TLDR: 5 stars – it's got that wow factor, and no appreciable faults.

This book has been sitting on my shelf for ages. I've always loved the ideas behind this setting – it's alien feel, vaguely science-fantasy, and the cultural inspirations from India, Egypt, and Central America really appeal to me.

Core Mechanic

I didn't know much about GOO's Tri-Stat system before reading this, and I suspect I'm still missing something since Tekumel has six stats, not three. But it seems a simple enough D10 roll under system with your stats as target numbers that can be modified up or down. The difference between your roll and the target is recorded as your margin of success.

Contents

1. Introduction to Tekumel (3 pages)
This chapter introduces us to the setting and its publication history. This also has one of the best What is a Roleplaying Game sections I've seen anywhere. This chapter has a nice section outlining what makes Tekumel unique as a setting, and these things are:

• a. Metal is scarce; most weapons and armour are made from Chlen hide.
• b. There are no riding animals.
• c. The wilderness is very hostile, so don't leave the trail.
• d. The world is hot and humid, sometimes beyond endurance limits.
• e. The culture of the place obviously differs from the usual.
• f. Clans are very important in society and are your first loyalty.
• g. Architecture in cites as being unique, though with the exception of the 3-tiered sakbe roads, this doesn't really come across anywhere else in this book, and the architecture is not particularly well described or illustrated – a missed opportunity.
• h. Dress is different. Dress isn't often a feature that gets played up in games, but I suppose this is an invitation to do so, which by itself would give Tekumel a different feel.
• i. Status is important, and something you wear and give outward clues about. How you relate to NPCs depends on relative status. The game recommends that all characters start with the same status.
• j. Blood money: wrongful injuries and deaths will cost you.
• k. Noble Action: In our way of thinking, noble and ignoble acts follow from morality, but in Tekumel, nobility is not tied to morality. You may not approve of someone's acts, but if they have acted nobly (ie. according to their professed core beliefs) then you still respect them. This is a small distinction, but an interesting one.

2. Character Creation (44 pages)
The second chapter has you jumping right into character creation with the following subsections: Concept, Clan, Religion, Stats, Attributes, Defects, Career, Skills, Resources, Rank, and Derived Values.

3. Non-Human Races (14 pages)
Chapter 3 describes the six playable non-human races (really, these are species, not races) on the planet, and how to make characters from them.

• a. Ahoggya are four-legged and armed brutes with a shell on top, looking kind of like a cross between a turtle and a mushroom.
• b. Hlaka are imp-like flying creatures.
• c. Pachi Lei are four-legged and armed humanoids with heads that look like somebody crossed a bird with an artichoke. They bear both male and female sexual organs and wear their eggs on the outside.
• d. Pe Choi – if you think 'mantis-man' you're nearly there.
• e. Shen – think 'lizard man'.
• f. Tinaliya are short, squat, beings with beaks and bee-hive heads with four legs and 3 genders. The live underground and are very literal.

So yep, these are not your typical fantasy races. They're no stranger than many D&D creatures, but where the playable races in d&D are fairly vanilla, the races here are quite different and most would really let you excercise your role-playing muscles.

4. Equipment and Economics (24 pages)
Money, stuff, and how you convert one into the other. The most interesting thing here is that your clan may cover some of your expenses and even loan you weapons and armour for your ventures. It all depends on your status.
Also interesting are the descriptions of talismans, charms, and magic (ancient technology) items. There aren't a lot, but they are meant to be rare and are very flavourful. You get little things like this:

Fake Eyes: Few people want to find out the hard way whether an Eye pointed at them is real or not, so a Fake Eye can be as effective for Intimidation as a real one. This category represents top quality fakes and near-perfect replicas of the real thing. They look real until the button is pushed. A Fake Eye will provide +4 to intimidation checks.

5. Game Mechanics (19 pages)
This covers the core mechanics of the game and gives a number of optional advanced combat rules for more tactical play, which look like fun. At the end of the section are four subsections that I really liked, and that could be adapted to any game or world:

• a. Teamwork and Planning are two different ways to increase your chances of success.
• b. Respect is a measure of your respect in the community, and I really like how this enables PC interaction with the setting.
• c. Favours is similar to Respect, another neat little mechanic for interacting with the setting.
• d. Duels, and the settling thereof.

6. Magic (30 pages)
Magic rules, sources of spells, and most of all spell descriptions.

7. The World of Tekumel (16 pages)
This section describes the setting in overview, including history, current events, a rough guide to the Tsolyanu empire and it's larger neighbours, and a bit more on the workings of magic.

8. The Bestiary (23 pages)
What you would expect, and the creatures are refreshingly different. This is not an exhaustive bestiary, but it'll get you through a campaign or two. At the end of this sections are the two Inimical Races, races native to the planet so alien that interaction with them is not really reasonable on most levels.

9. Life in Tsolyanu (36 pages)
We're back to the setting in this section, now focused on the Empire of the Petal Throne itself and it's society and culture. This is really the meat of the game. Here we have:

• a. Religion, with gods divided between the houses of order and chaos, and largely mirroring each other with 5 main gods of each house in the realms of Rule, War, Learning, Sex, and Death. Each of the main gods has a single cohort with a narrower focus in the realm of the main god.
• b. Cultural values, including Noble Action, Honour, Gender, Family and Kinship, clothing, social status, and law.
• c. Lifestyle by Clan Social Status describes what a typical life is like in a low, medium, or high status clan. Assassin clans are covered separately.
• d. Priesthood describes how a character might become a member of and advance in the priesthood.

• e. Military describes the same for the military, and this seems like a common path that character might take to enter the game world. What follows is a list of the many Legions of the empire that one might be a member of. Some are clan or race-specific, other more broad. And they have wonderful names:
  Legion of the Sweet Singers of Nakome
  Legion of Potent Destiny
  Legion of the Scales of Brown
  Legion of the Deep Purple Dark
  Legion of the Maces Raised High
  Phalanx of Lord Durritlamish of the Rotted Face
  Battalions of the Seal of the Worm
  Cohorts of Chegarra, the Hero King
  Regiment of the Knower of Spells
  Battalions of Vrishtata the Mole
  Horde of Hrk-ss, the Eater of Eggs

• f. Describes Paths a character may take to wealth and power in the imperial government.

10. Game Mastering (7 pages)
More or less the usual GM advice, and good advice on how to run a non-vanilla setting for those who are intimidated by such.

Appendix
A page on languages, some reading resources, NPC stats for common NPCs, and the index.

Impressions

I really enjoyed this book. I'm a gamer who likes to to use gaming to explore exotic locales, meet interesting characters and cultures, and solve interesting problems, and this book really delivers. The rules are medium crunch and not overly complicated. The whole book is geared to giving the GM tools to provide experiences (not stories) to gamers, and that's really what I want in a game book.

Many people say that the don't know what to do with Tekumel, or find it too hard to get into. It's not an attitude I can really relate to. The cultures are and species in the book are all interesting, but not completely alien. To play the game well, you'd have to be able to somewhat think like a local character, make decisions like a local character, play the role of a local character. That requires a little more investment, but it's not all that hard to do.

If you like Trad games, and trad games with an anthropological bent (Jorune, RuneQuest, Harnmaster, Talislanta, Mechanical Dream) then you'll love this one, too. The setting is well thought out, convincing in execution, and refreshingly original. The rules are medium crunch and get out of your way, letting you concentrate on the good stuff, like how you'll escort the Pachi Lei priests through the humid uplands without letting a single sacred egg-sack get pierced by a flying worm.

I'm giving this one 5 our of 5 – serious wow factor for me.

by Paul Mitchener, 2015, 111 pages.
A Swords and Sandals Roleplaying Game. D101 Games.

D101 Games: Hunters of Alexandria

Hunters of Alexandria is a sweet little RPG by the incalculable Dr. Paul Mitchener with an added scenario by publisher Newt Newport.

The game is set in Roman Alexandria in the year 753 after the foundation of Rome. That's 1 AD to you and me...well, to me anyway; you might be more of a CE person. Anyway, the book is set in ancient Alexandria when it is a thriving city under Roman rule. The conceit is that all the players are part of an organization called The Venatores (or Hunters, if you're like me and have a North American education and didn't learn some cool words in Latin) and your job is to seek out and trouble-shoot supernatural threats to the city and empire.

And why not? Roman Alexandria is chock full of larvae lamiae, lares, and lycanthropes, not to mention more exotic things that have creeped in from nearby Aegyptus, like ghouls, sphinxes, and sha.

