Lovecraftian Western Horror

‘Cowboys and Indians’ lie at the heart of hobby. A great many roleplaying games back in the day began their explanation of what roleplaying was by drawing parallels between roleplaying and games of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ (as well as Cops and Robbers) which we played as children. So, it was no surprise that as the hobby progressed we got roleplaying games set in the Old West, such as Boot Hill from TSR, Inc. in 1975 and Wild West from FGU in 1981, and more recently, Deadlands from Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 1996 and Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier from Kenzer and Company in 2007. Indeed, both of these last two roleplaying games would win the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game a decade apart. Now although Deadlands combined horror with the Old West, there has never been a supplement which took the Cosmic Horror of H.P. Lovecraft way out West. Now supplements and scenarios have certainly visited, such as Adios, A-Mi-Go!, the Dime Novel for Deadlands, ‘Call of Cthulhu in the Wild West: The Good, the Bad, and the Utterly Insane’ from Worlds of Cthulhu #2, ‘And Madness Shall Rise to Devour the West’ from The Red Eye of Azathoth, and the Basic Roleplay supplement, Devil’s Gulch: A Basic RolePlaying Historical and Supernatural Wild Western Supplement. All that changes with the publication of Down Darker Trails: Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West.

Published by Chaosium, Inc., Down Darker Trails: Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West is the official Old West sourcebook for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. It is not quite straight Call of Cthulhu though, for it is designed to be used—as an option—with Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos, to bring out the Pulp elements at the heart of its inspiration—the horror fiction of author Robert E. Howard. So, this is ‘gritty adventure’ rather than ‘pure nihilistic horror’ and both the mechanics and the setting support this, providing a history that covers the brutality of the period—physical, mental, and social—before it even begins describing the Supernatural West. What this background goes out of it way to highlight is the difference in social attitudes between the classic Call of Cthulhu set in the 1920s and the second half of the nineteenth century in Down Darker Trails. Racism is uncomfortably present in the former—however a gaming group wants to handle it—but in the period of Down Darker Trails, it is more explicit, prevalent, and all of the minorities suffer from it. This includes African-Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and American Indians, the latter term being used throughout to encompass the many and varied tribes and nations of the continent’s indigenous peoples, but where the supplement can be specific, it uses the appropriate names of tribes and nations.

Character or investigator generation in Down Darker Trails is essentially the same as in Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. A player selects an Occupation, rolls for characteristics, assigns skill points, and creates a backstory. Some twenty-six Occupations are listed, including Cowboy/Cowgirl, Dilettante/Greenhorn, Gambler, Outlaw, Rancher, Scout/Mountain Man or Woman, amongst others. A pleasing touch here is that the references to historical figures who had these Occupations as well as fictional figures from film and television are included in the Occupation descriptions. These help player and Keeper alike to visualise the type of characters typical to these Occupations.

In addition, some skills are altered, for example, the base chance for Electrical Repair is reduced as it is a new science and increased for Ride as most people know how to ride a horse. New skills are also added, including Gambling, Rope Use, and Trap. Four tables list Physical, Miscellaneous, Mental, and Combat Talents. These have been adjusted to fit the Old West setting, for example, Hunter’s Blood allows an investigator to spend Luck points to gain a bonus die on Track, Rope Use, and Trap skill rolls. If the Keeper is running Down Darker Trails with Pulp Cthulhu, it is suggested that an investigator start with two as standard. Advice is provided if a player wants to play an investigator of an ethnic background as well as rules for previous experience should an investigator have served in the Civil War.

Our sample investigator is a Civil War veteran left with burn scars on the right side of his face and chest after one charge under enemy cannon fire too many. He returned from the war scarred in more ways than one and disappeared into the mountains. In more recent years, he has worked as a scout and guide in New Mexico when he was not drunk on his own moonshine. About two years ago he found god and a way out of the bottle.

Herman Duncan
age 42, Mountain Man

STR 70 SIZ 65 CON 45 DEX 45
APP 25 INT 75 POW 70 EDU 81
SAN 55 Luck 65 Damage Bonus +1d4 Build 1
Move 8 HP 11

Brawl 65% (32/13), damage 1D3+db
Bowie Knife 65% (32/13), damage 1D4+2+db
Winchester Model 1873 Rifle 65% (32/13), damage 2D6+1 
Dodge 22% (11/04)
Skills: Climb 30%, Credit Rating 20%, Firearms (Rifle) 65%, First Aid 50%, Jump 30%, Listen 30%, Natural World 60%, Navigate 50%, Persuade 30%, Ride 55%, Stealth 60%, Survival (Desert) 40%, Track 67%, Trap 50%.
Languages: Athabaskan (Western Apache) 20%, English (Own) 81%, German 31%, Spanish 20%.

Backstory
Personal Description: Rugged and stocky.
Ideology: There is evil in society which should be routed out—the demon drink!
Significant People: Reverend Eustace Cardew
Significance: Idolise them
Meaningful Location: Place where the worst thing happened
Treasured Possessions: Bible
Traits: Polite
Notes: Immune to sanity losses resulting from viewing a corpse or gross injury.

Some optional rules are provided for an Old West set campaign. These include increased Hit Points—needed because of the setting’s lethality and lack of good medicine, Being Quick on the Draw, Fanning, Dual-Wielding with Two Weapons, amongst others. The latter comes with a decent example too, but essentially dual-wielding involves a Penalty die being applied to both weapons, whether they are pistols or blades, and this of course, means that there is a significant increase in the chance that something will go awry… Guidelines are provided for handling chases with both horses and horse-drawn vehicles; for the treatment of insanity in the Old West—the cure rate is not high, unsurprisingly; and optionally, alcohol consumption, this actually a potential positive effect upon temporary insanity at least. This is all in addition to the expected lists of equipment, weaponry, and beasts of burden.

The history of the Old West begins with the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century and ends with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Its primary focus is on the period after the Civil War, covering the war in some detail before exploring the primary period subject by subject. So, everything from buffalo hunting and cattle drives towns and town life and trails across America are covered in enough detail to help the Keeper to ground her campaigns and describe any necessary details for her players. This is backed by descriptions of each of the frontier states and territories and some of the major locations and events there, such as the town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory and the Lincoln County War in New Mexico. There are some notes on ‘Back East’, the states and cities east of the Mississippi, but they really just showcase how much the region deserves a supplement of its own.

