The Other OSR: The Hand of God

Troika! is both a setting and a roleplaying game. As the latter, it provides simple, clear mechanics inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of solo adventure books, but combined with a wonderfully weird cast of character types, all ready to play the constantly odd introductory adventure, ‘The Blancmange and Thistle’. As the former, it takes the Player Characters on adventures through the multiverse, from one strange sphere to another, to visit twin towers which in their dying are spreading a blight that are turning a world to dust, investigate murder on the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on an ice planet, and investigate hard boiled murder and economic malfeasance following the collapse of the Scarf-Worm investment bubble. At the heart of Troika! stands the city itself, large, undefined, existing somewhere in the cosmos with easy access from one dimension after another, visited by tourists from across the universe and next door, and in game terms, possessing room aplenty for further additions, details, and locations. One such location is The Hand of God.

The Hand of God is the second entry in a new series of scenarios for Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council begun with Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. This is the ‘1:5 Troika Adventures’ series, which places an emphasis on shorter, location-based adventures, typically hexcrawls or dungeoncrawls, set within the city of Troika, but which do not provide new Backgrounds for Player Characters or ‘Hack’ how Troika! is played. The Hand of God lives up to these tenets, in that it is a dungeoncrawl that takes place in the upturned hand atop the tallest statue to a god in the temple district of the city of Troika. The Player Characters are plucked from their dreams and the scenario opens with them waking to find themselves atop the extended index finger, in the giant nest of THOG, the demon bird. It is a strikingly silly and utterly appropriate cold opening for the Player Characters and the scenario, and it makes the scenario incredibly easy to slot into a campaign. The Players Characters fall asleep one night and when they wake up, there they are. What the Player Characters can see below them is the fingers of the hand, a gondola spanning the distance between the index finger and the thumb, bridges between the other fingers, a tower on the middle finger whilst water rushes out of the tip of the finger to fall to a lake below, a ramshackle wooden town on the little finger, and far below on the palm, forests and mountains surrounding the lake, and even perhaps a way down. It is a wondrous vista, a sight unlike that in any other roleplaying game and The Hand of God never lets the Game Master or her players forget it. There are constant reminders of what the Player Characters can see throughout the adventure.

The Hand of God is a pointcrawl, consisting of locations linked by specific routes and connections, making deciding where to go from one location to the next easy to decide. It is literally laid out in front of them, like the palm of well, a god’s hand. As the Player Characters descend, they will encounter the denizens of the hand, like the Goblins at the Gondola Station led by Frenki, the elderly radical mazematician ostracised for his experimental maze design, and Skink, the priest from Jibberwind Temple, currently riding the gondola back and forth in silent contemplation, who could be provoked enough to start a fight—and would quite like it if you did. In a cave down the thumb, the sleazy, flat cap-wearing Crenupt the Undead, who has been thrown out of Jgigji, the tumbledown town of living dead on the little finger, who might have goods to sell that he very likely stole and if that fails, the means to take revenge by stealing everything from the town if the Player Characters will help him. All he wants is a lot of wine. A lot of wine. The index finger is scored and scarred by Sofia the Giant Serpent as she endlessly circumnavigates the finger, her iron scales cutting deep into the stone of the finger, whilst just above in the crags, three Harpy sisters all want food, but one also wants to hear fine music, another to see beautiful paintings, and a third to read beautiful words, and they all hate each other!

The hand has several major locations. They include Jibberwind Temple, which is home to the cult of the Perfect Fingers, dedicated to Thog, its looping corridors acting more as wind tunnels and its treasure vault the target of many an inhabitant of the hand, whilst Thark Village is being put to the torch by Automonous Arrests and Adjudication Inquisitorial sect of The Indelible Order of Allotted Idols as the villagers huddle in the crypts below and attempt a ritual which might save them. Elsewhere, there is Jgigji, the town of drunken undead, a wizard’s tower/folly where the wizard’s work is likely the actual folly, and a community of Parchment Witches—one of the signature character types in Troika!—who set snares and net traps for beast and intruders, using the skins of the former to create some of the best parchment across the spheres whilst squabbling about anything and everything. All of these locations and their various factions are interlinked and many of the people that they meet will share information or ask for help in return for it, pushing the Player Characters onwards in their exploration of the statue. The descriptions of the scenario’s many NPCs do vary in detail, but all are going to be fun for the Game Master to portray, some of the less detailed ones really leaving room for the Game Master to develop how she wants to portray them and make them memorable.

Escape is the ultimate aim for the Player Characters in The Hand of God. But there are also plenty of mini-locations and dungeons to explore, treasures to find or steal, and of course, there is the view to look at. Other options are suggested as to why the Player Characters might want to go to The Hand of God, whether that is find one of the treasures in the statue, locate a curse-eater, or discover their future from Vow, the Spider-God who can read the threads of fate. Many of these reasons might also explain why the Player Characters might want to return to The Hand of God in the future.

Physically, it all helps that the content of The Hand of God is presented in very accessible fashion. The maps are great and the adventure is decently illustrated. The scenario needs a slight edit in places.

The Hand of God manages to feel big, but is delightfully self-contained, more or less in the palm of a god’s hand, a pointcrawl as memorable for its location as its content, such that it is more of a ‘handcrawl’ than a pointcrawl. The Hand of God is fun, easy to drop into a campaign, and like any good Troika! scenario is weird and wondrous.

The Other OSR: Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

Troika! is both a setting and a roleplaying game. As the latter, it provides simple, clear mechanics inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of solo adventure books, but combined with a wonderfully weird cast of character types, all ready to play the constantly odd introductory adventure, ‘The Blancmange and Thistle’. As the former, it takes the Player Characters on adventures through the multiverse, from one strange sphere to another, to visit twin towers which in their dying are spreading a blight that are turning a world to dust, investigate murder on the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on an ice planet, and investigate hard boiled murder and economic malfeasance following the collapse of the Scarf-Worm investment bubble. At the heart of Troika! stands the city itself, large, undefined, existing somewhere in the cosmos with easy access from one dimension after another, visited by tourists from across the universe and next door, and in game terms, possessing room aplenty for further additions, details, and locations. One such location is Whalgravaak’s Warehouse.

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is the start of a new series of scenarios for Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council. This is the ‘1:5 Troika Adventures’ series, which places an emphasis on shorter, location-based adventures, typically hexcrawls or dungeoncrawls, set within the city of Troika, but which do not provide new Backgrounds for Player Characters or ‘Hack’ how Troika! is played. Whalgravaak’s Warehouse lives up to these tenets, in that its dungeoncrawl takes place in a large, in places, impossibly large interdimensional warehouse that served as major import/export house for the city of Troika. Whalgravaak was once known as the cruel, but efficient logistics wizard who could get anything from anywhere and ship anything to anywhere, which made him and clients rich as the city became a shipping nexus between the spheres without the need or the expense of training staff to crew and maintain the golden barges that still traverse between the spheres today. However, Whalgravaak grew paranoid in his old age, destroyed the instruction manual to the great device by which goods were transported, and retired. When the device became a threat to the city of Troika, the Autarch ordered Whalgravaak’s Warehouse permanently closed and locked. That was centuries ago. Whalgravaak is long dead. His warehouse still stands, a looming monolithic presence in a bad part of the city. Nobody goes in and nobody comes out. Though some claim there is movement on the room. Now, someone wants something from inside and have decided that the Player Characters are best equipped to find their way in and navigate its darkened offices and deep storage bays with their vertiginously stacked crates, which surely must still contain something interesting after all that since Whalgravaak himself died?