The book offers a capsule history of Alexandria, a gazetteer of places in the city, some sample characters, a who's who of the city, factions for the PCs to rub up against, some scenario outlines, a full adventure, and all the rules you need to play. Rules are a modified version of fate, but you don't need a copy of fate to play. The game is light enough that you can pick up and play with minimal preparation, and it can do this because you, yes you, can fill in all the blanks you need from your own imagination of what a Roman city is like. Setting the game in Roman Alexandria is actually a brilliant stoke, because it's just exotic enough to give a sense of wonder, and yet familiar enough to make playing there easy.

As good as it is, I do have a few small quibbles with the book. It really could use another pass through an editor or proofreader, though the errors are not significant enough to impede one's enjoyment. And the included scenario, although it does an excellent job of making use of the core text and bringing the setting alive, will need to be given some thought before running it to smooth out some structural inconsistencies – for example some scenes are connected by threads so silky I think the players will easily miss their connection, and the ending will need to be given some thought as none of the 4 possible resolutions presented actually deals with what I think the the most likely outcome. Lastly, there is some questionable advice in this scenario – it's a mystery and the text advises you not to give the players advice when they get stuck (even when the scenario writer doesn't provide enough clues). If you follow this, you may well end up in one of those embarrassing situations where the game grinds to a halt because nobody knows what to do next, and you'll be forced to write a Gumshoe system knock-off - and nobody wants that.

I'm happy to be able to recommend this game. It's short. It's sweet. It's fun. The hiccups in the scenario are easily overcome. And you all need more ancient history in your gaming life than you currently have – stop mumbling, you know it's true! Duo pollice!

Link

https://d101games.com/books/hunters-of-alexandria/

Disclosure

Paul Mitchener is a member of this club and a friend of mine, but hopefully that didn't influence my opinion too much. I purchased my copy direct from D101.

A Scenario Idea

Since this is the Tabletop Roleplayer's Book Club where we talk about how novels inspire us, here's a scenario idea inspired by a beloved fantasy novel for use with the **Hunters of Alexandria game. (Rescued from my Ancient History Blog)

Inspiration

I think there's a lot of scope for expanding with a sort of 'city breaks' book that gives adventurers a wide variety of places to visit on travels from Alexandria. There are a lot of very interesting but less famous Egyptian locales that would really lend that feeling of wonder and mystery to an adventure. And in this case I'd certainly include the Fayyum city of Arsinoe in Arcadia - aka Crocodilopolis. From Wikipedia: "The city worshiped a tamed sacred crocodile called in Koine Petsuchos, "the Son of Soukhos", that was adorned with gold and gem pendants. The Petsoukhos lived in a special temple pond and was fed by the priests with food provided by visitors. When Petsuchos died, it was replaced by another."

That's very cool on its own, but let's take this a step further and turn it into an RPG campaign.

Pataikos, or nmw

The Scenario

A bunch of Egyptian nmw, or Pataikos, servants of the cult of Ptah, wish to reclaim the treasures of their ancestors, unjustly robbed from them by the cult of Petsoukhos generations ago. On the advice of a priest of Thoth, they arrive for an unexpected party at the house of an unlikely burglar in Alexandria, whose door the Priest of Thoth had marked with a hieroglyph. The burglar is surprised by the intrusion, but politely provides many festive offerings to his guests. Before he knows it, the burglar agrees to set off on adventures with them and leaves Alexandria for the first time.

On their journeys they are nearly eaten by sphinxes, then captured by Troglodytes from the Erythrean Sea or Upper Nile area, and while trapped in the troglodyte caves the burglar meets an ancient mummy and wins a treasure from him - the Ring of Gyges, which turns the wearer invisible.

Eventually they all get out of the caves, only to be hunted by jackals, and then rescued by griffins and deposited on an island in the river where they meet a man who can change into a hippopotamus. They next traverse the great reed beds and nearly run afoul of giant water striders.

Finally they make it to Crocodilopolis and discover the secret way into the lair of Petshoukhos by moonlight. He lies within, encrusted in gems. Using the Ring of Gyges, the burglar steals the Eye of Osiris, which angers the great reptile, who then goes on a rampage in the city of Arsinoe where he is eventually killed by a local archer - but not before the town is nearly destroyed.

While the local residents deal with the great croc, the patraikos move into the lair and reclaim it and its treasure for themselves, as their heritage. The burglar finds he must mediate between the two groups that want the treasure in payment for past wrongs. And to complicate matters, the angry troglodytes, jackals, and some bird pals show up seeking revenge.

Now, what could you call this campaign? Maybe name it after the unexpected party that starts it all. Looking up the Egyptian word for festive offerings in the dictionary, that gives us Hbyt, so we'll call it The Hbyt. Sounds about right.

Links:

Crocodilopolis
Pataikos
https://theodora.com/encyclopedia/t/troglodytes.html
Ring of Gyges
Ancient Egyptian Dictionary

by Neil Gow, 2009, 162pp
TLDR: 3.5 out of 5 stars for a pretty solid with a few question marks and mechanics that don't really cater to my style. The presentation and flavour are top notch.

Beat to Quarters describes itself as an RPG that puts you in the roles of the men who sailed the Seven Seas during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It's clearly a game about adventures in the style of Horatio Hornblower, Aubrey, Bolitho, and Drinkwater.

The physical book looks and feels like an Osprey history book, which lends it a sense of adventure and historicity - it's a nice touch.

Contents

Introduction and Basics (12 pages)
This outlines the setting and gives the basic concepts of character creation - Measures, Reputations, Skills, and Experiences.

Characters (35 pages)
This section runs you through the creation of characters. Characters are assumed to be men on a sailing ship of any rank except captain. Any character that is promoted to captain becomes an NPC. The purpose, I suppose, is to maintain a sense of play balance. But note that it's possible to have one character who's a lieutenant commanding a small ship, in charge of the remaining characters who are able-bodied seamen. The book doesn't spend a lot of time on the concept of game balance, but in my experience most GMs are quite capable of using their heads. This game isn't really geared to beginners, in any case.

This chapter takes you through a life-path system of sorts, in which you describe your past experiences before becoming a sailor and after. Sailor origins (including press gangs) are discussed. Ship ratings, rank, nationality, religion, and class are all covered. The steps are: Concept, Personal Station, Life Before Recruitment, Your Ship, Naval Recruitment and Training, Naval Experiences, Traits, Wealth, and Final Details. That's nine steps. Character Creation look to be quite fun, very suited to the setting, and deep enough to satisfy without being overly long. There are no long lists of things to choose from. OK, not many, anyway.

Tests, Challenges, and Missions (35 pages)
This chapter takes you through the mechanics of the game, and gets into the role of the GM a little. The game uses a playing card mechanic, in which all tests are opposed (by the GM or other players/npcs). This is highly setting appropriate (skill at playing the game of whist was important for naval officers) but a little difficult to parse from a probability standpoint. It would have been nice if probabilities had been discussed in the book. As it is, I'll have to trust that it works until I can playtest it.

Also discussed in this chapter are Damage states (things like reputations can be damaged), and then missions and challenges. This last section disapointed me a little - the game is clearly a scene-framing game in which all the players come up with story ideas together. As an explorer, I personally dislike that kind of adventure structure, and having tried it several times with my groups have found it to fail in satisfying our sense of discovery. The framing of scenes is also quite difficult for most trad gamers - especially when not really familiar with the setting - and this book provides no advice on how to teach them.

The MISSIONS (read: scenarios) are defined as consisting of a fixed number of CHALLENGES. Challenges are defined as TESTS with a dramatic storyline outcome - the example given is if a character wishes to shoot a fleeing French spy before they reached the safety of a tree line. I'm not sure how many challenges are meant to be in a mission, but it seems like anywhere from 2-8 are mentioned. So, going strictly by the rules, if you shoot a French spy 2-8 times, that's your mission done. This section feels either under thought-through or under-explained. In any case, as a trad gamer used to playing more free-form, this kind of attempt to define missions by the number of challenges the characters face always feels rather forced. In my experience, it's usually pretty obvious when a mission is done, regardless of how many challenges you're supposed to have faced.

Combat Challenges, Naval Missions, Crew Actions, and Skirmish Rules are also loosely covered here. The combat seemed quite fine to me, potentially quite fun. I'd like to try it.

