Stacking the Odds

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is a storytelling roleplaying game from an unexpected source—Games Omnivorous. The publisher is better known for its horror scenarios such as Cabin Risotto Fever and Eat the Rich, its systems neutral supplements such as Bottled Sea and its Old School Renaissance-style releases such as the Isle of Ixx and Frontier Scum: A Game About Wanted Outlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier. It is specifically designed for one-shot sessions in which the players take the role of a gang of expert thieves, who will plan and execute a heist or robbery, and overcome the obstacles that they as players build into the story as part of their characters’ planning for the ‘job’. This is a roleplaying game inspired not just by great films such as Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, Logan Lucky, and Baby Driver, but also roleplaying games such as Leverage, Dread, and Fiasco. Perhaps the only entries missing from this bibliography are Reservoir Dogs and Rififi, but otherwise this is a solid bibliography and nice to see the author acknowledge his inspirations.

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is about stealing expensive jewels, priceless artworks, and world-famous artefacts and it is played in two parts, the Preparation Phase and the Action Phase, with between three and five players taking the roles of archetypes classic to the genre. To play, The Job requires a handful of six-sided dice and pen and paper. In the Preparation Phase, the players will plan the heist and set up scenes that they want to see played out in the Action Phase, stacking the heist against their characters as they add complications, describe locations, and build the world in which the heist is going to take place. In the Action Phase, the players will resolve the heist attempt, using their characters’ stunts to overcome complications, push the story forward, and to give each character time to shine. The Action Phase is played using a stack of six-sided dice which represents the pressure or tension in the heist attempt, with tension relieved by removing dice and ratcheted up by adding dice. When this stack falls, it is reset and thus the tension in the game begins again at zero, but after the first dice stack has fallen, more dice are added on the second and third rebuilds of the dice stack. If the third dice stack falls or is knocked over, the game ends as the heist fails and the Crewmembers suffer the consequences. If the third dice stack does not fall and the players complete all of the scenes they have created, the game ends with their characters being successful and getting away with the loot.

The start of The Job consists of the players picking an archetype, each one recognisable from the heist genre. These consist of the Animal Handler, Boss, Bruiser, Con Artist, Genius, Greaseman, Pickpocket, and Wheelman. A Crewmember does not have any stats in The Job, but the capacity to hold four items in his Inventory and four Stunts. Items are added to a Crewmember’s Inventory as necessary, but once a Crewmember has four items, he can carry no more and they cannot be changed. Which can mean that find himself in a situation where none of his equipment is going to help him. In general, Stunts give an Advantage for the character as well as special actions. For example, the Pickpocket has the Stunts of ‘Pickpocketing’, ‘Steal the Stack’, ‘Safecracking’, and ‘Magic Tricks’. ‘Pickpocketing’ gives him Advantage when stealing small objects and ‘Safecracking’ Advantage with delicate tasks such as picking locks, setting detonators, and the like. ‘Steal the Stack’ lets him steal a die from the dice Stack once during the Action Phase and ‘Magic Tricks’ actually gives him a magic trick, from close up magic to big stage events, and roll with Advantage. The four Inventory slots remain empty until the player decides he needs an item of equipment.

Once each player has decided upon the archetype he wants to play, the Referee presents them with the Brief. This gives the Crewmembers an object to steal, a budget to spend whilst conducting the heist, and six Complications. The Budget is spent during the Heist to equip a Crewmember with an item which will help him complete the Heist. The six Complications have to be added to the twelve Scenes that the players will create during the Preparation Phase. Depending on the Brief, they can be reinforced doors, laser sensors, guard dogs, and so on. The Complications are essentially the key points upon which the players will build and describe the scenes for their characters’ heists, their purpose being not to impede the heist or make it easier, but provide moments where the Crewmembers can shine as they do cool things to overcome the problem. All together these scenes will number exactly twelve—no more, no less, and consist of Infiltration, Deployment, Execution, and Escape scenes. When played out, they must be played in the order as written, and unlike other heist-themed roleplaying games, there are no flashbacks involved. What this means is that The Job is much more like a film heist rather than like that depicted on Leverage. The whole process for the Preparation Phase is collaborative, both between the players and between the players and the Referee, whose job it is make suggestions and adjudicate the players’ ideas in order to help fit the style of the heist. The Preparation Phase will appeal to players who like to plan.

The Action Phase begins with some set-up scenes. This is a chance for the players to narrate a pre-heist scene that establishes their character and gets them involved in the opening moves of the heist. This can include practicing manoeuvres and dummy runs, making a reconnaissance of the routine at the target of the heist, hacking into the building to make getting in later that much easier, getting hired as staff to get access to the building, and even stealing a particular item of equipment that will make the heist easier. None of this requires dice rolls, but it can generate Heat. For each set-up scene that generates Heat, the Referee adds a single die to the Dice Stack. This is a tower of dice, one on top of each other, which will be added to over the course of the Action Phase as the Crewmembers suffer setbacks, while certain Stunts can actually remove dice. For example, the Bruiser’s ‘Happy Birthday, Punk’ Stunt lets his player blow on the Dice Stack in an attempt to knock dice off.

Then the Action Phase proper begins. The Referee and the Referee work through the scenes one by one, resolving them in order. Whenever a Crewmember does anything risky, the Referee can call for a dice roll. Mechanically, The Job is very much like Powered by the Apocalypse. A player rolls two six-sided dice. If the result is six or less, the action fails, the player has to use an alternative method, and dice are added to the Dice Stack. On a result of seven or eight, the action is successful, but the player must either decide to add more dice to the Dice Stack or accept a Setback. A Setback is a complication which will come back to cause problems in subsequent scenes. If the result is ten or more, the action succeeds and the player gets to remove a die from the Dice Stack. If a Crewmember has an appropriate item of equipment or Stunt, his player can roll with Advantage, that is, roll three six-sided dice and ignore the worst result, but if the situation has adverse conditions or a Setback comes into play, the player rolls at a Disadvantage, that is, roll three six-sided dice and ignore the best result.

Play continues like this until either the third Dice Stack falls or all twelve Scenes are successfully narrated and roleplayed out. In the case of the latter, the Heist is successful and very player gets a final scene in which to narrate what happens to their Crewmember. However, if the third Dice Stack is knocked over, the Heist is unsuccessful, and the character of the player who knocked it over is caught. Everyone else is given one minute to write down what they do in response and which one of the other Crewmembers they involve. The notes are revealed and one player is designated to act as spokesman to narrate what happens based on the notes. If there are inconsistencies in the narration, the Referee can actually send a Crewmember to gaol! This, though, puts a lot of pressure on that one player not to screw the narration up and is at odds with the flow of the rest of the game where the players and their Crewmembers work together throughout both the Preparation Phase and the Action Phase.

