Grok?!ier

Grok is a monument to the folly of man. Technomancers pushed their study of the sciences and the arcane to its utmost and saw a way to harness the universe itself. For then Grok was a hollow world, formed around the rippling black mass of negative space known as the Voidstar from which the Technomancer were able to draw mana that in turn was used to develop trans-dimensional travel and contract the Simulacrum, a jigsaw-like spherical space station in turn encapsulated and revolved about the planet—just as Grok revolved around the Voidstar. Man entered a golden age of power and prosperity and Grok welcomed visitors from across the dimensions. Then a malfunction occurred in the harness that connected to the Voidstar, rupturing and unleashing untapped mana. In the Cataclysm, raw mana ruptured the planet and Grok cracked and split, marking enormous rifts in its surface, swallowing continents whole and ripping others free to float above the surface whilst the Simulacrum became unmoored. Parts of it snapped off and fell to the surface of Grok. The raw mana also rendered classical thaumaturgy unreliable and made technomancy inert or corrupt. In the Aether, the Domain beyond the planet’s atmosphere, bands of pirates and pillagers raid and pick over settlements often terrified by aliens discovered during colonisation. The Simulacrum—or the remaining parts of it—continues to revolve around Grok, the thrusters holding it up corrupting the surface of planet with the radiative phosphorescent twilight from recycled mana. The diverse inhabitants of the Simulacrum live under the merciless control of an A.I. to ensure their survival, though a few cyberpunks work to overthrow its control. The Hovering Isles are the lands formed from the parts of Grok’s floating crust after the Cataclysm, as yet not fully mapped, but home to the isolated Islanders who live on the underside to protect themselves from the radiation from the Simulacrum. This means that the Wastelands on the planet below form the Islanders’ sky. The Wastelands make up the planet’s surface, home to nomadic Vagabonds who trade with the Hovering Isles and often have mutations due to exposure to Simulacrum above. More corrupted are the Underlings who live in the Underworld of tunnels, caves, bunkers, research facilities, aquifers, and chasms that thread and shift throughout the subsurface of Grok. The worst of the monstrosities in the Underworld are found in the Underworld closest to the Voidstar, but on the inside surface of the Underworld facing the Voidstar is the Nether. This is a megacity home to Voiddwellers known as Lesser Ones who work towards to summoning the Great Ones from the obsidian spires of their city, The Nether. Grok is a broken planet.

Grok is the setting for Grok?!, a weird Science Fantasy roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic wonder and exploration. It was originally published as a fanzine in 2022, but has now been developed into a full roleplaying game. This includes sample Player Characters, advice for the Game Master, rules for playing solo, and guides to each of the regions of Grok, including adventure tips, sample locations, and tables to create more. None of the descriptions of the peoples or places are canonical so much as examples that the Game Master can use as is or alter as needed. All of which is accompanied by the same great artwork that sold the original fanzine.

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 an Aspect—a word or phrase—each for his Personality, Motivation, Background, Trouble, and Appearance Traits, plus five Assets. These Assets are Outfit, Accessory, Weapon, Oddity, and either Magic, Vehicle, or Companion. A player is free to chose these as he likes, but he can also roll on the given tables for all of them. Grok?! includes twenty ready-to-play re-generated Player Characters.

Pythagoras Powell
Physical d8 Mental d4 Social d6
Personality: Bigoted
Motivation: Seize Power
Background: Gambler
Trouble: Hunted
Appearance: Illusory
Outfit: Extendable Kilt
Assets: Power Fist, Nanobot Shirt, Star Charts, A Pessimistic Hologram trained as a Torchbearer.

Mechanically in Grok?!, to have his character undertake an action, his player declares his Intention, narrates the Action, and if necessary, determines the Outcome with the roll of an appropriate Attribute die. If the maximum is rolled on the die, it explodes and can be rolled again and the result added to the current total. If the result is between one and two, the Outcome is ‘No, and…’ something Detrimental happens; between three and four and the Outcome is ‘No, but...’ something else Beneficial happens; five and six and the Outcome is ‘Yes, but…’ something else Detrimental happens; seven and eight and the Outcome is ‘Yes...’ and the result is as intended; and nine and over, the Outcome is ‘Yes, and…’ something else Beneficial 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. If a roll is failed, it can be pushed, and pushed again, until the roll is a success. However, each time the roll is pushed, the Player Character suffers a detriment. Whenever a Player Character suffers a detriment, whether due to a Pushed roll or a failure to prevent a Threat, he suffers a Condition. This occupies an Asset Slot, and when a Player Character suffers so many Conditions that all of his Asset Slots are full, one of his Attributes suffers a Debilitation and is reduced by one step. When an Attribute would be reduced below a four-sided die, the Player Character is dead.

