Fifth Edition Filleted

How would you react if someone offered to run a horror scenario for you using Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition? Turn the offer down flat? Run a mile? Ask why would anyone would want to run a horror game using Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition when there are a hundred-and-one alternatives readily available, many of which are specifically designed to handle the genre? After all, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition is best suited to running heroic (some would even go as far as superheroic) high fantasy, even in its own horror setting of Ravenloft, with highly capable Player Characters who possess abilities and powers that are effectively miraculous, and probably likely, an array of magical items that make them even more capable, let alone being swaddled in Hit Points and the Frightened Condition not actually having that much of an effect in game. Before you run away or yell at whomever made you that offer or throw another roleplaying game at said person, what if someone else told you that there is a horror roleplaying game based on Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition which casts the ‘heroes’ as ordinary men and women who can get scared, act out of desperation, pay for their mistakes, and are forced to suffer unfair odds in the face of terrifying situations, horrifying monsters, and malign evil? All that and it is uncomplicated and easy to learn, plays and runs fast, and is supported by numerous scenarios straight out of the book, one of which you could be playing within an hour of the Game Master opening the book? You might not believe me, but such roleplaying game really does exist and upfront it makes a claim on the front cover so bold that you might wonder at the designer’s audacity.

FiveEvil: A Game of Unnerving Terror, Subverting the Expectations of the World’s Greatest RPG is that roleplaying game. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Handiwork Games, best known for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes and the second editions of both Cold City and Hot War, it is a roleplaying game of modern horror, intended to cover everything from the style of Stephen King, The Walking Dead, and Twin Peaks to Halloween, The Thing, and The Ring. It makes multiple changes to standard Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. These start with it not being a Class and Level roleplaying game and it not having either abilities, powers, or Feats. Also gone is Inspiration, although Advantage and Disadvantage remain, and yet even more radically, there is no combat system and no attack rolls, and in keeping with the genre, but not necessarily Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, the Horror that the Player Characters are forced to confront is out to get them—and it does not play fair. This is a roleplaying game in which the Player Characters do not seek out the Horror or choose to confront it, but one in which the Horror seeks them out and confronts them. With all of that gone, what does FiveEvil give in its stead?

The Player Character looks very different in FiveEvil. He has the traditional abilities of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, and they are rated between three and eighteen. He has skills, but these are limited to twelve, two per ability, and he has Hit Points, typically ten for an average Player Character. After that, the changes really start. He has two Descriptors, which can be a job, hobby, or archetype, such as accountant, fly fishing, or surly teenager. Each Descriptor has a bonus, typically +4 for the job or stereotype and +2 for the hobby. These are applied to the skills that the Player Character is proficient in, two for primary Descriptor and one for the secondary Descriptor, as well to a Save Bonus for each Descriptor. He has four Personality Aspects—Habit, Belief, Flaw, and Relationship—that help define how the Player Character should be roleplayed. They can be invoked to ignore the Intensity of a situation and thus make a needed roll easier to achieve or to shake off a point of Desperation. A Player Character starts with no points of Desperation, but will acquire them as he is forced to struggle to survive the odds in the face the Horror. The more points of Desperation a Player Character has, the greater the likelihood that he will make mistakes and fall victim to whatever plans the Horror has for him.

Creating a Player Character in FiveEvil is a matter of choosing Descriptors and their associated skills and saves, defining the four Personality Aspects, and rolling for the abilities. This is done on three six-sided dice, though other methods are suggested. The process is quick and easy.

Mathias Pouke
Descriptor #1: Attentive Editor (+4)
Descriptor #2: Roleplaying Fanatic (+2)
Habit: Makes too many puns
Belief: Expect the worst and you will never be disappointed
Flaw: Fear of missing out
Relationship: How any cats can one man have?

Strength 10 (+0); Athletics [o], Intimidation [o]
Dexterity 12 (+0); Agility [o], Stealth [o]
Constitution 13 (+1); Grit [o], Survival [o]
Intelligence 14 (+2); Investigation [×], Knowledge/Recall [×]; Save [×]
Wisdom 10 (+0); Insight [o], Perception [o]
Charisma 13 (+1); Deception [o], Persuasion [×]; Save [×]

Hit Points: 12
Desperation: 0

Mechanically, in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, when a player wants his character to act, he rolls a twenty-sided die and if the result after applying any bonuses, is equal to or greater than the Difficulty Class of the action, then the character succeeds. This is exactly the same in FiveEvil, except the Difficulty Class does not depend on the action being attempted or necessarily how challenging it is. Instead, it is based on the Intensity of the situation that the Player Characters are in. The Intensity value runs from zero to six, going from just another day at zero through the situation being pressed at two and disrupted at three to murderous at six. So, the more tense and dangerous the situation (accompanying music is, if this was a horror film), the higher the Intensity. When the Intensity value is zero, the Difficulty Class is always ten, but the Difficulty Class increases as the Intensity increases, raising up to sixteen. The players always know what the Intensity value is as the Game Master has to display it on the table. In this way, it lets the players know how tense the situation is and thus the degree of horror that they need to lean into, as well as its mechanical difficulty. Whatever the Intensity Difficulty Class, it is the current Difficulty Class for all actions, whether a Player Character wants to leap from one rooftop to another, decapitate a zombie with an axe, or search the library for the correct eldritch tome. This includes Saves as well, but most rolls will be ability checks as there are no skill checks.

If the result is equal to, or higher than, the Intensity Difficulty Class, the Player Character succeeds, but if not, he fails, and the situation is likely to go badly against him. If the result is a natural one, or is less than the Player Character’s Desperation, he has made a Mistake. The Game Master chooses the result which fits the situation, which might be that the Player Character stumbles, hurts himself, takes extra time, suffers Disadvantage, or drops, breaks, or forgets something, and so on. Conversely, if the result is a natural twenty or simply twenty or more, the Player Character catches a Break. In this case, the Game Master choses a benefit for the Player Character, which might be that he is impressive, finds something useful, gains Advantage, discovers a vulnerability of the Horror being faced, and so on.

In addition, the Game Master may need to roll a Doom check. This is rolled against the current Intensity Difficulty Class without modifiers and is used as an oracle to determine if the situation or an aspect of it favours the Player Characters or not.

The horror genre drives those subject to its terrifying events and encounters to act out of desperation to survive, let alone escape. No less in FiveEvil, but when a Player Character acts out of desperation, he gains points of Desperation. In return, a roll can be made with Advantage, a flat +2 bonus can be applied to ability checks or saves after their roll has been made, to temporarily ignore the effects of being Wounded, or to increase the damage inflicted in an attack by the current Intensity value. A Player Character can have a maximum of ten points of Desperation, before he can no longer act out of desperation. However, the acting out of, and gaining points of, Desperation, has its consequences. Any ability check or save roll whose result is under the Player Character’s current Desperation total, the Player Character makes a Mistake, and if the Player Character still has points of Desperation when in a rest, they have to be processed. This means that the Player Character comes to terms with what he has just encountered, survived, or witnessed. When this happens, there is a chance that one or more of the Player Character’s Personality Aspects is alienated. Mechanically, an alienated Personality Aspect cannot be invoked, but narratively, an alienated Personality Aspect indicates that the Player Character’s personality has suffered and he has lost something of himself. If all four Personality Aspects are alienated, the Player Character has lost the will to carry on, cannot act out of Desperation, and is effectively out of the scenario.

Alienated Personality Aspects are the equivalent of sanity in other horror roleplaying games, but in FiveEvil, instead of the loss of raw numbers indicating a Player Character’s state, it is who the Player Character is and how he acts that are affected. He suffers loss rather than has an effect imposed upon him, but this only comes about because the player has decided that he wants to put his character at greater risk and accumulate Desperation. Instead, where the effect of the Horror or the situation is imposed is on the Intensity value and whilst it is imposed collectively, it is till up to the player to decide how his character acts and whether or not that is through Desperation. Ultimately, it is up to player agency, but since FiveEvil is a horror roleplaying game, that choice is often a case of choosing the least bad option rather than the best option.

Instead of combat encounters, FiveEvil has Terror Encounters. These are the roleplaying game’s set pieces in which the Horror confronts the Player Characters. From the off, the Player Characters are on the back foot. Once the Game Master sets the stage, the Player Characters must make a Terror Save which determines if they freeze in terror, run away, or can act. However, the Player Characters do not so much act in Terror Encounters, but react. This is because the Horror always goes first in a Terror Round and as a Terror Reaction, a Player Character can do just one thing. This is either to fight and attempt to inflict harm on the horror, flight and runaway, or finish whatever other task the Player Character wants to do. To do so, a player Character must face the Horror and make a Doom check. In the unlikelihood of a ‘reprieve’, the Player Character gains a second Terror Reaction, whilst on a Success, he avoids any Evils, is subject to an Evil on a failure, and suffers an extra Evil on a Doom result. An Evil is an effect inflicted on the Player Character by the Game Master, either selected appropriately to the situation or rolled randomly, and they can be either minor or serious in terms of severity. Minor Evils are suffered on rounds one and two of a Terror Encounter, whilst Serious Evils come into effect from the third round onwards.