To help her run The Job, it comes with an example Brief and its twelve Scenes all written out, an example play, solid advice for the Referee, and five sample Briefs, complete with Objects to steal and a Location to steal them from, as well as a Budget and a set of six complications. They include stealing cash from Madison Square Gardens, the Imperial State Crown from the Tower of London, a triceratops skull from the Natural History museum in London, Michelangelo’s David from a Scottish castle, and a prisoner from an unspecified high security prison. This in addition to the worked examples that the Referee can easily adapt to her own crew of players. Overall, these provide plenty of variety in terms of settings, objectives, and complications. There are notes too, on using The Job with other roleplaying games and even the Old School Renaissance.

Physically, The Job is incredibly eye-catching. The graphical style echoes that of Saul Bass and the film posters of the sixties and seventies, with use of stark blocks of colour and black and white images, giving the book a sense of energy and drama.

The Job: A Game of Glorious Heists & Everything That Can Wrong In Them is a neatly self-contained roleplaying game that is pleasingly portable, easy to learn, and engagingly familiar in its genre. It combines dramatic storytelling possibilities with the tension of a towering Dice Stack, but without going the full Jenga.

Friday Fantasy: Bottled Sea

The classic hex crawl is an open-ended sandbox-style adventure in which the players and their characters explore a large geographical area, containing various Points of Interest, each of which can be explored individually or perhaps in a sequence determined from clues found at each location. Typically, the Player Characters will have a good reason to explore the area, such as being tasked to find a specific location or person, but instead of knowing where the location or person might be, only know that they are somewhere in that region. Armed with limited knowledge, the Player Characters will enter the area and travel from one hex to the next, perhaps merely running into a random encounter or nothing at all, but perhaps finding a Point of Interest. Such a Point of Interest might be connected to the specific location or person they are looking for, and so might contain clues as to its location, then again it might not. In which case it is just a simple Point of Interest. Initially free to explore in whatever direction they want, as the Player Characters discover more clues, their direction of travel will typically gain more focus until the point when they finally locate their objective. Classic hex crawls include X1 Isle of Dread for Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Slavers for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, whilst more recent examples have been Barrowmaze and What Ho, Frog Demons!.

Bottled Sea is a hex crawl—or sea crawl (seabox?)—from Games Omnivorous dotted with the flotsam and jetsam of the ages, coral-reefs stung together from debris from across the universe, wrecks both sunken and afloat, technology scavenged and jury-rigged to new purpose—survival, dolphin-riders, Mother Sea Cucumbers spraying acid, Mimic-Islets that swallow ships whole, strange tides that sweep ships away, and more. The Bottled Sea is an in-between dimension where ships lost at sea end up, from past, from today, from the future, and from elsewhere. Here survivors search for the food and water necessary to survive, but also myths of the Bottle Sea, rumours of solid land, and salvage that can be used to make repairs or even something better. At the heart of the Bottle Sea is the Harbourage, a palimpsest of waste and rubble kept assiduously buoyant, where Travellers are always welcome, especially if they have resources, in particular, the rare dirt, paper, and plants, to trade and use as currency. Four factions vie for control of Harbourage. The Collectors are a masonic lodge of inventors working haphazardly to create an article island. The Ichthys are amphibious mutants, highly capable deep-sea salvagers, who want a greater unity between the sea and the surface. The Shepherds are an ascetic cult which worships and herds Sheep for their wool and their milk, and want to take its herd home. The Rainmakers are priests of the rain.

The Bottled Sea takes its cue from the publisher’s earlier The Undying Sands, being part of its ‘Hex-n-Screen’ format series. It is thus a hex crawl of a different stripe. First, it is systemless; second, it is improvisational; third, it is random; and fourth, it is physical. The Bottled Sea consists of four elements. These are forty hex tiles, Game Master Screen, two double-sided card sheets, a cloth bag, and two pamphlets. The hexes, done in sturdy cardboard and full colour using a rich swathe of tones, measure six-and-a-half centimetres across. Their backs are either blank or numbered. The former show simple calm seas on their front, whilst the latter have locations on their front. There are eighteen such locations, all of which are different. There is the floating city of Harbourage, home to the four factions which dominate the Bottled Sea. On their journey across the Bottled Sea, the Player Characters may run into the Alabaster Fingers, colossal rocks scoured by guano and inscribed by Myths; the Drifting Dealers aboard their lashed-together ships, ready to trade salvage and other goods; the Hives, where enigmatic Beekeepers harvest and sell hallucinogenic honey; and the Great Dross Reef at the shallowest point in the Bottled Sea, a combination of rubbish and coral. There are many more, the most notable of which is the Floating Hexahedron, a sealed cube of highly polished, reflective material, which so far nobody has been able to gain access to and has any idea as what might be inside. The style of the artwork on the hexes is busy and cartoonish, but eye-catching, and gives the Bottled Sea a singular look which sets it apart from both other gaming accessories and neighbouring regions.

The Game Master Screen is a horizontal, three panel affair. The front depicts a paddle-galleon on the Bottled Sea itself, about to be overtaken by a tempestuous storm. The back is the meat of the supplement. Here, from left to right, it explains what Bottled Seas is, how to use and the best way to use it; tables of myths, salvage, pelagic—meaning open sea—encounters, weather, and details of the locations across the Bottled Sea—including areas of Solid Ground and the Mythical Whirlpool. Two locations are described in detail, one The Beacon, a lighthouse home to a Wizard, said to be able to use magic or psionic powers, depending upon, of course, who you ask, whilst the other is the Harbourage. Here can be found the Sea Lion Milk Farm, the Museum of Discarded Curiousity, the Blood Polo Sharkadrome, the Oyster Ranch, Wishing Windows, and other establishments. These require development upon the part of the Game Master, as they are not as detailed as other locations (and tiles) on the Bottled Sea, and similarly the entries on the tables of tasks and jobs will also need some development.

The first of the two posters has a full illustration of The Beacon on the one side and Harbourgae on the other. The second depicts and describes not what is on the Bottled Sea, but in the Bottled Sea. On the front is a cross section of the sea below the surface with various creatures and features illustrated and numbered, whilst on the back, ‘What is in the Sea’ provides a quick description, plus rules for fishing and deep-diving.

The Bottled Sea also includes two small pamphlets. ‘The Floating Hexahedron’ describes the six-sided, very shiny polyhedron, which literally floats above the surface of the Bottled Sea. The Shepherds from the Harbourage make an annual pilgrimage to wherever it is currently located, but like everyone else, cannot find their way in. What is inside is thus a mystery for everyone. The means to open it can be found somewhere across the Bottled Sea and locating said mean will form part of the backdrop to any campaign set on the Bottled Sea. The pamphlet provides basic descriptions as to what is inside the Floating Hexahedron, its major features, and also some adventure hooks to bring into play. The one piece of advice for the Game Master is that she should watch the 1997 film, Cube. The smaller, but longer pamphlet, ‘Watercrafts’ details some ten of the water-going vessels on the Botted Sea, from Rubbish Raft and Hydro-Cage to Catamaran Wavecutter and Benthic Bell. All have a lovely illustration, a short description, and details of their speed, price, crew requirement, power source, and cargo capacity. These are very nicely done and the illustrations are thoroughly charming. These are all vessels that the Player Characters can encounter, build, purchase, or sail—or depending upon their scruples, attack and/or capture.

