Roleplay Relief I

Since 1985, Red Nose Day has been a biennial fixture here in the United Kingdom, a telethon originally set up to support famine relief in Ethiopia. In the almost thirty-five years since, it has raised over £1 billion, but in general ignored by the roleplaying industry. In 2019, that changes thanks to Simon Burley. Best known as the co-creator of the first British superhero roleplaying game, 1984’s Golden Heroes and a dedicated attendee of gaming conventions up and down the country—as evidenced in Conventional Thinking, Simon Burley has got several of United Kingdom’s gaming luminaries who together contribute to Role Play Relief. This consists of a two volume set. One is Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book, subtitled ‘For those who know NOTHING about Table-Top Role-Playing Games (but would like to know more)’, the other is Role Play Relief: The Experts Book, subtitled ‘For those who know EVERYTING about Table-Top Role-Playing Games (or THINK they do!’, and the proceeds from the sales of both will be donated to Comic Relief.

As the title suggests, Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is designed as an introduction to the hobby and to roleplaying for anyone who is interested and knows nothing about either. As well as providing said introduction, it comes with three complete roleplaying games, three adventures, a history, a ludography, a glossary, and more. All of this content comes in a thick paperback and is donated by Simon Burley, JPete Cakebread, John Dodd, Ed Jowett, A. J. Kear, Paul Mitchener, Epistolary Richard, and Baz Stephens, with art by Claire Peacey, Jonny Gray, C. Michael Fanning, Sophia Michailidou, Rick Hershey, and Storn Cook.

Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book gets off to a jaunty start with Simon Burley introducing the concept of roleplaying and smartly leading the reader, step-by-step, into their first roleplaying game. Simon’s voice shines through here, the jolly patter of a man who attends convention after convention—not all of them dedicated gaming conventions—and encourages members of the public to play in his games. The game in question is Simon’s own d6 Hack. This is a fantasy roleplaying game a la Dungeons & Dragons, but one based upon The Black Hack. Thus, this is a Class and Level with four Classes—Warrior, Thief, Priest, and Conjurer—with character actions being decided by rolls against the character’s attributes. Now where The Black Hack and its derived roleplaying games employ a twenty-sided die for this process, d6 Hack uses a roll of three six-sided dice. This makes the game easier to pick up and less obtuse in its obvious use of funny shaped dice.

Very quickly, the rules cover actions, combat, and magic in as straightforward a manner as possible. A character sheet is provided for each Class as well as a ready-to-play example, so that the Referee can provide sheets for the players to roll up characters of their own or just grab one and play. This leads up to ‘One of Clerics is Missing’, a short rescue mission the type of which veterans will be familiar with. It amounts to no more than a ten-location dungeon which should provide between a hour and two hours’ worth of play. Certainly a veteran will pick this up without any difficulty, whereas although a neophyte Referee will be slightly more challenged, the author leads him through the process and gives him advice and pointers along the way. Beyond the adventure, the d6 Hack comes with some advanced rules, including monsters, more spells, and rules for experience and going up in Level. Overall, this is a nicely done start to the book, although perhaps a short solo adventure could have been included to get the reader playing and help him learn the rules?

Having given the reader his first roleplaying game, Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book delves into the history of the hobby with John Dodd’s ‘In the beginning…’ It is a brief introduction, before exploring a few games to choose from, all of them in print. It is very light with just a few choices being highlighted across a few genres. Fantasy is the main focus here, which is understandable given the popularity of the genre, but it is at the cost of other games being included. ‘RPG Genres’ by Paul Mitchener follows a similar pattern, but provides the reader with a slightly deeper examination of how roleplaying presents certain genres, but with less of an emphasis on particular roleplaying games. ‘How Actual Play came to shine a light on the hobby’ by Baz Stevens explores how a relatively recent development in the roleplaying hobby—the recording of roleplaying sessions and campaigns for viewing or listening by the general public—has become both its flagbearer, to the point that the recordings are listened to by people with no interest in actually playing and people are coming to playing their first roleplaying game after listening or watching them being played. It is a good introduction to the movement, but perhaps could have made clearer some sample shows for easy reference by the reader.

Donated by Ed Jowett of Shades of Vengeance, the second of the roleplaying games in Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is Era: Lyres. This is a fantasy game in which the players take the roles of barbarians, bards, rogues, and warriors in a traditional medieval setting, that of the city of Yarnolth. Known for its innumerable number of taverns and city squares where the practitioners of Lyres’ arts, that is, the player characters, can pitch up and spin their yarns for potential profit. They must dress the part; they cannot profess to using magic—divine intervention is believable, but arcane arrows are not; avoid being found lying lest they ruin their reputations and end in barroom brawls; and lastly, not be seen committing acts of murder or theft. Okay, so far, but instead actually going on adventures, the player characters will spin stories of they slew great dragons, battered bandits, obliterated ogres and trolls, and more. The more successful they are, the more they will increase their party’s Confidence Rating and thus be able to ‘perform’ at bigger and more prestigious venues.

Era: Lyres is a brilliantly clever set-up. Essentially, it has the players roleplaying characters who are telling stories about their adventures, the types of adventures which characters in a fantasy roleplaying game go on. Unfortunately, neither the mechanics—dice pools with multiple attributes—fit the setting or Era: Lyres fit the Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book. Essentially both are too complex, the first mechanically for its concept, the second conceptually for what is meant to be an introduction to roleplaying. Had Era: Lyres been included in Role Play Relief: The Experts Book, its conceptual complexities would not have been an issue.

The third roleplaying game in Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is Cakebread & Walton’s OneDice. Again, this uses a roll of a six-sided die, typically with the addition an attribute and a skill, to handle most of a character’s actions. In comparison to the earlier two roleplaying games, OneDice is very much stripped back, being a simpler game with just three attributes and a handful of skills. It adds the complication of Stunt Points, which when spent allow a character to get out of scrapes or survive a perilous situation, but provides some good examples of their use. There is a fairly knockabout feel to the rules, especially in the example of play. Accompanying the game are two scenarios. The first is a ‘The Hollow Horror’, a short fantasy adventure which is little more than a trek to face a big monster, whilst the second is ‘Raid on Graxlek 5’, a solo Science Fiction adventure. Consisting of just twenty-three entries, this has a security officer investigating a strange facility planetside and is a whole lot more interesting than ‘The Hollow Horror’. It is a pity though, that the reader has to get so far into Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book without being given an opportunity to play like this.

Rounding out Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is A.J. Kear’s ‘What does that mean? A glossary of jargon and abbreviations used in roleplaying games’. From AC and Action to Worldbuilding and XP, this provides an explanation of the many terms we use regularly in the hobby. Helpful of course, and useful should anyone want to look up a term.

Physically, Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is a a thick, digest-sized paperback, lightly illustrated and done in black and white throughout. It does need another edit and the layout is somewhat scrappy around the edges. So it feels slightly rough in places and has an amateur feel to it.

There is a lot to like to like about Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book, whether that is two good roleplaying games, the scenarios, the history, explanations, the fact that its proceeds go to charity, and so on, but there are disappointing aspects to the book too. Era: Lyres has already been mentioned as being unsuitable for a book intended to be read by anyone new to the hobby, but another is the fact that the book does not reflect the diversity of games that its various articles mention. Thus, there are is no horror roleplaying game or a Science Fiction roleplaying game—though there is a Science Fiction scenario—in the book, which is disappointing given that it would have broadened its appeal and better showcased what the industry and the hobby is capable of. Instead, what you have is three fantasy roleplaying games and two fantasy adventures when really only the one of each was needed.