Matters Nautical (13 pages)
Here's a section on spot rules, looking at weather, wealth, equipment, prize money, grog, the Captain's Favour (which seems a neat mini-rpg within a story game) Ear of the Gun Deck (same as above, but for the below-decks), The Articles of War (rules of the ship - to be used with discretion), and Promotion.

Heat of Oak (23 pages)
This section describes the ship mechanics and naval combat. Naval combat is fairly abstract, relying on a range chart. It looks quite fun, and has a reasonable amount of detail (ship types & customization, ammo types, and setting fires, weather gauge, broadsides and boarding) but in it's abstractness it also missed a lot of the kind of detail you get from the novels listed above - night actions, fog of war, cutting out parties, fire-ships, deception, and many other details of naval warfare are not covered. Realistically, a game writer needs to decide how big the book is and who detailed the game is - Beat to Quarters takes a reasonable middle path, here, that I think will appeal to most people.

Friends and Foes (21 pages)
This section describes several foreign navies, several NPCs, and several theatres of naval warfare, including the Channel Fleet, North Sea Fleet, Baltic Fleet, Mediterranean, North America, West Indies, and Cape/East Indies, with a small amount of advice for playing in each region.

Clear for Action! (10 pages)
This section gives some generally quite good GM advice, ideas for alternate campaigns (such as having a player captain, or playing privateers) and a bibliography.

Appendices (19 pages)
This section has some experience tables (which should have been in the character section), list of British ship names, or personal names, some captain templates for NPCs, nautical phrases, masts, riggings, character sheets, ship sheets, mission sheets, range chart, afterword, and an index.

Conclusion

Overall, I found this to be nice product. It steers you toward a style of gameplay I don't really care for (collaborative scene-building), but I suspect a group can ignore that style and safely play in their own style and have quite a good bit of fun. I quite like the presentation, the writing, and the book is full of good ideas. The mission-building section didn't quite satisfy, and I think some advice of probabilities for the card-based resolution system would have been nice. It feels like a game that would be suitable for a short campaign. I'm not sure at it has the chops for a long one, and a one-shot could be fun but won't make use of all the rules. This game is a 3.5 out of 5 for me - pretty solid with a few question marks, but not quite catering to my style.

Turns out the PDF is Pay What you Want on RPG Now - you can't beat that if you're curious!

Beat to Quarters on RPG Now

by Flying Mice Games, written by the under-capitalized clash bowley and his ingenious friend Albert Bailey. Published in 2011, 296pp
TLDR: 4 out of 5 for a very fun game, a clever and interesting setting, and some nice bells and whistles.

Outremer is an alternate history/fantasy game that re-imagines what might have happened if the second crusade into the Holy Land had been less disastrous and the crusader states had lasted into the renaissance.

I was first exposed to this game many years ago when Clash ran a great session of it at a con in Montreal. The mechanics and the setting push all the right buttons for me, so naturally I bought it. I've skimmed it many times, but never actually read it cover-to-cover until now.

Contents

Introduction (14 pages) establishes the setting as an alternative timeline and follows the logical progression of historical events from the time of the second crusade in 1147 to the ascension of Elizabeth I in England in 1558

Creating your Association (19 pages) jumps right into the nuts and bolts of the setting by getting you started creating a reason for your characters to work together by putting them in association with one another. Are they members of a private club? an arcane mercenary company? a scholarly society? an arm of the church? This section contain a number of evocative tables to help you establish your place in the world and flesh out your hangout and resources. This is like building the covenant in Ars Magica.

Character Generation (66 pages) goes through all the nuts and bolts of character creation, with a particular amount of detail on 'path' characters - those who practice or have access to the 'paths of power' - i.e. magic. Character creation follows a lifepath system that takes you from youth to maturity across several 'careers', which means characters can be focused or multifaceted based on their pas experiences. There are probably some 2-dozen mature careers here, including spies, tinkers, turcopoles, poets, priests, knights, pirates, performers, fencers, herbalists, barber-surgeons, and apothecaries.

The path options are pure gold, and great setting material. You can play half-angels, half-djinns, immortals, esotericists, magi, minstrels, crusaders and ghazi, kabbalists, mechanists, sorcerers, oracles, dervishes, snake charmers, mystics, and faqih (islamic law masters).

Skills and Traits (12 pages) lists the many skills. There are a lot of them, but skills in this game don't limit what you do, so much as enhance what you do, so each character only gets a small subset of what's available.

Religion (20 pages) gives an overview of the main religions in the game. This is pure setting (maybe even pure history) to help GMs and characters think like an Ourtemerian. There are no mechanics here.

Adventure Generator and NPCs (20pp) contain some toolboxes for generating adventures and adversaries. Again, more tables.

Magic (6 pages) gives rules for magic in the game. The placement of this chapter before the explanation of the core rules is a little odd and confusing, as many terms are used which we haven't been introduced to yet. Here we learn that this is a 'Blood Games II' game, though the significance of that is not explained.

Playing Starpool (11 pages) This is the rules section. What is starpool? Sir not explained in this book. This is the core mechanic that Bowley has chosen to run the system, first developed for his Starcluster game, hence the name. Is this a Bloodgames II game, or a Starcluster game? Son of sir not explained in this book. Doesn't really matter, though - the lineage of the game has no bearing on the reading or playing of the game.

Starpool is a super easy D20 dice pool system. The idea is to roll a number of D20 dice equal to your skill+1, and get a number of successes equal to or under your attributes. I've played it - it's fun (assuming you like trad systems, as I do). And it's a good thing it's simple, because some of the subsystems in this chapter are not terribly well explained. For example, under initiative, it says "Players may trade dice with Resolution" which is capitalized, suggesting it's a defined term. But it's not defined anywhere, or even used elsewhere. In the example to the side, the word 'Chance' is used instead of 'Resolution', but that's not defined anywhere either. There are also a few references to SF elements here (unless they do have Plasteel armour in Outremer) that suggest this chapter was copied and pasted here without a thorough look over. This chapter really could have used a good edit by someone less familiar with the rules.

But that said, there's no flaw in here that the average gamer can't surmount.

Creatures and the Spirit World (26 pages) Essentially the Outremer bestiary, and more or less what you'd expect.

Weapons and Equipment (16 pages) mostly lists of things you can obtain. This game doesn't count cash, but weighs your lifestyle against access to things, which I quite like.

The Nations of Outremer (46 pages) This describes all the kingdoms and principalities in brief, with their basic political outlook. It's pretty bare bones and consistent with the tool box approach. I would have liked to see more plot hooks baked into the section, however, maybe with some evocative detail, like "the tomb of Sir Rollo of Nicosia can be found here, who was said to have found the toe of Bar Kochba." but Clash mostly leaves that kind of detail to the invention of GMs - which for many people will be a feature!

The Military Orders (8 pages) Another short section and, like religion, is mostly setting/history to help round things out.

Game Mastering (4 pages) A very short section in which Clash talks about how he's played the game to success, and speaks specifically to the structuring of scenarios and campaigns.

Appendices, Etc. This contains some optional rules (Commando-style actions, plot points, active defense, and troupe style play), lists of names, lists o titles, , an index, character sheets and work sheets, and an essay on the food of the period by contributors Sally and Rachel Abravanel.

Conclusion

I love this setting to bits, and the mechanics are a lot of fun, so I'm very happy to have this in my collection. This is definitely a game I can see myself running one day. I'm glad I finally read it - I find it very inspiring. As an RPG product compared to all the others on the market, potential buyers should know that this isn't a slick production. Flying Mice Games is basically a one man show and all the art, maps, design, and layout are by that one guy - and he's not equally good at everything. The layout is functional and designed for reference over reading. The illustrations evoke the setting, but are not the thing that's going to sell you on the book. The writing is generally clear - the organization a little less so at times. But the game is mechanically sound, fun to play, and has a wonderfully evocative setting - and those are really the things that count, aren't they? 4 out of 5 stars.

Flying Mice Store Page

by Epidiah Ravachol and Nat Barmore, 2005, 168pp

Dread bills itself as a game of Horror and Hope. Mechanically, it is a game of suspense with advice on how to adapt that to horror. As for 'hope', it is only a game of hope in the sense that players will no doubt hope they are not the next person to be removed from the game. Hope, in the sense of hope for a better future, or in the sense of hope for a chance of redemption, is not really part of this game.