Terror Rounds are patently unfair and favours the Horrors rather the Player Characters and is entirely intentional. The Player Characters are ordinary folk and the Horror not, and survival is never guaranteed. The explanation of how Terror Rounds work is supported by a lengthy example of play which very nicely showcases how all of FiveEvil works.

All of the play rules in FiveEvil are covered in the book’s first forty pages, including base advice, the elements of both Player Characters and Horrors, and running the roleplaying game. The advice for both player and Game Master is upfront and is to play hard, earn and give trust, take the hits, feel the fear, and play safe both in establishing the tone of the game and how it then plays out. Taking all of this in hand, the Game Master and her players are ready to play the first of five scenarios in FiveEvil. This is ‘Wakefield House’ in which a group of high school teenagers are confronted by Kyle, a friend of theirs who disappeared the year before, a victim of his tragic circumstances. In the first part, the Player Characters are confronted by Kyle and run away, but are haunted by his presence as they try and work out what has happened to him and how they can stop him or rescue him. There is a emotional strand to the scenario in that each Player Character is not as good a friend to Kyle as he or she should have been and rescuing him is their path to redemption as much as his.

‘Wakefield House’ is a short affair, playable in a single session or two. It is also easy to prepare and comes with six pre-generated Player Characters, such that a Game Master really could read through the first forty pages of FiveEvil and the twenty-page ‘Wakefield House’ and have it ready to run in surprisingly short amount of time.

The rules for Player Character generation follow this and it comes with plenty of advice and suggestions in terms of Descriptors and Personality Aspects for different settings. All of this is done by page eighty or so, with the remainder of book dedicated to the Game Master and running and creating for FiveEvil. The advice throughout is thorough and helpful, but at its core is the idea that whilst FiveEvil likely draws heavily from films and books in terms of inspiration, and might look like a story from a film or a book, what it really is, is a trap for the Player Characters. They are trapped by the situation they are in and they are trapped by whatever plans that the Horror has for them, but they are also trapped by their Personality Aspects as they are what will motivate them. That is, when they are not running away! The advice also examines the different modes of play, going from Quiet Mode to Suspense Mode, and finally Terror Mode with Terror Encounters. There is advice too on running investigations, but particularly good is the section on ‘Horror Stagecraft’ which examines different techniques that the Game Master can use to maintain a rhythm of tension rising and falling. Being explicit about the odds, but preserve hidden truths until they need to be revealed (always at the worst moment in the story); getting under the skin of the players not to scare them, but help them scare themselves by leaving gaps in what their characters know and listening to them; keeping the suspense unbearable by setting up the threat and dialling up the Intensity, but allowing to slow down too; throwing in jump scares (with a nice Lewton bus reference thrown in); maintaining the tension in the moment; and more. The advice is excellent and it could have been published in standalone book of its own and it still would be good, not just in the FiveEvil rules.

The advice continues with a guide to creating scenarios, including deciding on a setting, choosing a Horror, selecting the right type of trap that the Player Characters will fall into, and pitching a scenario to the players. Settings break some archetypical locations for a horror, asking questions about each, giving suggestions as possible Player Characters and their group dynamics, adding setting details, and backing it up with advice on using the settings. Examples include an isolated research station, touring band, wilderness adventure, busy hospital, boarding school, grimy spaceship, charming suburb, and dead end town, each one a toolkit to help the Game Master set the stage for a scenario. The example Horrors include alien insects, vampires, ravenous carnivores, infections and zombies, cultists and the things they serve, and unstoppable maniacs. It feels like a short list, but they are constructed more like archetypes and it is easy to see how they can be fleshed out to be something more specific in detail and flavour for a scenario.

So far, FiveEvil has been primarily aimed at single scenarios. For campaign play it offers various different types of encounters and other options that extend play. These include hunt encounters when the Player Characters are being hunted and specific challenge encounters for difficult situations; expanding character options with particular areas of knowledge called ‘Know-Hows’ and developing a Player Character in the long term; and handling mysteries. There is a good toolkit help the Game Master create mysteries and again, just like the advice on horror stagecraft, it is worth reading by any Game Master who wants to run horror, not just FiveEvil. Then, this backed up by examples, including revisiting ‘Wakefield House’ to run it as a mystery.

Lastly, FiveEvil includes four, ready-to-play scenarios. ‘Last Fun Weekend’ sees a high school reunion go wrong at a lonely house in the hills where the Player Characters grew up; in ‘Everyone Got Something Going On’ the Player Characters get locked in downtown and hunted by a brutal killer when they attend a mandatory counselling appointment; in ‘Out of the Circle’ they are members of a religious cult who go in search of a missing member only to discover some horrible truths about her; and in ‘Big Screamin’ Demons’ a band whose members hate each other get back together for final time on a private island because the billionaire’s pay is good. The scenarios vary in length, none more than two or three sessions long. ‘Big Screamin’ Demons’ does disrupt the tone a little, being an over the top comic rock opera of a horror scenario. All four scenarios are good though and showcase the possibilities of FiveEvil very well.

Curiously, what FiveEvil is reminiscent of is 13th Age from Pelgrane Press. 13th Age presents a radical blending of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition combined with genre enforcing storytelling mechanics. Putting aside the Class elements of 13th Age—Features, Talents, and Power—what feels specifically reminiscent of the epic fantasy roleplaying game in FiveEvil are Descriptors and Intensity. Descriptors feel like Backgrounds, the equivalent of skills in 13th Age, being very broad in their description and application, whilst Intensity feels like the Escalation Die in 13th Age. Both possess the same scale, running from one to six, and both values are player-facing, so that the players always know what they are. The Escalation Die literally sits on the table in front of the players and a six-sided die could do the same when playing FiveEvil. The Escalation Die is a bonus combat, designed to speed up combat in 13th Age, triggering various bonus effects, and making it more exciting. Intensity does not make the situation more exciting, but more tense, more horrific, and more challenging, the inverse of the Escalation Die. Both though, enforce their respective genres.

Physically, FiveEvil is very well presented. Both artwork and cartography are good. The writing though is excellent.

Whilst it is true that the underlying architecture of Dungeons & Dragons remains in FiveEvil, making it accessible to players of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, the changes to FiveEvil are more than enough for players who have eschewed either Dungeons & Dragons or Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition to look at it and see a very different roleplaying game. These changes are not other elements drawn from Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition or other similar fantasy roleplaying games, but with techniques and mechanisms more familiar to storytelling design. These enforce the genre again and again, making play tense, placing Player Characters in horrifying situations, and confronting them with terrible choices as they are confronted by real monsters and Horrors. FiveEvil: A Game of Unnerving Terror, Subverting the Expectations of the World’s Greatest RPG is an incredibly accomplished redesign of the hobby’s number one roleplaying game that both fulfils the claims of its subtitle and fails to fulfil the claims of the subtitle. It fails in part because the architecture of Dungeons & Dragons underlying the roleplaying game still remains and in part because so many changes are made to get what FiveEvil to do what it does, but succeeds because the end result really does what you expect Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition not to do. That said, FiveEvil: A Game of Unnerving Terror, Subverting the Expectations of the World’s Greatest RPG does not change Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition so much, as slice it open and gut its insides, filleting it right down to the barest of bones before building it back up again to make it a mean, lean scaring machine.

Dark Tales of the Dark Wine Sea

What if everything that Homer wrote of the greatest journey across the ancient world was false? What if its hero, the greatest general of the forces arrayed before the walls of Troy led by Agamemnon, renowned for guile and his cunning, was a liar? A bully and a freebooter, a reaver and a ravager, a slaver and a pirate. What if Odysseus and his men sailed the dark wine sea, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other—and beyond, not in search of a way home denied to them by the gods, but in search of plunder as recompense for the ten years before the walls of Troy? And what if you sailed with him? Roleplaying games and supplements, such as the island-hopping campaign of Agon from One Seven and Trojan War from Green Ronin Publishing, cast the Player Characters as the heroes, serving their kings and adventuring in the name of their gods. Not in Odyssey: Black Tales. This is a roleplaying game which casts the Player Characters not as ancient Greek heroes, but as the marauders and the pirates under the command of the wily Odysseus. Yet as the lost King of Ithaca commits them to darker and darker deeds in search of plunder, there are some who suffer pangs of conscience. Will they follow the commands of Odysseus and remain Marauders or will they answer the call of conscience and morality and reject his orders, instead becoming Saviours who protect the peoples that Odysseus targets?

Odyssey: Black Tales is a ‘Class and Level’-style roleplaying game from Italian publisher, Officina Meningi. Published via a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is one-part comic book, three-parts roleplaying game and has a mature, if not quite adult, tone. The artwork, primarily consisting of two-page spreads, is very good, but whilst not explicit, does depict scenes of both torture and sexual acts. These are not illustrative of Odyssey: Black Tales’ game play, but rather of what monsters Odysseus and his crew have become and what the Player Characters revolt against—at least if they follow the Saviour path in an attempt to redeem themselves.