Combat in Grok?! is an extension of these rules, except that Grok?! phrases it in terms of dealing with Threats. The aim is to apply a Condition, and even a Debilitation, to an opponent if attacking and avoiding them 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, amongst other rules. They include alternative attributes, Supply dice, NPC conversion from other roleplaying games, opposed rolls, and more.

There is advice and commentary on this edition of Grok?! as well as the previous edition, throughout the rulebook, but the specific advice for the Game Master begins with a short discussion of safety tools, how to use both Aspects and Assets in play, define NPCs (this can be as simple as a single Aspect or as relatively complex as a Player Characters), an examination of Benefits that can be gained and Detriments that can be opposed, and then how to define a scene with locales and events, motivations extending from the latter. There are tables for random locales and events or random locale and event prompts. The advice is relatively light and it is somewhat unbalanced by the rules and procedure for running and playing Grok?! solo. These are built around an adventure loop that initially revolves around establishing and playing a series of scenes before using them to formulate a plot and then check to see if the plot is true or not. If not, more scenes are played through and the veracity of the plot checked again. At this point a capstone scene can be played to bring the plot to a climax. More attention is paid to the solo rules, but at the same time, the Game Master can use them as a tool towards creating plots too.

More than half of Grok?! is dedicated to the world of Grok itself. Attention is paid to all of the planet’s six domains—the Aether, the Simulacrum, the Hovering Isles, the Wastelands, the Underworld, and the Nether—and how each caters to different styles and types of adventures. For example, adventures in the Aether, set in space beyond Grok’s atmosphere, are about survival, discovery, alien horror, and Science Fiction, whilst adventures on the Hovering Isles, set on floating islands lit only by the dim reflected light from the Wastelands above, focus on isolated islands, their cultures, and breaking their taboos. Every domain has adventure tips, sample regions and scenes, notable NPCs, tables to generate prompts and ideas, and touchstones. The latter comprises a list of books, films, games, and music that inspired the domain. It gives an abundance of potential further reading and watching for the whole of Grok and Grok?!.

Grok?! is rounded out with a scenario, ‘The Thesis of Mr. Person Hugh Mann’. This will take the Player Characters across Grok at the bequest of a shrimp piloted mechanoid known as Mr. Person Hugh Mann to locate and rescue his Field Teams, which happen to be small contingents of shrimp hiding in unique headpieces. It is fast-paced, over-the-top, gonzo affair that showcases the different Domains and playstyles of the planet.

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 bewinged jet bike down a street. The artwork is truly excellent and hopefully future releases will feature more of it.

What sold the original version of Grok?! was its artwork. However, as good as the artwork was, and as well as it showed the reader how fantastically weird and gonzo the world of Grok was, it did not leave enough room for the author to tell the reader what the world of Grok was like. Grok?! Second Edition—a full roleplaying game rather than a mini-roleplaying game—has the room for that. It can both show and tell the reader what the world of Grok is like, and it does. Grok?! Second Edition brings the roleplaying game’s weird post-gonzo apocalyptic setting to life and provides the tools with which the Game Master can make it her own. If you dismissed the original Grok?! as unfulfilled potential, then take a look again.

—oOo—

The Kickstarter for Grok?!, Second Edition can be found here.

Gnashers & Nazis

Punching Nazis. Shooting Nazis. Blowing up Nazis. Setting Nazis on Fire. Scaring Nazis. Biting Nazis. Then feeding on their blood. It is 1943 and as Hitler brings about his dire plan to create Werewolf soldiers, the British government decides to strike. Not with its brightest and its best, but its darkest and its worst. Under the command of F.A.N.G., a single RAF bomber will drop six crack commandos onto Paris in their drop-coffins. Each drop-coffin contains a vampire. Their mission? Cut a bloody swathe across the City of Light, kill Nazis and feed on their blood. Once enriched, they are to storm the Eifel Tower and climb to its top where Hitler has his personal Zeppelin moored. Once aboard, they are to kill Hitler, drink his blood, and stop his Nazi werewolf programme. This is Inglorious Basterds meets The Suicide Squad in a sanguinary splatterfest in an alternate World War 2 and the setting for Eat the Reich. This is a pulp-action horror one-shot storytelling roleplaying game or a scenario with some roleplaying rules attached, published by Rowan, Rook, and Decard, best known for Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath. Intended as a fun and cathartic punch-up of a game of evil action delivered on an even greater evil, Eat the Reich does not so much wear its heart on its sleeve as bare its fangs and tell you to hold still whilst it bites you.