In reading Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book, it feels reminiscent of a much earlier introduction to roleplaying, 1982’s Dicing with Dragons. It is not as polished of course, and in not offering a solo adventure at the start, it does not offer quite as easy an introduction to the hobby. Yet Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book provides a broader outlook on the hobby and provides more options in terms of play and so provides a solid introduction to the hobby in 2019.

Role Play Relief: The Beginners Book is available for purchase here.

Batrachian Horrors & Tumorous Tubers

As the title suggests, What Ho, Frog Demons! – Further Adventures in Greater Marlinko Canton is a scenario set in the Hill Cantons, a region described as, “A Slavic-myth inspired, acid fantasy world of Moorcockian extradimensional incursions and Vancian swindlers and petty bureaucrats.” Previous releases—Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld—have focused on specific places in the region, not forgetting of course, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, the city at the heart of the Cantons. Published by Hydra Collective LLC, What Ho, Frog Demons! expands greatly upon these specific adventure locations by presenting the wilderness which surrounds all of them, that is Marlinko Canton, as a bucolic yet weird, mini-hexcrawl, infested with neatly trimmed, but sleepy villages and hamlets inhabited by smiling rustic yokels who adamantly adhere to customs, practices, and beliefs that are probably weirder than the last settlement you passed through.

Designed for a group of four to seven player characters of between Second and Fourth Level, What Ho, Frog Demons! is written for use with Goblinoid Games’ Labyrinth Lord, but of course is easily adaptable to the Old School Renaissance retroclone of your choice. It details a region roughly twenty-eight by forty-eight miles, with some fourteen fixed sites of interest; thirty-six random encounters encompassing ‘Road Riff-Raff and Other Personages’, ‘Creatures Fell and Less Fell’, and ‘Sites of the Weird’; ‘Rumours, Hearsay, and Gossip of the Rankest Sort’ and ‘Weighty Conversation’; a pair of Adventure Sites; and a bestiary and a ‘Bucolic Village Generator’. Together this gives the Labyrinth Lord the means to run the journey between adventure locations like Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Misty Isles of the Eld, and the two described within the pages of What Ho, Frog Demons!, as well as a hexcrawl-style campaign fuelled by rumours and random encounters.

Of course, What Ho, Frog Demons! can be run in multiple different ways, whether as a standalone wilderness region or as source of scenarios, encounters, rumours, and monsters to be taken apart and added to a Labyrinth Lord’s existing campaign. Really though, it is designed to be combined with Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Misty Isles of the Eld, and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko to give the Labyrinth Lord a campaign for low to mid-Level characters set in the Hill Cantons. There are numerous links to all three locations in the pages of What Ho, Frog Demons!, primarily in the rumours and conversations it gives to help the Labyrinth Lord present engaging NPCs and give hooks for her player characters to follow up. At the heart of What Ho, Frog Demons! though—and what several of the hooks point to, are its two adventure sites.

The first adventure site is ‘The Frog Demon Temple’, what the author call a ‘Saturday Night Specials’, a small dungeon designed to be played between larger, longer adventures. Running to just eleven locations, this is a damp, foetid, batrachian hell hole sitting awfully close to a Hot Hell and which suggests further dangers to be found lurking under the Hill Cantons and which is probably too tough a dungeon to throw at characters of the lower Level range that What Ho, Frog Demons! is written for. 

Where ‘The Frog Demon Temple’ is likely to offer one or two sessions’ worth of play—less if the player characters realise that it is just too tough and decide to make a run for it, the second adventure site presents a much longer, more traditional scenario in the vein of Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld. ‘Beets for the Beet God’ takes place in the village of Ctryri Ctvrt where rumour has it that a local farmer has dug up a giant beet—or beetroot—allegedly marked with a strange, face-like blemish. Other hooks are given to get the player characters there, but whatever the reason for their visiting, it really is not too far for them to go from anywhere in the Marlinko Canton. What the party will find is yet another sleepy village, one full of nicely drawn NPCs, each with their own motivations which will change over the course of the adventures. The player characters are free to wander as they wish, interact with the NPCs as they wish, and in doing so, they will discover the weirdness at the heart of the adventure. There is the possibility that they will stop the weirdness early on, but player characters being player characters…

The primary similarities between Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld and ‘Beets for the Beet God’ are structural. All three are ‘pointcrawl’ adventures—consisting of connected adventure nodes rather than a hex grid of locations and wilderness spaced in between—but where Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld are regional in size, ‘Beets for the Beet God’ is limited to just Ctryri Ctvrt and its manor house. All three use an index—or clock—to track the progress of elements or forces at the heart of the scenario. In the previous two scenarios, this was a ‘Chaos Index’, which tracked the response of those elements or forces to the player characters’ actions, but here it is an ‘Infection Index’ which tracks the progress of its threat if the player characters decline to act. Ultimately, if they decline to act, the threat escalates into one that infect the whole of the Marlinko Canton… and beyond.

‘Beets for the Beet God’ is the highlight of What Ho, Frog Demons! It is a delightfully playful satire upon the conspiracy/zombie infection genres, but one that perfectly suits the bucolic weirdness that runs throughout Marlinko Canton.

Physically, What Ho, Frog Demons! is a well-presented book. It is profusely illustrated, not quite as archly styled as Misty Isles of the Eld, but nevertheless weird, rife with rustic insularity and bucolic resentment, and involving lots of frog demons. Many of the latter verge on the adorable, possessing an almost Muppet-like cuteness, but others are twisted and freaky, infusing the canton with batrachian horror. The cartography is also good and the writing is engaging and enjoyable.

What Ho, Frog Demons! is something of a contrast to the previous two adventures, Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld. With their use of the ‘Pointcrawl’, both are tightly focused in their design to enable the Labyrinth Lord and her players to concentrate on adventuring rather than having to travel. So it feels a little odd to have what is a hexcrawl rather than a Pointcrawl for the Hill Cantons, but What Ho, Frog Demons! – Further Adventures in Greater Marlinko Canton brings the Marlinko Canton to quiet life with its parochial oddities and bucolic weirdness that together hide the horrors that lie in the garden shed and in the earth below.

Pulp Sci-Fi Jockeying

Britannia Game Designs Ltd is best known for continuing to publish Chivalry & Sorcery, the roleplaying game of medieval chivalry with an emphasis upon realism, first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It makes a complete switch in terms of both genre and realism with the recently published Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future, a roleplaying game of Pulp Sci-Fi inspired by the Saturday morning serials starring Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers, by the Skylark and Lensman novels of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and so on. Thus this is a roleplaying game of the space opera from the 1930s and 1940s, when men are real men, women are real women, and anthropomorphic tigers from the jungle planet of Venus are real anthropomorphic tigers from the jungle planet of Venus. This is a roleplaying game where a crazy, bearded scientist builds a rocket ship, gets a crew, and together they escape the bonds of Earth to find new civilisations across the Solar System. This is a roleplaying game where mankind’s first interstellar destination is a star system of multiple occupied worlds under the rule of a tyrant. This is a roleplaying game in which the men and women of the Inter-Planetary Patrol keep the space lands free of pirates, investigate mysteries, enforce interstellar law, and more. This is a roleplaying game which can do all three in a future history which takes mankind from the year 1927 to 2148.

