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.

Therapy & Terror

What if the monsters today sent young men and women off on pointless wars of aggression and pride? What if the monsters today sat at their keyboards and spread hate and lies—and were even paid to do it? What if the monsters today printed or broadcast hate and division in the name of patriotism? What if the monsters today refused life improving and even life-saving medical care because it was deemed too expensive and people suffered because of it? What if the monsters today took hostages for political gain? What if the monsters today poisoned wells and befouled the waters because it was profitable? What if the monsters today were in positions of power and influence, what would happen to the monsters of old? The monsters from under the bed. The monsters from folktales. The monsters from legends. The monsters from just at the edge of the shadows? The monsters reduced to entertainment on screens big and small, in books on the bestseller lists? Would they even be monstrous at all? And if they cannot be monsters as they once were, what will they do?

In Mansters, you roleplay one of these monsters. Classic, even universal monsters. The Vampire, the Witch, the Werewolf, the Mummy, the Not-Frankenstein, the Ghost, the Zombie. Monsters who have lost what they once were, that is, scary, yet they still have the same powers for which they were known. Monsters who in attempting to understand why the world has changed and why humans are no longer scared of them, have lost part of what made them monstrous. And have thus become depressed at their loss of status and loss of opportunity to embrace their true, monstrous natures. Since they are trying to understand humans, they do what every human would do and that is to seek therapy. Fortunately, Doctor Lector runs Depressives Anonymous at which every monster can unburden himself and come to terms with the world that he finds himself in. He also finds an outlet for his monstrousness, seeking the evil men and women of the world and striking fear into them, to prove himself what he once was.

Mansters: Fight Against the Real Monsters of the World is a storytelling game, a satire upon horror stories and the modern political and financial worlds. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is from Black Lantern, the Greek publisher best known for the Soulmist, the post-apocalyptic setting of a world literally divided into two by darkness and light, written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. The aim of the Player Characters—or Monsters—in the game is restore balance in the world, both internally and externally. Externally, they want to return a sense of fear to the world, but keep themselves unknowable. There is a Veil between the ordinary world of humans and the world of Monsters, the Monsters living as ordinary humans on one side and unleashing, even revelling in, their monstrous nature on the other side. A Monster can draw upon his monstrous nature to achieve strange and arcane feats, but pierce that Veil too often and too readily, and a Doom may befall upon him. Internally, they want to understand humans better and restore their self-respect. So, they set out to stop those in power and control who spread fear, uncertainty, and hatred, and commit crimes that go unpunished, so that ultimately, humans will fear monsters.

A Monster in Mansters is first defined by his Abilities and Skills. There are three Abilities—Body, Mind, and Heart—and each Ability has four associated skills. Each Ability is represented by a circle, which is divided into four quarters, or Hacks, and each Hack into two Slices, so that an Ability has four Hacks and eight Slices. Similarly, each Skill can be divided into four Hacks and eight Slices. He will also have a Monster type—Ghost, Mummy, Not-Frankenstein, Vampire, Werewolf, Witch, or Zombie, a Charisma, and a Flaw, two more Banes, and a starting Monstrosity Level. The Charisma is the Monster’s positive quirk, ability, or power; the Flaw a negative, limiting trait; and Banes the aspects of the Monster which will impede him. Some Banes are mandatory, whilst the others a player can choose.

To create a Monster, a player selects a Monster type and then Charisma and a Flaw, two more Banes, and a starting Monstrosity Level. Each of his Abilities starts at two Hacks and he can then assign a further two Hacks. He then determines the number of Slices his Monster has in each Ability and assigns that number of Hacks to the four Skills associated with the Ability. The process is quick and simple.

Dirk Fordice
Type: The Ghost
Charisma: Mind Over Matter
Flaw: Incognito Window
Banes: It’s Cold Out There, Chatterbox

Body 2 (4) – Fight 1, Stealth 2, Shoot 0, Handle 1
Mind 3 (6) – Knowledge 1, Perception 2, Investigation 2, Politics 1
Heart 3 (6) – Manipulate 2, Insight 2, Intimidate 1, Streetwise 1

Mansters uses what it calls the Hack & Slice System. It makes clear that it is not a ‘hack & slash’ roleplaying game. To have his Monster undertake an action, a player will roll either a number of six-sided dice equal to the number of Hacks his Monster has in an Ability or the number of Hacks in an Ability and a Skill. The aim is to roll successes, that is, rolls of five or more. A Difficult task would require two successes for a Monster to succeed, whilst an ‘Are you insane?’ task would need four. To make a task easier, a player can spend Slices. A Slice spent from an Ability lowers the number of Successes required to succeed, whereas a Slice spent from a Skill a reroll of any dice that have not rolled Successes. A short rest will restore some, but not all Slices, whereas a long rest of several days under the care of Doctor Lector will restore them all.

Confrontations can be physical, mental, or social. They are opposed rolls, with the winner inflicting damage equal to number of Successes rolled more than the defender. Each point of damage inflicted removes one Slice, whether that is physical damage from Body, mental damage from Mind, and social damage from Heart. If a combatant rolls two Successes more than his opponent, he gains the Edge. This applies to both the Monster and the NPC, and gives limited narrative control to the combatant with the Edge. For the Monster, the plater decides what happens and for his opponent, the Doctor—as the Game Master is known—decides. If a roll is failed, it adds to the Monster’s ‘Skutendo’ clock.

When a Monster wants to use one of his Monster Superpowers, his player makes a Monstrosity roll. This is equal to the Monster’s Monstrosity Level. If the number of Successes rolled is equal to the Difficulty of the particular Monster Superpower, it is activated. However, this is not easy and it has consequences. A higher Monstrosity Level means that the roll is more likely to succeed, but a high Monstrosity Level will add even more to the Monster’s ‘Skutendo’ clock. A player can choose to lower the Difficulty by expending Ability Hacks, but this will lead to exhaustion if done too often. A player is thus forced to make a choice and as much as Monster strives for some kind of balance in game, there is no balance here. The consequence is to add to the Monster’s ‘Skutendo’ clock and also to the Doctor’s ‘D(oo)M’ Clock.

So what is Skutendo? It represents unlucky events that occur near the Monster, rolled randomly. For example, it could be ‘The Little Cousin’ in which the Monster’s aunt asks him to look after his cousin or a ‘Monster Movie Craze’ in which people start dressing up and acting as the monster, making it more difficult for him to intimidate anyone. It is triggered when the Monster’s ‘Skutendo’ clock is filled and then cleared again. When it is triggered it, it also adds to the ‘D(oo)M’ Clock. This tracks the likelihood of Hunters turning up to look for the Monsters, the Slices from the ‘D(oo)M’ Clock being spent by the Doctor to bring them into play.