To be fair, the elevator pitch for Eat the Reich, as hard as it punches, it is not the first thing that grabs the reader. What grabs the reader is the crazed eyes staring out of the cut-out in the front cover. After that, it is the colours used—vibrant swathes of neon pink, yellow, and blue that continue right through the length of Eat the Reich. This is technicolour in all of its comic book exuberance and brio, that in case of the front cover hides a frightened looking monster. And it is monsters that Eat the Reich makes a case for playing, noting that it is monsters preying on monsters that are even more monstrous. It includes the by now traditional advice on safety at the table, covering the X-Card and Lines and Veils, but goes beyond that to ask the Game Master and her players what is acceptable in their game. Anti-hero vampires invading occupied France, feeding on blood for the power it gives, killing and feeding fascist, are all fine. Murdering innocent civilians and acts of fascism are definitely reserved for the villains of the piece. Although there are boundaries that it definitely sets—primarily sexual violence and violence against children—Eat the Reich examines others to help guide a playing group what is and is not acceptable at its table taking into account religious sensibilities as well. It backs this up with an ‘Evil Calibration Checklist’ that a group can work through before play.

Unfortunately, the response of some to this advice—which goes further than most roleplaying game—is to see it as unnecessary moralising, especially in a roleplaying game that only runs to seventy or so pages. Perhaps in a longer roleplaying game it might not have been so prominent. On the other hand, it is not bad advice and in the context of the game, it is really only going to ask everyone to think about their limits and their expectations. And ultimately, like any advice, the Game Master and her players are free to accept it or reject it as is their wont.

Although there is advice on creating Player Characters or rather adapting the pre-generated ones, Eat the Reich really is about playing its six pre-generated Vampire Commandos. They consist of Iryna, a noble woman who is a crack shot and wields a mesmerising dark glamour; Nicole, resistance fighter and saboteur who likes blowing things up; Cosgrave, Cockney spiv and necromancer on the run from East London’s undead mafia; Chuck, a fan of cowboy films pulled out of prison to go on the mission; Astrid, ex-fighter pilot with a parasitical soul wrapped round her heart who can command spirits and hunts with a greatspear; and Flint, a half-human, half-bat who can fly and rarely speaks.

Each Vampire has seven stats—Brawl, Con, Fix, Search, Shoot, Sneak, and Terrify—rated between one and four. He will also have some equipment each marked with a number of use boxes; four Abilities, some of which require the expenditure of Blood, some of which require a player to roll dice and assign a Special result to them; Advances when he learns from the campaign against the Nazis; and Injury boxes. For example, Iryna has an ‘Exquisite Hunting Rifle’ which grants an extra die when she is elevated; a ‘Magic Cavalry Sabre’ which grants a bonus when she charges with it; ‘Explosive Runes’ that wok better if concealed; and ‘Cigarettes taken from the pockets of a hanged man’ to smoke and regain two Blood. Her Abilities include ‘Dark Glamour’ to mesmerise those nearby with her unearthly appearance; summoning a swarm of bats under her control with ‘Night’s Willing Servants’; and reducing a Threat’s Attack rating by one with ‘Deadeye Shot’. Her Advances include ‘Hell’s Ravenous Fire’, ‘Enervation of the Soul’, and ‘Mantle of the Fell Beast’, whilst her Injuries are randomly determined, which might be ‘Suit Torn’ or ‘Abdominal Puncture’, ‘Shoulder Injury’ or ‘Arm Removed’, and so on. Each Vampire’s character sheet is easy to read and comes with a great illustration.