Balancing this is an excellent section detailing each of the major ‘culture groups’ and tribes to be found west of the Mississippi. Some twenty tribes are described in detail sufficient to create an investigators or investigators from any these tribes and again some notes are given on running an American Indian campaign. As with the notes on ‘Back East’, they are really only a starting point and they are deserving of a supplement or scenario anthology of their own. Rounding out the Old West section is a who’s who of the period, including American Indians, Civil War generals, lawmen and outlaws, and more. For Mythos devotees, the inclusion of Ambrose Bierce is a nice touch, as is Stagecoach Mary, and again the authors do make every effort to highlight figures of note of all ethnicities and genders, not Caucasian men.

The Old West takes up roughly half of Down Darker Trails, setting everything up for the second half, the Supernatural West. This begins with an examination of the possible creatures and entities of the Mythos to be found in the Supernatural West. In general, most of the entries, like Sand-Dwellers, Serpent People, K’n-yanians, and Yig, are what most devotees of Lovecraftian investigative horror world expect and so it feels slightly underwhelming, but there are a few surprises. For example, The Faceless God, an avatar of Nyarlathotep, better known to be found as a Sphinx in Egypt, might be found in the western deserts by some unwitting traveller… One issue with many of the entries is that they are not listed in the Keeper’s Rulebook, but in the Malleus Monstrorum, a supplement which is not in print at this time (a reprint and upgrade to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is planned). Various Mythos tomes are suggested which might be found in the Supernatural West along with several new ones. In addition, several new cults and secret societies are described, as shamanic or folk magic, should the Keeper want to include that option.

Things take a turn for the weird with ‘Lost Worlds of the Old West’, four locations either lost or somewhere to get lost in. Two are based on short stories. ‘Lost Valley’ is based on Robert E. Howard’s ‘The Secret of the Lost Valley’, whilst ‘K’n-Yan’ is based on ‘The Mound’ by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop. The other two are new, ‘The Shadow-Desert’ describing a bleak parallel version of our world which can be entered physically and in dreams, whilst time has stood still in ‘El Canon De Los Viejos’ for millennia. So is perfect for a Weird West Valley of the Gwangi-style games. The advice on designing adventures might be a bit short, but it certainly showcases the author’s knowledge of the genre and there are plenty of suggestions here on campaign set-up and possible scenarios.

Rounding out Down Darker Trails are detailed descriptions of two towns, along with two scenarios. Pawheton is rough and ready gold-rush town in Dakota Territory a la Deadwood, more a tent town than an established city, whilst San Rafael is a long-established cattle ranching town on the Texas-Mexico border. If the first is inspired by the television series, Deadwood, then the latter is drawn from the Spaghetti Western trilogy, so Pawheton feels like a modern take on the Old West setting, whilst San Rafael feels like a nod to a classic take. Both though, are riven by factions and both have their secrets and rumours, some of them Mythos related, and in San Rafael, there is at least a connection to a classic Call of Cthulhu scenario from The Cthulhu Companion. The first of the two scenarios, ‘Something from Down There’ can be outside either town and sees the investigators hired to check on some miners working a nearby claim who have not come into town recently. The challenge here is in dealing with what the miners have unfortunately dug down to, but this is in general, a straightforward affair which echoes the tales of Robert E. Howard. ‘Scanlon’s Daughter’ is set in San Rafael and is not so straightforward. It is best described as a Mythos tinged version of Romeo and Juliet and requires much more in the way of roleplaying than does ‘Something from Down There’, and so is the more sophisticated and interesting of the two.

Physically, Down Darker Trails is nicely presented as you would expect from Chaosium these days. It is liberally illustrated, with lots of period photos and classic art of the Old West. In comparison, the new art is not quite as good—and in the case of the NPC collages for both the towns and the scenarios, utterly useless. Both the old and the new maps are good, although the map of San Rafael is much, much better. The book is also well written, providing a balanced approach to what is potentially a contentious subject matter.

Unlike previous attempts to bring the Cthulhu Mythos to the Old West, Down Darker Trails is unarguably more comprehensive and better researched—at least going by the extensive bibliography at the back of the book and the references scattered throughout its pages. It provides a solid foundation upon which a Keeper can build and run her Supernatural West campaign, providing plenty of suggestions and ideas along the way. If it falters slightly in its examination of the Mythos, then the supplement more than makes up for that when it applies both genre and Mythos knowledge in the two settings and the two scenarios. Overall, Down Darker Trails: Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West is a balanced and mature take upon the Old West with some great examples of how to twist it into the Supernatural West.

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Chaosium, Inc. will be at UK Games Expo which will take place between June 1st and June 3rd, 2018 at Birmingham NEC. This is the world’s fourth largest gaming convention and the biggest in the United Kingdom.

Friday Filler: The Cousins' Filler

In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Wars of the Roses were fought between two rival branches of the royal House of Plantagenet—the House of Lancaster and the House of York—to determine who would rule England. Ultimately, it would lead to the extinction of the House of Lancaster, the defeat of the House of York, and the founding of the House of Tudor, which would rule England until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Were you to want to explore this dynastic conflict by playing a game or two, then the classic boardgame, Kingmaker, is the perfect choice, but that game is out of print and if you can track down a copy, it takes multiple players, and it takes several hours to play. The Cousins’ War, published by Surprised Stare Games, offers an alternative. It is a two-player game, for players aged twelve and over, designed to be played in roughly thirty minutes. Distilling a thirty-year conflict down into micro-wargame, The Cousins’ War combines area control, action card, dice and bluffing mechanics to present a game with a solid theme, involving mechanics, and easy portability. 

The Cousins’ War consists a game board, seventeen Action cards, one Play Aid card, twenty-six wooden cubes, one black cylinder, and three six-sided dice, plus a twelve-page rulebook. The game board is done on thick card and depicts England and Wales and a Turn Track. England and Wales are divided into three areas—South, Central (the Midlands and Wales), and North—and marked with the site of the conflict’s seven major battles. A short history of the Wars of the Roses is given on the back, a nice touch as that would otherwise have been in the rulebook. The Action cards are divided into two types. There is one for each battle, each Battle card giving its date and location, the starting forces present, and the number of Command Points it grants. Command Points are used to add Troops to a player’s Reserve or the Battlefield; Move or Place Influence; Remove an opponent’s Influence. The remaining ten Action cards are Event cards, which can be used in one of two ways. They can be used to generate Command Points or to bring its Primary Event into play. Each Event card also has a Secondary Event which affects an opponent and is triggered if the Event Card’s Round number matches the current Round number.

For example, the ‘Earl of Northumberland’ Event card grants on the one Command Point, but as an Event, it enables a player to ‘Add 1 or 2 cubes to the North Region from your Reserve.’ If played on the second or fourth Round, then the Opponent or Lancaster player may ‘Add 1 cube to any single Region from their Reserve.’