They include the sibling monster hunters, the Losechester Sisters, Van Helsing, and Scrood-Be-U, a gang of monster hunters which travels in a van called the Misery Machine and whose members benefit from eating Scrood-be-Snacks. Antagonists in Mansters are talked about in terms of archetypes (as are the Player Characters). These consist of Mr. Moneybags, The Man in the High Chair, the Long Arm of the Law, the Underworld, and so on. These are supported by detailed examples, such as Elton Mask for the Mr. Moneybags. It is here in the naming references that Mansters best and most obviously shows its satire. There is some advice for the Doctor, but it is very light. There is, though, an introductory adventure in which the Monsters investigate a landlord who is evicting all of his tenants to turn a block of flats into short stays for Airbnb.

One issue with the scenario is that it does not fully showcase all of the roleplaying game’s mechanics since a Hunter is not intended to appear as the ‘D(oo)M’ Clock fills. This is disappointing, but it means that the Doctor can save Mansters’ Hunters for a scenario of her own. Oddly, it does introduce another mechanic, ‘Initiative Points’, which essentially tracks the effects of the Monsters’ actions and determines how well they have done at the conclusion. What this means is that it is not entirely the typical adventure the Doctor might expect as an introductory adventure for Mansters when it comes to showing the rules in action. This does not mean that the actual adventure itself is bad as it is otherwise enjoyable and nicely detailed. It also showcases how a typical adventure starts with the Monsters all attending Doctor Lector’s Depressives Anonymous sessions, which are as much social events as they are therapy sessions. Despite the name, the Doctor is not evil, but part of later therapy sessions will involve some reflection of the adventure or situation that just happened. These post-investigation/post-defeat the banality of evil session are also where the players expend Experience Points. This has the potential for some interesting roleplaying scenes if the Doctor and players want them.

Unfortunately, the rulebook does not list the experience point costs for improving the Monsters. Nor does it list the Monstrosity Levels for each type of Monsters. Nor does it really explore how a Monster’s Monstrosity Level goes up or down. In fact, only the Vampire has a Bane which can increase his Monstrosity Level. Instead, Experience Points are intended to be spent on permanently lowering the Difficulty of activating a Monster’s powers. Ultimately, it may be up to the Doctor to decide, depending upon a Monster’s actions, whether his Monstrosity Level goes up or down. Mansters should have explored this aspect of its design and developed mechanics for it.

Physically, Mansters is well presented. The artwork is fun, capturing the tedious normality of the Monsters’ lives versus their true nature. The writing could have been clearer in places and it is repetitive in others. The cover also suggests that monsters other than the ones given in the book can be played when that is not the case.

Mansters does come as a boxed set. In addition to the rulebook, the box also contains a set of dice, a deck of ‘Skutendo’ cards, Monster portfolios for each Monster type, and oddly, a set of Monster-themed coasters and a set of Monster-themed bookmarks! One advantage of the boxed set is that the Monster portfolios do give each Monster’s starting Monstrosity Level.

There can be no doubt that the intent of Mansters is good, a satire of classic monsters versus the banality of modern live and the banality of modern evil, and of old evil versus new evil. Unfortunately, Mansters does not quite achieve what aims for. Mansters can be played as is, but the lack of interplay with and of potential to shift the Mansters’ Monstrosity Levels means the roleplaying game’s intended imbalance between the Monsters’ everyday, humdrum human existence and their inhuman, monstrous nature cannot be explored as it really should.

So Whose Dare is This, Anyway?

There is a very early meme called ‘Realmen, Real Role Players, Loonies, and Munchkins’. In this meme, players are classified into the four categories and the types of roleplaying games they would play, their favourite elements of those roleplaying games, and how they would play them. It originally dates back to 1983 and so its references are all from the eighties. For example, for ‘Favourite 1920s RPG’, the responses are, ‘*Real Men* play Gangbusters’, ‘*Real Roleplayers* play Call of Cthulhu’, ‘*Loonies* play a variant Spawn of Fashan’, and ‘*Munchkins* play anything by TSR’, whilst for ‘Favourite Dungeon Activity’, the responses are ‘*Real Men* fight Dragons as old as the world itself’, ‘*Real Roleplayers* bluff the Ogres’, ‘*Loonies* tell dirty jokes to Green Slime’, and ‘*Munchkins* do whatever gives the most experience/rip each other off’. Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests: The In Character Game for your RPG Party very much plays into that type of humour—the *Real Men* will be up for the challenge, but will probably fail to get the humour, the *Real Roleplayers* will embrace the challenge because their character is a good sport, the *Loonies* will do it just because, and the *Munchkins* will do it for the Experience points.

Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests: The In Character Game for your RPG Party is published by Loke BattleMats. Although it has form this kind of humour, having previously published The Deck of Many Insults, the publisher is better known for its volumes of maps such as Big Book of Battle Mats: Rooms, Vaults, & Chambers and Castles, Crypts, & Caverns Books of Battle Mats. Now Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests, as with The Deck of Many Insults, does sport a content warning in its cover and it does state it suitable for players fourteen years old and older, due to its mature content. It also states that that it is ‘5E Compatible’. To be honest, the degree of mechanical compatibility, let alone rules, is actually very low, and the cards in this box will honestly work as well with any Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying game and any retroclone, not just Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition.

The idea behind Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests is simple. Each player and each NPC—important NPC—races to complete three dares and do so in-character. Completing a Dare earns the player or NPC a reward. In terms of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, this can be Inspiration, Advantage on a roll, Experient Points, the benefits of a Short Rest, or some loot. These are suggestions only, and in terms of rules compatibility, that is about as far as Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests goes in being ‘5E Compatible’. And even then, these suggestions work as inspiration for the Game Master of another roleplaying game.

The rules to Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests are just as simple. Explained on two of the game’s one-hundred card deck, at the start of the session or adventure, the players and the important NPCs receive three cards. The player or NPC who completes the most not only receives the individual rewards for completing dare cards in-game, but wins the game of Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests too. The rules themselves are very simple and to be fair, it is what is on the Dare cards that matters.

Each Dare card is split into two parts. The top tells the player what the dare is, whilst the bottom half suggests ways in which the player might complete the dare. The player is free to follow the given suggestions or have his character complete the dare however he wants. The Dares include, “Get to know your companions in the worst possible way.” with the suggestion of, “So, whose parents are the most disappointed in them and why?; “Refer to a companion as they are not present/deceased.” with the suggestion, “It’s what Dan would have wanted”; “Translate what the pigeon are saying (it is all swears, taunts and insults).” with the suggestion, “That pigeon really hates your mother…”; “Keep a score card, ranking your companions.” with the suggestion, “That’s minus two points for not spotting that trap Dan, making you the new worst party member.”; and “Use only taste and smell to search for clues or answers.” with the suggestion, “Traps, locks, hidden keys? Lick your way to answers…” Most of these are entirely player-driven, but in some cases, like the last Dare involving searching for clues using only the senses of taste and smell, they can involve the Game Master too, as she has to tell the player what it is exactly that his character is smelling or tasting.

