machines. Overall, Dreams and Machines feels cleaner, more positive, and more hopeful than other roleplaying games of its genre.

Call of Cthulhu: Arkham
Chaosium, Inc. ($59.99/£48.99)
The city of Arkham crown—if not the jewel that is Miskatonic University—in the milieu of Lovecraft’s fiction, the New England town at its heart, witch-haunted and fabled, rich in secrets and conspiracies and crime. Call of Cthulhu: Arkham returns it to print for call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, to detail everything from town and its history, its inhabitants, its shops and its societies to its dread secrets and even worse, the people and things that keep them! Just as the original Arkham Unveiled was in 1990, this supplement is the keystone to the Lovecraft Country series of scenario anthologies and setting books, and it enables the classic Call of Cthulhu Investigator to remain at home and have a family and a job to investigate the strangeness all around him rather than going on some expensive round the world, never to be seen again. This sets up a very different style of campaign, one based in the community as much as it is in the surrounding region with the Investigators discovering secrets and facing threats which are much closer to home. Call of Cthulhu: Arkham is a great updating of a classic supplement and setting that successfully makes them both more accessible and useable, whilst laying the groundwork for a terrible series of encounters and threats to faced by the Investigators in the future. (And if this is not enough Arkham, then Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is also good.)

Outgunned Adventure
Two Little Mice ($55/£45)
Sadly, we do not have an official Indiana Jones roleplaying game, but we do have one which will do all of the action of the Pulp action and archaeology genre. This is Outgunned Adventure, a roleplaying game inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Mummy, which of course, sends the adventurers off in search of treasures and secrets in the remotest parts of the world, from deep in the jungles of Central America to the sandy deserts of Egypt, from the mountains of the Himalayas to the islands of the South Seas, more often than not, chased by rival archaeologists and treasure hunters, cultists and Nazis. The heroes and heroines of Outgunned Adventure must search and research, jump and duck, and punch and kick their way to glory and success if they are get that invaluable treasure to the right place and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands! Outgunned Adventure is a Genre book for Outgunned, the Cinematic Action RPG inspired by Die Hard, Kingsman, Ocean’s Eleven, Hot Fuzz, and much, much more. Outgunned—and thus Outgunned Adventure—is a roleplaying game in which the Adventurers cannot fail. At worst, they can succeed in an uninteresting way, so it is better to gamble in succeeding in a more exciting and thrilling fashion in keeping with the genre! Outgunned Adventure is fast playing and captures all of the pace and excitement of some our favourite action films.

XCRAWL Classics Roleplaying Game
Goodman Games ($59.99/£45.99)
Imagine a world where the number one sport is not football or cricket, but a death sport called Xtreme Dungeon Crawling! Some adventurers do delve deep into the caverns and labyrinths below the earth, but if they really want to become famous, they turn Professional and form teams which enrol in leagues which stage manufactured dungeons live-streamed via spellphones throughout the North American Empire and beyond. If they can survive the arena, with its horrific monsters, lethal traps, magical hazards, and challenging puzzles, then they had better wish their agent is good, because he has to navigate the shark-infested waters of corporate sponsorship, rival teams and their agents, the networks, and even the Action Guild, responsible for running the events. But then it is the only way to become the superstar influencers and live celebrity lifestyles few in the Empire can imagine, backed up with for endorsement deals and corporate sponsorships, and the fabulous cash prizes earned for slaying monsters. Using the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game rules, what the XCRAWL Classics Roleplaying Game does to take Dungeons & Dragons-style play and modernises it with all of the razzmatazz and energy modern wrestling! This is as witty and as entertaining to play as it sounds and creates some great over-the-top gaming.

Pendragon Core Rulebook
Chaosium, Inc.  ($49.99/£39.99)
The Pendragon Core Rulebook returns to print the classic Arthurian roleplaying game that designer Greg Stafford considered be his masterpiece with a brand new, illuminated edition. It provides all of the rules and details to create young Cyrmic knights ready to ride out in service to the liege lord and ultimately King Arthur, to go in search of adventure and quests, to attend court and participate in tournaments and more. There is so much more to Pendragon with the Pendragon Core Rulebook covering the creation of a Player-knight and the duties he will undertake, combat, and the duties of a knight, but focusing very much on how he will behave and carry himself. At the core of the game are thirteen pairs of Personality Traits—Chaste and Lustful, Honest and Deceitful, Valorous and Cowardly, and so on—that the player will roleplay as they determine how his knight will act, usually in the best interests of the knight in mind, but at other times, especially when the knight is being tested, against the interests of the knight, and possibly those of his fellow knights! The Personality Traits are flexible though, and will change over time, enabling a player to roleplay his knight becoming a better person, knowing that sometimes, the Personality Traits will tell him otherwise. The Pendragon Core Rulebook provides everything that a player needs to begin playing and the Game Master with the basic rules, thus laying the groundwork for the Pendragon Gamemaster’s Book and Great Pendragon Campaign to come.

This is Free Trader Beowulf
Mongoose Publishing ($59.99/£45)
In the year of its fiftieth anniversary, it was no surprise that Dungeons & Dragons got all the fanfare and the attention, but 2024 also saw the release of another good history of another long-lived game. Indeed, there are very few roleplaying games that have the depth and detail and storied history to have an actual book devoted them, but Traveller is one of them. With multiple editions and multiple publishers, Traveller has almost as many years to explore in This is Free Trader Beowulf from Mongoose Publishing. This charts the history and development of the world’s longest running Science Fiction roleplaying game, examining the many decisions and changes made with each new edition and supplement, not just upon the part of the creators and developers, but also the fans who would make their own contributions too. Accompanied discussions of books that would have been and comparisons with the rest of the hobby for context as well as lengthy lists of everything published for the roleplaying game in each of its iterations, This is Free Trader Beowulf is written by the authors of the Designers & Dragons series of roleplaying histories and he provides a thoroughly detailed and well researched book that every fan of Traveller will want and every roleplayer with an interest in the development and history of roleplaying games.