So that is the physicality of Bottled Sea. What of the random nature of Bottled Sea? Simply, the hexes are placed in the cloth bag and drawn one-by-one, as the Player Characters cross or explore one hex and then move onto the next, creating the region hex-by-hex. If the hex is simple sand dunes, the Game Master might roll on the ‘Pelagic Encounters’ or ‘Weather’ tables to create random encounters. When the Player Characters reach a numbered location, they can explore one or more of individual places there, the Game Master improvising what will be encountered there based on the sentence or two description given for each. There is more detail for Harbourage, The Beacon and the Floating Hexahedron, especially the latter, and thus more for the Game Master to base her improvisation upon. This randomness means that playing Bottled Sea will be different from one gaming group to the next, more so than with other hex crawls or scenarios.

So that is the random nature of Bottled Sea and the improvisational nature of Bottled Sea? What of the systemless aspect of Bottled Sea? No gaming system is referenced anywhere on Bottled Sea, yet there is an assumed genre within its details. So it is weird. It is more Science Fiction than fantasy, especially with the inclusion of the Floating Hexahedron and many of the watercraft. However, it would work with Player Characters from any setting with a tradition of sailing, whether the ancient world or the Age of Sail or the modern day. Player Characters can come from the same setting, perhaps the same ship, or from an array of backgrounds or settings. Then depending upon what style and tone of game that the Game Master wants to run, a Bermuda Triangle style game could be using a fairly mundane ruleset, such as Savage Worlds or Basic Roleplay. However, there are numerous choices for a more fantastic style of play considering the Science Fiction elements of the setting. Numenera would be an obvious choice, as would Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd, Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm, and Troika!. It could even be run using Rifts if the Game Master wanted to! A more generic rules system would also work too, as would any number of Old School Renaissance retroclones. Another genre to shift Bottled Seas into would be that of the Post Apocalypse, for example, using Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic or Barbarians of the Ruined Earth. However, Bottled Sea underplays its Post Apocalyptic elements, so the Game Master will need to bring them into play more. Ultimately, whatever the choice of rules, the Game Master will need to know them very well in order to improvise.

As suggested by the range of roleplaying games which Bottled Sea would be a natural fit for, its influences are equally as diverse. Those given include Waterworld, New Weird, and a Canticle for Leibowitz, but there is also the feel of boy’s own adventure or Saturday morning cartoons combined with elements of horror, such as the Floating Hexahedron. Of course, Bottled Sea need not be run as a standalone mini-campaign, but as an extension to an existing one. All the Game Master need do is provide a reason for the Player Characters to visit the Bottled Sea. For example, the Bottled Sea could be a rumoured location of a device of the Ancients in the Third Imperium for Traveller or what if the Player Characters were passengers from a crashed starship in the MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror Roleplaying Game?

In terms of play, Bottled Sea sort of traps the Player Characters within its confines. It keeps them within its limits until the last hex is drawn from the bag and they can find their way out. By that time, the Player Characters will probably have visited every hex and encountered multiple threats and dangers, and if they have engaged with any of the four factions to be found in Harbourage, they are likely to have found employment too, and that will drive them back out onto the Bottled Sea again. How or when that will happen all depends upon when the city location is drawn during play. What this means is that the Bottled Sea is a mini-campaign in its own right.

Bottled Sea is fantastically thematic and fantastically presented. A Game Master could grab this, set-up the Game Master’s Screen, pull the first tile, and start running a mini-campaign. However, that would take a lot of improvisation and improvisational skill upon the part of the Game Master, who also has to know the game system she is running the Bottled Sea with very well to run it easily. All of which is needed because the textual content of The Undying Sands really consists of prompts and hooks with little in the way of detail—if any. Perhaps a better way of approaching Bottled Sea—especially if the Game Master is not as confident about her ability to improvise—is to work through the locations, especially Harbourage, and prepare, prepare, prepare. Some Game Masters may relish the prospect, but others may wish that there had been more information given in Bottled Sea to make the task easier for them.

Ultimately, Bottled Sea gives a Game Master the means to improvise and run a fantastically pulpy campaign in a range of genres against a weird Science Fiction, lost worlds, lost at sea background. How much improvisation and how much preparation is required, will very much be down to the individual Game Master.

Escape from Ixx

It opens with a disaster as the ship is caught up in the Eternal Storm and driven onto the rocks of the tropical island. As the vessel sinks and the survivors are harassed by hungry, hungry amphibious horrors, the survivors must find their way ashore and onto the strangest island amidst the tropical sea. Atop its high cliffs they can see across their new home. It is covered in thick jungle, the land pierced by sharp crags, stretching down to soggy swamp, and then to a coastline pockmarked with cave mouths. Even as the survivors make their way to safety of Wrecktown, the wreckers are coming the other way to pick over the wreckage of the ship. All too quickly, the survivors discover that there is no straightforward way off the island and they will have to search for a means far and wide across its strangeness. As they search, the survivors will encounter dinosaurs, mutants, things not of this world, weirdness, and more. This is the Isle of Ixx and the survivors are trapped until they can find a way off the island.

This is the set-up for Isle of Ixx, a roleplaying game and mini-campaign, that is in part Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, the television series Lost, and S3 Expedition to Barrier Peaks for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. Written and drawn by Skullfungus and published by Games Omnivorous, it is a sandbox of varying environments and mysteries, which uses Into the Odd as its mechanics. What this means is that the players can create their Survivors in a few minutes and this combined with the starting mini-adventure that gets the Survivors off their ship and onto the island, means that the Game Master can be running the campaign in the first session. The campaign is relatively short, primarily player driven and often deadly, meaning that not every Survivor is necessarily going to get off the island. Survivors are easy to replace and bring into play though given the speed of their creation.