Physically, Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests is simply presented. The rules are easy to grasp and the content of the cards is easy to understand.

Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests: The In Character Game for your RPG Party is silly. So silly that it will disrupt a normal game, unless that game already includes the type and amount of ridiculous humour that Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests is all about. So best then, to use Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests as an occasional treat or special event. Perhaps for April’s Fools Day, a dream sequence, or when the Player Characters are all caught up in the effect of a prankster’s magic? Dumb Dares & Silly Side Quests: The In Character Game for your RPG Party will definitely encourage some fun, silly roleplaying, but is best used in moderation or ideally, under special circumstances, to avoid spoiling that fun.

Review 3000: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

In 1984 and 1985, the breakout comic was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, written and drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and published by their Mirage Studios. It was an independent black and white comic that told the adventures of the eponymous quartet of four genetically-mutated turtles trained under a pet rat, Master Splinter, to fight rival ninja, including the Foot Clan, and other threats, such as aliens. Combining humour and stories with a darker edge than Marvel Comics like Daredevil and The New Mutants, the comic book was a hit and not only continued to be published by Mirage Studios for the next thirty years, but was heavily licensed, pushing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the mainstream. Since 1987, there have been five television series based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and eight films. However, in the forty years since the first issue of the comic, there has only been one roleplaying game—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was published in 1985 by Palladium Games, a company best known at that point for 1983’s Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game and 1984’s Heroes Unlimited. It was designed—or rather redesigned in a matter of weeks after Palladium Games was unhappy with the original submitted version—by Erick Wujcik, who most notably would go on to create Amber Diceless Role-Playing. The result was a fast-paced, engaging, if imperfect roleplaying game packed with art from Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, that looked like it was a lot of fun. And if you were a teenager when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was released, it was, because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was and were cool. Perhaps because of the speed in which it was rewritten, perhaps because it is a Palladium Games book, there is ‘cookie cutter’ feel to some parts of the roleplaying game—the alignment system, the equipment list, and the weapons—which all very feel imported from Palladium Games’ other roleplaying games that used the Megaversal system, like the earlier Ninjas & Superspies. There are certainly some parallels between the two, not least of which are the fact that they were both written by Erick Wujcik, but they do not feel like a natural fit to the comic book universe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That aside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness proved to a be a big hit for Palladium Games, selling very well until the release of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series and the first film, when the toning down of the edginess and darkness of the original material meant that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was no longer cool.

Nevertheless, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was cool in 1985. At just one-hundred-and-twelve pages, it does not have a lot of space to waste. It starts by pointing out the animal characters are common to comics, if not roleplaying games, so the roleplaying game is giving players that option. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is designed as a supplement to Heroes Unlimited, the superhero roleplaying game published by Palladium Games, but can be played as a standalone game as it is complete. It also rationalises why it uses a random character generation system rather than a point buy system, which was then becoming popular, such as with Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, Victory Games’ James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Steve Jackson’s Man to Man: Fantasy Combat from GURPS, the precursor to the full release of the system the next year. What this boils down to is that “Excellent players can role-play ANYTHING…”, the Game Master can create interesting villains as much the players interesting characters, and randomness reflects real life. This is followed by quite description of what a roleplaying game is before leaping straight into character creation.

A character in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is defined by eight attributes—Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.), Mental Endurance (M.E.), Mental Affinity (M.A.), Physical Strength (P.S.), Physical Prowess (P.P.), Physical Endurance (P.E.), Physical Beauty (P.B.), and Speed (Spd.). The base attributes range from three to eighteen, with results of sixteen or more granting bonuses, though low rolls do not impose any penalties. A character will also have Hit Points and Structural Damage Capacity or S.D.C., essentially stun points. He has an Animal Type, which be anything, including dog, cat, mouse, frog, monkey, cow, pig, chicken, goat, sheep, turkey, wolf, coyote, fox to elk, moose, boar, sparrow, robin, blue jay, eagle, owl, escaped pet bird, lion, tiger, leopard, baboo, camel, and buffalo. All animals found in North America, including those in zoos and safari parks. The list, of course, includes the turtle. He will have a Cause of Mutation, the reason why he is anthropomorphic and intelligent. This can be due to a random mutation or an accident, but will primarily because he was a research project of some kind, either growing up in a researcher’s home or even being deliberately trained as an assassin! This background will determine how many skills he will have and often, how good a combatant he is, and his basic attitude towards humans, the default attitude being one of distrust.

Creating a Player Character in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness involves fives steps. These are rolling for attributes, animal type, and cause of mutation (this will also determine the organisation that will have created the mutated animal and his degree of education), and then spending ‘Bio-E’ or ‘Biological Energy Points’ to mutate the animal. Each animal type has a pool of ‘Bio-E’ points that a player can spend to make it more anthropomorphic and give it hands that grip like a human, speech like a human, and stance like a human, as well as its own intrinsic animal abilities. For example, the aardvark has tunnelling and digging, and the elephant has a prehensile trunk, advanced hearing, and thick skin. ‘Bio-E’ points also account for size. So, if an animal is small, the player has to spend ‘Bio-E’ points to make it bigger, but is given ‘Bio-E’ points to spend if a bigger animal needs to be smaller. The aim here is to make the Player Characters roughly about the same size and of roughly the same capability. It was a way of balancing wildly different character types, but still left something to be desired. In addition, ‘Bio-E’ points can be spent on psionic powers.