Eighteen years in the making, it should be no surprise that being published by Britannia Game Designs Ltd, Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future, a roleplaying game of Pulp Sci-Fi uses ‘Essence’, the same rules first seen in 2011’s Chivalry & Sorcery Essence. For a character to do anything, his player simply has to roll under a Success Chance with a twenty-sided die. This target is typically the total of an appropriate attribute plus suitable skill, modified by various penalties or bonuses. Higher rolls are better than lower ones, and a critical result is scored if a player rolls the target number exactly. The penalties—known as ‘Murphy Numbers’—are quite harsh though, running from -1 for even a ‘Very Simple’ Murphy Number up to -24 for a ‘Seemingly Impossible’ Murphy Number. A player can have his character take a Risk by lowering his Success Chance and in return a +1 bonus to the roll. Although this increases the chance of the character failing, it increases—ever so slightly—the chance of a critical being rolled.

Combat uses the same basic mechanic to cover everything from punch-ups and sword fights to Colt .45 pistols and beyond—the beyond including rocket guns, atomic bullets, sliver guns, and ray guns—blasters, stunners, and disruptors. This is covered in ‘Mad Scientist Levels’—as Rocket Jocks’ Tech Levels are known—which run from the Stone Age at MSL 0 to teleportation at MSL 10. Combat takes place in thirty second rounds with characters capable of a number of actions depending upon their Agility and the size of weapon being wielded if a melee weapon and the Rate of Fire if a missile weapon or a gun. Range modifies both the roll to hit and the damage done, with damage also being modified by half the attack roll made by the player as well as half the character’s Strength if the attack was made by a melee weapon or muscle-powered missile weapon. Ray guns have needle settings that use up two shots, but which can pierce armour and wide settings to hit more targets.

Combat is the most complex aspect of Rocket Jocks, primarily because there are a lot of fiddly little technical details as to what a weapon does, how it is reloaded, and so on. Given how relatively simple the Essence mechanics are supposed to be and what Rocket Jocks’ genre is meant to be, it just feels overly complex. Conversely, the rules for starship combat are covered in barely half a page, little more than a series of modified rolls. Sadly this is more coverage than spaceships receive elsewhere in the book, such that there are no stats or deck plans of any kind. Just what kind of a rocket is a jock supposed to ride in this near future?

Rocket Jocks does devote more than a few pages to other types of technology. Not just arms and armour, but also lots of ray-powered gizmos—because, hey, this is a Pulp Sci-Fi future—vehicles of all types (except spaceships), communication devices, sensors, and just some of the best entries from ‘The Megalomaniac’s Catalogue of Cunning Contrivances’, such as the Brainstawm Incorporated Neural Scrambler and The Handee Dandee Nerve-centre-of-evil-o-matic™. Of course, every robot comes with a chance of brain madness. Lastly, there are alien healing devices and there are psionics. The latter because despite the power of rays, the power of the mind is superior to everything else (except, of course, love and a punch to the snoot). Each psionic power gives a psionicist access to a range of abilities, so Heal, Pain Block, Purge Poison, and Sustain for the Autosophy (or self-healing) psionic power, and is bought in levels that are both a character’s skill with the ability and its power. Psionic use is fatiguing, though mysterious alien devices called Sunstones can aid a their use. Overall, the psionics rules are simple enough and suitable whether running a psionics-based campaign or wanting to give them to any villain who has a preference for mind control.

Characters in Rocket Jocks are defined by nine attributes—Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Wisdom, Grit, Appearance, Voice, and Conviction. These are rated between six and fifteen, a player halving the roll of a twenty-sided die for each one and adding five to get the final value. A player’s choice of Species, Environment (the equivalent of home world and its gravity), and Background (social class) will provide some modifiers to the attributes as well as some skills. Humans are the baseline species, but others include the Tigermen of Venus, the mobile, intelligent crystals known as Electromen, the merman-like Nitholest, and the ursine June who find buying things weird. These are not the only species given in Rocket Jocks, there being more in the campaign settings. Backgrounds include not just Working Class, Middle Class, and Upper Class, but also Barbarian, Barbarian Aristocracy, and Escaped Slave so that other genre character types can be created by the players or the Game Master. Finally, a player selects a Vocation, such as Athlete, Merchant, Engineer, Solitary Inventor, Journalist, and so on. There are just eighteen of them, but really there are actually sixteen of them, since Deposed Space Tyrant and Unemployed Minion are probably best suited to NPCs. Unless of course, the Game Master is running a decidedly odd game, perhaps in the vein of Doctor Smith in Lost in Space.

Our sample character is Wilf Goadsby, a Gentleman’s Gentleman. From a Yorkshire farming family, he entered service as a lad and has accompanied his master all over the world, including into the Space Patrol. He is unnerved by it all and believes that mankind were not meant to leave the planet. Nevertheless, he is determined to make the best of it and not show his master up, whatever scraps they get into. This means that he is never without the means to make tea, press a suit, sew on a button, or serve cocktails.

Name: Wilf Goadsby
Species: Human
Environment: Normal (Earth)
Social Background: Working Class
Vocation: Soldier

Strength: 08 Constitution: 15 Agility: 13
Intelligence: 09 Wisdom: 15 Grit: 10
Appearance: 09 Voice: 12 Conviction: 14

Skills
Beguiling 2, Brawl 1, Craft (Farming) 1, Craft (Tailoring) 2, Dancing 1, Healing 1, Pilot 1, Rifle 1, Sleight of Hand 1, Sports (Lawn Bowls) 1, Survival (Temperate) 1

As well as advice for the Game Master, Rocket Jocks come with three settings, which can be used singly or as three consecutive periods in a short timeline. These take the player characters out into the Solar System, then interstellar, and finally intergalactic. All three settings come with adventure ideas, new character Species, threats, Vocations, and puns—terrible puns. There is a fair degree of gameable content around which the Game Master can create games. These are very much the most fun parts of Rocket Jocks. 

Unfortunately, Rocket Jocks can be described as physically disappointing at best. Its greyscale look feels outdated and bland, the artwork is adequate if uninspiring, and the layout scrappy and inconsistent. In places, it is so inconsistent that some of the game’s technical information is lost in a game example box such that it is incredibly difficult to find. That said, the real problem is the editing. It is simply not of a professional standard, which is disappointing given the fact that there has been an eighteen year wait for this roleplaying and really, a few weeks’ delay whilst it was in the hands of a professional editor would have made a great deal of difference.

Another problem Rocket Jocks is its untimely release. Eighteen years ago, this would have been an unusual release. Plus, it would have just been in time for release of Rocketmen, WizKids’ constructible strategy game produced in 2005. In 2019 though, Pinnacle Entertainment Group has released the Flash Gordon roleplaying game for use with Savage Worlds and Modiphius Entertainment will soon release John Carter of Mars - Adventures on The Dying World of Barsoom, so when it comes to Pulp Sci-Fi, a gamer is going to have more choice and more colourful choice.  

Rocket Jocks is designed to emulate Pulp Sci-Fi, a fairly broad, muscular genre, and it a great many ways it does this. Whether it is the discussion about ‘Ray’ technology, weapons such as ray guns and atomic bullets, the inclusion of the Deposed Tyrant and the Unemployed Minion as Vocations, the nicely done three-in-one settings, and the tone of the writing, Rocket Jocks actually has quite a bit to like. It is also obvious how fond the author is of the genre. Yet, the rules feel overly technical in places, as if an adherent sense of realism had wandered in from another roleplaying game, hampering the author’s pulp intentions. And that despite the fact that spaceships are all but ignored. The real problem though, is the physical layout and editing, which makes the book awkward to both read and use.