Mechanically, Eat the Reich uses the HAVOC Engine. To have his Vampire undertake an action, a player rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to an appropriate stat plus any bonus dice from an item of equipment used or an Ability. The Game Master rolls a number of dice equal to the current Threat or Attack rating. Results of four and five count as a Success each, whilst a six counts as a Critical. There are multiple ways in which a player can now spend his Vampire’s Successes and Criticals. If the situation has an Objective, they can be spent to advance it; to counter a Threat and reduce it; to active a Special; to feed on a Nazi; and to defend against an attack. When defending, a Success counters a Success rolled by the Game Master, whilst a Critical counters a Critical. A Critical can also be used as a Special to activate various Abilities. Any Success or Critical not defended against like this means that the Vampire suffers an Injury, and if he suffers too many Injuries and dies, he can at least go out in a ‘Blaze of Glory’ with one last roll of a bigger dice pool. Blood can also be spent to heal a Vampire. Lastly, feeding on Nazi blood fills up a Vampire’s Blood which he can subsequently spend to active various Abilities.

In addition to rolling the dice and assigning the dice, what a player is expected to do with each Success or Critical is narrate the outcome and describe the actions of his vampire. Once per session, if a player rolls two Successes or fewer, he can instead narrate a flashback scene of a prior mission which somehow helps this one and reroll all of the dice again.

There is a definite loop to the play of Eat the Reich. A Vampire needs Blood and thus needs to feed on Nazis, in order to have Blood to activate Abilities or heal himself. So, he needs to keep a flow of Blood going from scene to scene, action to action, but this has to be balanced against the needs of an individual scene, whether that is reducing a Threat and thus its capacity to Attack the Vampires or work towards an Objective. Plus, he also has to counter the Attack rolls made by the Threats to prevent himself from being Injured. However, when a Vampire lands in his Drop Coffin, he has no Blood, as it has been used to heal him from the drop, which means that his player has to make Successful rolls in order to get Blood to get the play loop running. It does make for a slow start to the action.

The play of Eat the Reich is one big mission. Essentially, rampaging across Paris until the Vampires get to the Eifel Tower and ascending to the final confrontation against Hitler. After the briefing and the coffin drop, this takes place across three sectors of Paris. This is a comic book version of Paris rather than an historical recreation, but then having already thrown the Vampires into the mix, it not being historically accurate is hardly going to break immersion. Working their way across three sectors, the Vampires will start off in somewhere like the Place de la Sirène where there are families and bistros and the only threat they will face are police patrols, their Objective being to get out of the open and into cover. In Sector 2, they might have to get through ‘The German Technology Pavilion’ and get out the other side. They will face Stahlsoldat, half-men, half-machine warriors, but will also have the opportunity to find loot such as a ‘Prototype Beam Emitter’ and achieve secondary Objectives such as powering up a weapons platform. As the Vampires move from sector to sector, the locations become more interesting and complex, including a chance for the Vampires to team up with the Resistance at the ‘Le Cochon Noir’ and battle magically-animated suits of armour and use medieval weaponry in the ‘Museum of European Warfare’! Eventually, the Vampires will make it to the Eifel Tower and hopefully defeat his minions and kill Hitler.

Physically, Eat the Reich is a riot of colour. This is used in such a way that it does not impede the legibility of the text, which is clear and well written.

Eat the Reich is a one-shot. Two or three session’s worth of play and the playthrough is done. Whilst there are suggestions for sequels, including going up against Churchill—for unfortunate historical reasons—and perhaps they might want to play it again, but switching vampires, a group is unlikely to play through it again. Of course, the Game Master could run it for another group. It is simple to play and as a storytelling game gives plenty of room for every player to narrate how vicious and nasty and frightening his vampire is, in a very violent comic book caper. Nevertheless, however a group decides to play, whatever boundaries they set for themselves, Eat the Reich is a blast to play, a blaze of blood and brutalising Nazis, of monsters masticating on monsters, and ripping the heart out of the Reich.

The Other OSR: Eye of the Aeons

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 Eye of the Aeons.