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse gives one main reason why the Player Characters might want to break into and explore the warehouse. This is to locate a book called The Tome of Sable Fields, for which they will be paid handsomely, but there are others and the Game Master can easily come up with more. Finding a way into the warehouse is a challenge in itself, but inside, the Player Characters will find strange worm-headed dogs gone feral, creeping bandits and burglars looking for goods to fence or places to dump bodies, cultists who worship the still breathing nose of a titan, a clan of dustmen sieving the heaps of dust on the expansive roof of the warehouse where the air glows aquamarine like the Dustmen of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, and more. There are rooms full of great lengths of rope that are mouldering into slime, a vegetable store where an onion has become an Onion Godlet, a room of sponges so dry it will suck the moisture from anyone who enters, and a set of employee records laden with bureaucratic despair… The roof is a post-apocalyptic hexcrawl of its very own, a separate environment that is essentially a desert of dust, marked only by the flickering head of one the giants that still work in the warehouse below and an Oasis of Tea, that will take the Player Characters days to explore. They had better come prepared for hot weather!

Locating The Tome of Sable Fields is a relatively simple matter and the Player Characters may do so relatively quickly, but actually getting hold of it is another matter. It is actually suspended over the very means by which Whalgravaak transported goods from one dimension to another by a crane. Unfortunately, none of the parts of the crane are talking to each other and the only way to get the crane operating is to get them to talk to each other. Essentially one bit of the crane is more noble than the other and the Player Characters will probably need to persuade them to overcome their individual problems and snobbery. This will drive them into exploring the warehouse further in the hopes of finding the means of getting each one to co-operate.

As part of the ‘1:5 Troika Adventures’ series and thus a dungeoncrawl, although one in a warehouse, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is designed to be played like a dungeon and explored like a dungeon. Thus movement, noise, and resources become important, the Player Characters need a source of light and the scenario is played out in ten-minute turns in true Old School style Dungeons & Dragons. This also means that Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is played differently to other adventures for Troika!, with less of an emphasis on narrative play and more on environmental, location-based exploration. In keeping with the style, the adventure is perhaps deadlier and more challenging than the typical Troika! adventure, requiring more caution and care than a Troika! player might be used to.

Physically, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is very well presented. The artwork is as weird and wonderful as you would expert, the cartography is decent, and the layout is clear and easy to use. There is also good advice for the Game Master on how and why she should use Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, and a clear explanation of what is going on in the warehouse.

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is a great set-up for an adventure. Take the warehouse of an interdimensional import/export house, abandon it for centuries, and then turn it into an industrial dungeon with weird Dickensian undertones. The result is eminently entertaining and constantly going to screw with the heads of both the players and their characters as they discover one example of industrial decline after another and just what happens when you leave a dangerous interdimensional magical industrial complex alone for far too long.

Your Own Private Arcane Academy

Academies of the Arcane has a problem. Or rather, the subject matter of Academies of the Arcane has problem. Academies of the Arcane is a roleplaying supplement about creating and playing in your own school of wizardry. Which means that it draws comparisons with the series of novels starring Harry Potter and set at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and by association, the contentious views of the series’ author, J.K. Rowling. Academies of the Arcane and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are about academic institutions modelled on British boarding schools with their own peculiar practices and traditions where magic is researched and taught. That though, is where the comparisons end. For although there is nothing to stop a Game Master and her players using Academies of the Arcane to create and roleplay a game similar to that of the Harry Potter, should they so desire, that is not its raison d’etre. In fact, doing so would actually be to ignore the possibilities and options that the book presents that enable the Game Master and her players to create their school of magic and everything associated with it—school uniforms, school houses, teachers, locations, events, classes, and more—and roleplay their students’ time at the school.

Academies of the Arcane is a supplement for Troika! Numinous Edition. Published by the Melsonian Arts Council following a successful Kickstarter campaign, presents some forty or so tables, over a third of the supplement, for creating numerous different aspects of an institution dedicated to the teaching of magic. Academies of the Arcane does not start there though. It begins with advice and suggestions for the Game Master on how to use the book and the types of campaign frameworks and framework elements it can be used for. These include using the magical school as a place of intrigue, betrayal, and treachery; as a base of operations from which the students can set out to undertake the very dangerous process of learning magic—at the school and beyond; to explore the pride and factionalism of the board school model and its houses, but with wizards and magic; and play not as young students, but as graduate students or members of the faculty, or interlopers at the school with a mission of their own. None of these concepts are explored in any great detail, but they are solid starting points from which Game Masters and players can develop their own frameworks, aided of course, by the familiarity of Academies of the Arcane’s subject matters and settings.

Academies of the Arcane provides some thirty-six student Backgrounds. These begin with the Prodigal Magus—who just happens to have an interesting birthmark or scar that glows when he casts spells, and the Warlock of the Withered Ouroboros, who is trying to avoid the fate of being consumed by his own magic. All have several possessions and several advanced skills, including spells, as well as a special ability. Others include odder creations such as Tiger Conceptual, Worm Troll, Printer’s Devil, and Precocious Ooze. These is a fantastic mix of the ordinary and the outré, and whilst a player can choose one from the thirty-six available, rolling for his character’s Background as intended adds to the challenge. Added to this are some ninety or so spells, from Acumen, Alignment Language, and Astral Parasite to Window-Weald, Word Feaster, and Wormcast. The spells are as weird and wonderful as the Backgrounds, such as the Word Feaster which enables the caster to eat the vocabulary of another wizard and effective silence them temporarily; Discordance which disrupts time with the terrible singing of the cosmos and upends the initiative stack in combat; and Manifest Doubt, which reveals a flaw in a personal philosophy, forcing the victim to collapse into painful introspection or double down on his belief. The spell notes that no philosophy is truly pure and so there is always a flaw to take advantage of.

Then Academies of the Arcane presents the tables needed to create an academy. This starts with the name such as ‘Father Ankou’s Cage of Arcane Triumph’ or ‘Drimcliff University of the Torment Eternal’. After this, rolls are made for campus appearance, interior and exterior, nearby notable locations, school uniform, history, recent troubles, and rumours. There are tables for creating houses and their mascots and mottos, notoriety and troubles, and for the classes and subjects that the Player Characters can take and study. As well as tables for creating members of the faculty, there is guidance for running classes and the school itself, and even a wizarding competition. Rounding out the book is a wild selection of interesting magical items such as familiars, The Adder-Skin Book of New Fate, Ancient Indelible Foods of the Gods, and more, all of which be used to drive stories at the wizarding school.

Although Academies of the Arcane is designed to be played used Troika!, a Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness, it need not be. Both Academies of the Arcane and Troika! are Old School Renaissance adjacent, in addition to being British Old School Renaissance in its inspiration. The simplicity of the mechanics Troika! and Academies of the Arcane—the latter’s spells in particular, combined with the lack of mechanics in its numerous tables and the prompts they contain, mean that the supplement is easy to use as a framework in another roleplaying game. This could be generic like the Cypher System or Savage Worlds or a retroclone like Old School Essentials. Either way, Academies of the Arcane is sufficiently generic to make adapting to another set of rules or a setting relatively easy.

Physically, Academies of the Arcane is cleanly and tidily presented. The artwork is excellent whether of the inclusive nature of the student body, the wonder of the arcane, or the exquisite nature of the magical items. The clarity of the design to Academies of the Arcane means that it has few problems and even then, they are minor at best. One is the size of the book, larger than that typical of supplements for Troika! Then again, getting all of the supplement’s tables into a digest-sized book and making them useable would have been challenging. The other is perhaps the brevity of the content, but then that content is designed as an extensive series of prompts to push the Game Master and her players to create their own arcane academy. However, that leaves one element of the genre unaddressed and likely intentionally so. Academies of the Arcane focuses on the fantasy of the magic and learning the magic and ignores the ordinary aspects of living in the equivalent of boarding school (for magic). So, there is no contrast between the ordinary and extraordinary, no push and pull between the two. The problem with doing so of course returns Academies of the Arcane to the problem of its subject matter and comparisons with Harry Potter, which could have been contentious. Thus, the aspect of the setting is left unmentioned and unexplored and in the hands of the Game Master and her players should they decide to include it in their game.

Ultimately, Academies of the Arcane provides everything the Game Master and her players need to run a game set at a sorcerous school, but not just any institute of invocation. Instead, an academy of the arcane that they create and make their own, telling the stories of their students, their studies, their rivalries, and adventures, and that is what makes Academies of the Arcane the toolkit of choice for its genre.