There are some good ideas and some fun content within the pages of Rocket Jocks, but without spaceships it feels unfinished and incomplete. Of course, a Game Master can get around such omissions as Rocket Jocks is hindered by, just as she will have to get around the disappointing layout and editing. Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future is not a terrible game, but it is one with problems and that is an issue in a hobby that expects better.

Friday Filler: Cat Tower

If have not yet had enough of cats—and if you have, why?—there are plenty of feline themed games to go around. Whether its telling their tales in Action Cats! – Spin Tales From the Secret World of Cats or trying not to get them to detonate in the distinctly mediocre Exploding Kittens: A Card Game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats or whizzing them around in murderous fashion in amusingly titled Kittens in a Blender, there are more than enough games to satisfy the cat lover in you. So one more will hardly add to the clowder and the good news is that instead of blowing them up or whizzing them to death, you are only stacking them.

Published by IDW—best known as the English language publisher of Machi Koro—folloing a successful Kickstarter campaign, Cat Tower is the dice rolling, dexterity game of cat stacking designed for between two and six players, aged six and up, and playable in no more than twenty minutes. It requires no set-up and so can be brought to the table quickly and easily.

It comes in a bright and breezy cat-themed cube of a box inside of which can be found two rulebooks, forty-two stackable Cat cards, twelve Fatty Cat cards, five dice, and twelve cat tokens. One rulebook gives the full rules, the other a pair of variants, but neither runs to more than three pages. The three dice are wooden and an inch square. Out of the box they are blank, so they do require various stickers to be applied to each of their faces. Each of the cat cards measures 2¼ by 3½ inches and is scored across its width twice such that when folded, it will stand up. One of the things a player will need to do is fold his cats when it is not his turn. The Fatty Cards are the same size, but are flat and do not have the same score lines and so do not need to be folded. Both the Cat cards and the Fatty Cat cards depict a cute cat—a very cute cat.

At the start of Cat Tower each player receives seven cat cards. One cat card is placed in the middle of the table as the base of the tower. The first player is always determined by whomever has the most cats (which usually means myself or my partner). On his turn a player rolls a die and does what the symbol on the result instructs. This can be to stack ‘One Cat’ or ‘Two Cats’; to get another player to stack one of his cats with ‘Cat Paws’; to stack a cat card upside down with ‘Dried Fish’; and place a Fatty cat on the tower and flip a token. The tokens force play order to be reversed with ‘Turn Around’; the next player to skip his turn with ‘Skip’; all of the remaining unplayed Cat cards to be redistributed between the players with ‘All Cats are Equal’; or force another player to stack one the current player’s Cat cards with ‘Cat Paws’. Any token played in this fashion is placed on the Fatty card when it is added to the tower.

Play continues until one player has managed to stack all of the Cat cards from his hand. At this point, he is either declared the winner or if multiple rounds are being played, the other players receive a penalty point for each of the Cat cards they still hold in their hands. After the agreed number of rounds have been played, the player with the fewest points is declared the winner.

Of course, a game will never progress as smoothly as that. If a player knocks a Cat card off the tower whilst stacking a Cat card, he must take two cards from the tower into his hand. If he knocks a Cat token off the tower, he takes back an additional Cat card into his hand. If another player is placing the current player’s Cat card on the tower after a ‘Cat Paws’ die result or token, it is placing player not the current player who has to take the Cat cards back into his hand. 

Physically, Cat Tower is a very attractive game with simple, cute components. The only issue is with Cat cards that might not fold very well.

Cat Tower is quick and easy and very, very light. It is undemanding and simple and it is unpretentious. It is also cute and pretty and overall a lovely little package. It is certainly worth having on the shelf for games sessions with the family. More dedicated gamers though are not going to want to bring this to the table very often. Overall, fluffy feline fun, Cat Tower is a family filler game that plays quickly and easily.

Dungeons & Dragons & Glorantha?

It would be trite to describe 13th Age Glorantha as Dungeons & Dragons does Glorantha, but for all that, there is some truth to such a description. Published by Chaosium, Inc. following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it uses Pelgrane Press’ 13th Age to bring the best elements of both Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition to 13th Age Glorantha and then tunes them to fit the setting and empower both the mechanical and narrative elements of the rules. From 13th Age comes mechanics which make each character an individual, not say unique, whilst Glorantha provides the means and reasons to interact with the world. Although the world of Glorantha is not new, it is new to 13th Age and similar mechanics, just as they are new to Glorantha. The result is something unique, but not without its issues because of it.

The most obvious issue with 13th Age Glorantha is the degree of buy-in. Not only will a playing group need a copy of 13th Age Glorantha, but also a copy of 13th Age, for 13th Age Glorantha is not a standalone product. Further, both 13 True Ways and The 13th Age Bestiary are likely to prove useful too. If a group knows nothing about Glorantha, then The Glorantha Sourcebook—funded by the same Kickstarter as 13th Age Glorantha—is all but a necessity, for 13th Age Glorantha is not a standalone rulebook in terms of mechanics or setting. The buy-in also differs depending upon if the players are coming to 13th Age Glorantha as Gloranthaphiles, fans of the late Greg Stafford’s setting of Glorantha, or if they are coming to 13th Age Glorantha as fans of 13th Age or similar Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games. The Gloranthaphiles will be dealing with a set of mechanics that are vastly different to those seen in either RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha or HeroQuest Glorantha, whereas the 13th Age devotees will be coming to the complexities of a setting like Glorantha.

The other difference between 13th Age Glorantha and other Glorantha-set roleplaying games like RuneQuest and HeroQuest, is the default campaign setting. This is ‘Chaos Rising’, in which the magical energies unleashed by the Hero Wars at the end of the Third Age and beginning of the Fourth Age, rending at the fabric of the world and allowing Chaos to seep in… Much like the Dragon Empire of 13th Age, this is a time of great upheaval and it up to the player characters to take care of the crisis upon crisis that has befallen Glorantha. The setting is still Dragon Pass, one that is wracked by war and tumult in the wake of efforts to drive the invading Lunar Empire out of Sartar. The player characters are on the verge of becoming heroes, all but Rune Masters and Rune Priests at campaign’s start, the equivalent of First Level in Dungeons & Dragons, but far more capable and powerful than starting characters in either 13th Age or RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

To a Gloranthaphile, a 13th Age Glorantha character will look like a Dungeons & Dragons character. He will have the same attributes, Armour Class rather than armour values, general Hit Points rather than hit locations, but because the characters in 13th Age are different to those of Dungeons & Dragons, so too are those of 13th Age Glorantha. What marks a 13th Age character out as different are the Icons, the Backgrounds, and the One Unique Thing. In the Dragon Empire of 13th Age, a character has a relation with two or more Icons, the thirteen great figures of the age like the Archmage, the Crusader, the Diabolist, the Dwarf King, the Elf Queen, the Emperor, the Great Gold Wyrm, the High Druid, the Lich King, the Orc Lord, the Priestess, the Prince of Shadows, and the Three—the latter being ancient evil Dragons. A character can interact with them as much as they can have an influence upon the scenario being played. Backgrounds represent a character’s skills, training, and experiences, for example, Woodsman +2 could be explained as the character having grown up in the woods and knowing to track, survive, and move in the forests. The One Unique Thing represents the one fact or feature that separates a character from any other, for example, “I am the true wielder of the Cleaver of Doom and my last blow with it will end the Thirteenth Age.”