Odyssey: Black Tales presents its core game and associated game play first, interspersed between the comic book style scenes of the monstrousness of Odysseus and his crew. Six acts, from ‘The Sacking of Ismarus’ to ‘Seizing the Sirens’, take the crew across the Mediterranean, including partaking of the forbidden delights of the Lotus Eaters, battling the Cyclops, and selling souls on the shores of Hades, before the journey ends for the crew—if not, famously, Odysseus—as the Sirens take their revenge and the fate of the Player Characters is decided. Structurally, each act consists of three phases: ‘The Encounter’, ‘The Pact’, and ‘The Pillaging’. ‘The Encounter’ is when the crew come upon more People of the Sea and Odysseus gives orders as to how he wants to deal with them and the temperament of the People of the Sea, whether or not they are hostile, is determined. Away from the ship, the Player Characters together make ‘The Pact’ and forge a secret alliance that will raise Odysseus’ ire should he find out. This pact will vary according to whether the Player Characters act as Marauders, still in service to Odysseus, or as Saviours attempting to undermine Odysseus’ efforts to plunder the peoples of the Mediterranean. The reward will differ depending upon the role that the Player Characters decide to adopt. In general, the Saviours’ reward is narrative in nature, whereas the Marauders will receive material and materiel rewards. As the King of Lies, Odysseus will come to suspect the Player Characters if they act as Saviours and they may be forced to act otherwise against the People of the Sea to hide their intent, which will certainly not endear the Player Characters to the People of the Sea, who will come to regard them as Marauders anyway they are trying to avoid this. Consequently, this forces the Player Characters to tread a fine line, but this may not be enough to escape Odysseus’ wrath.

The core play of Odyssey: Black Tales is built around the six acts of Odysseus’ anger and avarice with his path to redemption and the repairing of his reputation taking place after he has confronted the Player Characters and escaped the revenge of the Sirens. The Cantor—as the Game Master is known in Odyssey: Black Tales—and her players can play through the six acts and finale, and be done. However, there is scope for the Cantor to expand her campaign by adding Quests, whether of her own creation—perhaps inspired by the maps in the Odyssey: Black Tales Map Pack—or adapted from other adventures. To that end, there are notes for the Cantor for handling roving monsters, doors and chests, secret paths, traps, and looting, as well as a bestiary, so that she can run a dungeon. The bestiary gives stats for ordinary men and women as well as classic creatures from Greek mythology, such as Cerberus, Chimera, Cyclops, Harpy, and so on. However, there is no advice as to what a typical quest for Odyssey: Black Tales might look like and how it might play. This leaves the Cantor with a lot of work to do unaided.

In terms of what the players roleplay, there are five Classes. The Spartan is a peerless warrior; the Athenian is a cultured warrior, able to read and write and well versed in the arts and philosophy; the Achaean is diplomatic and cunning; the Healer is a highly disciplined aesthete who harnesses spiritual energy to enhance his perception and change the laws of physics; and the Oracle instinctively understands the laws of sorcery to cast spells. Each Player Character has three abilities—Valour, Intelligence, and Cunning—which range between one and twelve. Each is primarily determined by the Player Character’s Class, but may be adjusted according to the difficulty that the Cantor wants to set her campaign at. The Player Character has Endurance Points, the equivalent of his Hit Points, whilst Strike Points represent the amount of damage that the Player Character can inflict, whether from a weapon or other source (but it can come from external sources). Protection is the equivalent of Armour Points, whether from actual armour or another source.

Creating a Player Character is simple. The player selects a Class and rolls the character’s Abilities. The Player Character receives some basic equipment and some money to buy more. The player also chooses a name (though there is no list included) and can add a background if he wants. The Player Character is Level 1 and has the Rank of Novice. The process is fast and simple.

Theokleia

Class: Oracle

Level: 1 Rank: Novice

Valour: 5 Intelligence: 7 Cunning: 4

Endurance Points: 5

Abilities: Sorcery

Equipment: Dagger, Burlap Sack

Mechanically, Odyssey: Black Tales is relatively simple. To have his character undertake an action, a player rolls six-sided dice and attempts to roll under the appropriate Ability. The difficulty determines the number of the dice the player rolls and the method of determining the outcome. For example, for an Easy task, the player rolls three dice and adds the two lowest results; rolls two dice and adds them together for a Normal task; and three dice and adds the two highest results for a Difficult task. A roll of two ones is always a success, but if two sixes are rolled on any dice, it is a critical failure. Overall, it feels inconsistent and it is not easy to grasp.

Combat uses similar mechanics. Initiative is determined by a six-sided die being rolled and the result deducted from the combatant’s Cunning. Combatants act in order, highest to lowest. In a round, a combatant, whether creature, NPC, or Player Character, can move or move and then act. Movement is intended to be handled using maps and figures, in particular the Odyssey: Black Tales Map Pack, but does not have to be. A combatant’s Valour determines the number of squares that can be moved. A combat action can be a Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, Defence, Manoeuvre, Retreat, Mental Power Activation, Recalling a Spell, or Casting a Spell. Of these, Defence increases the difficulty to successfully hit the defender; Manoeuvre covers any other action from changing a weapon and standing up from a prone position to picking a lock and drinking a potion; Retreat means moving towards or getting to an Escape Square on the map (or the equivalent if not using a map); Mental Power Activation is required to use the powers of the Healer; Recalling a Spell is needed to ready a spell to be cast; and Casting a Spell can be of any spell that an Oracle holds in his memory. An Oracle can hold as many spells as he likes in his memory, but there is a penalty to successfully cast a spell in combat if the Oracle holds multiple spells in his memory.

In order to successfully attack, a Player Character must make a successful Valour check. The Difficulty is Normal, meaning that two dice are rolled and added together. To determine the Strike Points—or damage—the player rolls a number of dice determined by the size of the weapon. One six-sided die for a light weapon, two for a medium weapon, and three for a heavy weapon. At higher experience Levels, a player adds more dice to this roll. The defender rolls dice equal to the Protection rating of any armour, natural or worn, and this is subtracted from the total number of Strike Points. If the Strike Points are reduced to zero, the attack inflicts no damage, but if not, the remainder are subtracted from the defender’s Endurance Points.

One oddity is the possible ‘Additional Effects’ for any attack, ranged or melee. If twelve is rolled on any attack, an Additional Effect is potentially triggered. This occurs whether the attack is successful or not. It can result in the attacker getting another attack, knocking the defender or his weapon to the ground, or even the defender striking back! Since most attacks are at Normal Difficulty and two dice have to be rolled, this means rolling double six. It is possible for a Player Character to have a Valour of twelve, the maximum value allowed by the gods, whether by increasing it through experience or setting the overall difficulty of the game to high at the start of the campaign. However, the Additional Effect is not based on skill, or rather on Ability. It is simply a lucky roll, and for almost every situation will occur when the attacker fails.

The casting of magic requires an Oracle to recall a spell to his memory, and he can hold as many spells in his memory as he wants, although this imposes a penalty to cast any spell during combat. The Oracle starts play knowing a wide range of destructive, psychic, and special spells, and will learn rituals at each experience Level gained. To successfully cast a spell, an Oracle’s player must succeed at an Intelligence check at Normal difficulty, minus the Complexity of the spell, which ranges from one to four. For example, Harmonious Lament is a Psychic spell that makes it harder for an attacker to successfully strike an opponent and has a Complexity of one, whereas Curse inflicts five six-sided dice’s worth of Strike Points and has a Complexity of four. If the attempt fails, the Oracle does not forget the spell, but can attempt to cast again, but with a bonus to the roll that reduces the Complexity penalty. This can be done again and again until the Complexity value is reduced to zero or the spell is cast.

Also included in Odyssey: Black Tales are rules for group checks and challenges, and the setting is supported by a decent equipment list and a lengthy loot section. The latter better supports long term play since the campaign itself gives out specific loot in each act. There is advice too on playing Odyssey: Black Tales solo or with two players, and these are workable enough.

One of the claims about Odyssey: Black Tales is that the rules are compatible with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, Old School Essentials, and Mörk Borg. This is both true and untrue. It would be challenging to adapt it straight from the core rulebook, whereas what the Game Master will actually need to facilitate the process with ease is the expansion supplement, Black Tales – Adventures in the Mediterranean and Conversion Kit.

Physically, Odyssey: Black Tales is stark jet black throughout with white text and great art. The book is slightly overwritten in places, especially when trying to explain the rules, but a careful read-through is enough for them to be clear.