The Other OSR—The Big Squirm

Troika City is rocked by scandal! The wealthy families and institutions of Downgate Arches, where their homes and headquarters hung suspended over a great toxic gas-filled chasm, have lost enormous sums of money with the collapse of the Scarf-Worm investment bubble—and no one knows who is responsible! Worse, the uncertainty and recriminations have unleashed a war of assassins across the district, adding yet further to the chaos and uproar. Yongardy House of Law wants the war to assassination to end so that the process of legal murder and trial combat can resume. The House of Peace & Love is aghast at the outbreak and wants it to end, including sending out its own Executor-Executioners to bring that about. The Lodge Half-Sinister Twistblade wants better regulation of the war of assassins. The Crew of the Floating Autonomous Zone Orb has mutinied against its captain and thrown him overboard after discovering he put their pay into  Scarf-Worm investment bubble and now want to find the culprits and get paid. The Bank 10,082 Stepped Heaven want the Scarf-Worm investment bubble investigated since so many of its clients have lost money. The Left Yellow Gang is annoyed because it was making money selling fake Scarf-Worms. The Prodrumus family has disappeared aboard its golden barge, Nargeboll, and The Band of the Wandering Plume is having a party with themselves that has so far lasted several weeks… And the Scarf-Worm? It is warm, fuzzy, and quiescent creature the fur of which transcends the concept of colour and so is in much demand as a fashion statement. Enter the Player Characters.

This is the set-up for The Big Squirm, a scenario for Troika!, the Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness published by the Melsonian Arts Council. It is a rococo noir inspired by Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as much as the historical South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulip mania of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively in which the Player Characters are hired by one of the factions to determine who was responsible for the speculative run on the Scarf-Worms, or at least bring about an end to the War of Assassins, or even just to ensure that they are definitely, absolutely not responsible for the situation. The Player Characters are investigators, but can be of any character given in Troika! They are free to proceed how they want according to the wants of their client and this leads to the obvious problem with The Big Squirm—where to begin.

The Big Squirm is written as a toolkit. This toolkit consists of some twenty-three locations, each drenched in dissolution, couched in corruption, invested with intrigue, and described in detail; seven factions, each with its own goals, methods, and rewards; and six rival detectives, working for rival factions and desperate to out do each other and the Player Characters. The mystery itself is bound up in some nineteen facts—or clues—and their individual sources and locations—which can be rolled for or picked from the ‘d66 Facts’ table as necessary by the Game Master. Not only will the players and their characters need to track the clues, but so will the Game Master, not just to note which facts the Player Characters have acquired, but also because the value of the information in a clue degrades within a few days and becomes general knowledge. They will also have to track the relationships between the Player Characters and the various factions and investigators wrapped up in the mystery. The format means that The Big Squirm does not have an easy beginning, middle, or end, and whilst the middle and end are going to be determined by the actions of the Player Characters, the lack of easy beginning means that starting the scenario needs some set-up upon the part of the Game Master.

Once the scenario has started though, the contents of the toolkit the Game Master is presented with is rich, weird, and diverse. Downgate Arches consists of the mansions of the rich suspended on massive chains, whilst the servants and their families, as well as the rest of the district’s populace reside in blocks which cling precariously to the walls of the chasm. Access to the mansions and other buildings is primarily via barges, although the daring—including the various guild assassins—might climb down the chains. The highlight is the description of a family estate, fastidiously ornate and opulently cluttered, its security handled by some very caring robots—in fact, too caring as there is the danger of a ‘TPK’ or ‘Total Party Knockout’ if the players are not careful—and its care by concerned staff. All this whilst the family pets sue for autonomy! The estate is at heart a dungeon, but one designed with thick carpets, silk hangings, tasteful lighting, and multiple kitchens. Whole sessions of a playthrough of The Big Squirm will involve exploration of the house and interaction with its various denizens.

Besides the richly detail locations to describe, the Game Master also has a great cast of grotesques and odd personalities to portray. These include Xloss Sanss, a fur coat wearing Slough Lizard accompanied by four Orcs, who stores the facts of the case as murder-sculptures made from mammalian pets and Maciej, a vicious little tyke who is pandered to because he is believed to have the gift of prophecy. The others include the complete crew of the golden barge, the Floating Autonomous Zone Orb, fractious and undecided on what to do, and the Graneneck Hotel, the floors of which are grandiosely themed, and its guests, such as the Goblin King and The Porcelain Speaker, an ancient skeleton encased in a porcelain exoskeleton.

Physically, The Big Squirm is beautifully presented. The advice for the Game Master is decent, the book is well written, and the artwork painted to match the tone and nature of the descriptions. Again and again, the Game Master is going to want to show the book’s illustrations to her players as they encounter an NPC or visit a location. The look has the look and feel of thirties futurism, but seen through a byzantine lens.

The Big Squirm is a big adventure, a dark, twisted, and intriguing investigation across a bizarre landscape and through a baroque society that will confound the players and their characters again and again with one strange encounter or location after another. It is an impressive set of tools for running a fantastically weird mystery, but does require a bit more set-up than is given for the players to get their characters involved, but as soon as they are, they will find themselves in a brilliantly recherché, delightfully outlandish noir.

The Other OSR—Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs

On the glacier moon of Myung’s Misstep, perpetually enshrouded in ice and snowstorms, the Player Characters have been contracted to transport and guard a locked box from Out of Order, the site of the moon’s still not functioning space elevator to the water-farm town of Plankton Downs. The safest means of travel is aboard a low-bodied hovercraft fitted with a heat spike it can use to anchor itself when a severe storm strikes. The Player Characters are booked aboard the Nantucket Sleigh Ride, one of these vessels with an adequate record in terms of punctuality, safety, and comfort. If the Player Characters are expecting a thoroughly uninteresting journey, then they are going to be disappointed. Amidst all of the colonial cyborgs, Martian nuns, alien tourists, and macrame owls aboard, a body is found missing its head! Then another one! And the way they died, their heads are all mangled... Could a monster out of galactic myth be stalking the halls and cabins of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride?

This is the set-up for Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs, a scenario for Troika!, the Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness published by the Melsonian Arts Council. It is a whodunnit in the mode of Murder on the Orient Express or ‘Robots of Death’ for classic Doctor Who, but here infused with a sense of the weird or the unknown a la the episode ‘Squeeze’ from The X-Files. With the crew ill-suited to conducting anything beyond attempting to implement security measures, it falls to the Player Characters to conduct the investigation. To that end, the Game Master is provided with a break-down of the scenario’s plot and a detailed description of the antagonist and its motives. In addition to the isometric-style cutaway deck plans of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride, the Game Master is given stats and details for the passengers and crew aboard the vessel. All twenty-five crew are named, whereas only a handful of the twenty-one Martian Orthodox nuns, twenty-four water farmers—including children, twelve ice-miners, and four glaciology graduates are treated in similar fashion. Fortunately, a set of tables inside the back cover can be used to determine names, precoccupations, and distinctive features for any of these NPCs. There is also a weather table, mostly containing weather events which will delay the journey of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride even further, giving more time for the murderer aboard to strike again…

In addition, Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs also includes seven new Backgrounds that can be used describe some of the passengers aboard the Nantucket Sleigh Ride or future NPCs, as well as possible replacement Player Characters, should one of their number fall victim to the murderer aboard the vessel. The new Backgrounds do include the suitably weird, such as Astropithecus Truckensis, a colonial cyborg of Old Mars attended by an Interpreter Parrot and several Martian Rhesus Macaques as attendants or Macramé Owl, which defies explanation. Others are prosaic and are related directly to the setting of the scenario, such as Ice Miner, Misstep Monastic, and Scud Miller.

Physically, Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs is presented in a swathe of vibrant, gauche colours. It needs a slight edit in places—one of the tables is mislabelled in particular, but is otherwise engagingly written. The art is excellent, having a distinctly European feel to it. The deck plans of Nantucket Sleigh Ride are also decently done and are accompanied with detailed descriptions of each deck and location.

Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs can primarily be run in one of two ways. As a one-shot, it makes for a weird whodunnit on a strange world for Troika! set in a classic closed environment as the murderer picks its victims off one-by-one. As part of a campaign, it is a short interlude between other adventures or a reason perhaps to get the Player Characters to Plankton Downs. Whatever that reason—and the Game Master will need to devise that, just as if necessary, she will ned to decide what is contained in the locked box the Player Characters have been contracted to transport. This might be the element that ties the scenario into a campaign. Whatever way it is used, Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs should provide a session’s worth of murder investigation, perhaps two at the very most!

Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs is short, combining elements of both scenario and toolbox. The brevity of the writing means that there is a lot of room in the scenario for the Game Master to improvise and make the scenario her own. However, the scenario has a lot of atmosphere, a sense of rundown drudgery and people going about their daily job or just waiting for the journey to end so that their lives can continue. Overall, Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs is a lovely little book which provides the means to stage a weird, claustrophobic whodunnit that can be played through in an evening and ideally on a cold and wintery one at that.

[Fanzine Focus XXX] The Electrum Archive Issue #01

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another DM and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Not every fanzine is dedicated to particular roleplaying games.

The Electrum Archive Issue #01 begins a Science Fantasy roleplaying game delivered in the  fanzine format, inspired by films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, books like Dune and The Book of the New Sun, computer games such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, settings like Dark Sun, Wormskin, and Through Ultan’s Door, and roleplaying games such as Cairn and Maze Rats. Written and published by Emiel Boven and the Cult of the Lizard King, it  explores the world of Orn and its people, descended from those who were transplanted to the planet by an ancient starfaring civilisation known as the Elders. Knowledge of them was lost when their ships fell from the heavens and buried themselves in the surface of the planet long ago. Gold and silver are so abundant on Orn that they are worthless, instead the main currency is drops of Elder Ink, a magical substance that was left behind by the Elders. Further, when vaporised and inhaled, Elder Ink expands the mind and allows the user to enter the Realm Beyond, a parallel dimension inhabited by spirits, and tap into its magical energy, thus enabling Warlocks to cast their spells. Ink can also be used to power a variety of ancient constructs like golems and airships. Trade across Orn is handled by ancient Merchant Houses feuding with others in a desperate search for former glory and power, whilst their trade networks are barely recovering from the fungal parasite known as Bone Spores. Fortunately, the Order of Ilsaar works to keep the networks free of infection. Meanwhile, hidden below Orn is the Sunless Princedoms, a network of an expansive network of tunnels and caves where the insect-like Irr are locked in a cold war over control of their ancestral city and the Twin-Souled Emperor, ruler of the ancient City of Nol, claims they are a spirit from the Realm Beyond born into human flesh. Adventurers known as ‘inkseekers’ venture out into the decaying world beyond the cities ruled over by scheming Merchant Houses to look for Elder artefacts and ink.

A Player Character has five attributes—Agility, Archive, Body, Mask, and Spirit. Archive represents information, literacy, and insight, whilst Mask is both charisma and stealth. These range between one and eight, but typically start between one and six. He also has a Background and an Archetype. Backgrounds provide Talents, Attribute bonuses, and languages, whilst Archetypes grants specific features. Backgrounds include Archivist, Houseborn (member of a minor Merchant House), Muscle, Nomad, Cultist, Performer, Scavenger, and Worker. The three Archetypes are Fixer, Vagabond, and Warlock, and each has different features. The Fixer has Skills such as Swift or Network, gaining one of these at each Level or mastery in one of the previously selected Skills. The Vagabond has Manoeuvres, such as ‘Focus’, which enables a vagabond to attack and ignore an opponent’s armour, or ‘Shake It off’ which enables him to shake damage off. The Vagabond can choose more Manoeuvres at later levels, but all Manoeuvres require the expenditure of Grit, of which the Vagabond has only a few points. The Warlock can learn spell names from the spell spirits of the Realm Beyond, initially randomly, but then by crafting them. Once known, spellcasting costs Drops of ink and how any one spell works is very much open to interpretation. Creating a character is a matter of rolling for attributes and then selecting Background, Archetype, and equipment.

Inaxx

Background: Warlock

Archetype: Cultist

Attributes

Agility 2 Archive 4 Body 3 Mask 2 Spirit 6

Hit Points: 3

Talents: Religion, Spirits, Rumours

Feature: Spell Names

Spell Names Known: Blade of Diminishing Cosmos

One possible issue with The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is that it offers limited options in terms of character types. The Fixer has plenty to choose from in terms of Skills and ways to improve them, but it is difficult to make one Vagabond different from another. So perhaps the Vagabond could have the option to take a Talent in a particular weapon and then Mastery? Whilst the Warlock has plenty of flexibility in terms of his spells and no two Warlocks are likely to possess the same spells because they are all random, could the Warlock learn more Talents? Ultimately, the issue is that as with fighters and warriors in many other retroclones, the Vagabond does feel underpowered in comparison to the other Archetypes. 

Mechanically, The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is simple. For a character to undertake an action, his player rolls a ten-sided die and succeeds if he rolls equal to or under the appropriate attribute. Advantage and Disadvantage works as standard, which can be gained from the situation or equipment, or in the case of Advantage, from a Talent. Combat is simple and deadly, a roll against a weapon’s Speed value to attack before an opponent and an attack always striking an opponent. Instead of rolling to hit, a player instead rolls damage, which is reduced by the Armour Value of any armour worn. The rules allow for critical hits, dual-wielding, aiming, and stunts. If a character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, he is at Death’s Door, there is a fifty percent chance that he will die immediately and a fifty percent chance of falling unconscious and dying later unless healed. If that happens, the character will awake with a Scar, which can be physical or spiritual.

Experience Points are awarded for finding treasure—ink drops, completing goals, learning about the world, establishing relationships, and surviving being at Death’s Door, but the number awarded is rolled randomly. Equipment is carried across the body in slots, including backpack slots, and weapons, armour, and ammunition have a usage die rolled after each combat, whilst Torches and Lumen Pods are used up on certain Exploration Events, rations on Travel Events, and tools and gear when they are used. The currency is Drops of Ink, a worker earning one Drop per day, whilst ‘inkseekers’ can search for more. The equipment list includes membrane masks, Inkdrinker Blades (a dagger which expands to three times the size and damage when fed Drops of ink), and Moonlight Rifles (recharges faster at night). Lastly there are rules for travel and exploration.

More than half of The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is dedicated to detailing the world of Orn and the first issue of the fanzine includes a separate map of the known parts of the planet, done as a point crawl rather than a sandbox. It begins with a short history and an overview of the regions, people, languages, and religions before explaining the nature of Elder Ink and the Realm Beyond. In terms of factions, it covers ‘The Blind Bank’ which stockpiles Elder Ink and influence, guarded by the eerie Stillsingers, and sponsors expeditions to both recover more and investigate the nature of Elder Ink; the merchant House Uvri, militarising because its cynical head wants to regain control of Ilsaar, the city it built up, but lost to the Order of Ilsaar, the monks who work prevent further infections of Bone Spores; and the Children of the Moon, a cult which believes that the Elders are watching them from Orn’s moon, waiting to return and judge everyone. The cult believes that inhaling ink and interaction with the Realm Beyond are both a sin.

A good third of the fanzine—and most of the background—is devoted to detailing six of the regions given on the map. These are ‘The Electrum Sea’, ‘The Mirall Delta’, ‘The Rift’, ‘The Ruinlands’, ‘The Spirit Roads’, and ‘The Spore Wilds’. Each includes a box of travel options, descriptions of its major locations, and then tables of plot hooks and encounters, for a total of four pages each. For example, ‘The Spirit Roads’ is where the Veil between Orn and the Realm Beyond is at its weakest, spirits bend and warp the laws of physics, rocks float in formation, and the great city of Nol stands at nexus of pilgrim routes, but the entire region is walled off and can only be entered by the Soulgate in its southern wall. Nol, the City of Sorcerery, is the largest in the world, once ruled by the Consortium of Nol, consisting of representatives of the city’s various spirit cults, now ruled by the Twin-Souled Emperor, whose Sorceror-Knights have been cracking down on anyone who challenges the Emperor’s claim. The Masked Apostates, consisting of disaffected members of the spirit cults, is in open rebellion.