A Survivor—or Player Character—in Isle of Ixx is lightly defined. He has three Abilities: Might, Move, and Mind, which range in value between three and eighteen. He also has a six-sided die’s worth of HP, or Hit Protection, rather than Hit Points, a Starter Package, potentially a Companion, and some coins. To create a Survivor, 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 Survivor’s highest Ability, he receives a Starter Package. A Survivor with either low Hit Protection or a low Ability will receive a more powerful Starter Package, including an Arcanum, whilst a Survivor with a high Ability or Hit Protection, will receive a more mundane Starter Package. Thus, a Survivor with six Hit Protection and a high Ability of twelve would start play with a spiked bat, some warpaint, and a jug of moonshine, whereas if the Survivor’s highest Ability is nine and he only has two Hit Protection, he begins play with a rapier, a flintlock gun, breastplate, an alien idol, and an extra Speciality. A Speciality is a perk or skill, such ‘Land Crab’, which grants +1 armour bonus whilst on land, and ‘Smuggler’, the ability to hide things. The feel of Isle of Ixx—much like Into the Odd—has the feel of Dickensian weird science fantasy, but here combined with weird tropical fantasy.

Ermengarde Baritch
Might 8 Move 10 Mind 15
Hit Protection 3

Speciality: Dirty Fighter

Starter Package: Mancatcher (d6), Net, Bait, Rat in a Small Cage

Mechanically, if a Survivor 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 managed with a Move save if needed. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much damage is inflicted. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Protection and then his Might. This necessitates a Might Save and the possibility that the Explorer will be unable to act. Should a character lose all of his Might, 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 Mind are used for several things, maintaining morale of course, but also in a pinch, maintaining civil discourse with others, and more interestingly, to sometimes use the Profane Powers.

The Isle of Ixx is described region by region and the adventures the Survivors can have there. Lowlands Adventures describes the Devil’s Reef, Wrecktown where the Survivors are likely to find a base of operations, and the Hermit’s Spire where Milliam the Hermit spends his days tending to the plants and meditating in the chrome tower. In High Jungle Adventures, the Survivors might come across a nest of Terrorbeaks, delve into the Overgrown Spire broken open by vines, or explore the ancient cities of the Pale Ruins or the Charred Ruins. The Great Swamp Adventures hide further signs of ancient technology, whilst the Ocean Adventures is home to numerous caves in which can be found shipwrecks, a colony of the fish-like Drowned Ones worshipping their cyclopean god, and more. All of these adventure locations are described in succinct detail, and each of the various regions is further supported by a table of events and a bestiary of Humans, Drowned Ones, and Mutants as well as Terror Lizards—both carnivorous and herbivorous, terrors aquatic and airborne, violent vegetation, and more. There is scope too, for the Game Master to add her own content, the roleplaying game including five numbered, but otherwise blank maps for her to fully describe and populate, perhaps using the quartet of spark tables intended to inspire her imagination.

Physically, the Isle of Ixx is a lovely little book. Clothbound and compact, it is profusely illustrated in a bold cartoon style that captures the often-eldritch strangeness of the island, from the roaring terror lizard on the front cover to the cartography of each and every adventure site, in a way that cannot be described as anything other than cute. Another nice touch is that the various sections of the book are colour coded according to regions—not always adjacent to each other—marked on the main map. It makes for easy reference back and forth.

Isle of Ixx takes the concept of the microclone—as typified by Knave, Into the Odd, and Mausritter—and extends it into presenting not just a miniature, stripped down roleplaying game complete in a few pages, but also a complete roleplaying setting and campaign. Together setting and campaign set up the situation, provide mysteries and weirdness to be found, and give an objective for the Survivors to achieve and all in a few pages more. Isle of Ixx physically feels like the perfect campaign to own and hold in the hand, let alone play, yet is a superlative example of succinct design, not just in terms of its physicality, but also its descriptive content and its roleplaying possibilities.

Reviews from R’lyeh Post-Christmas Dozen 2022

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—

Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop
Unbound ($40/£30)
Written by Sir Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson, Dice Men is not a history of Games Workshop, but rather a memoir of its founding and first decade or so by the founders of the company, whose dedication and hard work would propel the both of them and the company to the forefront of the gaming hobby in the United Kingdom. The company went from producing wooden puzzles and games and importing the first copies of Dungeons & Dragons direct from E. Gary Gygax to a licensee for numerous roleplaying games, including Call of Cthulhu, MERP, and Stormbringer, and publishing its own titles such as Golden Heroes and Judge Dredd the Roleplaying Game—plus of course, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The authors have delved deep into their archives and their memories to bring forth a fantastic array of photographs and treasures, and thus the book is a lavishly illustrated coffee table book that will bring back memories of a certain age.

Frontier Scum: A Game About Wanted Outlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier
Games Omnivorous ($25/£19.99)
This Old School Renaissance-style roleplaying game takes criminals to the Lost Frontier, an Acid West hallucination of the Wild West, in which the Player Characters must survive the weirdness, uncertainty, and loss, all of which infuses the landscape and its promise of renewal subverted by avarice and ambition. The Player Characters are desperate outlaws, at best searching for redemption, at worst trying to survive in what is a deadly game—especially gunfights. Fortunately, every Player Character can survive at least one gunshot by having his hat shot off! The roleplaying game includes the full rules and a setting, more enough for a mini-campaign. The Frontier Scum book itself is brilliantly done as a plain matte board book and a spine with no cover that makes the glue visible. The layout inside is thematically done as a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, which is absolutely perfect for the look and feel for Frontier Scum. This is a startlingly different version of the Wild West and Frontier Scum brilliantly brings it alive!

Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England
Chaosium, Inc. ($44.99/£39.99)
Regency Cthulhu takes Call of Cthulhu into the late Georgian period and an age of manners and propriety when everyone—including the Investigators—is expected to conform to societal norms, and woe betide to anyone who does not, including those prepared to investigate the Mythos and cosmic horror. The supplement provides a good introduction to the period and a guide to playing good gentlemen and good gentlewomen, including rules for new Occupations, place in society, and Reputation, the latter actually working as the equivalent of Social Sanity! It supports this with a complete setting in the form of a rural Wiltshire town with lots of secrets and two good scenarios set in and around the town, which invite the Investigators to various social events and then hint at strange things going on in and round the town. Both setting and rules highlight the tension between a highly conservative and stratified society and the need to investigate the Mythos and the consequences of doing so, all of which serves to bring out the Regency period’s roleplaying and storytelling potential.

The Electrum Archive Issue #1
Emiel Boven & CULT OF THE LIZARD KING ($26/£20)
The Electrum Archive Issue #1 introduces us to the Science Fantasy world of Orn where the descendants of survivors transplanted by the ancient starfaring civilisation known as the Elders (who have long since disappeared) survive and explore the Elder ships which crashed to the surface and buried themselves in the surface of the planet long ago. The Player Characters—Fixers, Vagabonds, and Warlocks—search the wilderness for signs of Elder technology and Elder Ink. As Elder Drops, Elder Ink is a currency, but when vaporised and inhaled by Warlocks, it expands the mind and enables users to enter the Realm Beyond and cast spells known by the Spell Spirits. And the spells themselves are entirely random in their name and effect, so every Warlock’s spells will be different. The Electrum Archive Issue #1 comes with lots of flavour and detail, and includes six detailed regions complete with the plot hooks and events that will keep a gaming group busy for multiple sessions. The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is a great introduction to what is a weirdly inky, baroque, and alien planetary romance.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Days of Wonder ($80/£60)

From the designers of Flamme Rouge, the board game of cycling ‘Grand Tours’, Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a board game of tense car races in which drivers jockey for position, manage their car’s speed and energy, requiring careful hand management of movement cards to ensure they can keep ahead of the pack and if not that, then at least, keep up. The base game is fast and furious, with a real sense of speed as the cars career around corners and accelerate onto the straights, but expansions and advanced rules add weather, road conditions, and events, which can make even a single race more challenging, let alone a whole championship. Designed for solo play or up to six players, Heat: Pedal to the Metal can be played by the family, but the expansions will appeal to petrolheads and board gamers alike as it lets the players race like it was in the sixties!