Odyssey: Black Tales wants to be two things and it succeeds at one and does not succeed at the other. In the first, it wants to be a storytelling game, telling the unrevealed epic of Odysseus before he retold it, not as an anti-hero, but as a villain, and the fall of the Player Characters who stood by him and the redemption of the Player Characters who stood against him, in secret at first, and then openly in the final act. Across the six acts and the finale, Odyssey: Black Tales gives the structure for the players and their characters to tell that tale. In the second, Odyssey: Black Tales wants to take the players and their characters beyond that epic. This could be after the end of the campaign and its confrontation between Odysseus, the Player Characters, and the Sirens, but it could be an entirely different campaign in the Ancient Greek world. To support that, Odyssey: Black Tales includes rules for Player Character advancement, monsters, loot, and various different situations, particularly if a dungeon-like environment is involved. What Odyssey: Black Tales does not provide is background to the Ancient Greek world or its gods and mythology or any advice for the Cantor, whether that is really on running Odyssey: Black Tales or on creating content of her own. In fact, the Cantor is left to her own devices and experience to that end. This is where Odyssey: Black Tales fails.

Odyssey: Black Tales is the basis for a solid, Old School Renaissance-style roleplaying game set in the Ancient Greek world that ably supports its retelling of Homer’s Odyssey with Odysseus as the villain and the path to his own rehabilitation as a hero. There can be no doubt that Odyssey: Black Tales has scope for play beyond this arc, but the support for that is simply not present. In the hands of an experienced Cantor, this is not an issue, but for anyone else, it makes the wider roleplaying and storytelling possibilities of Odyssey: Black Tales a challenge.

2016: Shadowrun: Anarchy

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—

Shadowrun had a problem in 2016 with Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and it is a problem that continues today with Shadowrun, Sixth Edition. Originally published by FASA, Inc. in 1989, but now published by Catalyst Game Labs, the roleplaying game has always had a great setting and been a great combination of genres. Fantasy and Cyberpunk in a future in which man meets machine and magic, corporations are states unto themselves, dragons are CEOs and media personalities. The problem is with the mechanics. At their core, they consist of a dice pool mechanic determined by attribute, skill, and other bonuses, the aim being to roll as many successes—five or six on the dice—as possible, which is simple enough. Shadowrun though is a game of different character types—Adepts, Mages, Shamans, Deckers, Street Samurai, Riggers, and Technomancers—and effectively, the rules for each one is essentially a different subsystem. Which meant different rules for each player to master and a lot of different rules for the Game Master to understand. Plus, with different rules and different variations upon rules in each edition, no player or Game Master could quite agree upon which edition of the roleplaying game they preferred.

Published in 2016, Shadowrun: Anarchy was offered as an alternative ruleset to the then Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, notably a narrative driven ruleset which kept the core mechanics, but also simplified Shadowrunner creation. At its heart though, is the Cue System. This first appeared in the publisher’s pulp Sci-Fi roleplaying game Cosmic Patrol and then in the superhero roleplaying game, Valiant Universe Roleplaying Game. Both are storytelling games with some traditional mechanics, but unlike some storytelling roleplaying games, they do not forego a Game Master. Instead, in addition to roleplaying their characters, whether members of the Cosmic Patrol or superheroes in the Valiant Universe, the players take in turns to serve as the Game Master. Shadowrun: Anarchy uses the Cue System, but makes one significant change to it. Instead of each player being the Game Master for a scene, Shadowrun: Anarchy maintains the role of the Game Master as in traditional roleplaying games. The Game Master sets the brief and at the beginning of each scene narrates the situation, what the Shadowrunners see, smell, hear, and so on. Then the game play proceeds around the table with each player narrating what his character does. Each player’s narration ends when it is appropriate, either in terms of the story or the scene, or if the player needs to roll dice for his character, whether that is to attempt a particular objective or combat is initiated. A player is free to narrate his character’s actions in the scene and to develop the scene as long as any addition is not going to break it, usually inspiration from the ‘Cues’ or story or situational tags, that can either be ones the Game Master presents at the start of the scene or ones that are on the player’s character sheet.

The role of the Game Master here is to decide when a player needs to roll a Test for his character’s action, and then what Skill and Attribute are appropriate to the Test as well as what modifiers apply. She also roleplays the NPCs, rolls their Defence rolls, handles any rules difficulties, and decides when a player’s narration comes to end, either because it is too long or stretching the limits of credulity. The Game Master also needs to know the details of the Contract Brief, the scenario that she is running. When it is a player’s Narration, it is his role to keep the character’s opposition on its toes, to make his character stand out, to explore and highlight what is great about the Sixth World, and to work with the other players to make the story and the game better. When it is not his turn, it is the player’s duty to prepare for his next Narration, building on the Narrations of his fellow players, and to have his character interact with their characters in their Narrations. Lastly, the player is there, when needed, when need to make suggestions to his fellow players, in particular, if another player has difficulty creating Narration, again working from the Cues for the scenes and the Cues for the narrating player’s character.

Play proceeds like this through Scenes and Turns from the start of the ‘Contract Brief’ to its execution and its conclusion. However, Scenes can be broken by ‘Talk Time’, which is when conversations can take place—most typically with a Mr. Johnson—and when planning can take place. Both the Game Master and players have access to ‘Plot Points’. A Player Character starts play with three and can have at most five at any one time. More are awarded for great Narrations and certain Shadow Amps grant bonus Plot Points at the start of combat. A player can spend a Plot Point to ‘Live Dangerously’ to add a Glitch Die to a player’s roll (either their own or that of another player); ‘Shake it up’ by making a Narration and have his character take an action when it is not his Narration; ‘Double time it’ to take two movement actions; to add a ‘Surprise threat’, such as having unseen corporate security guards show up; carry out ‘First aid’ and heal a point of Physical or Stun damage; cause a ‘Malfunction’ in the spirits or devices of an NPC or another Player Character temporarily; ‘Take the hit’ if a weaker or injured character is successfully hit by a combat action; or deliver ‘A dish best served cold’ and immediately have his character take a free attack action against the NPC who just attacked him.

The Game Master starts a Contract Brief with a single Plot Point and earns more as the players spend them. She cannot spend her Plot Points to aid or hinder a Player Character, but can spend them to add a Glitch Die to an NPC’s action and also to change the turn order, whether that is in reverse or randomly! This is to shake up the play pattern and to keep the players on their toes.

In general, this is well explained and there is good advice on how to handle this switch to shared narration. Encouraging the players to build up, rather than tear down, encouraging a player to use all of his character’s options instead of using the most powerful, and where necessary, offer hints and recapitulating on the current situation, plans that the characters have already made, and twists already introduced. However, there are issues with the explanations in places. For example, the explanation never goes into how exactly a player rakes inspiration from a Cue, but worse, having told the Game Master and her players how to play a Contract Brief and thus Shadowrun: Anarchy, what it does not do is show them. There is no example of play anywhere in the book. Go back and read that again… Such an omission is a fundamental flaw in the design of any roleplaying game, but in a roleplaying game such as Shadowrun: Anarchy which is making a radical shift in its style of play, from traditional, simulationist to narrative, storytelling, this is worse. It is not a catastrophe in that its omission makes the game unplayable, but it hinders the learning of how the roleplaying game is run and played and it hinders the teaching of how the roleplaying game is run and played.

To be a little nuanced here, if the Game Master and her players have some experience of storytelling, narrative roleplaying games, this is much less of an issue. Even less of an issue if either has experience of the previous Cue System roleplaying games, Cosmic Patrol and Valiant Universe Roleplaying Game. If not, if the Game Master and her players are wanting to play Shadowrun for the first time or have played Shadowrun for a long time and are looking for a lighter ruleset, then it is a grave error of judgement upon the part of the designers.

In terms of the rules, Shadowrun: Anarchy starts with Shadowrunner creation. A Shadowrunner is defined by Attributes, Skills, Shadow Amps, Weapons, and Gear, plus Qualities and Cues. A Shadowrunner will also have a Metatype, either Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ork, or Troll. This Metatype provides various bonuses and adjustments. The Attributes consist of Strength, Agility, Willpower, Logic, and Charisma, which typically range between one and six for Humans, but can be higher or lower for different Metahumans. There is a wide range of Skills and a Shadowrunner will have some Skills in common with his colleagues—combat skills in particular—but specialise in a particular area, whether that is magic, vehicle use, hacking, or even combat. All skills have Specialisations, which increase the number of dice a player rolls when using them. Shadow Amps are what makes a Shadowrunner special. These can be Awakened so that the Shadowrunner can cast spells (the spells cost extra) or Emerged which gives the Shadowrunner access to Technomancer Amps. There are Amps for Adepts, Bioware and Cyberware, Matrix Amps for hacking, Drone Amps for the Rigger, Gear Amps, Social Amps, and Critter Amps. Installing too Bioware or Cyberware has its cost though, reducing a Shadowrunner’s ability to handle the effects of magic, including healing. Cues are often common phrases that a Shadowrunner might say or how he might react.

Qualities are the equivalent of advantages and disadvantages and a Shadowrunner has two positive Qualities and one negative Quality.

To create a Shadowrunner, a player assigns points to his Shadowrunner’s Attributes and Skills, purchases Shadow Amps, selects weapons and gear, and then creates Cues, at least two or three, and optionally add Tags, which give a quick ideas as the theme and style of the Shadowrunner. He also selects Qualities. The number of points the player has to spend on Attributes, Skills, and Shadow Amps, as well has many weapons and how much gear he has to select, will vary by game level, either Gang-Level, Street Runner, or Prime Runner. The rules allow for a player design the Shadow Amps he wants for his Shadowrunner, but the Shadowrun: Anarchy includes lots of off-the-shelf options which ease the creation process. The process overall is not difficult, except that is for coming up with Cues and Dispositions.