The represent both the Influence and the troops of each House. There are twelve red cubes for Lancaster and twelve white cubes for York, whilst the French are represented by two blue cubes. When placed on the game board, the cubes represent a House’s Influence in each Region, but serve as Troops in a Battle—the French cubes are always Troops. Although nicely presented, the rulebook is not as clearly written as it could be and it assumes that the players have some experience with the mechanics in The Cousins’ War. A careful read through of the rulebook is probably a good idea as is a careful play through.

The Cousins’ War is played out over five Rounds, each consisting of seven Phases. In the first few Phases, players draw and swap Action cards and determine which Battle will be fought during the Round. In the later Phases, the players take it in turn to use Action cards to alter their Influence in the three regions of England and Wales or to bring Troops into a Battle. Attempts to alter a House’s Influence are not a given. There is a chance it may fail, which increases the greater the Influence already has in a Region. Then any Battle is resolved, the winner gaining Influence in the Region where the Battle was fought or an adjacent Region.

Mechanics for battles in The Cousins’ War are essentially ‘Liar’s Dice’. Players take it in turn to roll the three dice and declare the result. The player with the worst result loses cubes or Troops from the Battle and once all of his Troops have been forced from the Battle, he also loses the Battle. The mechanics being ‘Liar’s Dice’ means that the active player does not have to declare the actual result of his dice roll, but can instead Bluff his opponent. His Opponent can either believe him and accept the result, or challenge him as to the veracity of the dice roll. If the challenged declaration is true, the Opponent loses, but if not, the active player loses. What The Cousins’ War allows though, is for a player to actually alter his dice roll by playing an Action card and spending Command Points to alter the values on the dice. Both players continue rolling, declaring, bluffing, and challenging until one House has troops left on the Battle. The winner gains Influence in the Region as well as the Battle card itself.

The end of each Round involves checking to see if the victory conditions have been met. These are met if a player controls all three Regions on the game board; by the player who controls the most Regions at the end of the game; or by the player who has won the most Battles if both players control the same number of Regions.

Despite its size and play time—both small—The Cousins’ War presents each player with plenty of tactical choice. Of course, there is choice to bluff or challenge in Battles, but in the Event cards, each player will really need to give careful thought as to how to get the best out of each card. This is because each has three options—use its Command Points, use its Event, and whether or not its Secondary Event will benefit his opponent. Plus, where to spend Command Points—Influence on the game board or Battles. Winning Battles affects the outcome of The Cousins’ War and may be key to winning it if neither House has sufficient Influence in play.

Physically, The Cousins’ War is very nicely presented. Both cards and game board are well designed and nicely carry through the Wars of the Roses theme. The illustration on the cover of the box is really quite good and it is a pity that none of the cards are illustrated. The rulebook is slightly underwritten, especially if coming to the Action card mechanic for the first time. There are two things that the game could benefit from. One is a second Play Aid card and the second is another set of dice, since the players will ultimately be comparing dice rolls in Battles.

Even though a microgame, The Cousins’ War does feel a bit fiddly in places, especially in the number of Phases which have to played through each turn. It also feels odd to have the three-different mechanics in the one game—the area control, action cards, and ‘Liar’s Dice’—as they would seem to be a bad fit. That said, the luck element of the dice mechanics, both for Battles and determining Influence do balance out the non-luck element of the Action cards. Further, once you play through a game or two, it becomes clear that they each work to direct each player’s Command Points and Influence. It is just not as clear as it should be that the mechanics do interlock.

As a microgame, The Cousins’ War streamlines thirty years of history and conflict with three interlocking mechanics that offer solid play and tactical choice.

—oOo—

Surprised Stare Games will be at UK Games Expo which will take place between June 1st and June 3rd, 2018 at Birmingham NEC. This is the world’s fourth largest gaming convention and the biggest in the United Kingdom.

Miskatonic Monday #10: Hocus Pocus

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share them with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was a Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise ofthe Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more...” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the far reaches of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: Hocus Pocus

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.

Author: Adam Gauntlett

Setting: Jazz Age

Product: Scenario

What You Get: 1.9 MB, 22-page full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: That cool cat got some moves in a Hoodoo Hoedown.

Plot Hook: The investigators are hired to find out where a wannabe Hoodoo man got his latest and amazingly greatest act from—it is cutting into a better man's bottom line.

Plot Development: A black cat, your numbers are in, Houdini's ex-dive, and a horse's head all under radium's bright glare.

Plot Support: Eight plus NPCs; two nicely detailed occulted occult tomes; investigation angles neatly organised.

Production Values: Needs a slight edit.

Pros

# Few NPCs for the Keeper to roleplay

# Straightforward, but involving plot
# Companion scenario to The Man Downstairs
# Companion scenario to Harlem Unbound
# Companion scenario to Tales of the Sleepless City
# Companion scenario to Masks of Nyarlathotep and Day of the Beast
# Opportunity for the investigators to become a band of brothers 

Cons

# Keeper will need to provide area map of New York

# Main villain of the piece mostly kept off stage

Conclusion

# Meaty investgative scenario

# Solid plot

The Massively Multiplayer offline Role-Playing Game

E.D.R.P.G. or Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is a roleplaying game based on the computer game of the same name, a rare thing, a pen and paper roleplaying game based on a computer game. Developed by Spidermind Games and published via Modiphius Entertainment following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it presents a far future Science Fiction setting in which owning your spaceship and space travel is cheap—and so is your life as the police shoot first and might ask questions later, entire systems are overrun with space pirates, and corporate interests dominate the galaxy. Into this free-for-all capitalist paradise come the player characters, hotshot pilots with the best customised ships on a budget, transporting cargo from space station to another in the hopes of making profit enough to upgrade every aspect of their ships before upgrading to an entirely new model of ship! This is, of course, the classic ‘Lone Wolf’ campaign as played in every version of the computer game, Elite, right back to the 1984 original, including the most recent version of the game, Elite: Dangerous. Now where Elite: Dangerous and Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game differ from the original, is that Elite: Dangerous is not just a lone player experience—it is a MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games which can be played together, and Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game offers exploration, espionage, and military campaigns as well as the Lone Wolf campaign. All this is played out against a persistent universe which is constantly growing and aspects of this are present in the Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game.

Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game supports this with rules for combat in person, planetside in vehicles, in space between the player characters’ and enemy ships—pirates, slave traders, bounty hunters, and sometimes the police; stats for classic spaceships from the computer game which can be customised and upgraded; trading in and out of the game; and tables for both random star system and adventure generation. All of which comes packaged in a bright and cleanly presented hardback book which is nicely illustrated and written.