After this the player chooses his character’s skills. These will include a variety of skill programmes, scholastic and physical skills, and secondary skills. From amongst these, a Player Character should definitely select a martial arts package, whether that is Hand-to-Hand Basic, Hand-to-Hand Expert, Hand-to-Hand Expert, Hand-to-Hand Assassin, Hand-to-Hand Martial Arts, or Hand-to-Hand Ninjitsu, since part of the roleplaying game’s title includes the word ‘Ninja’ and it does have an emphasis upon combat. Plus, there is a variety of Weapon Proficiencies for various weapons, many of the melee weapons drawn from Japanese culture and history. There are Modern Weapon Proficiencies too, but these tend to be the province of NPCs rather than Player Characters, in keeping with the source material, though there is nothing to stop a Player Character learning one. Lastly, the player selects an Alignment and purchases equipment. The process is not difficult, but slightly cumbersome. It does allow for players to create a group of similar characters a la the turtles of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Name: Aaron
Level: 1
Alignment: Principled (Good)
Animal Type: Aardvark
Mutation Cause: Rescued and adopted from a private company by a friendly researcher whilst it hunted him.
Human Features: Full Hands, Full Speech, Full Stance
Natural Weapons: Claws (1d6)
Animal Powers: Digging, Tunnelling
Psionic Powers: Sixth Sense

Intelligence Quotient 12 Mental Affinity 12 Physical Strength 19
Mental Endurance 12 Physical Prowess 16 Physical Endurance 18
Physical Beauty 07 Speed 29
Hit Points: 22
S.D.C.: 32

SCHOLASTIC SKILLS
Mathematics: Basic 82%, Read/Write English 60%, Speaks English 60%

MILITARY/ESPIONAGE SKILLS
Pick Locks 35%, Tracking 35%, Wilderness Survival 45%

PHYSICAL SKILLS
Acrobatics (Sense of Balance 65%, Walk Tightrope 65%, Climb Rope 82%, Climbing 44%, Back Flip 65%), Athletics, Boxing, Prowling 64%, Running

SECONDARY SKILLS
Automotive Mechanics 53%, Cook 65%, Computer Operation 65%, Dance 45%, First Aid 55%, Hand-to-Hand: Martial Arts, Land Navigation 44%, Pilot: Basic – Automobile 80%

COMBAT BONUSES
Two attacks/round, +4 Damage, +1 to Strike, +5 Roll with Punch/Fall, +7 Parry, +11 Dodge, +2 Strike with Body Block/Tackle (1d4), +2 to Save versus Coma, Death, and Toxins

NOTES
Fearless of Heights

Mechanically, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness uses Palladium Games’ Megaversal system and is in general, quite straightforward. Skills are percentiles and cannot rise above 98%, with bonuses gained from high attributes, training in physical skills, and gaining Levels. Otherwise, the emphasis in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is on combat. Once initiative is determined, usually by a roll of a twenty-sided die, combatants roll to attack and defendants roll parry, dodge, or entangle, and so on. A roll of five or more on a twenty-sided die always hits. If the attack roll is less then defendant’s Armour Rating (either natural body or worn armour), damage is deducted from his S.D.C. only. If the roll is over the defendant’s Armour Rating, damage is deducted from his S.D.C. first and then actual Hit Points. A roll of natural twenty is a critical hit and inflicts double damage. If a defendant is hit, his player or the Game Master if an NPC, can choose to parry, dodge, or entangle the attack. This requires a roll greater than the attack roll. This can be done automatically if parrying, but dodging uses up one of a combatant’s attacks. Bullets and energy blasts can be dodged, but not parried. If the attack is with a blunt weapon or with fists, the player or Game Master can for roll for character or NPC to roll with the punch and if successful half the damage. Hand-to-hand combat allows for a variety of different attacks, including punches, kicks, jump kicks, leaps, throws, and so on, as well as the use of various martial arts weapons. The rules for firearms allow for multiple shots per round, since a round actually lasts fifteen seconds, and also automatic fire. They add some complexity to combat and are likely to slow things down whilst melee and hand-to-hand combat is going to flow back and forth a lot more easily.

For example, Aaron the Aardvark is out on patrol one night when he spots Bill the Burglar attempting to break into a house. Aaron’s player states that the Aardvark is going to sneak up on Bill the Burglar and attempt to knock him out. The Game Master calls for Prowling roll first, but Aaron’s player fails this by rolling 83% rather the 64% needed. Since Aaron has failed, the Game Master rules that since Bill the Burglar was being quiet too, he heard the sound of Araon’s claws clicking on the slabs of path. She calls for an initiative roll. The Game Master rolls 17, but Aaron’s player rolls only a 12. With the initiative, the suddenly shocked and frightened at the sight of a five foot tall aardvark Bill the Burglar reaches into his jacket and pulls out a 9 mm Smith & Wesson Model 59 and opens fire! Bill the Burglar has done time at the range and has the Weapon Proficiency: Handgun, but in his state, he opts to blast Aaron with a burst of shots. This gives him a +1 bonus instead of the +3 for an aimed short. Aaron is wearing a vest which gives him an Armour Rating of 10 and 50 S.D.C. The Game Master rolls 16 and one of the shots from the burst hits Aaron, meaning that the damage will be deducted directly from his own S.D.C. rather than the vest’s. Instead of taking the damage, Aaron’s player opts for him to Dodge the attack. Aaron’s player rolls the die and adds his Dodge bonus of +11. He rolls 16 to get a result of 27, meaning he leaps out of the way. This uses up one of Aaron’s actions. Realising that whatever this creature is that is in front of him, Bill the Burglar realises that just blasting away at it, is not going to work. This time, he takes an aimed shot, which gives him a +3 bonus to hit. This time he rolls a 3 for a total of six, which means that Aaron’s vest has stopped the round. Aaron’s player chooses not to Dodge, but instead pounces on Bill the Burglar with a body tackle. Aaron’s player rolls 19, adds +2 to get a result of 21, which definitely means he hits. Aaron’s player rolls for damage, a four-sided dice, +4 for his damage bonus, and inflicts eight points damage to Bill the Burglar’s S.D.C. that he is not fast enough to avoid. There is an oof from Bill the Burglar as Aaron slams into him!

One aspect of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness that is decently handled is Experience Points. Player Characters do improve going up Levels, and so increasing their Hit Points, Skills, hand-to-hand combat skills, and Weapon Proficiencies. Experience Points are awarded not just for killing or subduing menaces, but also ideas clever and useful, performing skills, endangering your life to save others, avoiding violence, and good roleplaying. There is a lot in the list that encourages good gaming.

There is a decent equipment list drawn from other modern-set roleplaying games from Palladium Games as well as an extensive list of Japanese and Ninjitsu weapons, plus equipment for the latter. The Game Master or player wanting more is recommended to check out Heroes Unlimited or The Palladium Book of Contemporary Weapons. The list does include energy weapons since they appear in the comics. A lot of the equipment is intended for use by the police or in espionage.