Name: ‘Rávdos’

Metatype: Ork

Tags: Ork • Barrens Girl • Rat Shaman • Wet Behind the Ears

Cues: Oh shiny! • The darkness is my friend • I know a shortcut (if you’re squeezy enough) • You lost something? I can find it • The pack is family • Eyes most places

Dispositions: Twitchy • Not run to fight another day. Just run • The streets always deliver • Pack player

ATTRIBUTES

Strength 3 Agility 4 Willpower 5 Logic 4 Charisma 3 Essence 6

SKILLS

Agility: Athletics 1, Close Combat 2

Willpower: Conjuring 2, Sorcery 2

Logic: Knowledge (The Barrens 1, Greek 1), Tracking 1

Charisma: Negotiation 1

SHADOW AMPS

Awakened (2), Vermin Control (1), Analyse Truth (1), Clairvoyance (1), Natural Weapons (1)

QUALITIES

Mentor Spirit (Rat), Home Ground (The Barrens), Low Pain Threshold

WEAPON

Knife (STR/2+1)P

GEAR

Synthleather jacket: 6, Trauma Patches, Crowbar, Smoke Grenades

Mechanically, Shadowrun: Anarchy uses a dice pool system that will be familiar to players of Shadowrun. When a player wants his Shadowrunner to act, he forms a dice pool of six-sided dice consisting of Skill Dice and Attribute Dice, plus any Modifiers from the situation, Shadow Amps, and Qualities. This roll is made against the Game Master’s Opposing Dice pool. Results of five or six count as Hits and if the player rolls more Hits than the Game Master, his Shadowrunner succeeds, if not, he fails. Edge can be spent—and a Shadowrunner typically starts with a single point of Edge—to alter the results. If spent before the test, four, fives, and sixes count as Hits, but after the test, any results that are not five or six can be rerolled. A player can also spend a Plot Point to add a Glitch Die to a dice roll. This is a die of different colour. If the result of the Glitch Die is a one, bad luck has befallen the Shadowrunner, even if the result overall means that the Shadowrunner has succeeded. For example, a Close Combat attack could not only fail, but the attacker falls over as well; a gun could jam; a Hacking Test results in the Hacker deleting or downloading the wrong file; and so on. However, if the result on the Glitch Die is a five or six, then good luck has befallen the Shadowrunner, such as bypassing armour in a fight, finding something interesting on a Hacking mission, and so on. Again, this good luck will still occur if the overall result indicates that the Shadowrunner has failed.

Combat is more complex, though some elements, such as ammunition tracking, shots fired per turn, firing modes, reloading speeds, and so on, have been removed to simplify player choices and keep things moving. When a player wants his Shadowrunner to attack, he forms a dice pool of six-sided dice consisting of Skill Dice and Attribute Dice, plus any Modifiers from the situation, Shadow Amps, Qualities, and Weapon effects. For the opponents, the Game Master is rolling a dice pool formed from the Agility Dice and Logic Dice, plus any modifiers and Shadow Amp effects. If the attacker rolls more Hits than the defender, the difference is added to the damage of the attack. If fewer or none, the attack fails and no damage is inflicted. Armour is treated as ablative and reduces damage, but is damaged in the process, though it can be repaired. Damage can either be Phsyical or Stun and is applied to the appropriate track of a Shadowrunner’s Condition Monitor. As it is filled in, modifiers reduce the number of dice a player will roll on every Test. Eventually, a Shadowrunner will either be knocked out or killed.

Combat is slower than standard task resolution in Shadowrun: Anarchy. Although there is an optional rule for handling Mooks, that is being able to subdue or kill numerous opponents in one attack, it is not the default. The problem here is that adds an element of grit that otherwise is at odds with the cinematic simplification of some rules elsewhere, such as removing the need to reload or track ammunition use.

There is a brilliant piece of writing when it comes to ‘Attack Limits’. “A character can only take a single attack action during their Narration. What is an Attack action? An action that intentionally and directly damages another living being (including NPCs, critters, spirits, and whatever). Want to debate the meaning of Attack action beyond that? Have fun, and we’ll be here for you when you’re ready to play!” It is just saying, get on with it, because Shadowrun: Anarchy is not the kind of roleplaying game where that kind of detail should be causing any sweat. This is not to say that Shadowrun: Anarchy manages to avoid causing any sweat, but it is a point well made.

An interesting side effect of there being no Nuyen in Shadowrun: Anarchy is that a Shadowrunner cannot simply go out and buy new armour. A Plot Point can be spent repairing a single point, but for a full repair, the player has to pay a point of Karma (usually awarded at the end of missions and spent to improve a Shadowrunner) or promise a favour to the Game Master. This allows the Game Master to select the next Contact Brief—normally the players do it—and if multiple favours are owed, the players at least get to choose the order in which they do them. This adds a narrative wrinkle as an urgent job suddenly gets in the way of what their Shadowrunners might want to actually do!

Elsewhere, there is a lot of streamlining in Shadowrun: Anarchy compared to previous editions of Shadowrun. Nuyen and Lifestyle Costs are treated as abstract, narrative elements rather than players needing to track the numbers; weapons and gear are simplified for fast play; hacking in the Matrix is distilled to single rolls and reactions such as triggering alarms and the Overwatch Score are narrative elements; magic remains much like Shadowrun, but there is no Drain effect; and Technomancers have no Drain effect. In many ways, this is an improvement, often really simplifying quite complex subsystems in Shadowrun, such as the Matrix rules. This does come at a cost, in terms of limiting the number of spells a caster can have, the spirits that a summoner can bring into play, and the Complex Forms a Technomancer knows. Combat in the Matrix though, works exactly as it does in the real world. Optional rules do allow for hacking to be more detailed if desired, but that does add extra complexity. In comparison, the Rigger, the one role which would have benefited from streamlining is underserved by the lack of details for drones and vehicles, except some drones described in the NPC descriptions.

Shadowrun: Anarchy does give the Game Master and player with a lot of support. There is a solid introduction to the setting with some fiction, the characters from which appear as NPCs or potential Shadowrunners elsewhere in the book, and there is decent account of the history up until the year 2077 when Shadowrun, Fifth Edition is set. The Big Ten megacorporations from Ares Macrotechnology to Wuxing Incorporated are detailed, as well as organised crime, gang, the law, politics, major powers, and more, as well as a look at life in the Sixth World. Thirty sample Shadowrunners, including an Elf combat archaeologist, Dwarf parkour adept, Human ganger razorgirl, Troll face, and Ork reporter, are given full descriptions and character sheets, plus there are stats for twenty-three NPCs, though twenty-three definitely does not feel enough. There is a good guide to Seattle as well.

The star though of this support, is the twenty-five ‘Contract Briefs’, several of which are multi-part affairs. Each starts with ‘Mr. Johnson’s Pitch’ and then lists the objectives, the setting, and the plot scene by scene. There are suggestions as the NPCs for each scene and a list of Tags for the whole mission. There is even one called ‘Food Fight’, an obvious nod to the original scenario/encounter given in Shadowrun. Overall, the selection of ‘Contract Briefs’ is very good and will provide multiple session of play if the Game Master decides to use all of them. Most of them can be played through in a single session or two. Lastly, there are notes on Shadowrun: Anarchy and Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and on using source material from the latter as well as adapting Shadowrunners from one to the other or vice versa. These are serviceable.

Physically, Shadowrun: Anarchy is a good looking book. The artwork is excellent and the layout clean. However, it definitely needs another edit.

Unfortunately, Shadowrun: Anarchy is a book with problems. Not least of which is the fact that there is no map of Seattle and its environs in 2077, let alone North America or the world. There are places where rules could have been clarified, but either never are or are very later on, such as placing the ‘Anarchy Catalogue’ with its ready-pick Shadow Amps right at the end of the book rather than with the rules for Shadowrunner creation or rules for a particular in a ‘Contract Brief’ rather than in the general section for the pertinent rules or in the NPC section. The selection of NPCs or ready-to-play Shadowrunners is great, but not all of them are consistent in their design. So, if player or Game Master wants to use one, they need to be redesigned to make the costs balance.

The issue with Shadowrun: Anarchy is threefold. First, it set out to address the crunch and mechanical complexity of Shadowrun, Fifth Edition that made it difficult to learn run, and whilst it can be argued that it very much did that, offering a streamlined, faster-playing system, in switching to the more narrative, player-involved Cue System, it asked player and Game Master alike to make a radical change in playing style, but did not explain it enough. How exactly does a ‘Cue’ work? Or a ‘Tag’ or a ‘Disposition’? It is possible for the Game Master and her players to grasp the fundamentals, but the nuances are lost they are not fully explained or given a full example of play, which if done right would have been the best teaching aid of all. Second, Shadowrun: Anarchy cannot decide who it is for. The old Shadowrun veteran who wants to try a simpler system for his favourite roleplaying game? Someone who is completely new to Shadowrun? Or someone who has played a Cue System roleplaying game and wants to try a Shadowrun roleplaying game? All three? It is unclear. Third, is the lack of development to make it coherent and have more of the pick-up-and-play aspect that you get the impression it is aiming.