Eye of the Aeons is the third entry in a new series of scenarios for Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council begun with Whalgravaak’s Warehouse and continued with The Hand of God. 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. Eye of the Aeons lives up to these tenets, in that it is a dungeoncrawl that takes place in a single castle location, but arguably fails to live up to these tenets by not actually being set in the city of Troika, but in the rubbish and detritus strewn wastes beyond the city’s extensive walls. The location is the Manse of Mirrors, a walled castle consisting of seven domes and three towers that is home to Queen Yanwa of the Cyclopes. It is of particular interest to the Wizards of the College Illuminate, a minor school of magic in the city of Troika, because it also houses the Eye of the Aeons, a mysterious prism of immense power said to be cause of the Red Eye Curse that afflicts some of the college’s members. ;Victims of this curse randomly shoot a fire bolt that pierces armour, which makes them a danger to others. ;Queen Yanwa of the Cyclopes also suffers from the Red Eye Curse, but is rumoured to dole out an elixir that cures or at least alleviates the ailment, attracting many sufferers, known as ‘Burning Eye Pilgrims’ to the manse in the hope of relief. Unfortunately, Queen Yanwa has been beset by rebellion, not once, but twice. The Cyclopes’ former servants, the Anthropophagi, which have four arms and hands and no legs, so always walk on their hands, a single eye and a mouth in their stomach, and no head, have rebelled and set up their own kingdom in the manse, where they squabble and fight, and regularly hold elections to see who the new Jub-Jub will be. Worse, Yorg the Usurper has dethroned Queen Yanwa, and studies the Eye of the Aeons in hopes that it will repower his golden barge and enable him and his compatriots to escape to the Outer Spheres where he hopes they will be safe from the fate ordained for him. Add in rumours of a Chaos Godling at the heart of the manse, a missing wizard’s apprentice, and treasures said to be hidden within its walls, and the Manse of Mirrors sounds like an intriguing place to visit and explore.

Getting the Player Characters to the Manse of Mirrors requires some set-up. Several hooks are given, ranging from shattering the mirrors in the manse to prevent something terrible from approaching this sphere to finding a cure to the Red Eye Curse by asking Yorg the Usurper. One or more of these can be used to drive the Player Characters to explore the manse and interact with its factions, who though opposed to each other maintain a rough truce between themselves, barring the odd raid or Queen Yanwa’s Cyclopes deciding to turn the mighty weapon atop the Gun Tower on somewhere in the Manse. That said, the ; obvious starting point and entrance into the Manse is not as clearly signposted as it could be and the factions, the relationships between them. and what they want are not as clearly explained as they could be. Which is a pity because it hinders the set-up process and getting the Player Characters involved in Eye of the Aeons.

The likelihood is that the Player Characters will begin at the Burning Eye Pilgrims’ Camp in one of the ruined tower, though there are other options as how they might enter the Manse. Here they can pick up rumours, interact with the members of the various factions, and begin to learn more about the situation within the Manse. Beyond this the grounds of the manse are split between a very large pond and an equally large, but overgrown garden. The pond is dominated by the boathouse, home to the rowdy Anthropophagi, and the blind boatwoman who sees beauty in ugliness and ugliness in beauty and cleanliness, and who prefers to be paid in trinkets and eyes. The garden is an oasis of calm by comparison. The Manse, though, is dominated by its nineteen towers, many of them in ruins, some of them containing mounds of rubbish and rubble, and some home to the rival factions of the Cyclopes. Others though house sets of mirrors, set up in differing fashions, sometimes to hold an object in place between them, sometimes to hold something or someone within. The mirrors form the major magical element of the scenario and finding the way to operate them will grant access to some of the secrets in the Manse of Mirrors.

There are some nasty surprises to be found and dangers to be encountered in the walls of the Manse of Mirrors, but Eye of the Aeons is not a scenario that drips with menace or suffers a sense of impending doom. Rather, the Manse of Mirrors feels forlorn, run down, and forgotten, the last refuge of a fallen Queen, that the Player Characters can explore and pick over, perhaps siding with one faction or another as they attempt to fulfil their objectives within the manse. This will expose them to the weirdness and wonder to be found in the Manse of Mirrors.

The scenario is supported by stats the various faction members in the Manse of Mirrors, as well as the enemies that the Player Characters might face. There is a list of new equipment too, but many of the items to be found within the manse’s walls are drawn from the Troika! rulebook.

Physically, Eye of the Aeons is very well presented. The layout is tidy and the artwork is excellent.

Eye of the Aeons is far from a bad adventure, but in comparison to other scenarios for Troika! and its ‘1:5 Troika Adventures’ series, it does not grab the reader and make him want to run it. Unlike the first two entries in the series, it lacks the enthrallment of a good elevator pitch and its set-up needs development itself to motivate the players and their characters to want to explore the Manse of the Mirrors. None of that is beyond the ability of a good Game Master to fix, and if that is done, Eye of the Aeons is a quiet, eerie manse meander punctuated by hullabaloo and horror.

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.