The starting point in Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is the character, which in the game is defined by his Rank, Skills, Backgrounds, and Karma Abilities—there are no attributes such as Strength or Intelligence as skills cover everything. Rank determines the maximum levels a character can have in his skills as well as Endurance, Karma Points, and Karma Capabilities or Enhancements. There are nine Ranks, from Harmless to Elite. Skills are expressed as percentages from which a bonus is derived; Backgrounds add a little colour, but mostly provide bonuses to skills and a possible Enhancement—an improvement which sets the character apart from ordinary folk; and Karma Capabilities are little tricks characters can pull to get out of sticky situations. For example, the Hacker Background provides Computer +20, Security +10, and the Natural Genius (Computer) Enhancement. In the case of the Natural Genius (Computer) Enhancement, it raises the cap on maximum skill level for a Rank. A Karmic Capability is something like ‘Spin Wildly’, a spaceship combat maneuvre which costs 5 Karma to use and grants a +5 bonus to a pilot’s Spaceship Defence against an attack that would hit his ship.   

To create a character, a player selects or rolls for—tables are provided for the latter—four Backgrounds, selects three Karma Capabilities, improves ten skills, and then selects his starting spacecraft from a choice of four, plus variants. These include the Sidewinder FD-4, the Eagle Interceptor MR1, the Hauler Hatchback Zeta, and the Adder Cornucopia. Experienced players are given the option of spending a set budget on a basic design and customising it. Each character also comes with a standard set of equipment plus some other items depending whether they have certain skills. It should be noted that all characters receive the Pilot Trained Background and the Escape Death Karma Capability for free and in addition to the ones selected during character creation and that all skills start at ten.

Our sample character is Rise ‘Roundhouse’ Rownels a medical graduate from 5714 Coronae VII. He expected to have a career in medical science which would last his lifetime, but when he blew the whistle on the unethical activities of his employer, Kerensky-Jadin Technology GmbH, he was blackballed from the profession and lost his medical licence. Forced to turn to other employment, he found work as a boxer and a private eye. A number of missing persons cases led him offworld and now he knows he wants to follow up on those cases. For that he needs a spaceship and the settlement from his wrongful dismissal case just got him the money he needed for that. Rise ‘Roundhouse’ Rownels is a rookie pilot, but in a brawl or after you have been punched out, he more than punches above his weight.

Rise ‘Roundhouse’ Rownels
Rank: Harmless (1)
Background: Scientist, Boxer, Private Detective, Trained Doctor, Pilot Trained 
Defence (Dodge): +1 Defence (Parry): +2 Initiative: +1
Damage Bonus: +2
Karma Points: 10 Endurance: 20
Skills: Computer +23, Cyber +34, Energy Weapons +20, Fighting+37, Insight +26, Medicine +38, Parry +20, Perception +20, Science +49, Security +22, Spaceship Piloting +35, Spaceship Weapons +30, Stealth +20, Systems +21
Enhancements: Natural Genius (Science), Strong
Karma Capabilities: Diligent Medic, Escape Death, Slam, Liar, Liar!

Perhaps one of the most interesting Backgrounds to choose from is ‘Partner’. Whether a Best Friend or Boyfriend/Girlfriend, Business Partner or Husband/Wife, this is an NPC who accompanies a player character on his missions. Controlled by the Game Master, this NPC is not quite equal to a player character, but have skills, Backgrounds, and Enhancements and can make use of a player character’s Karma Capabilities. It is possible for such an NPC to be a pilot like the player character, but either way, the Partner is a player character’s companion who can help out on missions, make repairs to ships, and so on. Having a Partner necessitates choosing a spacecraft capable of carrying both the player character and his companion. 

The mechanic at the heart of Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is straightforward enough. A player rolls a ten-sided die and adds a relevant Skill bonus to equal or beat a target number. Rolls of one always fail, but rolls of ten always succeed. A Skill bonus is equal to one tenth its percentile value, so for example, a Rise ‘Roundhouse’ Rownels’ Skill bonus is +3 when using Fighting, but +4 when using Science. It should be noted that since all player characters have a minimum of ten in each skill, they always have a minimum Skill bonus of +1 in any skill. Guidance for Difficulty Number is given for realistic difficulty or relative difficulty, the latter taking into account the average player character Rank, the former not. Thus under realistic difficulty, the average Difficulty Number is between nine and eleven, representing a challenging task for a professional, whereas under relative difficulty, it is seven at the Rank of Harmless, eight for Mostly Harmless and Novice, and so on… The advantages and disadvantages of both are discussed in detail, although Difficulty Numbers as a topic are not really explored until two thirds of the way through the book. Whether successful or not, this will earn the character a tick for the skill used. At the end of an adventure, each tick enables the skill to be increased by one up to the Skill Cap for the character's current Rank, but only one tick can be earned per skill per adventure.

Given its origins, it no surprise that combat plays a big part in Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game, spacecraft combat in particular. Personal combat is not particularly complex, being only covered in a few pages. A player character gets a move and an action per round, but can also defend himself as necessary. One interesting touch is that if a player character successfully parries a Fighting or Melee attack, then he can counter-attack. This is essentially a free action. Space combat is really dogfighting, with player characters taking an Equipment Action—assign a bonus if the spacecraft has the right equipment, deploy chaff, or deploy mines; Recharging their spacecraft’s shields; and then taking a Combat Action. The type of Combat Action depends upon the range, for which Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game has just the two—‘At Distance’ and ‘Up Close’. The former means that a spacecraft is at the edge of the battle, or just beyond it, whereas the latter means that the spacecraft is involved in the heat of the battle. ‘At Distance’ enables a pilot to play Chicken, Flee, Joust, Pass, Snipe, or Strafe, whilst ‘Up Close’ a pilot can attempt to deliver a Broadsides, Disengage, Dogfight, Flight assist off, Pass, and Ram. These maneuvres determine both how a spacecraft is going to move and how many weapons her pilot can fire. In general, a pilot and his spacecraft really only gets to fire once per turn, but with the Dogfight manoeuvre, multiple spacecraft can get involved and this means multiple manoeuvres and potentially, multiple chances for a pilot to fire his weapons, each time on different opponents. Once a hit is scored, damage needs to overcome a target ship’s shields and then it is applied to the ship’s hull. If a ten is rolled on the to-hit roll and the damage is sufficient to reduce the target ship’s shields to zero, then the target ship suffers damage to both the hull and one of its components. Again, the space combat rules are covered in only a few pages, but presents a chaotic free-for-all system in which the player characters really get to mix it up. They are followed by rules for vehicle combat, which are again relatively simple and straightforward.