Elsewhere, a monastery to St. Shebol sits atop Lifthold, a large floating rock formation, and houses the largest library in the world, and the Plain of Jars is a vast field scattered with thousands of burial jars, attracting unsavoury spirits and warlocks scavenging for secrets and treasures. Each of the locations is described in sufficient detail to pique the interest of the Seer—as the Game Master is known in The Electrum Archive Issue #01—and the plot hooks and encounters more than make up for the lack of a starting scenario. Rounding out the fanzine is a decent bestiary, an NPC generator, a ‘I Loot the Body’ table, and information about the dread Bone Spores. Lastly, there is a bibliography, which is surprisingly comprehensive.

Physically, The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is a lovely looking book. The artwork is excellent throughout, the writing engaging, and the cartography decent. One excellent inclusion is a full example of play, two pages long and far more than roleplaying games from actual publishers usually include. For a small roleplaying game/fanzine, The Electrum Archive Issue #01, its inclusion is a marvel.

The only thing real wrong with The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is that you wish there was more of it. This first issue of the fanzine is a roleplaying game in its own right and it has everything that the Seer and her players need to get playing, barring the lack of a scenario (but then the author is upfront about this), and yet this world is so intriguing that you want to learn more and explore more. From the moment the cover to The Electrum Archive Issue #01 and the basic background were available, it sounded fascinating and rife with possibilities, and there can be no doubt that this inaugural issue delivers on both the fascination and the possibilities. The Electrum Archive Issue #01 is a stunning first issue, opening up a weirdly inky, baroque, and alien planetary romance to our exploration. Electrum Archive Issue #02 is coming in 2023 and Reviews from R’lyeh is disappointed that it has to wait.

Not Enough Grok

Grok?! is an adventure role-playing game set on the planet of the same name, a gonzo world which was once a haven for trans-dimensional migrants and a bastion of advanced technomancy, until a cataclysm rendered it a desolate hollow planet. Now Planet Grok is rent with chasms haunted by feral monstrosities as cities float across its skies and a derelict space station contains the whole the planet, constantly bathing it in phosphorescent radiation. Yet the survivors of the cataclysm have begun to rebuild and explore, cities have been founded and lost relics discovered and begun to be understand, and war looms as the cities and their cultures clash, all whilst something black and unfathomable peers out from the hollow left by the cataclysm.

Grok?! is not a retroclone like Old School Essentials or Labyrinth Lord, nor is it a microclone like Knave or Into the Odd, although it is heavily inspired by both as well as Numenera, Savage Worlds, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Technoir, and Troika!, amongst others. The simplicity of the mechanics suggest that Grok?! is a microclone, but the player-facing mechanics, use of advantage and disadvantage (at a cost), capacity to bring elements of the setting into play with description-based modifiers, and narration of Player Character actions push it away towards more storytelling style of play.

A Player Character in Grok?! is simply defined. He has three Attribute dice, one each for Physical, Mental, and Social, ranging between a four-sided and a twelve-sided die. He has a word or phrase each for his Personality, Motivation, Background, Trouble, and Appearance Traits, plus an outfit and four Assets. Bar the outfit, which the player—or Actor as Grok?! terms them—is free to decide on his own, everything is determined with a roll of a few dice. The creation process takes a few minutes at most.

Nero Stout
Physical d6 Mental d6 Social d10
Personality: Pessimistic
Motivation: Create strife
Background: Paranormal Inquisitor
Trouble: Impoverished
Appearance: Hulking
Outfit: Inquisitor’s Ruby Lame Trouser Suit
Assets: X-Ray Monocle, Telekinetic Glove, Auto-Inflatable Airship, Spell of Mind Melding

Mechanically in Grok?!, to have his character undertake an action, his Actor declares his Intention, narrates the Action, and determines the Outcome with the roll of an appropriate Attribute die. If the result is between one and four, the Outcome is ‘No, and…’ something bad happens; between five and nine, then ‘Yes’ as intended; and ten or more, then ‘Yes, and…’ and good happens. Grok?! employs the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic as standard, each one which comes into play—up to five Advantages and five Disadvantages, with the two types cancelling each other out—must be based on an Aspect. Aspects can be the character’s Traits, Assets, or from the environment or situation the character is in. Advantages and Disadvantages are also acquired through Effort. However, applying Effort comes at a cost. This is a Condition appropriate to the action, and when acquired, it fills one of the character’s Resource Slots, of which he has seven. Conditions can also be acquired by failing actions.

Normally, Resource Slots are filled with the character’s Assets, but as they are filled Conditions, the character can carry fewer and fewer Assets, to the point where he acquires the Incapacitation Condition and is unable to act. Beyond that, if the character gains further Conditions, they reduce the appropriate Attribute die step by step, until if educed to below a four-sided die, the character is dead. The die-rolling is, of course, all Actor-facing, so the Director never rolls a die.

Grok?! uses the same mechanics for combat, the aim being to apply a Condition to an opponent if attacking and avoiding if being attacked. The rules for combat are underwritten in comparison to other roleplaying games, the roleplaying game talking about dealing with threats rather than adversaries. For some players some adjustment may be required to switch to narratively driven combat.

However, Grok?! does acknowledge this possible difficulty by including optional rules for Health Points and weapon effectiveness, as well as rules for handling wealth in a less abstract fashion and the use of the exploding die for characters with low Attributes. The Director, as the Game Master is known in Grok?!, is also given tables for creating Director Characters and one line scenario prompts, such as “An Angry Tree is Teaching Musical Masterpiece in a Derelict Spaceship”.

Planet Grok is described as world in part rent and in part shattered by a cataclysm caused by the failure of hyper advanced technology. Most of its inhabitants are divided between four castes—Celestials who reside in the giant Simulacrum which surrounds the planet, Islanders who live on the microcosms that float above the planet’s surface, Vagabonds who travel its surface exploring and trading, and Underlings who survived in the underground shelters despite many of their number being warped into monstrosities. The realms for each of the castes—the A.I. controlled Simulacrum of the Celestials, the haphazard wanderings of the Islanders’ floating Isles, the Wastelands travelled across by the Vagabonds, and the tunnels, caves, bunkers, research facilities, and chasms of the Underworld are all given a page each, which includes two tables for creating encounters.

Physically, Grok?! is stunning. The layout is bright and breezy, but the artwork is amazingly good, capturing the weirdness of the broken world, whether is the three-eyed, beaked and spike-tailed camel-like camel on the front cover, the fecund fungi, the broken canal city menaced by a tentacled monster who eyes cry black ichor, the shattered land amidst which a warrior swathed in a cloak surveys the chaos and a floating island, or a scythe-wielding Plague Doctor-like figure rides a be winged jet bike down a street. The artwork is truly excellent and hopefully future releases will feature more of it.

However, as good as the artwork is—and it is very, very good—it is also Grok?!’s curse. It is not difficult to imagine so many of the Kickstarter backers being enticed by the artwork with the promise of the roleplaying game’s weird post-gonzo apocalyptic setting and being disappointed at the lack of background or a scenario or a starting point for play or anything beyond an overview. There are a lot of prompts in terms of the tables for creating Director Characters and encounters, but that leaves a lot of work for the Director to undertake to bring world of Planet Grok to life. For some Game Masters that may not be an issue, but for others…? Ultimately, Grok?! is more mechanics than Planet Grok and the prospective Director and her players will have to wait to get more of the latter than the former.