The One Ring: Roleplaying in the World of Lord of the Rings
Free League Publishing ($49.99/£45)

The new edition of The One Ring moves the highly-regarded roleplaying game set in Tolkien’s Middle-earth two decades on and the focus from Rhovanion, the region to the East of the Misty Mountains, to Eriador, the region to the West of the Misty Mountains. The One Ring Starter Set began with The Shire, but the new rulebook explores far and wide beyond its borders as well as tidying and streamlining the mechanics. The Player Characters step out into the wilderness to find adventure and perhaps curb the influence of the Shadow which threatens to sow chaos and undermine society as its forces search for signs of the One Ring. This has all been redesigned in a style and look that echoes that of the classic editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy published by Allen & Unwin, and has a more scholarly feel as if Bilbo himself sat down to write it himself.

Everybody Wins: Four Decades of the Greatest Board Games Ever Made
Aconyte Books ($29.95/£24.95)
Board games have come a very long way in the last quarter of a century, but as authors James Wallis and Sir Ian Livingstone explored in Board Games in 100 Moves, their history goes much further back than that. Now James Wallis returns to explore the history of board games from a different angle—through the boxes, boards, cards, and meeples of the annual Spiel des Jahres winners in Everybody Wins: Four Decades of the Greatest Board Games Ever Made. This is a history of some of the best games ever published—as well as some of the near misses—that tracks the massive rise in popularity of the board game as well as the themes, the changes in design, and trends in the hobby in that time. This is a great read for anyone who loves board games and wants to know more about them and the genesis of the hobby. Beautifully illustrated with many titles from the author’s own collection and engagingly written, this is the history book that board gamers will want on their shelves.

Gran Meccanismo: Clockpunk Roleplaying in da Vinci’s Florence
Osprey Games (£25/$35)
What if by 1510, Niccolò Machiavelli, the military commissioner of the Republic of Florence, had persuaded Leonardo da Vinci to stick to engineering rather than painting? What use could the genius’ designs have been put to in the defence of the republic? Now armed with primitive computers run on water clocks, spring-powered tanks capable of withstanding any cavalry charge, their canons blasting way left and right, and gliders flit across the perfectly blue Tuscan skies delivering messages, intelligence, and reports of troop movements to the city and her military commanders. The Republic of Florence is once again a growing power, but her neighbours are jealous of the new technology and the question is, just how much information is being controlled and compute by the calculating devices. Gran Meccanismo is a Clockpunk roleplaying game of intrigue, invention, and war—no surprise since the Player Characters might find themselves crossing wits with Machiavelli, avoiding the charms of Lucretia Borgia, and entering into philosophical discussions with da Vinci himself! Gran Meccanismo: Clockpunk Roleplaying in da Vinci’s Florence combines fast-playing, easy to grasp rules with a setting that not only can genuinely be called unique, but one to which your first response should be, “That’s a cool idea!”

Bones Deep

Technical Grimoire Games ($30/£30)
Bones Deep begins with a genuinely weird premise—that after you die your skeleton hatches from your corpse and goes in search of a near life and to find itself as far away as possible, on the sea floor. Literally, ‘bones deep’. Together the skeletons explore the strange, often lightless realms of the sea floor, armed with a few skills, a little magic, and a desire to both own and create some memories of their own. Bones Deep is packed full with a briny bestiary and descriptions of some twenty locations, including ‘The Bottom of the Barrel’, a meeting place for undersea creatures specially constructed with an air half and a water half so that crabs, fish, wizards, witches, skeletons, and any other creatures can meet in safety, stories, and more. This is a fantastic undersea sand crawl which uses the simple mechanics of Troika!, but takes into account the very different physics of the bottom of the ocean. 

Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One
Rebellion Unplugged (£40)
Remember the good old days when you could arrest Judge Death for the crime of Littering? It was possible in the classic Judge Dredd board game designed by Ian Livingstone and published by Games Workshop in 1982. Rebellion Unplugged brought this fondly remembered game back in 2022 allowing players to return to the streets of Mega-City One and bring the law to its 800 million citizens. Their task is to respond to crimes and their perpetrators, making arrests, and proving themselves to be the most productive Judge—and so win the win. The original game involved lots of luck and plenty of intervention by the other players in an attempt to stop a player and his Judge from arresting high value criminals and crimes. The original game has bags of theme, but its high luck and high player intervention make it very much an Ameritrash design. The new edition—some forty years on since the release of the original—keeps the same game play, but adds extra rules which bring more detail and depth to game, including Specialist Judges such as Cadets, Special Judge Squad, PSI-Judge, and more. The result is that players can play the game like they remember or use the new rules for a new experience. Either way, Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One is a light, highly thematic, and most of all, fun board game that fans of the iconic law man of the future will thoroughly enjoy.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons
St. Martin’s Griffin ($29.95/£22.99)
If one of the most interesting histories of roleplaying and TSR, Inc. in particular, was 2021’s The Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, then arguably its counterpart and equal was 2022’s Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs. The Game Wizards charted the first half of the TSR, Inc.’s history and Slaying the Dragon explored the second half from the ousting of E. Gary Gygax and takeover by Lorraine Williams through to the company’s purchase by Wizards of the Coast. It is a fascinating tale of missed opportunities and mismanagement of property after property in a failed search to find that one thing that would transcend the publisher beyond its roleplaying origins. It is not a definitive history of the company during this period, since Lorraine Williams is not interviewed, but nevertheless this is an engaging read from start to finish, providing anecdotes and insight down the path to TSR, Inc.’s sad ending.