After all this, only now does Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game start present any kind of background against which the game will be run. Even then, it does not open with the background to the setting, but rather with a guide to a player character’s, or rather, a freelancer’s, first spacecraft. Delivered as a legally mandatory introduction by a representative of the Faulcon Delacy corporation, it is the first piece of colour fiction to appear in the book and it is just ever so knowing and thoroughly engaging and enjoyable. It is followed by a guide to the galaxy and the major powers—the Federation, the Empire, the Alliance, and independent worlds—which although written in the same engaging style, it really is a bit short at nine pages and barely 2% of the book for a Game Master to write adventures for. On the plus side, it means that the Game Master has a lot of freedom to write adventures, but compared to other Science Fiction roleplaying games, the background is slight. Following this is a third lecture, a guide to ‘Being a Good Citizen’, how to act and what to expect as a newly qualified pilot out there in space… Given the simplicity and shortness of the rules, it seems odd to have this very short chapter of background after those rules and not before, at the beginning of the book.

Technology wise, Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game presents a setting where both Faster-Than-Light travel and ownership of personal spacecraft is common. What is not common is the generation of gravity, so player characters are equipped with mag boots, whose use can play a big role in zero-g combat. In addition to listing all of the personal equipment, Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game does a nice thing with its personal weapons. It gives generic stats for auto pistols, laser pistols, submachine guns, assault beamers, and so on, but it treats non-generic models as both different and rare, so that whenever a player character gets hold of one, it is special. Besides all this, cybernetics are also given, but once installed, if they are too obvious, they have a deleterious effect upon a character’s Karma points and his social skills. Likewise, heavy armour has a similar effect, but conversely, wearing the right clothing can have a positive effect.  

From the Adder, the Anaconda, and the Asp Explorer to the Type-9 Heavy, the Viper MK III, and the Vulture, Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game details some sixteen spacecraft models and their variants. All taken from the computer game, this provides plenty of standard models to buy off the shelf—or upgrade to—but also the rules to allow a player character to modify his ship according to his taste and design. There are lots of options here and should support the player characters and their equipment progression in the long term, although this is very much a set of mechanics that is best handled between adventures. Unlike the section on spacecraft, the section on vehicles just lists various models without the rules to modify them.

The Game Master’s section covers the basic rules as well as game types—military and police, espionage and intrigue, exploration, Lone Wolf, mission-based, and sandbox games. The standard game type is, of course, the Lone Wolf, a la the Elite: Dangerous computer game. They feel a bit short, more of a good start than overall helpful, and the Lone Wolf game type has issues of its own as we shall see… This section also provides further discussion about the rules, including handling combined personal, spacecraft, and vehicular combat, as well as handling trade during adventures. Again, this is kept fairly light, but really the default set-up is for trade is handled between adventures as can be asteroid mining, exploration, and bounty hunting. This enables a player character to earn some income between adventures and essentially moves what might not very interesting to play through off-stage. Then, it gives the Game Master the perfect means to take the player characters to another location ready for an adventure, to introduce an NPC or a threat, drop a clue, and so on, thus leading into the next adventure. 

In general, those threats come in three scales—individual, vehicle, and spaceship scale. These include soldiers and mercenaries, criminals, police and security, assassins, as well as alien animals and drones. These are fully statted out and described, all ready to use with the ‘Random Generation System’. This set of tables can be used to create two things—star system and missions or adventures. There is no adventure in Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game, but there is the means to create plenty. Each mission type is broken down into three or four types and accompanied by five possible twists, so there is a good mix here. What the combination of the extensive list of opponents combined with the star system and mission generator is model the procedural generation of game play in Elite: Dangerous. Now a roleplaying game needs slightly more rational rationale to its play, so the use of these tables requires an experienced Game Master or a bit of preparation beforehand. Rounding out Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is an extensive set of forms to help record the details of a game.

Physically, Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is an impressive book. It is a relatively light read and it is extensively illustrated in full colour. Now what it lacks is an index and that is a major, not to say, inexcusably frustrating, omission by modern standards as it will seriously hamper the use of the book. Now the book is well organised and the colour of the pages is nicely selected to make certain sections stand out, but there is no denying that there should have been an index. Full examples of character generation, general play, and space combat would been useful additions too, especially for anyone coming to the roleplaying game from the computer game without any experience of having played a roleplaying game before.

There is one very big difference between Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game and just every Science Fiction roleplaying game, whether it is Traveller, Firefly Roleplaying Game, and Coriolis: The Third Horizon, and that is the player characters do not crew their own ship, but crew their own ships. Thus they are not the pilot, engineer, gunner, medic, steward, navigator, and so on aboard their ship, but the pilot, engineer, gunner, medic, steward, navigator, and so on aboard their own ships. Now there is an option in the game for the player characters to crew the one ship as there is a ship suitable for that listed, but in the game’s default set-up, with everyone having their own ship, having their own objective in acquiring sufficient monies to pay for upgrades, and so on, there is a sense of the collective present in most other roleplaying games that is not present in Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game. If the Game Master is running a campaign built around military and police, espionage and intrigue, exploration, or mission-based games, then there is reason enough for the player characters to stick together, but in the Lone Wolf and the sandbox game suggestions, it is less obvious and the Game Master will really need to come up with something plausible if the player characters are to form a party and more importantly, stick together...

There are several things that Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is missing. One is sufficient background that would help impart the feel of the setting and help a Game Master write scenarios. The second is the lack of a map of the galaxy. It need not be detailed, but it would have been nice to learn the geographical relationship between the various powers. The third is the absence of an  index, which points to certain lack of professionalism as an roleplaying game should have index. The fourth is a scenario, which will be something of an issue for anyone coming to the roleplaying game from the computer game without any experience of having played or run a roleplaying game before. Admittedly, had there there been a scenario, what type of game should it have covered—military and police, espionage and intrigue, exploration, Lone Wolf, mission-based, or sandbox? This is all despite the fact that the mechanics and the means to play Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game are lightly handled and relatively simple to play, and thus easy to learn and suitable for those new to roleplaying.

Ultimately, what Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game cannot do is reconcile the Lone Wolf campaign play of the Elite: Dangerous computer game with the collective needs and set-up of the party in a roleplaying game and this is why the other game types are stronger and easier to use. It may need more exploration in a future supplement if the Lone Wolf game type is be fully realised as a possible campaign set-up for Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game.