In 13th Age Glorantha a character does not have Icons, Backgrounds, and a One Unique Thing, but Runes, Backgrounds, and a One Unique Thing. So a character’s One Unique Thing might be ‘I was destined for greatness, but failed and have been reincarnated as a Humakti Duck to avenge my death’ or ‘Since that day I got lost in the caves, I have born the Dragonewt Rune, but I do not know why.’ His Backgrounds might be Yinkini Hunter +4, Ex-Slave +2, or Voice of Orlanth +1. Runes are where 13th Age Glorantha gets slightly more complex. The Runes connect the characters to the universe, to the gods that embody them, and to the cults that worship the gods, and in game, they enable a character to engage with the world in fantastic ways, all dependant upon the type of Rune, whether that is to overcome a challenge, add an element to the story, and so on. 13th Age Glorantha goes into some detail as to the nature of each of the Runes and how they can be brought into play, giving suggestions and examples as to possible Backgrounds and Gods for each Rune, as well as examples of how each might be narrated to bring it into play. Even when a player narrates the use of a Rune, there is still the chance of a complication arising which fits the Rune being narrated.

Runes also play an active role in a character’s life, with one Rune playing a significant role from one day to the next. This is determined randomly, a process known as ‘attuning’, and half the time it will be one of the Runes a character already has, half the time it will be determined by the roll of a twenty-sided die. The result of this die roll can simply mean that the character is attuned to another Rune; to a Rune opposed to one of the character’s Runes—for example, Life versus Death, Truth versus Illusion, which can complicate the narration of either Rune; to a Rune a character already has, in which it becomes empowered and when used will grant a character a HeroQuest Gift; and lastly, to the Chaos Rune, which can have story consequences, but primarily makes any battles with Chaos all that more difficult.

One important aspect of Rune use is that they are included for narrative effect only and cannot be used in combat. This is not as bad as it sounds, since all of a character’s Feats, talents, and abilities are drawn from his Runes anyway. Another important aspect of the Runes in 13th Age Glorantha is that there are some limitations in what the Runes a player can select. Most obviously, the Fate, Infinity, Law, Luck, Magic, Mastery, and Unlife/Undead Runes are all the province of NPCs only, but whilst a player is free to select any of the other Runes, some are not supported in 13th Age Glorantha. Neither are some of their associated gods. So although a player character can have the Fire/Sky Rune, none of the Fire/Sky pantheon—Yelm, Yelmalio, Elmal, and so on—are supported. Further, whilst the focus of 13th Age is on the Air and Earth pantheons, some gods are ignored, notably Chalana Arroy, Issaries, and Lankhor Mhy. To be fair, it would be a challenge to fit the possible abilities of those cults into 13th Age Glorantha with its focus on action.

Every player character begins play with three Runes—two come from the primary god that the character worships, the other is more personal. So a Yinkin or Odalya worshipper might choose the Air, Movement, and Beast Runes, the Beast Rune being his personal Rune; a Humakt worshipper would have the Death and Truth Runes, and then perhaps the Air Rune to reflect Humakt being part of the Air pantheon, or alternatively, the Humakt worshipper might have seen too much death and so has Life Rune as his personal Rune; and an Ernalda Earth Priestess would have the Earth, Harmony, and Life Runes, but could stress which was her personal Rune. Choice of Runes also influence, if not determine which of the gods that a character worships.

Character creation begins with a player making a choice of Runes, associated god and Class, and then deciding on the character’s Backgrounds and One Unique Thing. Three Races are available to choose from—Ducks and Uz, but most commonly, Humans. The first two have their own racial powers, but Humans have a Culture to choose from, either Esrolian, Heortling, Praxian, or Tarshite. Attributes are then rolled for or assigned according to a standard array and then the player selects the various options he wants for his character.13th Age Glorantha presents a total of thirteen Classes. Five are entirely new—Berserker, Earth Priestess, Hell Mother, Humakti, and Trickster; five are transformation Classes, based on an existing 13th Age Class—Orlanthi Rebel, Rebel, Storm Voice, Troll Warrior, and Wind Lord. The other are either variants or Class updates like the Monk. (An appendix also covers alternative Classes, including those from 13th Age, Fire/Sky devotees, and Lunar devotees.) Now as much as the concept of Classes are anathema to the play of RuneQuest and Glorantha—indeed RuneQuest was one of the first roleplaying games to eschew Classes—it cannot be emphasised enough that all of the Classes in 13th Age Glorantha are deeply evocative of Glorantha.

So in order of complexity, the Orlanthi Warrior is like the Barbarian of 13th Age, inspired by the stormy spirit of Orlanth rather than rage; the Troll Warrior is similar, but his Hit Points grow from battle to battle and he builds himself into a frenzy; and Humakti are highly disciplined swordmasters sworn to destroy the undead. The Rebel is the nearest that 13th Age Glorantha has to a Rogue or Thief Class, but is much more of a sneaky, swashbuckling, charismatic warrior, one who can still get into places where he should not be; the Berserker consists of two subtypes, one of the Orlanthi pantheon, the other of the Darkness pantheon; and the Zorak Zorani Berserker is a hate-driven Troll warrior who can summon a Troll skeleton companion. The Wind Lord is a fighter who harnesses Orlanth’s power of storm and movement; the Storm Voice is akin the Sorcerer, but who uses Gather Storm rather than Gather Power to fuel its abilities; and the Storm Bull berserker is a Chaos-hating warrior with ‘berserker die’ powers which slot into the Class’ berserker die (which replaces the Escalation die). The Monk is a shield-wielding warrior from the Square Round Monastery in Nochet; the Trickster brings pratfalls to the battlefield, spreading the bad luck as much as the good luck; the Earth Priestess is a summoner of earth spirits to fight for her, who also hands out different favours according to the Class of the recipient and casts spells that control the battlefield; and the Hell Mother is a Troll summoner of unpredictable monsters and effects.

Some of these Classes are specific in terms Race, Runes, and gender. So only a female Troll can be a Hell Mother, for example. Others not so, so that a worshipper of Barntar, Odalya, Vinga, or Yinkin could be Orlanthi Warriors, Berserkers, or even Wind Lords, all dependent upon the combination of Runes a character possesses. Our sample character is a Rebel devoted to Orlanth Adventurous, a noble prince known for his courtesy and singing voice, who was forced to flee the Lunars during an uprising and lead a guerilla war against them. This has led him to take drastic actions and he has a terrible secret. In truth he was always a sly one, quite prepared to use underhanded means to get what he wants.

Name: Broyan Blacksong
Race: Human God: Orlanth Adventurous
Level & Class: Rebel (Level 1)
Cultural Trait or Racial Power: Heortling Cultural Trait.

Strength 13 (+1) Constitution 12 (+1) Dexterity 19 (+4)
Intelligence 10 (+0) Wisdom 15 (+2) Charisma 15 (+2)

Defences
Armour Class: 15 Physical Defence: 14 Mental Defence: 13
Initiative: +5 Hit Points: 21
Recoveries: 8 Recovery Roll: 1d8+1

Attacks
Melee attack +5, Dagger (1d8/1d6 Miss)
Ranged +5, Javelin (1d6/Level Miss)

One Unique Thing
I killed my father for allying with the Lunars, but I will not kill my mother for the same crime.