In keeping with the relative shortness of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, the section for the Game Master is also short. It is supported by helpful examples of combat and character creation, and there are some notes on matching the scenario to the capabilities of the Player Characters, creating villains and villainous organisations, and how to use Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness with Heroes Unlimited. The bulk of the Game Master dedicated to five scenarios. They include ‘Caesar’s Weasels’, in which the Player Characters track down a gang that has been looting meat packing plants; ‘The Terror Bears’ in which a gang of mutated bears have using their psionic powers to terrorise and then hide in a neighbourhood; ‘Doctor Feral: The Genius of Bio-Spawn’, which details a highly respected scientist who kidnaps mutant animals to vivisect them; ‘Terror on Rural Route 5’, in which mutant animals have taken a school hostage; and ‘The Leg of the Ninja’ which details a Ninja organisation that could grow into a major threat for the Player Characters. ‘Terror on Rural Route 5’ is intended as an introductory scenario, but to be honest, none of the five are actually full scenarios, but rather, set-ups. None of them are bad per se, but rather that the Game Master will need to develop each of them further. Of the five, ‘The Terror Bears’ is the most memorable, since it introduced the four anti-Care Bears—Pain Bear, Fear Bear, Doom Bear, and Nightmare Bear—that parodied a popular animated series of the day. One thing that all five scenario seeds did was provide the Game Master with good range of sample threats.

Rounding out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness are the stats and write-ups for characters from the comic. This includes the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, their friend April O’Neil and others, Shredder, the leader of the Foot ninja clan, and the T.C.R.I. (or ‘Techno-Cosmic Research Institute’) aliens, as well as the Sparrow-Eagles, the sample team characters outlined earlier in the book.

Physically, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness feels a little scruffy around the edges, and not quite up to Palladium Games’ usual neat and tidy standards. That may be due to it being rushed or the artwork that sometimes intrudes into the page. It is engagingly written and what really stands out is the artwork. This is either taken from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic or drawn for the roleplaying game and it really is good, including as it does a couple of short strips, one of which depicts the origins of the turtles. The artwork also gives the book a sense of energy and excitement like you really want to take up your katana and battle ninja in the sewers or aliens on the rooftops of New York. Lastly, it is short—at barely more than one hundred pages—and if not quite as well organised as it could be, its short length makes everything easy to find. It also suffers from none of the bloat or utter lack of organisation that have plagued books from the publisher since, most obviously, Rifts.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is not perfect. One problem is character generation, which though fun is very far from balanced because it is entirely random. Only very high attributes provide bonuses of any kind, and whilst taking some physical skills will improve them, any Player Character with attributes high enough to provide bonuses is at an advantage. The end results can also vary, so that one character might be a relatively mild manner creature with a college level education or a wild creature with barely any, whilst another is a super-soldier assassin killing machine trained by the military. This in addition to some Player Characters who might look humanoid, others not, and maybe not even able to talk, and given a roleplaying game as heavily focused on combat as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, the super-soldier assassin killing machine trained by the military is what everyone wanted to play. Another problem is that focus on combat, means that other aspects of the game may suffer such as roleplaying. The advice for creating NPCs is underwritten and the Game Master wanting to create ordinary humans will need to work out how to do that. It is not difficult, but advice would have been useful.

Unfortunately, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was not free of controversy. In the first printing of the roleplaying game, it included the option for a Player Character to start play with a form of insanity or gain a random later in play as the result of trauma, for example, demonic possession, near-death experience, or torture. Under the list of insanities, it included a list of sexual deviations, which notably featured paedophilia and homosexuality. The idea here was that one of the effects of the trauma was to compel a Player Character to change his sexual orientation. Another bizarrely, was that the Player Character would want to retrain as a psychiatrist! Even so, at the time, this was a tasteless, even offensive, treatment of sexual orientation, especially as homosexuality had been officially declassified as a mental illness for over a decade in 1975. At first, the offending section was covered up by Palladium Books, but then excised from later printings.

Alignment in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is also a potential problem. An Alignment represents a Player Character or NPC’s attitudes and moral principles and can be one of seven options divided into three categories. ‘Principled’ and ‘Scrupulous’ are both ‘Good’; ‘Unprincipled’ and ‘Anarchist’ are ‘Selfish’; and ‘Miscreant’, ‘Aberrant’, and ‘Diabolic’ are ‘Evil’. The problem, specifically, is that of torture. Only the ‘Principled’ character or NPC will never resort to torture, whereas even the ‘Scrupulous’ will, but “Never torture for pleasure, but may use muscle to extract information from criminals or evil characters.”; the ‘Unprincipled’ will “Not use torture unless absolutely necessary.”; and ‘Anarchist’ “Will use torture to extract information. But not likely to do so for pleasure.” The ‘Evil’ Alignments are worse, and this treatment of Alignment was common to all roleplaying games from Palladium Games, but that does not excuse in any way the suggestion that a Player Character should or can use torture.

—oOo—

Marcus L. Rowland reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 78 (July 1986). He did not come to any clear conclusion, but said, “Fans of the comic will already know what to expect, other readers will need enlightenment. The heroes are exactly what the title implies: large intelligent turtles, trained in Oriental martial arts, and equipped with a variety of Ninja weaponry. Apart from this central joke, the comics pretend to take themselves very seriously. To reflect this, the style of play is completely deadpan, setting intelligent and deadly animals against a background of urban terrorism, gang warfare, juvenile delinquency and random violence.” A more positive comment was made by Robert Neville in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 83 (November 1986) when he reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures!. He opened the review by saying, “TMNT has been one of the surprise hits of the last year, with multitudes of gamers snapping up copies of the rulebook as fast as importers can freight them over to the UK.”

Scott Dollinger reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness in ‘Game Reviews’ in Different Worlds Issue 44 (November/December 1986). He awarded it three-and-a-half stars out of five, said, “What is unusual is that Eastman and Laird have not taken the easy route to fast money and licensed the characters to a combat [sic] that would produce a hastily-made product to cash in on the current popularity of the characters. Instead they have maintained the high quality of the comic by licensing the characters to a smaller but well respected gaming company that takes their time and produces an excellent product. In this case the game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was created by Palladium Books and the results are fantastic.” He also added that, “…[T]he $9.95 price tag makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness one of the best buys on the market.”

Arcane magazine and editor Paul Pettengale had reason to examine Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness not once, but twice. First in Arcane Issue Twelve (November 1996) in which he made it the subject of the magazine’s regular ‘Retro’ department. He said, “Of the random character generation system and its consequently random results he said, “You can imagine how much potential this had for farcical situations.” whilst of the layout, which he said were badly organised, he added that, “The layout of the rulebook could have been clearer (the martial arts section was together with the skills rather than the combat).” Yet despite this, his conclusion was positive: “…[I]t was a quick and easy game to learn, and the rules for character generation are good ... together with Paranoia, TMNT&OS was one of the most fun, and funny games I have played.”