Nevertheless, despite these issues, what you have in Elite: Dangerous Roleplaying Game is a relatively light, Science Fiction roleplaying game which does its very best to model the Elite: Dangerous computer game. It might not provide as much background as it should, but it certainly provides the means and the mechanics for the players to take their freelancers to the spacelanes and trade their way to fame and fortune.

—oOo—

Spidermind Games will be at UK Games Expo which will take place between June 1st and June 3rd, 2018 at Birmingham NEC. This is the world’s fourth largest gaming convention and the biggest in the United Kingdom.

A Whovian Quartet

There can be no denying that Cubicle Seven Entertainment has released plenty of adventures for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space – The Roleplaying Game. After all, there is a sourcebook for every single incarnation of the Doctor, from the First Doctor to the Ninth Doctor and beyond, as well as U.N.I.T. and time travel. Yet even taking into account the twelve-part campaign in The Eighth Doctor Sourcebook, the roleplaying game is rather short of scenarios that the Game Master can simply add to his campaign. One solution is All of Time and Space Volume 1, a quartet of adventures set firmly during the tenure of the Twelfth Doctor—or at least after the events on Trenzalore.

All of Time and Space Volume 1 opens with ‘Ghost Engines’ by Gareth Ryder Hanrahan. The hunt for a missing boy in the present finds the time travellers shunted back into Victorian England where the railway industry is undergoing some form of rapid advancement and conglomeration as a railway engineer appears to bringing the country within the reach of his company, ‘The Great Compass’. Yet this railway engineer might not be as clever or as charitable as everyone says he is, so where exactly are his advances in railway technology coming from? There is a lovely mix of elements here, from Bertie Wooster types and suspicious policemen to ghost trains and steamborgs, with a healthy dash of The Paternoster Gang thrown in, allowing the Game Master to crack open the Paternoster Investigations sourcebook. (Although they are referred to, neither Professor George Litefoot nor Henry Gordon Jago make an appearance, but there is no reason why they should not!) ‘Ghost Engines’ gets the anthology off to a very good start with delightful and well done mystery with lots of opportunity for roleplaying and adventure. 

The opportunities for roleplaying and adventure continue in ‘The Northern Knights’, but adds intrigue into the mix. Written by Walt Ciechanowski, it sends the time travellers into the religious schism between Catholicism and Protestantism in Elizabethan England. A strange plague has befallen a Shropshire village and the nearby castle, one beyond the capacity of a visiting physician to cure—perhaps the time travellers can help? The task is made the difficult by the presence of a very special guest at the castle—Mary, Queen of Scots! It gets a whole lot more complex when the castle is besieged by Catholic knights who would overthrow Queen Elizabeth and raise Mary in her stead, knights who not only northern, but silver! Which means of course, the Cybermen are involved in what is essentially ‘The Time Warrior’ meets ‘Silver Nemesis’. This is another rich adventure with lots of detail, even one which looks to be an anachronism, but actually not.

The third scenario, by Nick Huggins, is perhaps the cleverest one in the quartet, combining elements of ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘The Time of Angels’ with ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. In ‘Schrödinger’s Expedition’, the time travellers find themselves aboard a space station, but a strange one, given the strange arrangement of rooms, warehouses, libraries, swimming rooms, corridors, and more. Add to this two parallel expeditions to the station—one military, one scientific—and odd flora and fauna, and what you have is an intriguing little puzzle. A puzzle which is made all the more difficult by the fact that neither expedition can meet, but getting them to work together is the key to solving ‘Schrödinger’s Expedition’. Now there is the danger with this kind of adventure that it is too clever for its own good and that makes it all the more difficult to run, but the advice which accompanies this adventure on how to run it is pleasingly helpful.

The last adventure is Timothy Ferguson’s ‘The Tomb of Cleopatra’. Another anachronism—an artefact which looks like a Cyberman’s head—has turned up in an archaeological exhibition in Egypt, so of course, the question, where has it been? To find out how, the time travellers have to go back to Roman Egypt not long after the death of Cleopatra and get involved in the opposition to the recently imposed Roman occupation. There is a nice bit of bait and switch involving a threat integral to the era of the Eleventh Doctor, but in some ways, the scenario is the most workmanlike of the four.

All four scenarios in All of Time and Space Volume 1 are nicely written with plenty of detail and good advice for staging them. There is also good advice for setting up and running each adventure, not just with time travellers equipped with a TARDIS, but other means, so that members of U.N.I.T. or Torchwood might go back in time and solve these instead of the Doctor and his Companions (or player character equivalents). Each is also rounded out with further hooks and ideas for sequels and more.

Physically, All of Time and Space Volume 1 is very well presented and organised, and is liberally illustrated with lots of photographs taken from episodes of the Tenth Doctor, Eleventh Doctor, and Twelfth Doctor. Where the book is disappointing, is in the editing as there are some ugly turns of phrase.

Now there is not a bad adventure to be had in All of Time and Space Volume 1. Yet more care could have been taken with the choice of scenarios to be included in this first volume—two of the scenarios involve the Cybermen and three involve both technological anachronisms in Earth’s past and manipulation of events in Earth’s past. Of course these are standard tropes to be found in Doctor Who, but it means that there is a fundamental similarity between too many of these scenarios—a similarity which could have been avoided with better development and editorial guidance and the authors being helped to be a bit more inventive. Again, none of these are bad scenarios, but it would have better to spread them between All of Time and Space Volume I and All of Time and Space Volume II—when the latter appears, rather than containing them all in the one book.

The best way to get around the similarities of the adventures in All of Time and Space Volume I would be to run adventures between each, because otherwise, this is an excellent quartet of adventures for use with Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space – The Roleplaying Game. The very best thing about these four is that if you thought about it, any one of them works as well on the page and at the table as they might on the television screen.

—oOo—

Cubicle Seven Entertainment will be at UK Games Expo which will take place between June 1st and June 3rd, 2018 at Birmingham NEC. This is the world’s fourth largest gaming convention and the biggest in the United Kingdom.

Friday Filler: Temp Worker Assassins

How do you feel about your boss? Does the boss ever annoy the heck out of you? Do you have the urge to do something about it? You could go postal, take up the weapon of choice, and strike him down, but that would be too obvious, so why not put a bit of planning into it? Why not hire assassins and send them to do the job for you? The easiest way of getting them into the place where you work—Bureaucrat Castle—is as temps on a one-week contract. Unfortunately, only the security is so good at Bureaucrat Castle none of the assassins have been able to smuggle their weapons in. Fortunately, the assassins are so good they can turn anything into a weapon, including office supplies. So your assassins have a week in which to assemble the best weapons they can from the stationery cupboard and take the opportunities to strike at Bureaucrat Castle’s Health & Safety Halfling, Internal Audit Ninja, and Acquisitions Merger Viking! (If only real life was like this?)