The Al Amarja Quartet

Welcome to the Island is an anthology of scenarios for Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger published by Atlas Games. It presents four lengthy, often complex scenarios designed to do six things. First, to show what a scenario looks like in Over the Edge, Third Edition. Second, to act as a campaign starters or slot into an ongoing campaign. Third, it is designed to present multiple story hooks and thus means to get the Player Characters involved in each of its scenarios, whether as agents of one faction or another, newcomers to Al Amarja, members of one or more of the conspiracies on the island, as street level gangsters or criminals, or as paranormals or mystics. Fourth, it is designed to showcase the island of Al Amarja and its people in all of their conspiratorial, counterintuitive, and corresponding weirdness. Fifth, it is designed to shake everything up by throwing a grenade into the room and upsetting the status quo. In other words, once the Game Master has run and players roleplayed any one of the four scenarios in the anthology, the situation on Al Amarja will not be the same as before. For example, by the end of the second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ Frank Germaine, owner of Sad Mary’s, the hottest bar on Al Marja, may have lost control of it, whilst at the end of ‘Battle of the Bands’, the biggest band on the island may or not have been reformed and even one of the Player Characters might be a member of it! The result, whatever the outcome, is to enforce the sixth thing and that is, make Al Amarja and thus Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger the Game Master’s own and thus different from that of any other Game Master with an Over the Edge campaign.

Right from the start though, Welcome to the Island is a challenging set of scenarios. There is always homework for the Game Master to do as part of her preparation. Thankfully, each scenario references the very sections of the core rulebook that she needs to read, though there are multiples of them. There are usually a lot of NPCs to handle as well, often quite detailed in terms of their background and motivations, if not their stats. The authors of the anthology do go out of their way though to give advice and further explanation, including tips and playtest notes, with much of this supplementary information organised into sidebars and sections of boxed text. These are categorised by colour, so for example, advice and Game Master tips are always in red sections, NPCs in black, suggestions as where one scenario intersects with another in violet, and so on. Thus, Welcome to the Island is laid out in great blocks of colour that are easy on the eye.

Welcome to the Edge begins in relatively gentle fashion with ‘Battle of the Bands’. The Glorious Lords of the Edge are hosting the biggest battle of the bands on Al Marja, an event which anyone can participate in, but one in which Oblivion Function, an electronica trio, is tipped to win and win big, and so get to perform a victory concert. However, this will be a big win too for the backers of the Oblivion Function, the Movers, and there are plenty of other factions on the island who do not want that to happen. So, another band needs to be found to defeat Oblivion Function and there is only one band capable of doing that, Betwixt, one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed groups on the island. Only Betwixt split up over a decade ago and nobody knows exactly why. If somebody—by which we mean the Player Characters—is to get Betwixt back together, they are going to have to track down the four members, find out why they split, and get them to make up and put aside their differences enough to perform together once again. Which means a road trip back and forth across the island as the Player Characters track down one band member after another.

The four members of Betwixt are nicely detailed, each with their own views and revelations as to why the band broke up and reasons for getting back together (or not). Part of the scenario involves getting the old band tour bus back on the road too (although alternatives are suggested) as well as finding out what has become of the band members. There are some fun encounters to had on the road too, such as a big burrito-eating competition and an attack by a hit squad consisting of a Capella band whose singing has dangerously telekinetic heft to it, and the scenario will climax with the actual battle of the bands.

‘Battle of the Bands’ is the least weird and the least complex of the four scenarios in the anthology, in some ways more of a multi-character piece than the weird conspiracy shenanigans that you would normally expect with a scenario for Over the Edge. This makes it both a good introduction and a poor introduction to Al Amarja. A good introduction because the level of weirdness is relatively low, plus because the road trip format provides a really good reason for touring the island, but a poor one because the weirdness is low and because the introduction, at least for ordinary visitors to the island, as members of the Betwixt fan club, is underwhelming. As a scenario, ‘Battle of the Bands’ has an enjoyably languid, summertime, dust and tarmac feel to it, and as an interlude from the weirdness of Al Amarja, it is just perfect.

The second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ both turns up the weirdness and has an easier means of introduction. It opens with the car they are in—either they are driving or being driven—knocking someone down in the street and a woman known as Chikutorpl appearing almost immediately out of nowhere. Then they begin finding flyers announcing the reappearance of the Winds of Change, the high-stakes pop-up casino owned by Chikutorpl where it is possible to bet your youth, your beauty, your talent, a memory, even your life… When they attend, Winds of Change lives up to its reputation as a raucous, racy event filled with strange games like hyperbolic billiards and immortal combat. Throughout the host is in a highly mercurial mood and seems to change almost every time the Player Characters see her. Whatever the outcome of their attendance, the Player Characters receive invitations to the next opening and that is when it gets even weirder. It turns out that the host both sent and did not send the invitations, because there are multiple Chikutorpls, each pursuing agendas of their own and seeming to threaten reality in the process. Successive events get more chaotic, and this begins to ripple out as multiple Chikutorpls’ plans have a greater effect upon attendee after attendee. Ultimately, it comes down to a showdown when all of the Chikutorpls on the island host their events to outdoor each other. Throughout the Player Characters can pursue their own agendas or get caught up with those of every other attendee, but the end result is likely to change them in ways they did not anticipate at the start of the scenario.

ParaCon is the most important cutting edge scientific and technological event on Al Amarja, if not in the world, and it is hosted by the leading paranormal figure on the island, Doctor Chris Seversen. In ‘Seversen’s Mysterious Estate’ the Player Characters get to attend the most exclusive high-tech event of the year, whether as bodyguards, as inventors, or simply at random! The scenario is one big party with a lot of guests and a lot going on, including the event being gatecrashed by an astral vampire (note this is not a spoiler, the author advises to tell the players at the start of the scenario about it attending the party in order to ramp up the tension) and a Presidentials wet works strike team. This is not so much a big sandbox as a highly populated sandbox with twenty-three NPCs to weave in and out of the event and several sequences of events for the Game Master to handle and run. It comes with good advice to that end, and it also provides a great set of NPCs which can be used beyond the party (that is, if they survive).

The last scenario in Welcome to the Island is ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’, which brings the Player Characters into contact with members of Al Amarja’s ruling family in a completely bonkers fashion. Everyone on the island receives a parcel containing a lifelike rubber mask of one of the D’Aubainnes, including the Player Characters. However, when anyone puts the mask on, they cannot take it off. Slowly the mask wearers begin to act like the D’Aubainnne family member they wear the mask off, so Jean-Christophe mask wearers starting teleporting short distances at random, Sir Constance mask wearers accrue wealth, and Sister Cheryl mask wearers become naturally disposed each other and feel stronger and better. The mask wearers also begin to hate the wearers of the other masks to the point that they will kill each other. As a rash of murders ripple back and forth across the island, it also becomes clear that someone is keeping a tally… ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’ best works if one of the Player Characters dons one of the masks and the scenario includes multiple suggestions as to why one or more of them would do so. Once they do, then the scenario becomes one of survival and investigation, closer to a more traditional type of scenario found in other role-playing games. The result is a disturbingly surreal end to the quartet.

Physically, Welcome to the Island is a bright, colourful book with excellent artwork. It is also well written, and the cartography is decent.

Welcome to the Island provides four good scenarios that are all different and all easy to slot into an ongoing campaign. In fact, they work better as part of an ongoing campaign because all four will have long term effects upon a campaign, as the various factions and conspiracies work out their agendas. The is exactly what the Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger needs, a showcase of just what the island of Al Amarja can deliver—stupendously surrealistic situations and wonderful weirdness backed up with good advice for the Game Master on how to handle all of that and run the scenarios too.

Over the Edge Again. Again.