Odd Jobs: RPG Micro Settings Volume I
MacGuffin & Co. (£34)
Technically, if you are going to cheat on a list of the best games of 2022, then you had better make sure that the  recommendation you cheat with, is worth it—and Odd Jobs: RPG Micro Settings Volume I is definitely worth it. This hidden gem is contains not one, not two, but eleven, fully supported, mini-campaigns, all systems agnostic and all lasting no more than four sessions (but can go on longer if you want). Covering a diverse range of genres, including Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Christmas campiness, and all sorts of weirdness. Religions done as start-ups, complete with a OSE or ‘Oracle Spiritual Exchange’ tracking the number of worshippers, essentially The Big Short, but literally with faith. Soul retrieval from the dead across the Solar System in Ghostbusters meets Office Space. Evil Wizard’s staff and familiars filling in for him after the wizard is killed. Nuns seconded in disgrace to an abbey in France which might just stand over a pit or it might stand over a hell pit in Seventies hellish horror. And what if Atlantis, after it sunk, became the Las Vegas of under the sea? Deep One mobsters anyone? Odd Jobs: RPG Micro Settings Volume I is a superb collection of ideas and set-ups, offering shorter, more focused, and engaging campaigns that can go on for as quick as you or as long as you want, and for the game system you want.

The Other OSR—Frontier Scum

Beyond the great frontier lies the Lost Frontier, dominated by Covett City, a teeming, bloated city of exploited masses and stinking industries, which arises out of the tarry swamps its factories pollute. Melanethon P. Murrsom, sits at the head of the Incorporation which controls this coastal city and whose influence reaches far and wide. Inland across to Sunken Hill where coffins are chained shut before burial and the dead are said to ring their grave bells still even as looters plunder the coffins that rise from the swamp. Across Carcass County where the roots of the ancient bloodgum trees have a taste for flesh. To Slackgaff-by-the-Sea in Stubbshead County, strife riven by an unpaid debt owed to the Incorporation. To frozen Dalliance in the south across the sea, where the Allied Governess rules with a love as cold as the artic wastes beyond the newly reopened silver mines that the Incorporation previously closed and claimed to have been worked out. West to Fort Gullet, an oil city where the gun rules and Marshal Betjemen Knapp and his posse of ne’er-do-wells enforce their law at gunpoint. Beyond to Palace in the Dust Barrens where the Redrum Boys, outlaws all, protect the exiles, homesteaders, bushwhackers, and deserters from Incorporation carpetbaggers, sending them packing after taking all they have on them—plus a pound of flesh—back to Covett city, even as they ensure that the hill around remain lawless. To Sickwater Oasis in the north, where the klepto-meritocratic Outlaw Union recognises only the licences it issues, otherwise killing all lawmen and bounty hunters, and hates any other legalise otherwise to the point of murder. At the edge of the Lost Frontier stretches the Western Expanse, accessible by the hellmouth of Allhallows Canyon, and beyond that lies the Scree Knives, a purgatory of slat flats where only the desperate pioneer and sanctimonious sect finds a home.

This is the setting for Frontier Scum: A Game About WantedOutlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier. It is inspired by the Acid Westerns, such as Jodorowsky’s El Topo, Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, which twisted the traditional westerns of the twentieth century and their conservatism with the radical counterculture of the sixties. Instead of codes of honour and morality and the mythic search for justice and a chance to begin again in a land of golden opportunity, the west of the Acid Western is infused with uncertainty and loss, the landscape and its promise of renewal subverted by avarice and ambition. The Lost Frontier of Frontier Scum is not the frontier of the Wild West, nor the frontier of the Weird West—its horrors being mundane and manmade, but a frontier, almost a hallucination of a twisted frontier of its very own. Published by GamesOmnivorous, Frontier Scum is an Old School Renaissance adjacent roleplaying game, inspired mechanically by Mörk Borg, in which the players take the roles of Outlaws. They are criminals and they are guilty. They did the crime they are accused of and are going to be hanged. Perhaps, if they can escape their fate at the end of a noose, then perhaps they can make their mark—pull off the biggest heist, win the biggest pot in a poker game, hit a silver motherlode, or even reap their own brand of justice—on the Lost Frontier.

An Outlaw in Frontier Scum has four stats—Grit, Slick, Wits, and Luck—which range in value from -3 to +3. He also has a pair of traits which make him stand out, a crime which he most definitely did commit and why he is wanted (dead or alive), a background which helps define starting skills and equipment, plus a bonus skill and a bonus item. He also has a canteen of water, a stolen horse, and a gun and some ammunition. Most importantly, he has a hat. This hat will save his life. Probably. So, he should keep it close. Probably wear it. Character creation is entirely randomly, except skills. These are devised by the player, though the event which inspired their selection is randomly determined. 

Windor ‘Grubworm’ Casket
A Charlatan and a Fraud
Outlaw Scum with ‘An Artist’s Soul’ and ‘Plague-Pox Scars’
Who is Wanted Dead or Alive for the Crime of Attempted Fraud

Grit -2 Slick 0 Wits +1 Luck -2
Hit Points: 2

Skills
Sympathetic Begging (lost all his stock)
Bargaining (sold some actual treasure)
Disguise Disease (you caught the Plague-Pox)

Items
Self-Help Bible
Expensive Perfume
Tin of sixteen biscuits

Stolen Mount
Donkey (HP 2, Morale 8, slow, bad at manoeuvring)

Gun
Pocket pistol (d6)

Hat
A stiff bowler, brushed to perfection, with an emergency ten dollar note inside the hat.

Mechanically, Frontier Scum requires a simple roll of a twenty-sided die against a Difficulty Rating, the standard Difficulty Rating being twelve, with the appropriate stat applied as a modifier. The standard rules for Advantage and Disadvantage are used, the former primarily derived from a Outlaw’s skills, and each player has an Ace up his Sleeve, which can be expended to reroll any die result which is not a one or twenty. If a player rolls a natural twenty on an ability check, he has the choice of choosing an additional Ace or a new skill. (This new skill must relate to the situation under which it was rolled, up to a maximum of six skills.) However, if a player rolls a natural one on an ability check, every player loses all of their Aces! In general, Frontier Scum is player-facing, so the players roll the dice, for example, to hit with an attack or to avoid an attack rather than the Game Master rolling an NPC’s attack.

Gun combat is nasty, and shots always hit (except tricky shots which require a roll). Damage dice can explode, so characters can be killed with a single shot or hit with extra shots from fanning a pistol or slamming in more rounds from a repeater rifle! Fortunately, every good character should be wearing a hat. If a player is shot, he can ignore damage by having his hat shot off his head. Which is an entertaining emulation of the genre! Then afterwards, once the fight is over, a player can roll his character’s Luck to retrieve his hat and see if it is still wearable.

An Outlaw can take damage that reduces him to zero Hit Points, necessitating a Death Check. This can result in straight death, but it might leave him dying and losing ability points, but it could also result in the Outlaw gaining ability points! An Outlaw can also suffer one of two Conditions—Drunk and Miserable. Of the two, Drunk is the more entertaining, with the Miserable Condition either due to being skunked, rain-sodden, frostbitten poisoned, exhausted, or some other cause, which prevents the Outlaw from healing when rested until the cause is addressed. When Drunk, an Outlaw swaps two abilities at random and that is always how he reacts when drunk. It is a potentially entertaining effect, and depending on the value of the abilities swapped, could be disadvantageous to the Outlaw or advantageous.