This is the set-up for Temp Worker Assassins, worker placement-decking building, hand-manipulation game published following a successful Kickstarter campaign and a launch at UK Games Expo, 2017. It is designed to be played by between two and four players, aged fourteen and over, in roughly forty minutes. From one round to the next, players will send their assassins to the Forbidden Stationery Cupboard, the Really Spooky Recycling Area, and Malevolent R&D Department amongst others to gain offices supplies such as the Evil Pencil Sharpner, the Pointy Edged Clipboard, Not-So-Floppy Disk, and Hideous Highlighter Pen, all in readiness to launch an assassination attempt at a chosen target.

The game consists of some one-hundred-and ninety cards, twenty Assassin Meeples (five of each colour), a Starting Player Marker, and a fourteen-page rulebook. Of the cards, forty consist of four identical decks, one per player. These are mostly Fairly Sharp Pencils and Reasonably Blunt Pencils, providing +1 or +0 Attack respectively. Even if a player has all of these in his hand, they are rarely sufficient to make a successful assassination attempt on a target, so better cards are needed. These come in the form of the Stationery Supply cards, of which there are sixty. Four of these are placed face up to form the available Stationary with the Stationery Supply deck nearby. There are forty Department Cards, ten of which will form the various locations in Bureaucrat Castle where a player will send his Assassin Meeples to gain more cards, improve his hand of cards, and gain other benefits. Forty-five Target Cards provide the victims for the players’ assassination attempts. Five of these are actually Typing Pool Zombies, which mostly stationary, are easier to assassinate, but worth fewer Victory Points. Three of these Targets will be available to assassinate at any one time, as will one Typing Pool Zombie. Together, the number of Department Cards and Target Cards gives Temp Worker Assassins a fair degree of replay value.

The last card type in the game is the Turn Marker card. There is one of these for each day and they each provide a better bonus as the game progresses through the week. They are won by the first player to make a successful assassination attempt on a day and go into the player’s discard pile. Here is where it is worth targeting the Typing Pool Zombies as although they may not be worth points, a quick stab with a bunch of pencils might be enough to bump one off as soon as an assassin gets into the office and so get the Turn Marker card for that day. Lastly, there is the rulebook. This is nicely laid out and easy to read, but it is underwritten as some of the rules are not as clear as they could be despite the game’s relative simplicity. 

Turns are quite simple. Beginning with the Starting Player—who will change day-by-day—the players take it in turn to place one of their assassins on Department Card or Target Card to make an assassination attempt. The Department Cards provide several actions, including Clear (discard and refresh the Stationery Supply cards), Draw (draw cards from a player’s deck), Gain (Take a face-up Stationery Supply card), Research (take cards from the Stationery Supply deck, add one to a player’s hand and discard the rest), and Trash (remove a card in your hand from the game). Some Department Cards provide just one of these actions, but others give a mix of them which all must be carried out. Other Department Cards provide a bonus to weapon types during assassination attempts amongst other benefits. This being a worker placement game, it means that it is possible to block access to a Department Card for other players and it does mean that as a turn progresses, there will be fewer Department Cards for a player to put his assassin meeples on, giving him fewer choices. That said, this is offset by the fact that some Department Cards have multiple spaces.

Once a player feels he has enough Stationery Supply cards to hand—there is no hand limit—he can make an assassination attempt. This is not a simple process, as it does require a player to chain his Stationery Supply cards in order to have the greatest effect—learning how to do this effectively is one of the game’s challenges. So Scaring Staples grants ‘Up to 2 Staplers get +2 Attack’, so a player needs to have another two Stapler cards in his hands and they will also have their effects as well as an Attack value. This allows for a certain degree of deck design, player trying to Gain cards from the Stationery Supply that will make a particular card work. In many cases, a player will also be discarding and drawing cards from his deck. In the early stages of the game this may be an issue because a player is unlikely to have particularly powerful cards in his deck, but later in the game, if he has been able to raid the Stationery Supply cards, he will certainly have better cards to draw from. One notable difference from a great many deck building games is that when taken from the Stationary Supply, the cards do not go into a player’s discard pile, but his hand. This means that he can prepare for an assassination attempt on his turn as much he might have to reply upon what is in his deck. If successful, the assassinated Target card goes into the player’s victory pile. Some Target cards provide bonuses in addition to their Bounty value.

After an assassination attempt, whether successful or unsuccessful, an assassin meeple is sent to Security. (He is not arrested, fired, or anything, but can return to work the following day—it appears that Bureaucrat Castle is really keen on its temps working out their period of employment.) The player discards both his hand and the cards played as part of the assassination attempt, draws a new hand of five cards, and continues play. Once everyone has played all of their assassin meeples on a day, it ends, they clock off, and a new day begins with a new Turn Marker card. This continues until the end of the fifth turn—or Friday—when everyone clocks off and the game ends. The player with the most Bounty points gained from assassinated Targets is the winner.

One issue with the game is the Typing Pool Zombies. They sort of provide a catch-up mechanism should another player be running away with number of Targets successfully assassinated. Essentially, they enable another player to make an early assassination attempt at the start of a day in order to gain the benefit of the day’s Turn Marker card. They do provide a powerful bonus, but only if a player can grab it. There is nothing to stop the leading player from grabbing the Turn Marker card bonus early on and so give his assassins a further boost. Now when taken, a Turn Marker card goes into a player’s discard pile—and not his hand like Stationery Supply cards—but it is a powerful bonus when it comes back out to play nonetheless. The problem essentially, is that as a catch-up mechanism, there is no guarantee that it will actually help…

Physically, Temp Worker Assassins is a very nicely presented game. The cards are sturdy enough and their instructions easy to read. The artwork though, especially on the Target Cards is very good—if only it had been bigger! The rulebook is somewhat underwritten, but does include a good example of how an assassination is supposed to work. It would have been nice if the assassin meeples had been a bit more thematic, but you cannot have everything.

Temp Worker Assassins not only has great artwork, but it has a fun theme too. A lot of thought has gone into the names and looks of the Target Cards as well as the name of the various offices and departments at Bureaucrat Castle (you may not have actually worked in some of these locations, but it probably feels as if you have). Once you get the hang of it, a game of Temp Worker Assassins should play faster than the suggested forty minutes—which feels a bit long anyway. This should only take the one play through, but after that, the game’s humour, and the replay value in the variety of the Department and Target cards will bring Temp Worker Assassins back to the table.