If you don't already know it, Dread is the famous 'Jenga RPG' - it uses a Jenga tower as the randomizer, rather than dice. Using a Jenga tower as a randomizer is really quite brilliant, and reason enough for any gamer to own this game. It's more than just a gimmick - the tower is visual and visceral symbol of declining stability. It's there, in your face. You look at it and note its impassivity, its inevitableness . The tower doesn't care about you or your needs. It will not 'give you a break' when you need it. You cannot fudge the tower. It just stands there, inert until someone touches it, and after each interaction you are noticeably, measurably, closer to your doom. I'm not sure I can think of a better symbol for a game of suspense and horror. Dread justifiably won an Ennie for best design in 2006.

Contents

The mechanics of Dread are fairly simple. When something needs to be tested, a block is pulled from the middle or bottom of the tower and re-stacked on the top. If a player does this without toppling the tower, they succeed in their task. If a player refused to attempt the pull, then they fail in their task, but remain in the game. If a player pulls a block and the tower topples, the player fails at their task, and is removed from the game (or is doomed to be removed from the soon, as a kind of promise). Deciding when to pull, or who decides when to pull, or whether to knock the tower over on purpose, are all nuances covered by the rules.

Character creation is largely descriptive. The GM develops a unique questionnaire for each player, and each players answers these. The answers provide the facts for the player, and the facts influence both how the player will play the character and how the character will pull blocks. Characters need not pull blocks for things they are 'skilled' at, according to their answers. The questionnaires also serve to set the tone for the scenario, providing foreshadowing and red herrings to the players. In creating a character, players will be forced to think about the themes of the game, and may question why certain questions are on the sheet. It's mechanically simple, but complex in nuance.

Most of this book is taken up by GM advice. There's a chapter on how to host a game, another on how to create a scenario, then six chapters on how to use the mechanics to bring out certain themes: suspense, supernatural, madness, morality, mystery, and gore.

Then there are three scenarios, each using a different skin: a deadly grand-canyon camping trip, an 'alien' type SF scenario, and a cosy-cabin slasher flick scenario. The first of these is more developed, but all have good advice and tips on how to run them.

Lastly, there's a short section on how to play the game if you don't have a Jenga tower.

Impressions

Conceptually, this game is brilliant. Knowing the concept, I'm willing to bet most experienced GMs can play Dread without even needing to read the rules. And yet there's a fair bit of text in here - what are we getting. The first part of the book is rather surprisingly filled with advice for people who are new to role-playing games, and for an experienced gamer I have to admit this makes for dull reading. I don't really need to be told how to host a game, for example. It strikes me a a bit odd, because I have trouble seeing anyone new to roleplaying games picking up Dread at random as their first game. It doesn't even come with one of those 'what is roleplaying' sections. In fact, I don't think it ever even calls itself a roleplaying game - though it surely is.

The second half of the book, though, is filled with advice that even the most experienced GM will find useful. This revolves around how to use the rules to bring out certain moods in the game, and in the 'Scenarios' chapters, advice on how to create scenes, advice on pacing, and so on - it's great stuff.

In spite of being full of advice on building scenarios and when to ask for pulls, I would have liked just a little more on how to ask for pulls without spilling the beans. The specific scenarios give a little of this at the end, but a section on this in the middle would have been welcome. The book is chock full of examples of when a GM should request that a player make a pull - but a little short on how to phrase the request without giving the game away. For example, if the GM wants to test whether the characters can sense something, they will ask for a pull. But how? Do you say to them "Anyone want to make a pull to detect something about the room?" In this case, the characters will undoubtedly suspect something. Maybe that's not a bade thing, but maybe the GM wants to keep some secrets. A GM can no doubt learn the answer to this through trial and error, but I would have liked more from the authors, who no doubt have a lot of experience with the system.

I was also a little unclear as to how many collapses the GM should be aiming for. The game is clearly set up for one-shots, and in the rules they seem to suggest that a GM should expect several collapses of the tower. But how many? One collapse per player minus one? Two collapses? Yet the sample scenarios included suggest that GMs should aim for a single collapse at the end of the scenario, and pace things accordingly. I would really have liked to get ore advice on the number of collapses in a session. Presumably too many and things get comical. But one collapse may not be dramatic enough.

Overall, I think this is a wonderful game that every GM (if not every player of RPGs) should own. I think it spends a little too much time tailoring the advice to people who will never play the game (it even at one point says "If you happen to have a bunch of dice lying around the house, try this..." - I mean really - no person that has no dice in their house will ever purchase this game - who are we trying to kid?) and it misses a few opportunities to tell real game players how to run the game. But these are very minor quibbles. I give this 4.5 out of 5 for being a very creative, very adult, very intelligent game about creating great, suspenseful experiences at the table.

Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_(role-playing_game)

This book is a beast - took me a month and a half to read.

In case you've been living in a cave with Precious, eating fish and talking to yourself, and don't know what Eclipse Phase is, it's a near future Sci-Fi setting in which humans have spread out into the solar system after a Fall, instigated by AI war machines run amok and an alien virus that turns people into monsters. Humanity is no more - Transhumanity is the norm. Your mind is easily downloaded and can be made to inhabit one of many kinds of bodies ('morphs'), or even live a purely digital existence in 'The Mesh' (the internet). It's a blend of Sci-Fi (of the John Varley/Richard Morgan variety), Cyberpunk, and Lovecraft.

Here's what the book contains:

Introductory fiction: 10 pages
Basic Setting (society, technology, politics, economy, groups): 56 pages
Gazetteer of Places: 26 pages
Game Mechanics and Character Creation: 104 pages
Psionics and Psychosurgery: 18 pages
The Mesh (i.e. the internet 101): 22 pages
Future Tech (egos and morphs, nanotech, spacefaring, social networking): 28 pp
Gear and tech (anything you buy or barter for): 56pp
GM Information (setting secrets and advice on running the game): 40pp
Tables and References: 10 pages

The Rules
The rules are D100 based, and so pretty similar to BRP or HarnQuest with a few local traits. I'd call them medium crunch, but the way character creation is handled ups the crunch level to high. There are no hit locations, but the game makes heavy use of modifiers (up to +30/-30) and factors several things into skill determination, so there's a fair bit of adding. Skills and abilities are a factor of your Ego (mind) and Morph (body), and everything is incremental point buy, so it's a little involved. And since your Morph is basically interchangeable, it seems to me that re-sleeving may be a quite clunky, since there's a fair bit of recalculating that would need to be done each time you switched morphs. Opposed rolls use the blackjack method, similar to Mythras. 00 is a critical success, and 99 is a fumble. All other doubles can be one of the other depending on whether they lie above or below your skill.

The Setting
This book is around 2/3 setting, and this is where the book really shines. This setting is extremely well realized, and in reading through it one can't help but think that they've thought of everything. It's well presented, too - you're given an introduction up front, but then later in the book the most important concepts are revisited in more detail. I didn't find it all equally interesting (the Mesh chapter bored me to tears - containing pretty much everything I didn't need to know about the internet) but it was all clearly done by people who really cared, and backed up their enthusiasm with some serious competence. I'm very impressed. I'm not sure how likely it is I'll run this game, but I'll certainly get some of the setting supplements just to explore this vision of the future further.

Presentation
The book is nicely presented on full-colour pages. The art is evocative but falls short of being illustrative. Layout is a mixed bag - it's stylish for the most part, but I needed glasses to read it, and a few of the design choices (like the Psi sleights) are kind of clunky and not very appealing. Overall, most gamers will be suitably impressed, though. The writing itself is clear and informative, though a little dry in places

Conclusion
Eclipse Phase is a serious work of trad gaming. It presents a rich and evocative world full of wonders and dangers. Society is quite different from the present, so your role-playing skills will be put to the test. Like all such games that require some up-front effort, it's geared to campaign play. There's currently a second edition in the works, and if D100 games don't appeal to you, there's also a FATE version.

I'm giving this one 4 out of 5 stars for seriously good setting building and presentation, and a reliable but heavy mechanical base. Recommended to anyone who wants to read a great SF setting, and to players of trad games in particular.

Posthuman Studios Page

A scenario for Ars Magica 2nd Edition by Jonathan Tweet, Atlas Games, 1991, 64 pages.
TLDR: 3 out of 5 for being generally good, but kind of missing the mark a little and hitting you over the head at the end.

This is a sequel adventure to one of my favourite published adventures for any system: The Ghoul of St. Lazare by John Nephew.