Shadowrun: Anarchy is a great idea. A fast playing roleplaying game with narrative elements in one of the best developed and entertaining settings in the roleplaying hobby. In fact, it is not actually unplayable, but the lack of development, the underwhelming lack of presentation in terms of its idea, and its organisation make it almost as difficult to play as the then current version of the main roleplaying game, Shadowrun, Fifth Edition. Which misses the point of what it was intended to do.

Ours is the Anarchy

It is the Year of our Lord 1376. England is a land of unrest. The Great Mortality—the Black Death—has swept the country twice in the last three decades and now half of her people are dead. With half of the labourers and serfs who worked the land also dead, labour is much in demand and wages have risen, enriching the working man and so giving him the possibility of improving his life and that of his family. In response, the authorities have passed laws that fix wages at pre-plague rates and made it a crime to refuse work or break a contract, imposing fines and even branding and imprisonment should such laws be broken, in practice applying it to the labourer rather than the labourer and the employer. Sumptuary laws have even been passed to regulate the goods that the increasingly wealthier labourer can consume! In France, King Edward III continues to press his claim to the French throne, but as the French conduct cross-Channel commerce raids, the war is becoming increasingly more expensive maintain, Parliament levying poll taxes upon every adult in the country more than once and sending commissioners from one County to the next in search of those who refuse to pay. In London, the city’s populace resent the presence of foreigners, Flemish weavers in particular, and loath John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, for his support of the religious reformer John Wycliffe, whom they regarded as a heretic, and this will continue upon the death of King Edward III in 1376 and the accession of his grandson, Richard II. The new king is only ten years old and John of Gaunt will go on to serve as his regent for many years. The infamous Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler is five years away, yet England buckles under the authority of the Crown, the Church, and the Nobility and there are many ready to throw off the shackles of oppression and their desperate despair, to rise up and make England theirs. And when they do, when they drive off their feudal lords and officers of the King, their land is theirs, their land is ‘The Anarchy’.

This is the backdrop to Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG, published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Three Sail Studios—whose previous roleplaying game was the joyous Mappa Mundi. Taking its name from the road junction where a set of gallows once stood in the old County of Essex where the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 rose, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is a storytelling game of struggle, hope, and community. Of struggle against the adversity of the environment and the enmity of authority, of hope for better future, and in connecting a community having the strength to survive. The players takes the roles of peasantry, tradespersons, and even the intelligentsia, natives to one of the counties of England, confronting the rich and the powerful, bettering the community, attempting to improve their Influence whilst reducing the Control that the authorities hold over the countries, and in the process acquiring retinues and retainers, and from their humble beginnings in a single hundred in one County, the Player Characters will travel to neighbouring hundreds and work to liberate them in a Point-Crawl keyed to themes based on verbs.

Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG, an alternative history roleplaying game, but one which does not ignore the grim realities of history. This means that violence against people and animals, arbitrary punishment, torture and execution, conflict at any and all levels of society, slavery and serfdom, refugee displacement, and sexual violence as a weapon are all part of the realities of the period. Whilst they are part of the setting for Gallows Corner, they are not the focus of it. Where they do factor, it should be as actions or the consequences of actions of the authorities, yet further signs—as if needed—of how little the authorities value the ordinary man or woman, let alone the Player Characters. However, Gallows Corner suggests setting boundaries (or Veils) during Session Zero and having any contentious issues happen off camera and make use of a stop sign (or X Card) in play).

A Player Character has three Experiences—Physical, Emotional, and Intellectual, but at the core of a Player Character is a Trade and a Job. Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG categories its forty-eight Jobs across eight Trades. ‘The Body’ represents those who work their muscles to earn their bread; ‘The Earth’ is made up of those who till the soil, grow the food, and tend to the animals; ‘The Flesh’ consists of those who see the inner workings of bodies and know exactly where to cut, either to kill or to cure; ‘The Hood’ are made up of those who work from the shadows; ‘The Market’ is where deals are made, goods are traded, and coin is earned; ‘The Masque’ is worn by performers and entertainers; ‘The Mind’ involves the learned and the clever; and ‘The Stranger’ is home to outlier, those that survive on the edge of society, often doing the unpleasant jobs that no-one else will. With Jobs such as Servant, Herbalist, Barber-Surgeon, Smuggler, Merchant, Minstrel, Scribe, and Gravedigger there is a distinct hint of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to the options. Even the Rat-catcher is depicted with a small, vicious dog! However, there is a grimmer tone to Gallows Corner with inclusion of Jobs such as Sex Worker, Marshman, Dung Farmer, and Sin-Eater.

Each Job has four skills. For example, the Rat Catcher has the skills of ‘Cunning’, ‘Good with Traps’, ‘Knows Poisons’, and ‘Terrier Companion’, whilst the Butcher has ‘Anatomy’, ‘Cause of Death’, ‘Precision Cuts’, and ‘Tools of the Trade’. Each represents knowledge or an ability that a Player Character has learned and instinctively understands. Each encompasses only a small area of expertise, but they are open to interpretation and if the Narrator agrees with a suggested interpretation, then that is how they work. In general, they allow a Player Character to undertake a relevant action without the need to roll any dice for a Test, though the Narrator may sometimes state that a Test is required.

To create a character, a player assigns a single eight-sided die to one of his Traits, either Physical, Emotional, or Intellectual. A single six-sided die is assigned to the other two and then also to the character’s Trade and Job. He picks a single skill from the four listed for the Job. The die size for all of a Player Character’s Traits, Trade, and Job can all be increased with experience, but instead of a die increase, a player can pick another Skill. Player Character creation is quick and simple.

Name: Hugo Brackenridge
Trade: Mind d6
Job: Lawyer d6

EXPERIENCES
Physical d6 Emotional d6 Intellectual d8

SKILLS
Good in an Argument

Mechanically, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG uses a dice pool system. When a player wants his character to act and pass a Test, he forms a dice pool starting with one or more of his character’s Experiences and then adding dice for his Trade and his Job, if appropriate. A result of five or more is counted as a success, four or less a failure, and only a single success is required for the Player Character to succeed. Another Player Character can help. This can be to increase the size of the Experience die that the player making the Test is going to be rolling or if appropriate, add a Trade or Job die to his dice pool. Gallows Corner advises the player to advocate for as many dice as he can to form the pool, but since the roleplaying game is narrative-led, a player and his character should ideally rely upon roleplaying and Skills rather than attempting Tests.

The size of a die can also go down as well as up. This may be due to injury or illness and if it falls to a four-sided die, it means that the Player Character cannot succeed with that die and its associated Experience, Trade, or Job, because the minimum needed for a success is five. If the Player Character is solely relying upon that die for a Test, then he is in trouble. In such cases, the player should definitely be trying to increase the size of the dice pool, whether that is trying to use his character’s other Experiences and Trade and Job, along with help from his character’s Retinue and other Player Characters.

The players as a group can also spend ‘Opportunities’ to alter the world around or give an order to members of their Retinue. This might be to send a member of their retinue to scout out a village, to wait in ambush ready to strike at an enemy, or to gather resources or craftsmen to reinforce their camp or improve their community, but they can also be spent to allow a player to bring their character’s Job into play once again.

Combat is quick and deadly. It is played out as a series of opposed Physical Experience rolls, each combatant attempting to reduce his opponent’s condition from ‘Standing’ to ‘Knocked Back’ to ‘Down’, and then ‘Retreating’. This also applies an increasing penalty to the roll. The victor always chooses the outcome, but can also improve his own condition, aid an ally, kill or capture an enemy, and so on.

Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG also advises that a player rely upon his own abilities as much as those of his character, since he will be more aware of the world rather than the character, that collaboration is the key to success, death is likely and combat to be avoided—most of the time, and that they should embrace failure.

Chronologically, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is played out over a series of Seasons and Scenes with Clocks being used to track something that the Player Characters are struggling against, such as being hunted by a local Sheriff's soldiery, attempting to erect fortifications in a hurry, and so on. By undertaking acts of liberation and challenging the power of the state such as writing and spreading mocking songs, disrupting the activities of tax collectors, and even burning the manors of the landed classes, each Player Character garners ‘Influence’, a combination of their fame and notoriety that enables them to do greater and bigger things as it grows. As it rises from zero and ‘Unknown’, all the way up through ‘Spoken Of’, ‘Recognisable’, ‘Well Known’, and ‘Notorious’ to ‘Famous’ and one hundred, a Player Character gains Benefits that can be used once per season, whilst the Narrator gains Detriments or negative events that she can bring into play once per season. For example, a Player Character who has an Influence of ten or more is ‘Spoken Of’ and gains the Benefit that because rumours of his good name are beginning to spread and people are willing to help him, he can turn a failed Test to influence an NPC into a success instead. However, the Narrator can select an NPC known to the Player Character who rejects his radical ideas out of fear for his safety. A Player Character’s Influence can also fall due to failure or defeat.