Fanzine Focus XI: Hearts in Glorantha Issue 6

On the tail of 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 when 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 showcased how 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 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.

The heyday of the RuneQuest fanzine is long past, but with the forthcoming renaissance in roleplaying games set in Glorantha, it is good to see the return of the fanzine, Hearts in Glorantha, after a hiatus of five years. Published by D101 Games, as a fanzine, Hearts in Glorantha has a focus upon adventures and gameable content which the Game Master can bring to her gaming group. Behind its delightfully and aggressively anatine cover, Hearts in Glorantha Issue 6 comes with four adventures—for HeroQuest Glorantha, RuneQuest Classic, and System-less, a little background, and some memories. It is a good mix with content for both veteran Gloranthaphiles and those new to the setting.

It opens with ‘The Awakening’, a system-less adventure by Scott Crowder. In it the adventurers find themselves caught in a dream of the Brown Dragon of Dragon Pass at a point between the Dragonrise and the Dragonkill. Stranded in the lost city of Harna Gamoon amidst an army of Yelmalians they must negotiate their way through the dreamscape to if not change history, then at least set it on another course. This is a scenario that Gloranthaphiles will enjoy as it allows them to both explore a period of Dragon Pass’ history and be its heroes some half a millennium later. The scenario is relatively easy to adapt to the rules of the Game Master’s choice, and would be even simpler to run under HeroQuest Glorantha.

Also for devoted Gloranthaphiles, Barry Blatt’s ‘God Forgot’ details the islands of God Forgot in the Holy Country. Adventurers will need good reason to visit these islands as their inhabitants, the Inagreen, are unwelcoming and stand-offish, preferring visitors to stick to Casino Town or Talar’s Hold with its Foreign Quarter. They have good reason for this, having been the victims of crusade in the Second Age and now their primary contact with the outside world is through the mercenaries of their six ‘Legions’, the military-crime families of the Horali caste which squabble with other over who controls what on the islands and thus who can make donations to them (as they are not allowed to trade). Instead of worshipping gods, the Inagreen muse and philosophise about the Logical Laws, and several volumes devoted to such thinking are given in the article. Given the default point of view in Glorantha is that of the theists of Sartar, this is both a weird and an interesting article to read. It may be used as background for player characters or as a strange place for the player characters to visit, but perhaps a scenario hook or two or ideas on how to create Inagreen characters might have helped with either.

‘Light and Death’, by Neil Smith, takes place in the city of Raibanth in the Heartlands of the Lunar Empire. The player characters are members of same League assigned by their patriarch to protect the architect of a new bridge across the Joat river and further strengthen the ties between Old and New Raibanth. They must deal with protestors, a murder, religious fanatics, and illumination in order to prevent the construction of the bridge from being halted. The scenario comes with five pre-generated characters and is relatively short and linear in structure, so it would work well as a convention scenario. One issue with ‘Light and Death’ is that it is written for use with HeroQuest, First Edition rather than HeroQuest, Second Edition or HeroQuest Glorantha, so the Game Master may need to do adaptation to run it under those rulesets.

‘Memories of RuneQuest 2’ is nice callback for long time Gloranthaphiles, especially since RuneQuest Classic has not long been released. It is followed by the ‘Ian Cooper Interview’, a Question & Answer article with the line editor of HeroQuest. An informative piece, it starts with Ian’s gaming history and involvement in writing Glorantha before coming up to date with the Red Cow Saga—The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights. Throughout the issue are sprinkled four scenario hooks by Newt Newport, such as ‘One of our Fish is Missing’ in which the player characters must find out what has happened to a village’s magic fish and ‘Hunter’s Tower’, a wilderness encounter with a mysterious structure with one door which opens only to lure game animals inside with sweet music. Each of the quartet comes with three options enabling the Game Master to select the reason as to what is going on. Stuart Mousir-Harrison’s ‘Why the Story is the Best’ is a lovely little vignette which pleasingly highlights the difference between knowledge and story by showing us why Lhankor Mhy knows things and Issaries tells us tales.

Matt Ryan’s ‘The Lightbringers’ Quest’ is written as an introductory HeroQuest adventure to be run and played in one session players both unfamiliar with setting of Glorantha and the mechanics of HeroQuest. It allows the players to roleplay their way through one of greatest of Glorantha’s myths—that of Orlanth the Storm God descending into the Underworld with his companions to free Yelm the Sun God. This is not a Hero Quest in the usual sense of Glorantha, but a ‘God Quest’ in which the player characters are Petty Gods, who will go on the quest on behalf of the Storm God and petition the Sun God for his atonement and friendship. This is a fantastic—in both senses of the word—introduction to the mythology of Glorantha and enables the players to roleplay both interesting characters and situations, which sadly they are unlikely, at least in the case of the characters, to play again. Now of course, this scenario deviates from canonical Glorantha in the sense that it was the Lightbringers who undertook this quest, not the Petty Gods of the player characters. One option here is to have those Petty Gods become the Lightbringers and so deviate further from canonical Glorantha, but another might be to see this quest as essentially a Hero Quest for the gods, a ‘God Quest’ if you will, enforcing the mythology and history of Glorantha in their quest to become Young Gods rather than Petty Gods.

Where ‘The Lightbringers’ Quest’ is problematic is in its use. The players are expected to create their own gods as part of the play through of the scenario and if playing this scenario at home, then this is not an issue. As a convention scenario, which the author suggests it can be ran as, ‘The Lightbringers’ Quest’ is a bit long and overwritten for the traditional four-hour slot they usually run to. Thus, the Game Master may need to do some trimming of the encounters and probably provide some pre-generated gods.

Rounding out Hearts in Glorantha Issue 6 is ‘Duck Hill’. Since there was a Duck on the cover, there had to be a Duck adventure and this scenario by Newt Newport is it. Written for use with RuneQuest Classic, this involves a mad Duck, a Duck day of celebration, and a dungeon. It is short—no pun intended—it is fun, and it is just a bit silly.

Physically, Hearts in Glorantha Issue 6 is a clean and tidy book, decently edited and illustrated. As a forty-eight-page A4-size book, it does not feel all that sturdy though.

Hearts in Glorantha Issue 6 is a packed with good content and content that can be gamed, whatever flavour of mechanics you prefer. There is enough material in its pages to serve as a jumping on point as well as enough to keep veterans of the setting entertained.