For the Game Master there are numerous tables upon which to roll for inspiration, from ‘Scum on the Trail’ and ‘Scum on the Streets’ to ‘House Loot’, Pocket Loot’, and ‘Tomb Loot’. There is even a ‘Going on a Bender’ table, followed by ‘What Was Won’, ‘What was Lost’, and ‘Who You Owe’ tables for evening’s carousing at the saloon. There are tables of employment opportunities and bounties too, sufficient enough to provide a variety of encounters, set-ups, and developments. Frontier Scum also includes the scenario, ‘Escape the Organ Rail’, which begins with the Outlaws held aboard a black penal train being transported to their execution. Naturally linear in design—after all, the Outlaws have to fight and make their way up the train to the engine to effect an escape, the scenario is presented in car order from the Outlaws’ cells to the engine. Each car is shown in cross section rather than floor plan. The Outlaws begin play shackled together hand and feet, which should challenge the players until they find the right keys. Although Frontier Scum is intended to be a more mundane version of the Old West than the horror of the Weird West, the scenario does involve elements of the weird and horror. If the Outlaws succeed in stopping the train and escaping, there is the chance they get away with some loot, find themselves a patron, or if they want, there is an ‘Epilogue Or How To Spend 10,000 Silver’ table if they scarper.

Physically, Frontier Scum has an immediate presence. It is done as a board book, with a non-glossy, plain matte cover and no spine so that the glue binding is visible. The feeling in the hand is rough and tactile like no other roleplaying game. Inside, the black and white layout is done as a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue and it is incredibly atmospheric, pulling the reader into the setting with tight blocks of black and white, and period style illustrations. The graphic design on Frontier Scum really brings the game to life and adds so much to its atmosphere.

Imagine in 1895 if the paste up artist at Sears, Roebuck and Co., high on absinthe and laudanum, sat down to create a game of the vanishing frontier. Frontier Scum: A Game About Wanted Outlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier is what you would get, a roleplaying game of the last, dark days of desperate Outlaws surviving on a dream of the frontier turned nightmare, ravaged by avarice and ambition, and the vicissitudes of modernity and misuse.

Cannibal Cults in the Clouds

Eat the Rich takes place one hundred-and-fifty years from now in a horrible future in which the Earth has been overrun by flesh-eating humans who have fallen victim to ‘The Hunger’, an unknown apocalyptic-plague of unknown origins. Amongst the Ravenous, there are a few survivors who have proven to have an immunity to the virus and a few who have managed to get by without being bitten or infected. There are others who have managed to escape it all, the genetically and cybernetically-enhanced ruling class, who reside in a majestic cloud-piercing levitating spire from where they can look down upon the survivors grubbing away in the mud below. Many when they look up, they see the home of the Gods and wonder what life might be like above their squalid existence. Now a Cult wants someone to ascend to the Godspire and capture a God. The Assembly, the leader of the Cult, knows that survivors of ‘The Hunger’ assume the properties and memories of anyone they eat—dead or alive. If they can consume the flesh of a God, what glorious memories and abilities will they gain? Will they include the  knowledge they will help humanity restore the Ravaged Earth of this terrible future?

In Eat the Rich, the Player Characters will put aboard a lift-spacecraft which will take them to the Godspire. There they will explore its heights and its secrets, discover what has come of the Gods, and ultimately, find themselves threatened by something which will prove to be a danger to the whole of the world below. It is designed to be played by a small group of players. Four pre-generated Player Characters are provided, but there are guidelines too for generating them. This includes starting equipment, background, talents, and motivations. What will the Player Characters make of this strange, new, and vertical world? What will they discover and what secrets will they reveal? How will the Gods react to intruders from the Earth below?

As with other scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Eat the Rich is a system agnostic scenario, but it does not fit the genres of the previous entries in the line. Both The Feast on Titanhead, and The Seed are fantasy scenarios, but Cabin Risotto Fever and Mouth Brood are modern-set affairs, although they call all be easily adapted to other time periods. Mouth Brood though, can be shifted into the Science Fiction genre, whereas Eat the Rich sits firmly in that genre as well as the Post Apocalypse genre. Which means that it could be run using the rules for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship, Gamma World, or Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, for example. Similarly, it is easy to adapt to any number of modern or Science Fiction roleplaying games. These include Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition or Chill, third Edition, as well as Alien: The Roleplaying Game, Traveller, and MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror Roleplaying Game. It would also really work well with Numenera. Of course, if Eat the Rich is run using any of the systems suggested, the scenario need not be set on Earth. Its set-up is simple, flexible, and easy for the Game Master to adjust as necessary. However, just like The Feast on Titanhead, The Seed, Cabin Risotto Fever, and Mouth Brood before it, Eat the Rich adheres to the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’, the ten points of which are:

1. All books are adventures.
2. The adventures must be system agnostic.
3. The adventures must take place on Earth.
4. The adventures can only have one location.
5. The adventures can only have one monster.
6. The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy.
7. The adventures must include a voracious eater.
8. The adventures must have less than 6,666 words.
9. The adventures can only be in two colours.
10. The adventures cannot have good taste. (This is the lost rule.)

As we have come to expect for scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Eat the Rich adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth (although technically, it takes place above the Earth), it has one location, it has the one monster, it includes both Saprophagy—the obtaining of nutrients through the consumption of decomposing dead plant or animal biomass—and Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-four pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, a dark red and silver on white. Lastly, where previous entries in the series have exhibited Rule #10, it is debatable whether or or not Eat the Rich fails to exhibit good taste—though perhaps that may ultimately be up to how the players and their characters react to it.

The scenario is self-contained, the location amounting to just eight locations and six out of the twenty-four pages that make up Eat the Rich. The Godspire is an odd mix of aesthetic and the technical, a luxury enclave beyond the comprehension of the Player Characters where the line between sufficiently advanced technology blends into magic. Some of the technology is described along with the handful of locations aboard the Godspire, as is the main threat aboard the floating spindle.

Eat the Rich is primarily a setting, a small environment awaiting the intrusion of the Player Characters, the inhabitants—the the ‘Gods’ of legend, the Technology Priests, and the scenario’s ‘monster’—reacting to their invasive presence. It requires a fair deal of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, primarily in terms of creating the stats for the various NPCs, monsters, and more. She is though supported by a pair of tables of random encounters and random inhabitants aboard the Godspire. She will also need to provide guidance for her players if they want to create characters of their own, or adapt the four pre-generated Player Characters to the system of her choice.