Ever hear of Al Amarja? Yes, that Al Amarja. The island in the middle of the Mediterranean that everyone denies exists, ruled by president-for-life, Her Exaltedness Monique D’Aubainne, Historic Liberator and Current Shepherdess of Al Amarja? There is no way you would go there. After all, the state health care is mandatory, especially under Doctor Nusbaum’s experimental treatment programme, as is voting. Plus it is a brutal place with state control and overwatch, whether it is the seemingly ever-present members of Peace Force and their guard baboons (and if the baboons are not in Peace Force, they are everywhere), the nationalised state Total Taxis, and more. Sure, it is unrelentingly violent. There are fights on the streets and even organised in the middle of Roller Derby League matches, but nobody is allowed guns, and you really, really do not want to see what goes on in the ice skating—or maybe you do! (Since it is a full contact sport, baby, do I mean contact...) Then there are the public hangings as well as the Festival of Fate, the highlight of which is prisoners submitting themselves to Sister Cheryl’s Wheel of Fate at Temple of Divine Experience, the result of which possibly leads to the commuting of their sentence, but more likely death or torture and death. Of course, it is a commercial, trade, and scientific free-for-all, unfettered by all the regulation we have to suffer. So go to Broken Wings District for the best parties—whether to be seen amongst the elites or disrupt the event; Flowers District to party on the streets or experience that latest in Avant Garde artwork; spend time away from the island’s weirdness in the Sunken District with a fellow exile; and so much more… And there are supposed to be sorcerers and psychics on the island, Organ Grinders harvesting for their dead god, aliens, oh so many aliens, secret world bettering technologies which the corporations are hiding because they can and the same goes for cancer treatments, and more. Yes, that Al Amarja, which does not exist and never did because it is all some damned roleplaying game, Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger from back in the nineties, put out by some weirdly progressive little gaming company in Minnesota, Atlas Games. So, none of it is real.

Except it is.

Al Amarja is real. You can get there if you know how. Plus, if you are American, the state language is English and everyone takes dollars. They will take every other currency too, because it gets exchanged into the state currency, zlotys. So if it is real, where is it? Well, not where it was in the nineties. Now it is not in the Mediterranean, but rather in the Atlantic. Freedom is still valued above all, but the government monitors everything—for your safety of course. Weapons are outlawed—especially firearms, but everyone carries something. Medical care is free at the point of delivery, but so is medical malpractice and there are no laws against that. Drugs are totally illegal, but the barista will add a shot of something to your coffee. In the teensies and the twenties, you will need look harder though, as Al Amarja slipped down a parallel time stream where Donald Trump got elected president and he let Nazis walk the streets of America again. Which means that it is different from back in the nineties, but the same, right? So if you have been before, you still need to get ready for the heady rush of unreality, because this is a whole other unreality even if bits still look familiar. And the reason for Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger? Call it the ultimate in disinformation sponsored by the government of the Ultimate Democratic Republic of Al Amarja. And if a piece of propaganda worked the first time, why not do it again? After all you are never going there, you were never going there, and you never will go there—and Al Amarja was and is fake, is it really there?

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is real though. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign is no mere update. Instead, this is a re-envisioning of Over the Edge with everything old, but new. It is still a roleplaying game of counter-culture conspiracy, weird science, and urban danger combining conspiratorial factions, strange fringe abilities, cutting-edge technology, and cross-reality incursions all under the watchful eye of an all-powerful anarchic State. The revision also includes the rules and the mechanics, which forgoes the complexities of the original WaRP system, in favour of a more luck-based system designed to drive the story with extra twists—good and bad. There is nothing to stop a Game Master from running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger using the original WaRP system, but it is not designed with that in mind. It should be noted that Over the Edge has always been cited as one of the progenitors of the storytelling movement in roleplaying and this latest edition very much draws from that movement. The result makes demands of both the Game Master and her players. It uses simple character creation that calls for strong conceptualisation and scope for storytelling over the course of one or more story arcs. It asks the players to be ready for said characters to encounter and accept random twists—both for good or ill—to the outcomes of their actions, whilst the Game Master has to be on her toes ready to create and suggest those twists. Lastly, the players are required to commit their dice to Over the Edge and no other campaign roleplaying game. (Fortunately, Over the Edge only uses a pair of six-sided dice each.)

A Player Character in Over the Edge can almost be anything, which includes paranormal and magical gifts. This excludes plot wrecking powers such as invincibility, invisibility, flying, phasing, mind reading, shape-changing, and others. So an ex-MMA fighter turned vigilante, a doctor searching for the cure to cancer, a burned out ex-FSB agent, a conspiracy theory seeking the truth, an extreme tourist, a would-be sorcerer with an intelligent rat sidekick, and more. A Player Character though, is always human, adheres to ‘Hollywood’ reality and tenacity of the everyman, described in broad details, fits in and interacts with the setting, and is new to the island. He is described in four features—a Main Trait, a Side Trait, a Trouble, and a Question Mark. The Main Trait is what the Player Character is or does, whilst the Side Trait is something that he can do in addition to the Main Trait. The Trouble is whatever will draw or force the Player Character to act in ways that are probably unsafe, if not dangerous, to him, but will always be interesting. The Question Mark is an aspect of the Player Character about which he is uncertain or he will break or he will transgress. For example, ‘Hard-Hearted-?’, ‘Friendly-?’, or ‘Fearless-?’. He also has a name, but this is chosen last and the other players can suggest ideas for it too.

Cheyanne Lovecraft
An ex-stripper turned sorcerer’s apprentice [Main Trait] who is Intuitive-? [Question Mark] and has a talking rat mentor [Side Trait].
Trouble: Cannot resist a sob story

In addition, a Player Character has a Level. In fact, everything in Over the Edge Third Edition has a Level, ranging from first to seventh. So this is not just a Player Character’s capabilities, but also locations, backgrounds, opponents, and story arcs. What the Level does is set the degree of challenge that a Player Character will face in comparison to his own capabilities, and a Player character will typically match that. So a First Level Story Arc is about ordinary people in over their heads, a Third Level Story Arc is about notable experts in their fields, even powerful, who can get into trouble as much as they can out, whilst a Fifth Level Story Arc is about characters beyond human. Sixth and Seventh Levels are godlike and out of reach of a Player Character. Typically, the default in Over the Edge Third Edition lies at the lower end of the scale. Opponents, or Game Master Characters, are on a similar scale as Player Characters, whilst locations and backgrounds get progressively weirder the higher up they are on the scale. Where a Player Character sits on that scale with regard to the world of Al Amarja around him has an influence on the mechanics of Over the Edge Third Edition.

Mechanically, in Over the Edge Third Edition, a player does not so much roll dice as ‘cast lots’, and lots are cast only when the outcome matters and then really to encompass everything in what the Player Character is attempting to do. Thus, sneak into a warehouse to obtain a sample of Voo, the drug that makes temporarily forget everything or get away from the Charters, the independent band of pirates that predates the United States and only men can join (so technically women are men in the Charters), that is one roll. If the roll is a success, then fine. If a failure, then maybe other rolls are called for. What a player needs to do in either situation is cast his lots and aim to get seven or eight, or more. That is a success.

If a Player Character is of a higher Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, his player gets rerolls and he rerolls one or more dice, but must keep the result. If a Player Character is of a lower Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, the Game Master gets rerolls that the player must make and keep the result. If the Levels are equal, then there are no rerolls. Casting lots also generates twists. Each three rolled when casting lots, generates a bad twist, whilst each four generates a good twist. So it is possible to roll one good twist or one bad twist; a ‘Lightning Bolt’ or two threes, which can a two bad twists or a double-bad twist; a ‘Twist Tie’, meaning a good twist and a bad twist’; or a ‘Crazy Eight’ and two good twists or a double-good twist. It is also possible to fail a casting of the lots and still have a good twist or succeed and cast lost with a bad twist. Whatever the nature of the twist, the Game Master brings something new and interesting into play, this perhaps being the capacity that the Game Master can have when running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger. In addition, the players can have access to Karma which is shared between them and also allows a reroll. Together they can only share one use of Karama, but since it can be regained whenever doubles are rolled, it is always better to use it than not.

Combat uses the same casting lots mechanic. The primary outcome of a bad twist in combat is damage. Three strikes and a Player Character is possibly dying, and unless it comes from a strange, alien, or paranormal source, healing is slow. Depending upon their status and potency, Game Master characters can have one or more Saves, Game Master fiats which enables them to shrug off damage.

A good third of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is dedicated to Al Amarja. This covers Al Amarja and the outside world, the presence and role of the state, culture media and media, and more. Every district is detailed, including why somebody might go there and what can be seen there, before the book details the gangs, groups, organisations, and more. Each one comes with an expanded explanation and advice for the Game Master as to how they can be used because ultimately, the Game Master is free to use them as she chooses, to pick and discard them as needed, and in the process, make Al Amarja hers and thus different to that of another Game Master. On the downside, this does mean that the island and its weirdness is densely presented, but on the plus side, the Game Master can in part tailor the island, its conspiracies, and its weirdness to the Player Characters and what is driving them.