In The Ghoul, members of the covenant discover a corpse floating in the river. Their investigations into this lead them to a small village church and a priest with some... unorthodox... views on the matter of Christ. Their suspicions swing like a pendulum until everything comes to a head one night in the church and all hell breaks loose. We had a blast playing it and experienced some very intense characterization. The interaction between the priest and the PC monk who was sent to investigate (and had his own dark secrets) was particularly good. The two clergy both argued about the nature of Christianity in an effort to get the other to reveal their heresy, while not themselves revealing their own.

So naturally I was excited to hear that there was a sequel.

Description

This scenario sees members of the covenant drawn back to the same village a year later. The villagers are trying to build a new chapel, and the old has been desanctified and surrounded by an iron chain. People have been ill, and deviltry is suspected.

There are two aspects to this scenario. The first is an investigative aspect as the PCs are charged with discovering the source of a curse that has been afflicting some of the villagers. The second is that the powers of hell are active here, and they will now assault the PCs much as they are the villagers, by tempting them into gluttony, envy, sloth, wrath, or any of the other deadly sins. The scenario climaxes on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when the Christ is dead and the devil has won. Can the PCs save each other from being dragged to hell by their own demons?

Analysis (spoiler alert)

I have mixed feelings about this scenario. I really love the idea of tempting the PCs to commit the seven deadly sins. I like how some of this temptation is achieved. I like some aspects of the investigative scenario as well, including the situation of the midwives and the red-herring that might be caused by associating witchcraft with diabolism.

What I'm less keen on are some aspects of the execution. In some ways trying to explicitly tempt PCs into committing all the deadly sins over the span of 5 days feels a bit forced. If the party only has 3 or 4 people in it (as my group might) then everyone will be tempted 2 or 3 times, and it's my feeling that it'll start to look a bit clumsy. I'm also not especially enamored of the climax, which literally has demons emerge from a pit in the ground to try to drag the corrupted PCs into hell. I think if I were to run it, I'd handle it all more subtly than that.

And this last bit is a curious thing, because another product from 1991, A Winter's Tale published by White Wolf contains an appendix at the end called The Devil's Advocate which deals with the subject of handling demons in your games with subtlety. It's afar more interesting treatment than the combat demons of Festival of the Damned.

I'll probably never run this scenario (and certainly not as written) but I do find some interesting things to borrow from this. As reading material goes, it's probably only of middling quality. It contains an awful lot of stats (which make pointless reading) and there's a page of pointless floorplans (do you really need someone to publish a blank floorplan of a 2-room church?) I'll give it a 3 out of 5. For different views from a couple of French guys who actually played it, see the link below. They both thought it was great.

Link

French guys love Festival of the Damned

by Gene Stanley Pritchard, Guildhall Press, 2002, 140pp.
TLDR: 2.5 out of 5 for being an interesting game presented in a confusing and cloying manner.

Scared Stiff is a light, campy rpg designed to emulate light, campy movies. And by 'light' I mean that the system is light (not the book itself, which at 140 8.5x11 pages feels rather dense), and by 'campy' I mean that the writing is campy, and the illustrations are campy, but the underlying subtext is, well, not so much. Intrigued? Then read on.

Contents

EPISODE 1 B-ASICS (3 pages)
In this book, chapters are called 'Episodes'. And here I think we mean 'scene', because episodes are TV, right? What, they show a lot of B Movies on TV! Shut up already! Episode 1 covers 'how to get in the mood' and a general introduction to the game. Well, to gaming B-Movies. Don't take it too seriously.

EPISODES 2 (TERROR 101) and 3 (PLAYING WITH PANACHE) (9 pages)
These next two chapters are full of GM advice on how to run the game. They reference rules that haven't been introduced yet. Confusing? Yep! They largely amount to the author laying out his GMing style. At one point the author says "Games too often make for dull reading", and I can't argue, but most games need to be both books you can read and books you can reference. One of these needs has the reader wanting to be caressed, and the other wants the author to get to the point. The writing in Sacred Stiff relies heavily on style as means to caress the reader - only here it's more of a rough wooing, to borrow a term from Scottish history. There's so much style it becomes cloying, and the explaining of the game suffers. Behind all the text and campy jargon is a game that seems straight forward and easy to play. It could have been presented in a much smaller and more focused book, were it not for all the style.

EPISODE 4 (PLAYING THE GAME) (30 pages)
This section introduces two ways of playing the game - with or without dice. The core die mechanic seems pretty straight forward - roll two 6-sided dice and try to roll higher than one of your 'flaws'. Mechanically simple, but from a design standpoint pretty interesting because your abilities are presented as things that hold you back, and must be overcome. Characters don't have attributes, they have flaws - Weakness, clumsiness, ignorance, cowardice, imbalance, superstition. The lower your flaw, the better, because you need to roll over your flaw - you overcome it. Conversely, the GM, or Evil Mastermind as she is called, must roll under your flaw to exploit it. In a diceless game, you trade points between flaws and misfortune. Which seems logical, but at this point in the book, misfortune hasn't been defined yet, so who knows. What follows next are a bunch of spot rules for things like chases. So we've skipped most of the core concepts of the game, going straight from 'dice' to 'spot rules' without really understanding how to play the game. Confusing!

EPISODE 5 (MASTERFUL MASTERMINDS) (16 pages)
This section is a mixed bag of more GM advice, opening with how to deal with idiot players (yes!) and pacing (play fast paced music to help with this, according to the author) to plotting, suspension of disbelief, and laughs - some good and bad advice here, IMO. Then we talk about Innocent Bystanders and Chumps, which are really two of the three kinds of NPC, and should have been defined much earlier. Chumps are allies that mean well but that PCs use for cannon fodder. Innocent Bystanders are as they seem. Then we have some optional rules that let a GM up the ante (i.e. make a game '3D'), and for climaxes, and gloating on the part of the Creeps (these are antagonist NPCs, or so we gather - they haven't been defined yet). Deathtraps, swarms, and stats for animals round out this disjointed section.

EPISODE 6 (VICTIMS OF CIRCUMSTANCE) (22 pages)
This chapter is all about how to make a character. At last, we get to learn what most of the terms used in the first five chapters mean, and the picture of how to play finally starts coming together. This chapter should have been much further forward. If you made it this far in reading the book, though, you'll get some payoff at last. Character creation is simple, and characters look pretty interesting. Each character is based on a 'stereotype' of behavior, You figure out and define your flaws. Add some 'goodies' (basically anything that's useful as a weapon) and 'trinkets' (useless but descriptive trappings). And finally round out the description of your character. This chapter also gives the GM some tools to punish those players who aren't really into the game. Wait, what? Yep. <---as it says back there. If players don't fully flesh out their characters or come up with interesting names, the GM is encouraged to punish you. An example of how to make Grace Fuller, the sample character, round out this chapter.

EPISODE 7 (GENRE RULES) (10 pages)
More GM advice, now properly located, on how to apply modifiers, on being taken seriously by NPCS when revealing the B-threat, on kissing (ew!), insanity (ah!), and gadgets (oh!).

EPISODE 8 (THE EVIL MASTERMINDS) (14 pages)
Here's where the rest of the basic rules are hidden. Creeps are finally described, and there are tips on how to run them. There's a menagerie here - mostly 1-2 lines of stats per enemy or creature. Honestly this is the first game i've ever seen with Brain in a Jar, Evil Dessert, Electrical Man, Crawling Hand, Gill Creature, Invisible Doctor, Mad Opera Star, Midget Madman, Somnambulist, and Telekinetic Girl statted up as opponents for the PCs. Slow Clap. Finally there's a section on magic and spells, in case the bad guys use them.

EPISODE 9 (A CLOCKWORK DUCK) (10 pages)
This section has more GM advice about bringing a setting alive. First a time frame giving the particular of various time periods. Then something about illustrating horror (mostly using a short story to illustrate), themes, hooks, playing a creep, and a list of buildings to plop into your setting.

EPISODES 10-13 (22 pages)
Ostensibly a bunch of skins, but these chapters are a weird mixed bag. The first, TRADITIONAL TERROR, gives a detailed statistical type description of a town in Maine - reads like an encyclopedia entry for a town, but doesn't really tell you how to run it, or even give plot hooks. The second, ALIEN INVADERS describes an alien species and why they're on earth. A lot of thought went into this, but it's still short on plot hooks or any advice on how to run it. SUPERNATURAL CONSPIRACY is basically a brief on the FBI, without ever really explaining why you should be briefed on the FBI, or how to build a scenario around it. Lastly, MEGA MONSTERS lists a number of Kaiju type beings and describes New York. You can put 2 and 2 together, I think, to figure out how those two things relate to one another.