This was followed in Arcane Issue Fourteen (December 1996) by its inclusion in ‘The 50 favourite RPGs of all time’ based on a reader’s poll at position #36. Arcane’s editor Paul Pettengale commented that, “The rules are badly laid out, but the principles are easy to learn and combat is fluid. So, fine on that score. It’s a superbly fun game to play because of its quirkiness, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic setting has most of California under the ocean. Fantastic fun.”

—oOo—

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was a big hit upon release. It was the roleplaying game that everyone wanted and just like the comics it was based on, it was cool and it was fun. Tonally though, there are elements of the roleplaying game that are at odds with the comic, even though that comic is grim and gritty and full of cartoon violence. But remove them—and at least Palladium Games removed some of them—and there is still potential for a lot of fun in its pages. If you can get them roughly balanced, then the range of character options based on the eighty animals it includes is huge and the rules are straightforward, if only a little rough. Which to be fair, is an amazing achievement for a roleplaying game designed in five weeks! It is not the greatest roleplaying game or even the best roleplaying game of 1985, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness opened up the world of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to roleplaying and let you roleplay strange mutant animals sneaking around in the shadows, fighting crime, stopping alien invasions from other dimensions, and facing off against ninja. Which was very definitely cool in the eighties, and if you want to whisper it to yourself now, it still is forty years later.

Friday Filler: Don’t Talk To Strangers

School has finished for the day, but your parents are not going to be home from work for hours yet. As a ‘latchkey kid’ you have to make your own way home or to the library or the pool or the afterschool pep rally, and that would be fine any other day. After all, your parents trust you and they have warned you to be careful of strangers, so you have been successfully making your way home from school for ages and without any problem whatsoever. Not today though! There are proper strangers on the prowl for little kids today. Otherworldly strangers with spindly, hairless green bodies and big black, unblinking eyes. In other words, little green men from outer space ready to abduct the children and whisk them away in their flying saucers. This is the set-up for Don’t Talk To Strangers, which is published by by Cryptozoic Entertainment and is part of the first trilogy of games—along with Let’s Dig for Treasure and Let’s Summon Demons—based on the art of Steven Rhodes, noted for its sly, subversive dig at the social attitudes and fears of the seventies and eighties. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is designed to be played by between one and four players, aged fourteen and up. The aim of the game is for a player to get as many of the thirteen kids under his charge to the homes, pool, park, pep rally, or library where they will be safe—for the most part—whilst avoiding their being abducting and perhaps ensuring that other kids get abducted instead, and ultimately, at the end of the game, score as many points as possible. A game can be played in twenty minutes or more, depending on the number of players. The aim of the game is for a player to get as many of the thirteen kids under his charge to the homes, pool, park, pep rally, or library where they will be safe—for the most part—whilst avoiding their being abducting and perhaps ensuring that other kids get abducted instead, and ultimately, at the end of the game, score as many points as possible.

Don’t Talk To Strangers consists of an eleven by seven-and-a-half-inch, double-sided board, a deck of one hundred cards, ten Stranger Tokens, fifty-two Kid Tokens, one Flying Saucer Coin, and a twelve-page mini-rulebook. The board shows the various homes, other locations, streets, bus stops, and Stranger spaces surrounding the kid’s school. Most locations in the board will score a player points at the end of the game, from the seven points of North End Mansion to the single point of the Library or spots in the South Pool. In addition, some locations grant extra benefits if a player has a kid there. For each kid in the Library, a player will increase his hand size by one, whilst for each kid in the South Park, he can increase the number of kids he has in place. The Stranger spaces are where the Strangers will land when a ‘Stranger Sighting’ card is played. Any Kid on a Stranger space when this occurs is abducted and out of the game and the presence of the Stranger on the Stranger space blocks movement through that space. The board is double-sided, the ‘Board B’ having a more complex layout and more Stranger spaces.

Most of the game’s cards are movement cards. For example, ‘Skateboard’ allows a player to move a Kid three spaces; ‘School Bus’ enables him to move a kid between any two Bus Stops; and ‘Hop the Fence’ lets him move a kid one space, but this can effectively be through a wall! A ‘Stranger Sighting’ means that a Stranger has been spotted and has to be added to the board on a ‘Stranger Spot’, whilst a ‘Saucer’ card forces a player to target a kid on the board, who can be from anywhere on the board, including those on a scoring space. He then flips the Flying Saucer Coin and if it lands ‘Saucer’ face up, the Kid is abducted out the game.

The game begins with each player having three cards and a Kid on the ‘Start’ space which is the school. On his turn, a player can do one of two things. One is to add a Kid to the ‘Start’ space, the other is to play a card. A player can only have one Kid in play. A Kid on a scoring location does not count towards this limit and a player can increase the number by gettinga Kid to the South Park location. Most of the time a player will play a card, move a Kid, and draw back up to his hand. However, if a ‘Stranger Sighting’ or a ‘Saucer’ card, he must play them immediately and resolve their effects. It is possible for a player to draw multiple ‘Stranger Sighting’ or ‘Saucer’ cards depending how the deck has been shuffled.

The continues until one player has managed to get all of his Kids to scoring locations, but very much more likely, all of the Stranger location cards have been filled—ten on ‘Board A’, eight on the more difficult ‘Board B’. At this point, each player totals the score he has from the Kids he has on scoring locations, and the player with highest score wins.

None of this game play is very challenging—if at all nor does it offer very in the way of variation. This makes the game better suited to a younger audience or a family audience, whilst the lack of variation means that more experienced players are unlikely to want to play it again.

Physically, Don’t Talk To Strangers is well presented. The rulebook is short and easy to read, and includes an example of play as well as explanations of what the various cards do. The artwork, with its bright, bold colours, is excellent, Steve Rhodes’ illustrations are excellent.

Don’t Talk To Strangers is underwhelming, both in terms of its limited game play and its humour. One of the pleasures of the games in this line is Steve Rhodes’ illustrations which are invariably sly and subversive. Not so in this game where only one card stood out, which is ‘New Step-Dad’ card which enables a player to move any Kid, including that of an opponent, from a Home or Mansion location to an empty Home or Mansion location, so changing their score valuable at game’s end. This has a witty element of social commentary that will hit home for some players—whether children or adults of a certain age—and which the other cards in the game lack.

At best, Don’t Talk To Strangers is an average filler game, at worst, the one in a gamer’s library which completes his collection of all six Steve Rhodes-themed games from Cryptozoic Entertainment. It is certainly far from the best in the series.

Quick-Start Saturday: Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart

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

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

—oOo—

What is it?
Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart is the quick-start for Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the roleplaying game based on the satirical fantasy works of Sir Terry Pratchett published by Modiphius Entertainment and focusing on the great city of Ankh-Morpork, set in a particular Now somewhere around the events of the novels, Going Postal and Thud!.