For the Game Master there is further advice on running the new edition of Over the Edge, this in addition to the advice that appears throughout the book, as well as on engaging the Player Characters, creating Game Master Characters, to what degree she should be preparing her game, and advice in general. Like much of the rest of the book, it is accompanied by commentaries from both of the authors and there is also a full scenario, ‘The Sun Queen Must Die’. It is designed as an introductory one-shot, in which the players should create characters coming to Al Amarja in search of a reclusive guru. Their chance to meet him takes place at Sad Mary’s Bar & Grill, known for its girl fights and radical arts performances, at the height of an unsurprisingly adult Passover celebration. Events outpace them though and potentially take a darkly weird turn…

Physically, Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger brightly and colourfully presented. The artwork is excellent, the layout a little busy in places, and the index is great. However, it takes a while for the roleplaying game as written to click. The issue is that the first fifth of the book is devoted to rules which feel out of context and difficult to quite grasp until you get to the selling point of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger and that is Al Amarja, its setting and its weirdness.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is weird and weird. It is weird because of what the setting is and what it is made up of, but it is weird because its resolution mechanic, which is designed as much to throw something else, a good twist or a bad twist, into the mix as much as can resolve any one situation. It forces players to fall back upon roleplaying and their character’s story and motivation rather than whatever stats or numbers a Player Character would normally have to rely upon. The lack of stats and numbers do make character creation incredibly simple, but incredibly challenging in making a player create a character with story potential. There are examples, all of them fully worked out, but the resulting ready-to-play Player Characters are not immediately obvious at the back of the book. Further the designers push the weirdness further than might be found in another roleplaying game by having the Game Master reveal interior elements of that weirdness to the players which their characters would not be aware of. Thus, the play of the game takes on extra-narrative elements, an artifice that enforces the sense of unreality on Al Marja.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is a darker, faster-playing, even more improbable random return to the unreality of Al Amarja. Its even more storytelling-focus and ultra-light mechanics make demands of both the Game Master and her players and consequently the degree of buy-in, whether because of those rules or the unreality of the setting, is greater than might be expected. Still, what it comes down to is that just like Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger back in 1992, what stands out in Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is Al Amarja, and that is worth overcoming whatever reservations you might have about the mechanics.

[Friday Fantasy] The Deck of Weird Things

Dungeons & Dragons has given the hobby a great many things, many of them signature things. In terms of treasures and artefacts, none more so than The Deck of Many Things. Since it appeared on page one-hundred-and forty-two of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition in 1979, The Deck of Many Things has been a wondrous thing, an artefact which dealt out fantastic gifts—both beneficial and baneful, which wrought amazing changes upon a Player Character and the world around them. These ranges from being given a beneficial miscellaneous magic item and fifty thousand Experience Points, being granted between one and four wishes, gaining an enmity between the Player Character and a devil to the Player Character losing all of his magical items—all of them and forever, having their Alignment radically changed, and being imprisoned—instantly! Once found and as each card is drawn from The Deck of Many Things, that card will change the drawing Player Character, the world about him, and the campaign itself. The Deck of Many Things is not just a wondrous artefact, but very probably, a box/bag—whatever it came in, of chaos.

Over the last forty years, The Deck of Many Things has always been part of Dungeons & Dragons, from edition to edition, and in the twenty-first century, there have been numerous attempt to turn The Deck of Many Things from the description in a rulebook into the handout of all handouts—an actual physical Deck of Many Things. Some of them are, like Green Ronin Publishing’s The Deck of Many Things, have become highly collectible and so surprisingly expensive. Of course, numerous other physical versions of The Deck of Many Things can be found—and for a whole less than what you would pay for a copy of Green Ronin Publishing’s The Deck of Many Things. The latest edition is from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, best known as the publisher of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay retroclone and its line of associated adventures, but it is not as The Deck of Weird Things.

As an in-game artefact, The Deck of Weird Things is designed to be left in the collection or library of some wizard, the point being that it should be found with some relative ease rather than being secreted away under a mound of treasure in a deep dungeon. It consists of a deck of fifty-two cards, but when found, there will be between two and twenty cards missing, these having been drawn by a previous finder of The Deck of Weird Things. As soon as anyone finds the box or bag containing The Deck of Weird Things, they know what it is, how it works, and that its rules bind all those who find it. These are simple—three or more persons must be present to draw from The Deck of Weird Things, they must all agree to draw, they must agree to draw the same number of cards, and that it must be shuffled before drawing. Then cards are drawn one-by-one, the effects described on each card taking place, and once they have, each card disappears, so further depleting The Deck of Weird Things.

So what effects might happen when a Player Character draws a card? The drawer’s hair—all of it, becomes brittle, inflexible, and like straw; a particularly frail and elderly person becomes obsessed with the drawer and joining the party, and generally though not of any real use, grants a bonus to reaction rolls when present; the drawer’s player must swap their drawer’s highest ability score with the lowest; the drawer can buy one single item or service for free; the drawer is immune to poisons and diseases; once everyone has drawn their cards, the current drawer can choose to draw more just for himself; and suddenly, duplicates appear of those drawing cards, but they do not want to attack their respective drawers, but go and settle down and live an entirely mundane life! There is a huge variety of effects in The Deck of Weird Things, some obviously mechanical, some world related, and so on, and given that each card disappears after having been drawn and taken effect, they are extremely unlikely to see them repeated unless there are multiple copies of The Deck of Weird Things in a game world. Further, given the number of effects in The Deck of Weird Things, its effects are still unlikely to be duplicated even if it turns up in an entirely different campaign.

The Deck of Weird Things requires some preparation before play. For this, two standard decks of playing cards are required. One is used to determine the category, that is, the page to refer to, whilst the other to random determine which of the four possible effects given on the page come into play. As per The Deck of Weird Things, cards are removed from the first deck to reflect cards actually disappearing after being drawn from The Deck of Weird Things.

Essentially, The Deck of Weird Things is a book of—not tables—but of one big table. One big table with what is effectively over two hundred entries. These are divided into categories, one category per page, and four entries per category. These are clearly presented on each page, so that that process from drawing a card to determine the category to drawing a card to determine the specific effect all plays out fairly quickly.

Physically, The Deck of Weird Things is a sturdy, digest-sided book. It is well written and there are nicely done standard deck of playing cards-themed illustrations of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay signature figures dotted throughout the book. However, the look of the book is pedestrian at best. Not so, the cover, which is a really attractive piece depicting the actual The Deck of Weird Things. The extra slipcover for The Deck of Weird Things is very nice, but entirely optional.

The Deck of Weird Things offers exactly what it promises—a means to change a campaign, to add random effects, to upset the proverbial apple cart, and to add weird effects to campaign. It will do that, and if that is what you as the Game Master want for your campaign and your players are happy with that, then fine, certainly add The Deck of Weird Things to change, potentially really change your campaign. And it should be noted that this does not have to be a campaign just for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay—The Deck of Weird Things will work for any Old School Renaissance retroclone, just as it would work for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition.

However, there is just one reason why you would not add The Deck of Weird Things to your campaign—and that is price. The Deck of Weird Things was released as a fundraiser and so is correspondingly expensive, and even more expensive with the now-unavailable limited-edition slipcover which goes with it. Notably, even the publisher does not think that this book is worth its purchase price and for its price, you almost wish that The Deck of Weird Things was actually a copy of The Deck of Weird Things and not a book. Such a thing would really work to entice your players and their characters, to tempt them with ultimate power, or ultimate ruin. Such a physical object would be magical in terms of game play, whereas drawing ordinary playing cards and referring to a big table, not so much. To be fair though, The Deck of Weird Things is not a deck of cards and was never intended be a deck of cards. It is though, given its price, more of a collector’s item than an actual supplement you would bring to the table.