Runes: Air, Movement, Darkness (Personal)

Backgrounds
Guerrilla Fighter +2, Ex-Skald +2, Princely Manners +2, Secrets & Lies +2, Clan Exile +5

Class Features, Powers, & Spells
Momentum
Opening Strike
Transgress
Consistent Trouble
Flashy Blade
Freedom!

Talents
Bravado
Kennings & Killings
Rebellion

Feats
Adventurer Feat: Call on a Rune to use the Transgress talent and if the story you tell using the rune impresses the GM, you can reuse Transgress later in the day.
Adventurer Feat: When you use Bravado, gain Momentum if you don’t already have it.

Equipment
Leather Armour
Sharp knives (1d8)
Javelins × 4 (1d6)
Lyre

Mechanically, like 13th Age, 13th Age Glorantha is a d20 System roleplaying game, and so whilst it uses some elements of 13th Age, such as the Backgrounds, the One Unique Thing, powers and spells that are either used ‘at-will’, ‘per battle’, or ‘daily’, and the Escalation Die, which grants a bonus to the player characters when in battle and which rises from round to round, it adds elements of its own. Most notably, the Runes and the ability to narrate them as already mentioned and the daily need to attune them, but also changes to healing because there is no Cleric Class and the Earth Priestess does not do that (and woe betide anyone who lets the Humkati or Zorak Zorani Berserker attempt to heal them), being able to and narrating heroically coming back from the dead, notes on magical items (generally rare and the subject of heroquests rather than just being loot), and so on. In fact, there is very little emphasis on loot and treasure in 13th Age Glorantha, but then when the characters are as powerful as they are, do they really need a +2 sword? Overall, there are lots of little changes, but nothing really all that intrusive.

Although 13th Age Glorantha lists all of the creatures suitable from 13th Age, the 13th Age Bestiary, and 13 True Ways, its main focus in terms of enemies and threats are on creatures from the world of Glorantha. From Orlanthi Bandit, Orlanthi Outlaw, and Orlanthi Bandit Leader under Air to Newtling Juvenile and Newtling Grownup under Water, the various entries are organised according to the rune they are associated with. The range of creatures offered runs from the mundane, such as Baboons, bugs, and spiders, to the weird and the bizarre, like the Thanatari Cultists who use severed heads to store their powers; the Walktapus, octopus-headed humanoids who can spray poisons and gases; and the Puppeteer Troupes who perform rather than fight and are probably getting the player characters to perform and they do not even know it. Understandably given the default ‘Chaos Rising’ campaign set-up in 13th Age Glorantha, there an emphasis upon creatures associated with the Chaos Rune in its bestiary, including a table of extra features to further add to their chaos. One notable feature of the Chaos related creatures is their ability to steal the Escalation Die and use it themselves, which can just exacerbate the challenge they present to the player characters.
13th Age Glorantha does not offer a great deal of information about Glorantha as a whole. That task is left to The Glorantha Sourcebook, but 13th Age Glorantha does offer information specific to its default ‘Chaos Rising’ campaign. There are feats which tie the characters further into the world as they adventure and rise in Level. These are Aspirational Feats and are either Ancestor Feats which indicate that a character is a descendant of one of the gods or Sartar Magical Union Feats, related to the alliance of cults which came together at the start of the Hero Wars to fight the Lunar Empire. Both types begin play dormant in a character, but certain situations may trigger their activation. There is an overview of what Dragon Pass and Sartar looks like in the wake of the Hero Wars, and a description of its major locations, again thematically Rune by Rune rather than alphabetically.

The organising of both the enemies and the geography thematically—Rune by Rune—supports an important aspect of adventuring in 13th Age Glorantha, that of Heroquesting. Heroquests are excursions onto the Hero Plane and back into God Time to recreate and reinforce the myths and legends of the gods and great heroes. These myths are known and recounted again and again, some specific to certain cults, some not, and many of them contradict each other. So when a party of characters goes on a Hero Quest they will know what to expect. Except not. Not in the ‘Chaos Rising’ campaign, for just as Chaos has seeped into the world following the Hero Wars, it has also seeped onto the Hero Plane where it disrupts individual Hero Quests. Now as much as the adventurers are reinforcing the myths, now they are repairing them.

Advice is given for the Game Master to build her own heroquests, how to score them to measure how well a group of heroquesting adventurers have done, and what rewards they might earn in doing so. Numerous example heroquests are given, some complete, some partial, but all come with engaging sections of myth with which to introduce them. In addition, 13th Age Glorantha comes with a series of adventures which showcase the different types of scenarios, including heroquests. The first, ‘The Horn of Snakepipe Hollow’ is a fairly simple heroquest to enforce a local myth, whereas the second, ‘Duck Point Venture’ is more of an open sandbox. The events of the first two scenarios culminate in ‘The Epic of Gagix Two-Barb’, whilst they get truly epic in the fourth, ‘Against the Crimson Bat’, in which the adventurers get to quest on a mind bogglingly location which is too good to divulge. Lastly, ‘Ascending with the Eleven Lights’ provides an extended encounter which provides a contrast to previous scenarios in being non-combat focused and the traditional view of Orlanth.

Physically, 13th Age Glorantha is a hefty sourcebook, profusely illustrated in a range of styles. Much of the artwork will be familiar from previous releases for Glorantha, but there is much that is also new. In places, the tone of supplement is conversational, but that makes the book highly digestible. The book could be slightly better organised—the section on ‘Running Glorantha’ feels out of place between the chapters on ‘Creating Characters’ and ‘Character Classes’—but the book includes a good index, so finding particular content is not too difficult.
13th Age Glorantha has a number of problems and they all stem from the creation and play of its characters and the complexity involved in both. First, there is the matter of creating a character, which involves a player having to make a lot of choices in terms of Feats, talents, and abilities in order to get their character to work. There is an intricacy to the design of all of the character Classes in 13th Age Glorantha each with multiple moving parts. Second, it is not a quick process, so that it is not one that can be done easily at the table. Third, learning how each of these moving parts works is a challenge in itself, for every character Class plays differently. So for example, the Zorak Zorani Berserker, when berserk, his player has to roll his own die at the beginning of each round to determine his troll’s attack bonus that round instead of using the Escalation Die like everyone else; the Rebel uses Momentum—much like the Thief Class from 13th Age—to power many of its Class abilities and so a player needs to handle the flow of Momentum from turn to turn; and the Storm Voice is constantly gathering storm to power his spells. Now it should be no surprise that this is an aspect of 13th Age also, but just as 13th Age Glorantha escalates the powers and abilities of each Class in comparison to those 13th Age, it also escalates the complexity and the differences.

The complexity and the differences between the Classes leads to a fourth problem—noting it down. With multiple Feats, talents, and abilities to his character, a player needs to know how they work from his character sheet. The 13th Age Glorantha is all but blank and it is not enough to record just the names of the various Feats, talents, and abilities. A player needs to have the information at his fingertips, not be referencing the rulebook all of the time, and this is a lot of information to write out. Now when creating characters, the solution for our gaming group was to copy and paste the relevant sections out of the 13th Age Glorantha book onto a character sheet of our own design. With all of the given information, the simplest of the characters—for example, the Humakti—takes up a mere two pages, but the most complex—for example, the Earth Priestess—takes up a whole five pages! What this suggests perhaps is that what would be useful for 13th Age Glorantha is a set of predesigned characters which a group could download and modify with relatively little difficulty.