It is a forty-eight page, 12.99 MB full colour PDF.

It is decently written and the artwork is excellent. It does need an edit in places.

How long will it take to play?
Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart is designed to be played through in a single session, two at the very most.

What else do you need to play?
The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart needs a standard set of polyhedral dice, including percentile dice, per player. Except that is, the die between the seventh- and nineth-sided dice. This known as as the ‘Narrativium Die’ and is rolled by the Game Master.

It also requires some puns.

Who do you play?
The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart includes six pre-generated Player Characters, all of whom are members of Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch. They consist of a veteran Zombie who was or is very close to retirement; an Igorina recruit good with a needle; a surprisingly charismatic Troll; a Dwarf Crimescene Iconographer; a gifted beggar who surprised her parents by joining the Watch; and a very observant Gargoyle.

How is a Player Character defined?

A Player Character in the Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart has a number of Traits that define who and what he is and what what he can do. They include the character’s name, the group he belongs to, species and background, his experiences and where he fits into his group, his core—his outlook on life and how he reacts to the world, quirks, and description. He may gain other Traits, primarily consequences for failing Tests. He also has several points of Luck. All six come with a good description as well as the other Traits and an excellent illustration.

How do the mechanics work?

Mechanically, Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork uses an opposed dice roll system. A player decides what he wants his character to do, selects a Trait, and explains how said Trait is appropriate for the Test. The player is encouraged to define how appropriate a Trait from one situation to the next, even that twists the meaning of the words. The Game Master will assign an Outcome Die that the player will roll. If the justification is perfect or suitability appropriate for what the Player Character can do, this is a twelve-sided die, but if the rationale is dodgy or shaky, or the Player Character has no idea what he is doing, it is a four-sided die. The Game Master may also assign the six-sided die or the ten-sided die depending upon the quality of the reasoning. In addition, the Game Master decides on the consequences of failure.

The roll of the Outcome Die is compared with the ‘Narrativium Die’. If the result on the Outcome Die is higher, the Player Character succeeds, but if the result on the ‘Narrativium Die’ is higher, he fails and the Game Master can narrate the result, which can be a new Trait, representing unforeseen consequences or twists.

If the test was a failure, another Player Character can attempt to help. This costs a point of Luck and the player will decide on the appropriate Trait and the Game Master assign it an Outcome Die. The roll is made against the result of the ‘Narrativium Die’ already rolled. If the result of the new Outcome Die is higher, then the Player Characters succeed, but if it is a tie or lower, the consequences affect both Player Characters and and are worse.

Luck can also be spent to reduce the effects of consequences.

On extremely rare occasions, a Game Master can decide that a plan devised by the players is so outlandishly absurd or ridiculously clever or astoundingly unlikely, that, “it’s a million to one chance, but it just might work.” In which case, it actually does.

How does combat work?
There are no specific combat mechanics in the Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart. Instead, Tests are rolled as normal with the ‘Narrativium Die’ standing in for the opposition and the outcome narrated.

How does magic work?

If you are not prepared to put your time in and complete your studies at Unseen University, there really is no hope of you actually finding out...

What do you play?

The scenario in the Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart is ‘Up in Smoke’. As member of the Watch, the Player Characters are assigned—by Sir Samual Vimes, no less—to investigate a burglary at Lady Ramkin’s Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons. The investigation will take the Player Characters back and forth across the Misbegot Bridge over the River Ankh and the scenario is actually organised geographically, with the various sites of investigation laid out either side of the bridge. Every location includes a description, details of what happened there previously and any NPCs, as well as a list of clues and possible consequences should things go wrong. This is slightly odd if a bit clever, as it also places the finale in the middle of the investigation! The finale is very written as an action scene with a chase, a dilemma, and plenty of complications and consequences.

Is there anything missing?
No. The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart has everything the Game Master and her players will need to play, including advice on tone, safety tools, and a good example of play. There is also a Reference Sheet on the last page.

Is it easy to prepare?
Yes. The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart is very easy to prepare.

Is it worth it?
Yes. There a lot to like about the Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart. It is simple and straightforward, the rules are very easy to grasp and allow for a lot of player input and Trait twisting in light, narrative fashion. ‘Up in Smoke’ is a solid scenario and the pre-generated Player Characters are all nicely, nicely done. The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart really is one of the easiest of quick-starts to run and play.

The Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork Quickstart. is published by Modiphius Entertainment and is available to download here.

Public Access Perturbations

Fairhaven is your typical American small town. Fairhaven is also utterly normal. There are no three-foot-tall bulbous headed babies running around in loincloths in the woods near the quartz caves that have been closed off since that kid disappeared in the fifties. Alien invaders are not planning to invade the town and replace everyone over eighteen with doppelgangers. The parking lot outside the 7-Eleven on route 67 out of town is not cursed. Fairhaven Mall, the town’s very first enclosed retail centre, is not going to be used as a summoning circle for the ancient serpent demon Menevoth, with the very excited members of the town’s Chamber of Commerce definitely not going to use everyone who attends on the opening day at 3 pm as ritual sacrifices. Sherman Glimp, wouldbe comic, prize-winning tap dancer, and owner of GlimpBytes, the most reliable computer repair shop in Fairhaven, did not die in strange circumstances. Swamp Eggs, the latest kids’ craze to hit Fairhaven, sold by local, advanced technology development company, X-Tec, definitely do contain something alive in them, but whatever it is, it is definitely safe (terms and conditions apply). The Fairhaven Aquarium Natural History Annex has definitely not lost the exhibit, ‘Our Cool Ancestor, The Iceman’, and Jed and Edna Hamburger were definitely not attacked by a prehistoric ape-creature with beady yellow eyes says a spokesman for Fairhaven Police Department. Rest assured, Fairhaven Police Department keeps everything normal.

Except, of course, the Rev. Joey Royale, the Station Manager at WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven knows different. He runs the town’s Public Access Television channel and he wants to ensure that the good folk of Fairhaven are kept safe from the weird, strange, horrifying, and unnatural things going on in the town that nobody talks about and the Fairhaven Police Department resolutely deny are happening. Of course, a figure of such ‘good standing’ in the community as Rev. Joey Royale cannot be seen to be involved in such abnormal activities as investigating the outré and the unconventional, but he can of course, call upon the skills, services, and gumption of numerous individuals already exposed to such doings—the hosts of the shows on WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven!