END PAPERS (14 pages)
Here we have a glossary, index, and character sheet (a toe tag! kinda neat!) to round out the book.

Conclusion

Scared Stiff seems like a pretty fun game for one-shot scenarios of campy horror - exactly what it presents itself as. It's rule's light (if reading heavy). It tries and (and largely fails) to give advice on settings and how to run the game, but there's definitely enough here for an experienced GM to use without difficulty. I think the strength of the book is the system - I'd definitely consider playing the game, and may even borrow things from the system in making my own games. The writing is campy and flavorful, as it should be. It flows well enough and is easy to understand. But it hits you over the head with style, leaving you feeling like you've just been filmed in one of those telescoping scenes.

There big weakness of the book is in the organization - the author presents details of how to use the system before the basics, and the GM advice is all over the place. Some sections (the various skins) give only half of what you'd really want to run it. Most experienced GMs can use this stuff, but will need to flesh it all out.

Also annoying is the GM advice, which varies from sound and useful (the psychology of a creep) to questionable (play fast-paced music when you play to hep keep the pace up) to downright bad (punish players who aren't that into it, and force people to pick male or female as a gender - though frankly this is more oversight than malicious).

I give this one 2.5 out of 5. There's what seems like quite a good gaming experience buried in here, but you'll have to sort through a bunch of weirdly intense text to get to it.

Product Page on RPGNow

I read the first published edition of this game, which has a blue and orange cover depicting Moorish architecture. There is a second edition - I'm not sure how its different - it may well address the concerns I mention below.

In A Thousand and One Nights players roleplay courtiers in the Sultan's court in moments of relaxation. They are gathered in the seraglio, the pavilion in the menagerie, or on the twilight gallery, and passing the time telling stories. In telling these stories, they are subtly jockeying for position in the court, and hope to use that position to either escape from the court or achieve an ambition. They also hope not to run afoul of the Sultan, who is easily offended.

Contents

The first five pages are taken up with the introduction and some advice on how to set the mood for play with candles and menu suggestions. Whether you serve snacks or not, this is also a handy reference for describing food in the game. The author will continue to emphasize the importance of describing the sensual aspects of the setting throughout the book.

The next fifteen or so pages are taken up with creating the courtiers. They are entirely prose-described, with no mechanical qualities. Again, the sense are heavily emphasized, and each player describes things relating to hearing, sight, sound, smell, and touch. They also describe a favorite article of clothing. Then come ambitions, and envies to tie the characters together. Names and roles in the court are also selected. There's certainly enough here to create interesting courtiers and a dynamic between them. And with no mechanics, this material could be adapted to creating PCs and NPCs in any game, really. This is good stuff - focused and flavorful.

The next eight pages describe the flow of play. Players take turn being GM, and on their turn they describe a scene in which the courtiers sit together and in which stories can be told. Once the scene is set, players are invited to roleplay their courtiers, and the GM has her character introduce a story. Other characters are then invited to participate as characters in the story, and a shared story is created. That's right - players play courtiers, who in turn pretend to be playing characters in a story. It's a little convoluted, but most gamers should have no trouble wrapping their heads around this.

As the story progresses, players can grab dice from a communal bowl whenever they wish to pose a question (or introduce a turning point) about some aspect of the story. As the story evolves, these dice are rolled and distributed to the players. By the time the story ends (after a certain number of dice have been pulled) all players will have a little pool of coloured dice in front of them ('the sultan's gems') which can be spent toward their ambition, toward escaping the court, or to prevent attracting the disfavour of the sultan. This is really the only mechanical part of the game, but I found it simple and interesting enough to satisfy the part of me that wants a game to feel like a game.

Once the dice are rolled and ambition is resolved, play proceeds again from the beginning with a new GM. The game ends when a character either achieves their ambition, escapes from court, or is beheaded by the sultan.

The rest of the book is taken up with an example of play, and three pages summarizing the rules.

Evaluation

This game is simple and flavourful, but on some levels it doesn't quite work for me. Although I liked the simple mechanic and the way it can steer character development, I found that the choices were not always meaningful. For example, to 'win' the game, you either have to be the first person to put five points toward satisfying your ambition, or seven points toward escaping from court. There's no mechanical means to differentiate these two things - you just pick where to put your points. So if winning is your goal, you would always put all your points toward ambition, because that's the shortest track to victory. There's no reason (except pure narrative) to ever put points into escape. And this means that the mechanics don't work quite as they should. Since the mechanics are largely there to drive story and 'winning' is not likely to be anyone's major concern, this isn't a fatal flaw, but it feels like it wasn't well-thought-out.

Another aspect of the game that doesn't quite measure up for me is that there's not a lot of setting, here. Yes, we do get some nice nouns and adjectives to describe the sensual aspects of the setting, but there's very little guidance on how to tell stories with Arabic themes, and certainly nothing to steer stories toward the kind of things that occupy the real Thousand and One Nights - those many stories about comeuppance and the learning of hard lessons about the injustice of the world. So if recreating the stories of the 1001 Nights is your goal, you'll probably be disappointed.

Players need to be able to bring both the setting and the themes with them, and it will be a challenge to find four or five people who will be on the same page, I think. I think this is a flaw that many collaborative world-building and story-telling games suffer from. You need to rely on a bunch of people to make up things on the spot without any prior organization. These things always trend toward the silly, in my experience, which can be a lot of fun for a short period of time, but always end up being slapstick pastiches. This is well-illustrated by the example of play in the book, which features a farting camel. That's not the tone that the original Thousand Nights and a Night sets, and I don't think you could recreate that tone while relying on a group of four or five people of varied experience to recreate it.

Conclusion

So, in this sense, the game doesn't really live up to the expectations for me. It's not a 'game of enticing stories in the style of 1001 Nights' but a 'game of silly stories with the trappings of a sultan's court'. Silly stories definitely have their place, but you should know what you're getting when you buy the game. If what you want to do is get together and tell some silly stories with your buddies with some of the trappings of medieval Arabia, then you'll have a lot of fun with this. If you're looking for something to inspire actual 1001 nights adventures (as I was when I first purchased it) then you may be disappointed.

I've given this 3 out of 5 stars. There's some really good stuff in here and you can have fun with it, but it don't think it gives you enough tools to properly emulate storytelling in the style of 1001 Nights.

Written by fantasist and vocabulist Pete Nash and published by The Design Mechanism
TLDR: 5 start out of 5 - Loaded with great material and a certain wow factor.

The Basics

Monster Island is an isolated, monster-infested volcanic island located in the middle of an ocean in the setting of your choosing. It's clearly inspired by both 19th C. adventure writing (both fictional and factual) and by pulp Sword and Sorcery stories of the early 20th C. - particularly those of Clark Asthon Smith, whose spirit is all over this book.

The island itself is shaped by jungle-covered valleys sloping up to steep-sided 10,000' tall mountains, beyond which is a cold and arid plateau, surrounded by even more improbably high mountains. Dispersed around the island are a number of ancient magical gates, perhaps once used to travel the planes, but now only allowing travel to the island, and its through these gates that the eponymous monsters have arrived.

There are three humanoid cultures on the islands. Nestled tenuously in the ruins of an ancient coastal city is a town of human 'settlers' (castaways, more like) trying to eke out an existence from the bounty of the island.

Beyond the city are the jungles of the lower mountains, home to a number of lizard-man tribes who live in rudimentary villages and practice unsavory cultural rites.

Hidden in the high mountains of the caldera are three very old cities, inhabited by what's left of the ancient ophidian sorcerers who once ruled the island. They have their own unique culture and magic system. If you can imagine a mash up the Fallout New Vegas: Big MT **and the underground telepath culture from **Beneath the Planet of the Apes, you'll kind of get the vibe.

All of these cultures are described in the book, along with their unique cultural practices, personalities, and magic systems. Here's what the book contains:

Contents

1. The Island. (12 pages). This first chapter describes the geography and possible location of the island.

2. History & Cultures (24 pages). This section gives a brief history of settlement on the island and provides an overview of the three cultures. These are great, and the 'Savages' in particular are very well done - as good a model of fantasy culture-building as I've seen anywhere. The cultural practices of geriatricide, skinning opponents, cannibalism, and shrinking heads are designed to seem unsavoury to outsiders, but to make complete sense from the point of view of those practicing them, which is a very nice touch.