Now to be fair, the designers of 13th Age Glorantha do acknowledge the complexity of the characters Classes they have created. Indeed, they rate each of the thirteen Classes according to their ease of play, from Orlanthi Warrior, Troll Warrior, and Humakti to Trickster, Earth Priestess, and Hell Mother. It also means that a playing group can tailor the Classes to not just what type of character a player wants to play, but also how complex a character he wants to play. In some ways the less complex Classes can be seen as an easier path into the setting of Glorantha, whilst the more complex provide a richer flavour. Nevertheless, all of the character Classes are highly evocative of Glorantha as well as providing enjoyable playing experiences.

Another issue is that 13th Age Glorantha may be too focused on Dragon Pass and the aftermath of the Hero Wars and so may not support every player or Game Master’s specific interests in Glorantha, whether that is geographical or in terms of playing options. Understandably, 13th Age Glorantha cannot support or cover every aspect of the setting, but that means that there is room for further support and content. For example, a 13th Age Glorantha campaign set in Pavis and the Big Rubble would make for an interesting sandbox style campaign.

So where does 13th Age Glorantha sit in regard to HeroQuest and RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha? Well, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is simulationist in terms of its play whereas HeroQuest is narrative. With a strong emphasis placed on the use of Runes to tell and influence the non-combat scenes of an adventure, 13th Age Glorantha has a strong narrative element. Yet the equally as strong emphasis on combat and battles in terms of both play and mechanics, means that 13th Age Glorantha also a strong simulationist element. Much of this comes from 13th Age anyway, like the assigning of weapons and armour to a character based not on the equipment’s empirical stats, but on how good their chosen Class would be with them, but again, 13th Age Glorantha ups the power of them, for example, the greater capabilities of the Runes. What this means is that 13th Age Glorantha actually sits somewhere between HeroQuest and RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, although arguably it mechanics are more complex than either.13th Age Glorantha is a perfect example of YGMY—‘Your Glorantha May Vary’. It may not be how you envision Glorantha, but nonetheless, it is an example of Glorantha, one that is post-Hero Wars, near apocalyptic, and verging on the Lovecraftian in the way that Chaos is seeping into the world and rending at its fabric. It presents a time in which there is need for very great heroes and supports that need with a version of 13th Age whose characters are heroic from the very First Level. Although 13th Age Glorantha brings a greater mechanical heft to Glorantha than other roleplaying games set in that world, the mechanics both support and evoke the world rather than get in the way of it. The result is that 13th Age Gloranthaa is a well-designed combination of mechanics and setting which provides a truly majestic treatment of gaming in Glorantha.

Blue Collar Sci-Fi Horror

It is over twenty-five years since the hobby had a roleplaying game set in the same universe as the films as Alien and Aliens. The roleplaying games the Aliens Adventure Game, published by Leading Edge Games in 1991. Now the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG is not the Alien or Aliens roleplaying game anew, but a Science Fiction roleplaying game in which a starship crew must survive the horrors of outer space, of confronting the unknown on worlds yet unexplored, of salvaging derelict spaceships and discovering what drove its crew to abandon their vessel, and of being terrorised by aliens intent on using them as incubators for their eggs. This is a roleplaying game of blue collar Science Fiction, of films like Outland, Dark Star, Silent Running, and Event Horizon, as well as Alien and Aliens.

Published by Tuesday Knight Games, Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG looks like a thick fanzine. Even at forty-four pages, its content is rather cramped, but around some rather scrappy illustrations, Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide covers character creation, game mechanics and combat, handling stress and panic, and all you need to know about the starships. There is no specific background supplied for Mothership, but any Warden—as the Game Master is known in Mothership—should be able to develop something of her own with relative ease.

As presented in Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide, this is a Class and Level roleplaying game. Characters are defined not only by their Class and Level, but also their Attributes and Saves, Skills, and how they react to Stress and Panic. The four Classes are Teamsters, Scientists, Androids, and Marines; the four Attributes are Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat; and the four Saves are Sanity, Fear, Body, and Armour. Character creation is a matter of rolling six ten-sided dice for the attributes, picking a Class, noting down various values, and finally choosing some skills. These come rated at Trained, Expert, and Master levels, indicating the bonus they grant to any roll. Each Class starts off with the same basic skills in addition to giving some options and some points with which to take more skills or improve those already known. No character begins play with any skill at Master level, but will typically have one skill at Expert level as well as a handful at Trained. Lastly, there is the matter of the Loadout, the equipment they start play with. There are four to choose from—Excavation, Exploration, Extermination, and Examination. A character also receives a random patch and a random trinket.

Character generation is simple and quick, taking no more than five minutes if you take your time. What speeds it up is the fact that the process is actually built into the character sheet. In a clever piece of graphic design, character generation can be done on the page. All a player has to do is go through five steps following a flowchart and he is done in minutes without any real reference to the Player’s Survival Guide. It is as simple as it is impressive.

Our sample character is an Android currently owned by Rasmussen Salvage Rights, a husband and wife, now husband and wife and android salvage team, which operates a salvage scow called the Mother’s Pride. She is a reconditioned Matsui-Poulton Class-12 model who has been named Sindy, a name that everyone laughs at for reasons she does not understand. Her current tasks involve computer operations aboard ship as well as tending to the hydroponics bays. Sindy sense that that is something that is missing from her programming, something that her owner is not telling her. Unfortunately she cannot break into certain files on the computer. Nor can she answer why is wearing a DNR Beacon Necklace and who it belonged to. In her spare time, she has been searching for answers in religious texts.

Name: Sindy
Class: Android Level: 1
Attributes
Strength: 36 Speed: 43 Intellect: 53 Combat: 32
Saves
Sanity: 20 Fear: 85 Body: 40 Armour: 25

Stress: 2 Resolve: 0 Health: 72

Skills
Trained (+10%): Computers, Hydroponics, Linguistics, Mathematics, Theology
Expert (+15%): – 
Master (+20%): – 

Loadout: Excavation Trinket: DNR Beacon Necklace  Patch: #1 Worker 

Notes
Fear saves made in the presence of Androids have disadvantages.

In terms of mechanics, Mothership is a percentile system. Rolls are either made against an attribute or an attribute plus an appropriate skill. If a character has the Advantage in a situation, his player rolls twice and keeps the best result, but rolls twice and keeps the worst result if the character is at a Disadvantage. Rolls of doubles are counted as critical successes or fumbles depending upon if the roll is a success or a failure.

Saves represent a character’s reaction to bad situations and his ability to survive against the horrors of space. Again, they are percentile rolls. If a Save is failed, a character gains Stress and potentially other effects too. For example, when a character is shot at, his player makes an opposed roll of his character’s Armour Save against his opponent’s Combat roll. If the Armour Save roll is failed, not only does the character gain Stress, he also takes damage. Making a Save with a critical success and a character will gain some other benefit, such making better use of cover in combat or gaining insight into a situation. Fail it with a critical fumble and a player will have to make a Panic roll. This requires a Stress Check, a roll of two ten-sided dice against the character’s current Stress. If the player rolls over his character’s current Stress, he succeeds, the character loses a little Stress, but if it fails, the player needs to roll on the Panic Effect table. This is another roll of two ten-sided dice, but modified by the character’s Resolve score. It can result in the character being struck by crippling fear, gaining a nervous twitch, or even suffering an Adrenaline rush. 