Physically, as with the other titles in the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’ series, Eat the Rich is very nicely presented. The cover is of sturdy card, whilst the pages are of a thick paper stock, giving the book a lovely feel in the hand. The scenario is decently written and quite detailed in terms of its locations. The artwork has an odd feel to it, a strangeness which reflects the weirdness of the setting.

A combination of the television series, The Walking Dead and the films, Zardoz and Elysium, Eat the Rich is a strange mix of fragility and the unknown with the Player Characters being hunted up and down the Godspire. The setting and its strangeness do make Eat the Rich the most difficult of the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’ series to add to a campaign, but easy to run as a one-shot.

Habitat Horror

Mouth Brood is an exploratory horror scenario set in the wilds of Canada in the Yukon on the Kaskwulsh Glacier. Here a strange discovery has been made—a great biodome jutting out of the ice, revealed no doubt due to the effects of global warming and the melting of the glacier. Buried here for millennia, the biodome has clear walls, but what is inside is hidden by leaves and mist and smears of algae. There is though, something moving inside. Clicking and humming and crying. Thousands of things. Millions of things. Are they alien? Are they vestiges of a prior epoch? Are they the results of an abandoned biological project—corporate or governmental? With the discovery of the biodome, Astralem Biotech has been sent a biologists to enter the structure, investigate and catalogue its contents, and above all, return with five live specimens with promises of a bonus for each extra one brought back. What will the team discover? Is it safe? Is it dangerous? Will the team survive?

As with other scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Mouth Brood is a system agnostic scenario, but unlike previous scenarios—The Feast on Titanhead, and The Seed, but like Cabin Risotto Fever before it, this scenario takes place in the modern world rather than a fantasy one. Where Cabin Risotto Fever was set in northern Canada in 1949, the setting for Mouth Brood is the Canada of the here and now—although it does not have to be. As a module, Mouth Brood combines Science Fiction and Horror in its investigation, and like the other titles in the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’ series is systems-agnostic. Although a modicum of stats is provided to suit a Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying game, Mouth Brood would work with, and be easy to adapt to any number of modern or Science Fiction roleplaying games. These include Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition or Chill, third Edition, as well as Alien: The Roleplaying Game, Traveller, and MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror Roleplaying Game. The point is, Mouth Brood need not be set in Canada, it could be shifted to the Antarctic or the Himalayas, or it could even shifted off world entirely, say to Mars or even to a planet in a different system (although that would break one of its rules listed below, but nevertheless, the possibility is there). Its set-up is simple, flexible, and easy for the Game Master to adjust as necessary. However, just like The Feast on Titanhead, The Seed, and Cabin Risotto Fever before it, Mouth Brood adheres to the Manifestus Omnivorous, the ten points of which are:

1. All books are adventures.
2. The adventures must be system agnostic.
3. The adventures must take place on Earth.
4. The adventures can only have one location.
5. The adventures can only have one monster.
6. The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy.
7. The adventures must include a voracious eater.
8. The adventures must have less than 6,666 words.
9. The adventures can only be in two colours.
10. The adventures cannot have good taste. (This is the lost rule.)

As we have come to expect for scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Mouth Brood adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth, it has one location, it has the one monster (though like the older scenarios, those others that appear are extensions of it), it includes both Saprophagy—the obtaining of nutrients through the consumption of decomposing dead plant or animal biomass—and Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-eight pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, a dark green and greenish-blue over snowy white. Lastly, where previous entries in the series have exhibited Rule #10, it is debatable whether or or not Mouth Brood fails to exhibit good taste—though perhaps that may ultimately be up to how the players and their characters react to it.

The scenario is self-contained detailing a biodome and its almost fizzing, swarming ecology filled with strange creatures that the intruding Player Characters—or indeed anyone—will have never seen before. It consists of the outer cover with a map of the biodome on the inside, descriptions of its locations layered out over three levels, from the Undergrowth up through the Canopy to the Emergent, plus a lengthy Bestiary of some eighteen creatures and species. Like all Manifestus Omnivorous titles, it is bound with an elastic band and thus all of the pages can be separated. The advice for the Game Master is to use the Undergrowth, Canopy, and Emergent pages as a screen, and refer to the pages of the Bestiary during play. There is a set-up too, that of Astralem Biotech team, and there are notes on the roles, gear, and advantages of the Expedition Leader, Ecologist, Micro-biologist, and the Bio-Mathematician. These can be copied and given to the players, but the Game Master can also use them as prompts to create pre-generated Player Characters for the roleplaying game of her choice.

Mouth Brood is also a hex-crawl—though very much a mini-hex-crawl, there being seven locations for each of the biodome’s three levels (Undergrowth, Canopy, and Emergent). Each of the hexes is given a thumbnail description, but the bulk of Mouth Brood, twenty-four pages out of its thirty-six, is devoted to its Bestiary. Each entry is accorded a fantastic illustration, a description, a table of things it is doing or is being done to it, and details of what it is doing when observed. They lifeforms of all sorts, such as Acris Motorium, a semi-mobile plant with acrid acid for its sap; the similarly motile Cryptostoma Dilitatus, a swarm-like organism which can contract and spread, and stings in proportional response to contact with it; and the Velox Sanguinus, the brachial apex predator with two sets of jaws, one in its swiveling head, the other in its belly. There is something quite verdant, fetid, and even feverish about the inventiveness of all of these creatures, which could be taken from the pages of Mouth Brood and used elsewhere if the Game Master so desired.

Mouth Brood is primarily a setting, a small environment awaiting the intrusion of the Player Characters, the creatures and species in the biodome reacting to their invasive presence. There is a slight here, that of the biological team collecting samples (and a bit more), but as an exploratory scenario and a hexcrawl scenario, Mouth Brood is very much player driven, the Game Master having to the extensive ecology react to them for much their Player Characters’ explorations. In some ways, this does require a fair bit of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, who has to understand how each of the different species will react to the Player Characters’ presence and actions. In terms of play, there will be a lot of movement and then just being still and observing, such there is almost something sedentary to the scenario. That will probably change once the Player Characters come to the notice of the biodome’s predators. If using pre-generated Player Characters, the Game Master might also want to add some storyhooks and relationships to them, not only to encourage interaction, but also to ramp up the tension when the dangers of the ecology within the biodome become apparent.

Physically, as with the other titles in the  Manifestus Omnivorous series, Mouth Brood is very nicely presented. The cover is sturdy card, whilst the pages are of a thick paper stock, giving the book a lovely feel in the hand. The scenario is decently written, if a little spare in places, but the artwork is excellent and when shown to the players, should have them exclaiming, Ugh what’s that?”, at just about every entry in the Bestiary. 

Inspired by films such as Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, Mouth Brood presents a hellishly febrile ecological unknown, its self-contained nature suggesting that its horror is all inside, when ultimately, the true horror is realising the consequences of what would happen if it were outside…