This is the set-up for Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game, published by Get Haunted Industries. Originally released as a series of fanzines—the Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game collates the first four and adds further content—this is an investigative roleplaying game into small town weirdness, horror, and mystery set in the eighties. Cryptids, UFOs, disappearances, strange deaths, alien invasions, all too advanced technology, cults, monster sightings, psychic powers, and that old homeless guy muttering prophecies under his breath are all fair game. The players take the role of Hosts of programmes on WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven. They have ordinary, even dull day jobs, but once a week—or even nightly, depending upon the needs of the schedule and their popularity—they have their own show on WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven. They might be spiritualists or psychics, fitness fanatics, local talk show hosts, variety show hosts, hosts of special interest shows—whether that is fishing, cooking, religion, and so on, and of course, they might host late night horror movie marathons! They receive instructions from Rev. Joey Royale, kept anonymous via the use of a ventriloquist’s dummy or a Speak & Spell, and then they investigate, keeping sure to avoid the Fairhaven Police Department because WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven definitely does not want that kind of publicity!

A Host in Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is simply defined. He has four core skills—Mind, Mouth, Body, and Soul. Every Host begins play with six points of Hope, which represents both his health and his determination. A Host also has a Programming Focus, which will define these skills, connections in the community, some props that he uses on his show, and a safety item which he can use in a fight. The latter cannot be a gun because that brings too much attention to WHPA-TV13 Fairhaven. The Host types include Spirituality, Fitness, Variety, Monster Movies, Local Talk, and Special Interest, which covers anything else that a player can think of. Each provides a bonus to a core skill and most also provide an extra connection and special abilities. For example, a Fitness Host simply receives a big bonus to his Body skill, but a Monster Movies is given a small bonus to his Mind skill, can receive vivid flashes of arcane, occult, and/or scientific knowledge, and can also perform acts of sleight of hand. Lastly, a Host has a Supernatural Ability, like X-ray Vision or Minor Pyromancy.

Host creation is a matter of distributing some points between the core skills, and choosing a Programming Focus, some props, and a supernatural ability. It is a simple process, but it is not as clearly worded as it could have been and an example would have helped.

Host: Frau Blücher
Programming Focus: Special Interest (Cleaning)
Show Name: The Marital Arts Show
Occupation: Small Business Owner (Spick-Und-Span – Murder Scenes a Speciality)

CORE SKILLS
Mind 1 Mouth 2 Body 1 Soul 0
Hope 6

Connection: Aldous Kesey (Deputy Chairman, Fairhaven Chamber of Commerce)
Props: Mop and bucket, bleach, thick rubber gloves
Safety Item: Urn with her mother’s ashes

Mechanically, Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is very simple, using a dice pool of six-sided dice. When a player wants his host to undertake an action, he rolls one die plus dice equal to the appropriate core skill. Rolls of five or six are counted as a success and typically, only one success is required for the Host to carry out the action successfully. However, if all ones are rolled on the dice, the Host loses a point of Hope, but if all sixes are rolled, it triggers the Host’s Supernatural Ability temporarily.

Combat is equally as simple and fast. Initiative is a roll of a six-sided die and a successful Body check is required to see if an attacker is successful. Damage is also rolled on a single die. If the result is four or less, the defendant loses one point of Hope, but two points if five or six is rolled. If a Host loses all of his Hope points, he can be stabilised and continue investigating with one point, but if not, he suffers Cancellation, or worse, a return to normality!

And that really is it to Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game. The players can help the Ref—as the Game Master is known—conduct some planning and zoning to create the town of Fairhaven, and there are detailed rules for psionic powers using Zener cards if the Ref wants to use them (though she should probably buy or create her own rather than cutting up the book) and for handling seances, which uses a standard deck of playing cards. Really though, but the rest of Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is dedicated to defining the possible weirdness in Fairhaven, and if not defining then alluding to it. This includes scenario outlines such as the appearance of the horse-headed serpent, Sassy, in ‘Return of the Pond Beast’ and exploring ‘The Forgotten Canals of Amontillado’, the tunnels dug under the town to facilitate the bootlegging of its famous fig schnapps during Prohibition. Whilst there are stats for a few creatures and oddities, the Ref is left to define a lot the details of the various descriptions.

In between—and even in—the scenarios, Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game bombards the reader and the Ref with adverts and classified adverts. ‘Haunted Light Tours’? Call ‘Capt.’ Bob on 555-1366; examine the ‘Outer Space Time Manipulator’, ‘Happy Clown Bombs’, and ‘Ghost-Whispering Mask’ at the Fairhaven Funtime Museum on Fairground Lane; and call Ethel on 555-1947 if looking for ‘Rare Ventriloquist Dummies’, but no flimflammers as these dummies are special! All of these are just a bit off kilter, slightly odd, and could with some effort be developed in an investigation proper.

Physically, Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game can best be described as scrappy. It is underwritten in places and the layout, designed to look like a cheap community newspaper with everything crammed in alongside the adverts—as much as it evokes the rundown, sometimes seedy nature of its setting—is overwhelming in places. Nothing ever has the time to breath in Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game and the weirdness is suitably relentless.

Of course, the problem with Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is that not everyone is going to be familiar with the concept of public access television and its often high aspiration, low achievement style of broadcasting on a wide of subjects. Whether talk shows, phone-ins, special interest shows, or movie marathons—complete with a host in a horror-themed costume, they provided cheap—in all senses of the word—late night ‘entertainment’ for the insomniac, the shift-worker, and the late-night party-goer who has just got home. Anyone outside of the USA may want to do some research to get a feel of what these shows are like, but Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game does get the tone across fairly well.

Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is underwritten in terms of its mechanics and messily overwritten in terms of its setting, which sounds like a terrible combination, but it does actually work. There is lot of room for improvisation and player input during play and roleplaying a Host who wants to be something more than an ordinary jane or joe and who might have a modicum of talent, but is probably going nowhere except Public Access Television, is actually fun. Weird Heroes of Public Access: The Roleplaying Game is The National Enquirer meets Eureka and Eerie, Indiana, managing to be both creepy and creaky with an extra couple of slices of cheese on top. American cheese, of course.

Miskatonic Monday #362: Bunny The Eldritch Slayer

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

—oOo—

Name: Bunny The Eldritch Slayer

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andrew Edward

Setting: Late nineties teen television

Product: Scenario for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos
What You Get: Sixteen page, 2.30 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Not the Buffy you know

Plot Hook: Rescue the Bunny in lurve...

Plot Support: Staging advice, five Scoobies, two NPCs, three handouts, one map, one Mythos spell, and one Mythos monster

Production Values: Decent

Pros

# Great cover

# It knows, you know, and it knows you know

# Either a loving pastiche or a knowing rip-off

# Gelotophonia

# Turophobia

# Ephebiphobia

Cons

# Vangelis

Conclusion

# Cheesetastic pastiche or parody that does what you expect

# Cultist-punching action in a pink highlighter love letter to a nineties classic