In addition, the Benefit gained at each rank of Influence, a Player Character can recruit a Retainer to his Retinue, up to a total of five. Each Retainer is an NPC in his own right and created just like a Player Character. Once a Retainer is part of a Retinue, a player and his character gains access to his Experiences, Trade, and Job as well as his skills and in combat, a Retainer contributes his Physical die to the Player Character. Retainers can also be sent off on missions, though this costs ‘Opportunities’ to do so, with the outcome determined by a Test after two or more scenes. There is some scope for troupe-style play here and a player is free to roleplay a Retainer as necessary. However, a Retainer is always a secondary character to a player’s main or perspective character. Should a Player Character die, he can be replaced by a Retainer. Thus, a Player Character’s Retinue is not just a source of replacement characters, but also an extension of his physical capabilities and knowledge.

Whilst each Player Character has his own Influence, they are combined together as the party’s Collective Influence. It is this value that is measured against ‘Control’, which represents the power and domination that the state—the crown, the nobility, and the church—holds over the immediate County or Region and ultimately, over all of England. If the Player Characters’ ‘Collective Influence’ is increased above the ‘Control’ for a County or Region, a Showdown can be staged. This is a significant and ideally cinematic confrontation with the leading antagonist for the County or Region. Now the text suggests that ‘Control’ might be reduced by a single point for writing and spreading mocking songs about the local sheriff, two points for skirmishing soldiers, and four points for attacking and burning manorial holdings, but there is not a useful list that the Narrator can easily reference. Whilst this does allow a Narrator a lot of flexibility, arguably it is too much and some guidance could and should have been included.

Chronologically, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is played out as a ‘Point Crawl’ that scales up from the Hundreds and Liberties which make up each County, and then the Counties that make up a Region, and the Regions which make up England. Each Hundred, Liberty, County, and Region is a Point, a location where there is a problem or situation to resolve and several scenes will play out as the Player Characters attempt to resolve it. The ‘Point Crawl’ is set up by the Narrator. The Narrator selects a County and determines its degree of ‘Control’, based on the number of Hundreds and Liberties plus a die roll for NPC antagonist in charge, and then assigns a single ‘Verb’ to each of the County’s Hundreds. For example, ‘Destroy’, ‘Entertain’, ‘Fight’, ‘Grow’, ‘Organise’, ‘Play’, ‘Sin’, and ‘Steal’. These are prompts around which the Narrator can set up a situation or storyline and they can come from the players—indicating what type of stories they want to tell in playing Gallows Corner, chosen by the Narrator, or selected from the suggestions given and developed in the rulebook as potential related scenes. A Clock is also set up which tracks the reactions of the authorities to the Player Characters’ rebellious activities.

Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG includes descriptions of London and of the thirty-nine counties of England in the late fourteenth century. London and its districts are given more detail, whereas the counties receive a page each. This gives a broad overview and feel for the county along with an encounter that the Narrator can develop into something more and one or more reasons why the peoples of that county might want to revolt. Each region is also given a scenario for a total of eight. There is an NPC generator which can also be used to create potential Retainers as well as antagonists.

The Narrator will need to download the forms for the different Region and Counties she plans to use. These are not in the core rulebook itself, but it would have been nice if the boxed set for Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG had included them, perhaps in a forms booklet that would also be available separately.

Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG makes clear that the Player Characters are both custodians and victims of England and working towards becoming more of the former and away from the latter. That ‘Point Crawl’ is a way to explore England starting from the very small and local and scaling up, with the surrounding villages, towns, and counties reacting in response to the actions of the Player Characters, but also having their own stories going on. The advice suggests that the Narrator should not get too bogged down in the historical details of the period, since the roleplaying game is intended to be an alternate history. There is some detail in the London and County descriptions and there is a section describing the English which includes details of various NPC types by class, but nevertheless, Gallows Corner is a roleplaying game that will benefit from some historical research if just to add a degree of verisimilitude.

Physically, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is a stunning looking book. It is easy to read, and as good as the production values are, what shines is its artwork. It is brutally bright and beautiful in its depiction of the hope and hardship of the setting.

Unfortunately, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG does not feel quite complete as a roleplaying game. There could have been clearer and fuller examples of set-up and play and the guidance on handling certain aspects of the roleplaying game, such as the reductions in ‘Control’ for certain actions by the Player Characters, that would have made the roleplaying game easier to grasp and easier to run, could have been given. Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is not a complex roleplaying game by any means and anyone with any storytelling game experience will have no problems either running it or playing it. Anyone with less experience, perhaps attracted by the high production values of the roleplaying game, may have more of a problem. Overall, Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is just underwritten enough in places to make it not quite as accessible as it should be.

Gallows Corner – A Peasants’ Revolt RPG is magnificently ambitious in its scope and parochially English in its setting and tone. This is a gloriously brutal, beautiful roleplaying game that with the right Narrator and players is going to tell a great campaign of hardship and hope.

Memory & Magic

The coven is where the sisterhood is safe, where memories can be made, where its members can rejoice in the company of each other, where threats can be faced together, and dangers overcome, even if that is at the cost of memories. For memories represent power. But give up too many memories, use too much power, and the afterlife may become a dark and evil existence. This is the underlying story to Last Sabbath, a storytelling game of the history of a coven of witches and warlocks. The history will take them from their calling and formation of the coven through the appearance of a threat which imperils the coven, the discovery of how that threat can be defeated, and ultimately a confrontation with that threat and the aftermath of that confrontation. As the history progresses, the events and Memories are recorded in a diary. To defeat the threats and dangers they may face, the Witches may draw upon these Memories or their life sources to power charms, spells, and incantations. As a result, they will lose the Memories or age minutes, hours, or years, and potentially die in the process. They will have an existence in the afterlife, but the number of Memories lost determines the nature of that existence. A few and the Witch will return as a familiar to the next generation, too many and the Witch becomes an evil ghost!

Last Sabbath is from the Italian publisher, Officina Meningi. It is very rules light and can be played as a group or solo, and is designed to be played without a Game Master. As a solo roleplaying game, Last Sabbath is a journalling game, whereas in a group, the journal, or diary, is shared. It is played over the course of seven Scenes—‘The Calling’, ‘Initiation’, ‘Danger’, ‘Research’, ‘Revelation’, ‘Threat’, and ‘Epilogue’—which takes the Witches through their story and the story of the coven. There is no setting beyond the fact that there is a coven and a threat, the players being free to create their own during the first scene, whether that is Witches at a school of magic, a coven fleeing the Salem witch trials, or modern day coven protecting a small town.

The Scenes are further subdivided into Rounds, either three, five, or seven, depending upon the length of game that the players want to play. Each Scene is driven by three Leading Questions and six Prompts, the latter intended to be rolled on a six-sided die, or alternatively a Divination, of which four methods are given. The push here is to use the Divination means as six prompts is not enough and does not offer enough variability for repeat play. The Divination can also be used as means to suggest a resolution also. In each Round, the players take it in turns to narrate the Story from their Witches’ perspective, inspired by the Prompt or Divination. Interaction between the players and Witches is limited, a player and Witch only able to respond directly to the narration of another player and Witch when it is their turn. At the end of her narration for a Round, a player notes a Record of it in the diary, and at the end of the Scene, the player marks one of these Records, whether it is personal or pertains to the whole coven, as a Memory. As the coven faces greater dangers and the threat, these memories can be consumed to cast ever increasing more effective magic—Charms, Spells, and Incantations. Casting an Incantation has the greatest effect, such as regenerating the whole of a burned down forest, exorcising an ancient evil, or sending another Witch through time, but also the greatest cost, either terms of Memories or the Witch’s life itself. It represents the greatest sacrifice and will likely come in the penultimate Scene, ‘Threat’, when the coven will confront the danger at the heart of their story. The ‘Epilogue’ has only one Round, in which the players each narrates what happens to their Witches, including those who died, in a single Record.

The last quarter of Last Sabbath is devoted to divination methods. Four are given—Tarot, Rune Stones, Mikado, and Tea Leaves—along with instructions on how to use them and then interpret the readings as prompts for each scene. Some are easier to use than others, and some will take longer to use and interpret, and so may slow game play down. The latter is less of an issue in solo play, but in group play, it may become a problem. The Tarot cards are likely to be more familiar and easier to interpret, whilst the Runes are more flexible and open to interpret. The Mikado is likely the least familiar and will take some adjusting to. Which leaves the Tea Leaves, the most ambiguous and most open to interpretation, but also the most charming and relaxing since it involves making tea in a teapot and drinking the tea to find the results. All include examples of interpretations. What might have been useful is a bibliography of books consulted for these methods. That said, they offer a greater variability than most journalling games do, since the prompts they provide are open to wider interpretation.