3. Settlements (22 pages). This section describes the one human settlement and a sample native settlement for each of the other two cultures on the island, along with the notable personalities of each. In some ways, this is a continuation of the previous chapter and rounds things out. Things get a little campier here, especially in the naming of NPCs, for although personalities like Persval Fawset, Harrick Hoodin, Artuur Doyal, and Gorge Ivrist certainly reveal the setting's inspiration, they also obviously contrived and undo somewhat the careful setting work of the previous chapter. Also, this chapter could have benefited from much better illustrations of the places, IMO. But these are minor points - the mind's eye does a pretty good job.

4. Places of Interest (47 pages). This section describes a number of locales around the island, from ancient causeways and valleys to enormous carvings, tombs, and temples devoted to unspeakable gods. Some of these are deadly tomb-raider style dungeon crawls, while others are clearly intended for more social encounters. All of them are well-stocked with plot seeds that give you many different ways of using these locales in your game. Many could also be plucked from this setting to be used elsewhere without much effort. Twelve locations are given a full description, and another 15 are given a smaller and more suggestive description.

5. Campaigns (14 pages). This is the GM section, and it talks about themes, scenario seeds, how to run a campaign, and has encounter tables. Solid stuff all round.

6. Magic (34 pages). The Magic chapter details the magic used by three cultures on the island. Each of these riffs off one of the magic systems described in the core Mythras book - Theism for the humans, Animism for the Savages, and Sorcery for the old ones. Like the cultures, these are extremely well done and are a great model for anyone who would like to see how you can adapt core Mythras to your own setting. I particularly liked the Sorcerous schools and the magical mishap table - this really feels like S&S sorcery! Except for the spell names, which rather jarringly sound like they were dreamed up by a delirious oxford don rather than a culture of snake-people. Pete Nash obviously has a deep love for the sesquipedalian word!

7. Items & Substances (22 pages). This section discusses the various poisons and narcotics of the island - and not even all of them, there are even more in the creatures section - maybe 35 altogether! Also covered are diseases, native armaments, and a range of magical or mystical items. There's also a very nifty and flavorful table listing the natural produce and their relative costs, so if your PCs need some cash in a pinch, they can figure out whether it's more worth their while to go out and hunt butterfly wings, combustible tree sap, tipsy melons, or yeti furs. (Answer: it's probably the sap, but remember the movie Sorcerer?)

8. Flora and Fauna (93 pages). And finally the monsters, of which there are a huge variety, mostly taken from Asian and island myths from around the world - a few are made up and unique to this book. Most, I'll warrant, you haven't seen before, even in D&D. Some of my favourites are the Lakooma, and giant hand-like sponge that plucks people from the shores of the lake, and the Polong, a nasty sorcerous homunculus made from the blood of murdered people. Almost all of these have come through the gates and are now naturalized on the island (and strangely, they've come through the gates with name tags telling everyone what the name of the creature is in its place of origin, so even though there don't seem to be any Japanese people on the island, everyone still calls the monster Hitotsume-Kozo rather than by some name in the local languages).

Appendices (10 pages). This contains stats for generic encounters, but also describes The Gods That Walk, local sleeping gods that can be awakened to walk (and fight) kaiju-like across the island. These are treated more like forces of nature that creatures, and that's pretty cool.

Rounding out the book is an index and a large, folded map. The map reveals the locations of many things, and is useful for GMs, but maybe less useful at the table if you want players to discover the locations of things, rather than reveal them in one fell swoop.

There's also a supplemental companion pack available in PDF format only that has the stats of major NPCs and a map. The map is 'layered' but it is only cursorily so. If you wanted to turn on the one hidden city that the PCs have discovered, you couldn't do that - you'll have to turn on all of them, or none of them, which makes the layering not all that useful, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Monster Island is a great RPG supplement, just loaded with goodies. It's got cool local cultures that will probably give your players back some of that wow factor they used to get when they first started playing. It's got interesting (and deadly!) locations to explore. It's got exotic and dangerous monsters to fight. It's got weird and wonderful magic and gods that your players can try to master, worship, or flee from. It's got trippy narcotics, poisons, and diseases. And it's loaded with plot hooks - both described and implied.

Gaming aside, the book is also a wonderful example of how to create setting material, and how to be inspired by the Mythras core systems to create your own setting elements. It's also masterclass on how to build and run a sandbox setting. Altogether, that's a lot of bang for your buck!

I score this one 5 out of 5. It's just loaded with good material - more than most people would reasonably expect - and some of this material has that Wow! factor. If you like Mythras, this is a must buy.

Link to Design Mechanism Product Page

A setting supplement for the Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok game by Andrew Valkauskas
TLDR: 3 out of 5 - Useful and inspiring, but with some flaws

Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok
Before proceeding with the review of this supplement, I should say a few words about the core game. Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok is a game about Viking myth. The setting is Midgard during the time of Ragnarok, the Viking end-times. Ragnarok is a cataclysmic series of events inaugurated by the eating of the sun and the moon by wolves and the resulting onset of the perpetually dark Fimbulwinter. Ragnarok will ultimately end with a great battle and a rebirth of the world into something new. Characters include warriors, craftsmen of renown, spell-casters, and seers who ultimately hoped to get picked by one side or another for this cosmic final battle. They do so by trying to make a name for themselves in mythic, night-ridden Midgard.

Fate of the Norns uses a unique and very creative mechanic that hinges on the pulling of runes from a bag as the randomizer. It's extremely flavorful, and really quite fun. The result is a medium-crunch, tactile game for traditional play that is quite unlike anything else. The physical book also has a certain wow-factor because every page is a piece of art - it's very stylish. Now - on to the review.

Denizens of the North
Denizens of the North describes itself as a "Lore Book." Think of it as the GM's companion to the core game. it looks and reads very much like an expansion of the core rule book. The quality of the art, writing, and layout are more of what you would expect after having read the core book. A few vocal people complained that the core book used Arial as a font – if you were one of those you'll be happy to know this book uses a serif font.
Here's what it contains:

Introduction: A brief description of Midgard and first two Ages of Ragnarok (Axe Age & Sword Age) 2 pages.

Legends and Villains: Prose descriptions of 36 historic and mythic personalities - the people of power in the setting. 84 pages.

Locales of Midgard: Brief descriptions of kingdoms and islands. 38 pages

Secret Societies: Groups you can use in the game: 6 pages

Magic Items: 52 Objects of myth and legend of varying power described and statted for your use. 20 pages.

Denizens: "Denizens" is FotN code language for NPCs. This section is basically a collection of new monsters/enemies with stats. 72 pages.

Viking Life: Short essays on various aspects of viking life to supplement what's in the core book. 16 pages.

Skraelings: Arctic natives of Greenland and Vinland are briefly described here. 5 pages.

Archetypes: These are additional character classes to the core book. Included here are Berserkir, Blacksmith, Druid, Fardrengir (similar to a Ranger), Scaedugengan (rogue), and Stalo (weapon specialist). 25 pages

New Game Concepts: Not really new concepts, but some expansions to existing rules: 7 pages

New Powers/Skills: This is a huge list of new feats/powers/spells - more than 150: 55 pages

Norn Rules: "Norn" is FotN-speak for the GM, so this contains some new rules and clarifications to existing ones. 22 pages.

New Lifepath Tables: To be used for fleshing out starting characters - these are super. 6 pages.

Saga (Cornerstone of the World): A full scenario that would probably last a few sessions. 12 pages

Starter Vignettes: Nine scenario briefs that a Norn could develop into scenarios or a campaign. 31 pages.

Updated Equipment List: 1 page.

Dwellers: "Dwellers" is FotN-speak for Characters - here are six starting characters, one for each new archetype.

Evaluation
So, what's good about this product?

This book mainly contains more of what you already saw in the core book, which makes it a useful companion. I'm not really someone who goes in for "more rules" - in fact, if more rules are a selling feature, I usually turn the other way. Same goes for "more spells". If that was all this book had to offer I would have been disappointed. But Denizens really does offer a smorgasboard of material; it's not just more fermented shark. The best material are the new classes, new monsters, and (my favourite) the Lifepath tables, which I thought we quite brilliant. Some of these (the table that determines how two characters know each other and relate to one another) could be used for any game. I also really liked the 'brushes with fame' table for integrating new denizens into the setting.