Although it  is possible to gain relief from Stress through rest, but this will only be a few points, if that, at a time. Instead, there is a constant chance of a character gaining, whether from when the ship a character is in is hit, going without food and water, from certain locations and creatures, and so on. So it is likely that a character will be constantly accumulating Stress. The Panic Rolls will be occurring when the ship a character is in suffers a critical hit, he sees another character die, encountering a strange and terrifying alien, and so on. The There is some balancing between them across the four Classes, so that the Android has a better Fear Save, the Scientist a better Sanity Save, the Marine a better Combat Save, and so on, but the Save mechanics in Mothership are designed to be unforgiving.

Combat itself is pretty straightforward, generally involving Combat versus Armour Save opposed rolls. Weapons are as deadly as you would expect and include a mixture of military small arms as well as utility devices which in an emergency could be used as weapons, like rigging guns and hand welders. Where the rules for character creation, combat, stress, and panic are all relatively simple, those for starship creation are less so. Starships are treated basically like characters, but do require working through a step-by-step design process and a fair bit of arithmetic and balancing of numbers. The rules also cover starship travel as well as starship combat, which works mostly like personal combat.

In addition, there are rules for handling and hiring mercenaries and running them in combat. This includes multiple roles, so starship crew as well as soldiers. The Warden can also roll for their motivation and some sample Scum—cheap and barely competent—are given as quick and dirty examples.

And this is all that the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide covers. There is no advice for the Warden, no background, no threat or dangers defined, and no campaign set-ups. The sample mining ship lends itself to a certain type of campaign, working class and blue collar much like Alien, whilst the inclusion of the Mercenaries rules lends themselves to not only providing a military sci-fi campaign like Aliens, but also provides a ready source of NPCs. Yet what the rules do not allow is for characters to be created straight out of the book with the ability to command a ship. So a character is always going to be a member of the crew, not its captain, at least initially. This is despite the fact that the players are going to be running the ship anyway. Similarly, for all that Mothership is a horror roleplaying game, there is not a great deal beyond environmental dangers to be horrified about.

In terms of design and presentation, Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide could have been better. The design of the character with its flowchart for character creation is undeniably clever, but it is not as effectively carried out in other parts of the rules. There is one for combat on the Player’s Cheat Sheet on the book’s back cover, but not one for panic and stress. The one for starship design is too cramped to be of easy use. It needs an edit in places and the layout could have been better organised. That said, there are plenty of examples throughout that do show how the mechanics work as much as they hint at what the sort of threats the characters might face.

As rough as it is around the edges, there is a great deal to like about Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide. Its look and its mechanics effectively evoke the film sources it draws very heavily from, the blue collar Science Fiction movies of the seventies and eighties, but it leaves the Warden left wanting more—a lot more—when it comes to taking both characters and rules up against the type of horror it wants to portray. If the players have the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide, then the Warden deserves her own Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Warden’s Horror Guide. Although the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG is not the Alien or Aliens roleplaying game, it is a very good evocation of its genre and its aesthetic.

The Other OSR: Bastion Ein Sof

Although perhaps initially opaque in terms of what it is, Into the Odd turns out to be a terrifically simple, stripped back, player-facing post-apocalyptic near fantasy, steampunk, roleplaying game. Published by Lost Pages, it is surprising that in the years since its publication, that there has been very little support published for it. Bastion Ein Sof, meaning “Bastion ‘unending’ or bastion ‘infinite’”, is one of the very few examples, building on the previous supplement Electric Bastionland. Running to just twenty-eight pages—and small pages at that—Bastion Ein Sof describes a setting that stands and falls before the monstrous.

Bastion has fallen. The Angels destroyed Bastion. In turn the Giants defeated the Angels. In the wake of this calamitous conflict stand ten cities, humanity’s final sanctuary, each one lying within a Giant’s shadow. Each of the ten cities stands in the shadow of one the giants, each no more than a be-halo’d wraith of its former self. Yet their vigil leaves them vulnerable to the Angels and it is up to bravest of the survivors to venture out into the ravaged wastes beyond the cities where they can ensure that none of the Angels are made whole again. Such stalwart men and women are known as Hunters and it is their task to defeat the Angels and return the secrets of Bastion to humanity’s last refuge. At the heart of Bastion Ein Sof are four questions—All is lost, but what has been found? Bastionland is a void, but what fills it now? The Giants keep Humanity safe, but what is their price? The Angels must be contained and what happens when the containment fails?

As Hunters, the player characters venture forth from the city to take the blood of the Angels and scavenge the relics of the past. Each Angel has a lair. Each is a dangerous place, the reality of which, as well as the lands around, is twisted by the nature of the Angel. The blood is required to pay a tithe per Hunter to the Giants for their service upon the return of the Hunters to the city, though the payment can take other forms, including the flesh of the Hunters. There is one other thing that can be taken from the Angels. Once they are reduced to a benign form they leave behind—Dæmons! Loathed by the Giants, for they see Dæmons as a corruption of nature, they are desired by Hunters for the powers and great abilities they grant. In times past, they were known as Arcanum. Yet should a Dæmon be destroyed, it turns back into an Angel, so any Dæmon wielded by a Hunter is a holy time bomb waiting to go off…! Not paying the price of returning home or being found wielding Dæmons risks the danger of angering the Giants and should their ire be raised, it threatens not only the Hunters, but also the safety of the city… Relics from beyond the Giants’ shadow are needed if the city is to survive and Dæmons may well be the only way in which Hunters can survive beyond the Giants’ shadow.

Bastion Ein Sof includes a stripped down version of the character generation rules from Into the Odd to reflect the desperate nature of post-Bastion world. No character begins play with any Arcanum as in Into the Odd, as after all, their true nature is revealed here. Our sample Hunter is the scrawny, scabrous Tipp Potterworth, a former sexton turned grave scourer to survive and to feed a terrible Ether habit. He has become a Hunter to find more goods and so feed his addiction. 

Tipp Potterworth
Profession: Ex-Grave Scourer
Strength 4
Dexterity 10
Willpower 12
Hit Points: 8
Equipment: Rifle, Flask of Ether


The three major elements of the setting—the Giants, the Angels, and the Dæmons—are covered in broad detail, essentially pointers for the Game Master to develop the post-apocalypse herself. Rounding it out is a short scenario, ‘Illustrious Hod’, which takes the Hunters in search of lost ship and into the lair of an unknown Angel. It should provide a session or two’s worth of play, including character generation.

Physically, Bastion Ein Sof is simply and cleanly presented, and is illustrated with some excellent public domain artwork. It comes with some pointed advice for running a game set in this post-apocalypse, essentially that every roll should have a point. 

Bastion Ein Sof takes the baroque world of Bastion and Into the Odd and casts it into an unknown future of humanity clutching literally to shadows, forced to make a pact that levels a great price. It presents an unreal setting, a sliver of something more begging to be developed into a richer, deeper world. There is enough to get started in the slim pages of Bastion Ein Sof, but please give us more. In the meantime, Bastion Ein Sof possesses huge scope for the Game Master to develop its weird, desperate future, one that seems without hope, even if only providing a taster of that future.