Although Last Sabbath is described as being suitable for being played as a solo journalling game, this aspect of its play is not explored beyond a single paragraph. The lack of advice on this and other aspects of play is disappointing. Last Sabbath is not a long roleplaying game, especially given that its lats quarter is given over to alternative, but thematically appropriate means of generating prompts. Arguably, one of these means could have been dropped in favour of more advice and support, especially for solo play. Or simply, the page count increased from forty-eight to sixty plages.

Physically, Last Sabbath is boldly presented in splashes of red and black with stunning artwork. The artwork really is good, but it does not always feel appropriate. The artist—Loputyn—is noted as being part of the Lolita fashion moment, and this is reflected in the art style of Last Sabbath. It means that the witches depicted are young, and often nude. The artwork is not explicit, but because it only depicts the Witches as young girls and not a wide range of ages, the look of the roleplaying game does lean towards the prurient. This is in contrast to the writing which states that the Player Characters can be warlocks as well as witches and that each player is free to decide who her witch is. As a consequence, there is a dissonance between what Last Sabbath is about and how it looks, such that it is either going to put off the audience it is intended for or attract the attention of an audience for whom it was not intended.

Where Last Sabbath is at its best is in the inclusion of its four real-world divination tools as a means of creating prompts and driving the story forward, as they bring a physicality and a verisimilitude to the play and give the players something to interact with. Yet ultimately, Last Sabbath is underwritten as a roleplaying game and definitely as a solo journalling game. It does not provide enough structure or advice on how to set-up or play the game, relying instead upon the players to provide that, giving them more work than is really necessary. With that in mind, Last Sabbath is best suited experienced players who can overcome its issues.

Relatives at Risk

Nephews in Peril: A Collection of New Mysteries in BRINDLEWOOD BAY is a companion volume to Brindlewood Bay: A Dark & Cozy Mystery Game. Published by The Gauntlet, Brindlewood Bay upended the traditional concept of murder mystery scenarios in roleplaying and changed what we play. In the traditional murder mystery scenario, the Keeper has the answers to hand—the victim, the suspects, the culprit, the means, and the motive—and the players and their characters have to deduce which of these is correct. In Brindlewood Bay, there is no set solution, but there are plenty of suspects and motives, and it is up to the players and their characters to hypothesise who the culprit is and why he committed the murder, and put it to the test. If passes, the murder mystery is solved. If not, the players and their characters must continue their sleuthing. Plus, the players are doing this with elderly female amateur detectives as their characters, such as Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple, for example. Brindlewood Bay changed how we thought about investigative scenarios in roleplaying and how we played them. Besides the rules, Brindlewood Bay: A Dark & Cozy Mystery Game also detailed numerous murder mysteries, the Dark Conspiracy behind them that threatens the future of the quiet New England tourist spot, and a little about the town itself. Nephews in Peril: A Collection of New Mysteries in BRINDLEWOOD BAY presents the Keeper and her players—and their Mavens—with even more of this.

Nephews in Peril: A Collection of New Mysteries in BRINDLEWOOD BAY gives the Keeper a total of twenty new Mysteries, seven of which are of a new type of Mystery, which change the way in which Brindlewood Bayy is played—ever so slightly, and details more of Brindlewood Bay itself. It does not waste any time beyond simply listing the contents and describing the first mystery. After all, the Brindlewood Bay Keeper already knows what she is getting as far as the content goes. Each follows the same format as the core rulebook, with sections labelled, ‘Presenting the Mystery’, ‘Moments’ for various particular scenes, ‘Suspects’ complete with their quotes, ‘Locations’ with a guide on how to ‘Paint the Scene’ at each, ‘Clues’, and ‘Void Clues’, the latter connecting the mystery to the Dark Conspiracy playing out behind the scenes in the town. Also included is a ‘Complexity’ value, which represents the number of elements of the solution that the players and their Mavens need to discuss and hypothesise before they can make the ‘Theorise Move’ without a penalty. Some of the Mysteries do include elements that only come into play once parts of the Dark Conspiracy have been revealed, so the Keeper will need to pick which ones she wants to run and when. Further, some also have special rules, such as that for Brindlewood County Charity Poker Tournament which the Mavens can enter in the first mystery, ‘Dead Man’s Hand’.

The mysteries vary in tone. So, ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ takes place at a charity poker tournament, whereas ‘Lies and Dolls, or A Very Brief Tenure’, in which a corpse is discovered at the Museum of Brindle-Dolls, home to a collection of historic, locally-made dolls, and is thus a bit creepy. There is a sequel to ‘The Great Brindlewood Bay Bake-Off’ , with the Mavens again judges, but this time at Faversham’s Favourite Fudge competition at a farmer’s market in a neighbouring town, in the process, expanding the world of Brindlewood Bay, if only a little. The title of the latter, ‘Fudge, Jury, and Executioner’ is in the running for the best named mystery in the book, although ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soulless’ and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Murder’ are almost as good. There are classic locations for murder mysteries too such as auctions, high school reunions, and carnivals, but also odder ones too, such as at a high school wrestling tournament. One of the most potentially fun is ‘A Throng of Vice and Liars’, set at the Mavens’ own headquarters, The Candlelight Booksellers which is hosting fantasy author, Herb L. L. Paxton, currently facing some criticism about how long it is taking him to finish the sixth volume of what was originally planned to be a trilogy. It very knowingly and amusingly pokes at fandom and fantasy, both onscreen and on the page.

Seven of the Mysteries are ‘Sweeps Week Mysteries’. These are designed emulate the type of stunt episodes of a television series in the USA in the eighties and nineties, typically involving a weird plotline or celebrity guest star, intended to attraction higher advertising revenue. In Nephews in Peril, ‘Sweeps Week Mysteries’ are intended to be played late in Dark Conspiracy campaign, as Mysteries after the campaign has been completed, or as one-off Mysteries. ‘Sweeps Week Mysteries’ emphasis the supernatural rather than murder, and to account for this, instead of solving a murder, the Mavens are answering key questions about the mystery. Further, there are limitations on the mechanics, most notably negating the effect of several Maven Moves, removing the Occult Move, and the replacement of the ‘Theorise’ Move with the ‘Answer A Question’ Move. Where in normal murder mysteries, there are Suspects, here there are Side Characters, and where in normal murder mysteries, solving a mystery would be enough, here the Mavens get rewards. These can come in the form of new Moves, recurring Side Characters, decorations for the Cosy Little Place, and so on.

The ‘Sweeps Week Mysteries’ start out with the amusingly named ‘The Hex Files’, which finds the Mavens on a road trip to Who Dunnit? Con, a mystery book convention in California when they discover an overturned car in a ditch outside of Devilwood, New Mexico—a New Mexico which looks surprisingly like Vancouver—and it so happens that there are bodies of two dead FBI agents in the vehicle with files about missing persons on the road on their person. ‘Dressed to Kill’ shifts the mystery to the Peak District in the United Kingdom, whilst in ‘Let the Night One In’, the Mavens are invited to visit another famous crime writer, this time living in an isolated town in the Canadian north in deep winter when the sun never rises and people are going missing… There is a good mix of mystery types to these ‘Sweeps Week Mysteries’ and they show off the flexibility of the Brindlewood Bay mystery format, though with some mechanical changes.

The third part of Nephews in Peril is devoted to ‘The Village of Brindlewood Bay’. This expands greatly upon the setting presented in the core rulebook that add a mixture of new and old businesses, old and new locations. So, there is Historic Brindlewood Congregational Church, The First Well Historic Restoration Trust, and Minuteman Memorial Statue versus the Foam coffee house and Nerdcore, which caters to nerd culture including players of Sorcery: the Coalescence! Each entry includes a description that explains what it does and its role in the community, details of its proprietors and employees, and with ‘Pose a Question’, a reason why a Maven might visit. The sense of Brindlewood Bay as a place is further developed in the last part of the supplement is ‘A Cozy Little Place’ which gives advice for the Keeper in bringing the town to live and playing up its cosy nature, developing each Maven’s attachment to both her home and community. The aim is to provide a counterpoint to the rash of murders that beset the town and the growing realisation that something else is going on with the Dark Conspiracy. The advice is optional, but if used it can enhance the setting of Brindlewood Bay.

Physically, Nephews in Peril is clean and cosy, and thus in keeping with the main rulebook. It is well written and engaging, but the illustrations by Cecilia Ferri are stunning, veering between showing the Mavens joyously having the time of their cosy lives, not just in Brindlewood Bay, but around the world.

Although entirely optional, Nephews in Peril: A Collection of New Mysteries in BRINDLEWOOD BAY can be both expand the play of Brindlewood Bay: A Dark & Cozy Mystery Game and continue its play even after the Dark Conspiracy at its heart has been confronted and thwarted and the campaign is over. Nephews in Peril: A Collection of New Mysteries in BRINDLEWOOD BAY simply gives you more. More mysteries and more cosiness and more of Brindlewood Bay itself, but also a slightly different way to way to play which remains faithful to the inspiration for the roleplaying game itself.