Also strong are the legendary figures (major NPCs), which are all interesting and quite varied. These include Weyland the Smith, Constantine the Pict, Vainamoinen, Eric the Red, Drifa, Queen of Svalbard. and many historic figures. These tie in very nicely with the Vignettes at the end of the book, and reading all these one can see how a grand campaign could be created where the PCs get caught up in the machinations of these figures. This book doesn't go quite as far as I would have liked in this regard, but after reading Denizens of the North I really did get a vision of Midgard as a very Game-of-Thrones-esque setting, and that's not something I really got from the core book, so it's safe to say this companion has changed my perspective on the setting and how I would construct a campaign for it.

These rest of the content is less interesting, in my view, but the new powers are really there to serve the new monsters and PC classes, so they have their place.

What's missing from the book are stats for major NPCs listed in the Legends section and in the full scenario (level and archetype are given, so a GM could stat them up on his own, but I really would have preferred someone else to do this). Also, the organization of the text is rather odd. It jumps right into to describing the people of legend without much context, and follows this up with descriptions of the kingdoms (which really should have come first). The text could also use some help contextualizing everything - giving the GM advice on how to fit these various bits together. It could have used another edit with an eye to making the material more accessible to tyros like myself.

Overall, this is a useful addition to the line, and I think it would be a valuable tool for anyone who plans to run a FotN campaign. You don't need this book, but you'll get something out of it if you're a fan of the system and setting. The book might also be useful to people who want to set up a game in any system using legendary characters because it gives you personalities, plot seeds, items of myth, and some great lifepath tables that could be used with any system.

One final word - although this book is big, and seems really long for a companion at 420 pages, the text is 12 point and only occupies a small part of most pages, which allows you to enjoy the illustrations that adorn each page.

Score: 3 out of 5. This supplement us useful and fun, but not necessary. Also somewhat disorganized and some elements are lacking in context. Another edit would have helped.

Link to Fate of the Norns Product Page

This one has been around for a while and is considered one of their best.

The book contains the following scenarios:

1. Mister Corbitt which draws the players into exploring Mr Corbitt's creepy house. It has one of the best openings I've seen in a while - the PCs are visiting a friend, and while they are in her living room listening to her drone on about her ailments, they can see the mild-mannered neighbor across the street drag what appears to be a body in a rug out of his house and hoist it into his car.

I loved this scenario!

2. The Plantatiom draws the characters to a plantation in South Carolina, ostensibly to prevent a ritual sacrifice. However, they end up serving one of the elder gods, and everything goes sideways.

This scenario was a little convoluted for me, but I can see it potentially playing well enough. By convoluted, I mean that the cultists in this scenario think they are serving one being, but are pretending to serve a second, but in reality are serving a third, unbeknownst to them.

3. The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse is another creepy house exploration in the vein of Mr Corbitt, but without the cool beginning. Still, it's very well executed and considered by those who have played the scenarios in the book to be one of the best.

Another great scenario, in by opinion.

4. The Sanatorium is a fairly simple scenario in which the characters are invited to an island sanatorium to review the psychologist's recent theories. But when they get there, not all is as it seems, and something has clearly gone wrong. The insane are loose on the island and their host is nowhere to be found. Their boat ride back has disappeared. An axe murderer seems to be on the loose and the insane are in charge. Also, there's an inhuman being at large.

This one is great fun and concisely written. Also considered a classic.

5. Mansion of Madness is another convoluted scenario. In this one, someone has disappeared and something been stolen, and both mysteries point to the same place - a mysterious mansion. Only once you've gone to that mansion and lived through the climax, you discover the the thing that was stolen has now been stolen again by someone else, so you then have to go to another mysterious mansion and have a different (but similar) climax.

I felt this one went on just a little too long, and the two climaxes were too similar. It's not terrible, but not one of the better entries.

6. The Old Damned House is really interesting, and also cleverly written, I think. In this one, the PCs are asked to investigate the disappearance of some pearls from a creepy old mansion - but in this case, the mansion has a creepy old family living in it, and instead of some soul-sucking monster, the PCs have to deal with the (generally) well-meaning but seriously odd family members.

This one seems like a lot of fun - especially for a GM who likes character acting! Also, this scenario is a good model for how to provide clues in CoC, providing many avenues to the same clues.

Conclusion

Overall, I though this was a great set of scenarios, and well worth having in your library. Even the two weaker scenarios (The Plantation and Mansion of Madness) are perfectly serviceable - just a little overwrought for my taste. I give it 4 our of 5 stars - a great supplement, but a little short of 'Wow!.

Chaosium Store Page

Tribe 8 is a far out post-apocalyptic game set in and around the island of Vimary, a sort of future Montreal. The apocalypse, whatever it was, happened a long time ago and its causes are lost. Memories of the old world are also largely lost, though its crumbing remains as still quite evident in the form of semi-intact buildings, metro tunnels, landmarks, and elevated expressways.

The apocalypse (or was it the Rapture?) was caused when an alien or demonic race called the Z'bri showed up and, like mad, drunken lords, broke the world and enslaved the human race. A number of 'nomads' appeared in the camps at that time and taught the people how to summon The Fatimas, avatars of the 'goddess', to fight back. They pushed the Z'bri north and seem to have bought some peace. The humans are now divided into 7 principle tribes, each of which follows one of the Fatimas in a sort of dystopian society. The eighth tribe is a new one, being formed by the outcasts of the tribal society, and it's this tribe that the PCs ostensibly belong to, forming a small pack.

The setting is a real winner, as far as I'm concerned, and is what originally drew me to the game. The portrayal of this future, overgrown and half-drowned world, at once familiar to me (I'm from Montreal) and also very different, fantastical, is quite well done.

The Fatimas are weird, numinous creations almost like cyber-constructs, that reflect certain human aspects - love, pleasure, old age, motherhood, justice, battle, capriciousness.They are neither good nor evil - or perhaps they are both. The Z'bri aliens are enigmatic.

Although a lot of text is devoted to describing the world, its mostly done from the point of view of voices within the setting. There really is very little direct setting exposition from the author - no section that just tells you how it is. Rather, you get a bunch of viewpoints from within the setting, many contradictory, and the reader is left to interpret and figure the rest out on their own. This may infuriate some readers, but other will find it inspiring and, perhaps, liberating. for not having to follow canon.

The rules are fairly traditional, described as a simulation. The core dice mechanic calls for multiple D6s to be rolled, with the highest single die roll to act as the total. Rolling multiple sixes adds 1 to the initial six for each extra one rolled. Rolling all ones is a fumble. To this are added a host of modifiers. The idea is to beat a target number (4 or 5 being 'moderate' or 'challenging'). The more you beat it by, the higher the level of success.

This is a skill-based system and skill levels increase the number of rice rolled. The core mechanic is simple enough and looks effective enough to me on paper. Some of the subsystems, though, like combat, have a lot of modifiers to be applied to rolls, which is something I find really bogs down a game in counting, I have my doubts about how fluid the system really is.

The magic subsystem is interesting because, like Ars Magica, it allows freeform effects, giving guidelines as to how the gauge the power use for various spell-like effects. Each Fatima and each faction of the 8th tribe offers unique ways tap into the River of Dream to shape magic. I thought this was the most interesting subsystem and the shamanistic feel makes a nice break from the usual spell lists.

Conclusion

The game feels very 90s. It presents a basically simulationist system with a lot of the advice to new players and GMs couched in that misleading old 'It's the GM's job to tell a story' kind of nonsense. If you're able to read between the lines to discover that what they really mean is that this is a game about sharing experiences and not telling stories, you'll find there's some decent advice toward that end. Other aspects of this game that make it seem very '90s' to me are the presence of a metric ton of splat-book type supplements. (most of which I likely won't be bothered to try and collect). And it has a published metaplot that reveals what the creators had in mid for the characters of the Fatimas. But I think you can play the game largely from the core book, and both the splats and the metplot supplements can be ignored.

Overall, I'm giving this three stars, which amounts to a 'yeah, I kinda like it' but doesn't go so far as 'great game' or 'Wow!'. The setting and some of the setting trappings (magic/synthesis) are cool. The expression is the setting is interesting, but could be improved upon. The setting is only lightly described (but there are supplements if you want to get into it more). Some of the mechanisms are overly heavy (i.e. too many combat modifiers) but the core is light. The writing is midling, but the art is fairly evocative. If you run this from the book, invest in some reading glasses - the text is very small!

This is not a high priority game for me to play, but I'll read a few more of the supplements that expand on the setting. And I think there are enough interesting things in the mechanics to inspire some of my own projects, and those things alone made the book a worthwhile read.

Wikipedia Entry