Ever have a rough morning and not remember where you are? No judgement, just curious. But, what about if you don’t remember where you are, and there seems to be a set of branded clothes sitting on a table across from you? What happens when you wake up with a weird device on your wrist, monitoring how many followers you have?

Can you imagine how terrible it would be to be trapped in a place where you don’t know anyone, you don’t know if anyone is acting in good faith, and everyone is obsessed with followers? I’m so glad stuff like this only happens in games. It would be a nightmare if something like that became commonplace and even started to affect life outside of that strange, disconnected environment.

And on that note, let’s take a look at Deathmatch Island, a new game published by Evil Hat, in association with Old Dog Games.

Disclaimer

I received my copy of Deathmatch Island from backing the crowdfunding campaign. I haven’t had the opportunity to play in or run the game, but the game is based on the Paragon System, the same underlying system originally created for Agon. I ran Agon both as an ongoing part of my gaming group’s schedule, and at conventions.

 Deathmatch Island

Game Design, Writing, Graphic Design, Layout, And Illustration Tim Denee
Editor Karen Twelves
Indexer Sadie Neat
Cultural Consultant James Mendez Hodes
System Consultants John Harper and Sean Nittner
Development Consultant Greg Soper
Business Manager Chris Hanrahan
VTT Developer Sophie Lagacé
Marketing Manager Tom Lommel
Project Manager Sean Nittner
Product Developer Fred Hicks

The Staging Grounds

This review is based on the PDF of Deathmatch Island. The PDF is 218 pages long. This includes a title page, a publication page, a credits page, a table of contents, a four-page index, a two-page competitor sheet, a two-page game tracking sheet, and two pages of rules summaries. The document is dominated by orange, white, and black, matching the colors designated for the organization present in the game.

The layout is the same bold, simple, but attractive layout that many Evil Hat projects have. Most pages have a single column layout, but there are a few two column pages, tables, and charts in the book. There are a number of simulated documents, as well as images of items from the competition, like branded flashbang grenades and competitor uniforms.

Production Meetings

Deathmatch Island is meant to emulate media where people compete in unconscionably dangerous games for the amusement of others. It channels the feel of media like The Running Man, The Condemned, The Hunger Games, The Hunt, Battle Royale, and Squid Games. In addition, it folds in some “stranded on a mysterious island/trapped in a mysterious facility” tropes from shows like The Prisoner and Lost.

Contestants wake up on the island, with no idea how they got there. A mysterious figure from Production encourages the players to give their all, while they are shipped off to different islands with fewer and fewer surviving the competitions there. Challenges can grant valuable resources to the competitors, and some may even reveal secrets about the competition and those who run it, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the deathmatch.

The general story of the RPG is simple. Survive, find out something about the mysterious organization, and decide if you are going to work together, or face off against the other players in the game. The texture of the game comes from the details. There are other detailed NPC competitors, a variety of resources to gather, some specific events that can be slotted into different phases of the game, and some mind boggling clues to the nature of the company, which may point people to secret government agencies, massive criminal organizations, secretive labs doing unethical experiments, and maybe even the presence of aliens.

The Backstage Area

While there are some differences, if you have played Agon, you’ll get the general structure of the game. If you haven’t played Agon, let’s talk about the basics.

Characters have die ratings detailing multiple aspects of their character. Characters will have a die for name (how popular you are, hence, how much weight your name has), occupation (what you did before you woke up here), and five additional capabilities, all ranking how well the contestant interacts with different stages of the game. These capabilities are:

• Social Game–communicating and negotiating with others
• Snake Mode–performing underhanded actions to succeed
• Challenge Beast–overcoming physical challenges against the environment
• Deathmatch–fighting for your life
• Redacted–finding out things that the organization doesn’t want you to know

You’re always going to be using your name die, because you’re putting your followers and popularity on the line. When you attempt a challenge, if your occupation seems relevant, you can add that to your roll as well. You use one die from your capabilities from the one that makes the most sense for the challenge. If you have Trust with another character (a currency that can be spent), if they are in the same contest that you are, you can spend Trust to add their name die to your pool, and you can spend Trust to avoid harm, representing your ally coming to your aid exactly when you need them.

In addition to these dice, you can mark Acquisition to use relevant items to help you. If you find something relevant and useful to what you are doing, outside of your normal gear, you can also add an Advantage die to your pool. So, your pool is going to look like this:

• Name
• Occupation (if applicable)
• Relevant Capability
• Advantage (if available)
• Trust (if you want to spend it and you have that competitor in the same contest)
• Second Capability (if you mark fatigue to use some out of the box thinking)
• Acquisition (if available)

To determine if you succeeded, you add two dice from your pool together, except for your Acquisition, which if present, adds to the two dice you picked. NPC competitors or challenges will have their own dice ratings, which will add a set difficulty bonus based on what island you are on, and how dangerous the island and the challenges are.

In Agon, the “parent” to Deathmatch Island, challenges are addressed as if you are narrating an epic poem. Players announce their character by name, stating who they are and what they intend to do. In Deathmatch Island, you introduce characters the way a commentator might on a sports program, and after you determine what happens by rolling the dice, each player goes into a confessional where they talk to the camera and explain exactly what happened and how, in whatever details they want to add, so long as it matches what the dice determined.

That means that, like Agon, a lot of the roleplaying is a zoomed out, third person narration of what the character is doing, with most of the “in person” roleplaying happening in the confessional, and during the trust building and theory crafting that the PCs do between islands.

Characters have Fatigue and Injuries. Failing a task normally costs you Fatigue, and you can spend it as a resource in some instances. If you don’t have Fatigue to mark when you fail, you take an Injury. If you are out of injuries, your character has met their demise. Injuries don’t clear during a season, but you will remove some Fatigue between islands.

As you meet challenges, you gain followers, and when you hit certain milestones, you can advance your characters, picking from the advancements shown at the bottom of the character sheet. Advancements are also gained by accumulating Injuries, but that’s a risky way to improve your capabilities.

The Call Sheet

Another thing you will know if you have played Agon is that there is a specific procedure to play. You tell your story within the structure. Characters arrive on the island, and they will participate in a number of contests. This is Phase One. These challenges happen at different nodes on the island, and some islands and situations may cause the PCs to head to different nodes. Prevailing at some of these challenges may get the PCs an Advantage die due to a situation moving in a favorable direction for the PCs.

They may also find some Acquisitions, the currency you use to add specialized gear to your rolls. While the actual Acquisition isn’t detailed (i.e. you may not find a specific weapon or a specific piece of gear), Acquisition is divided between weapons, equipment, and Redacted. You may have a hard time justifying using survival gear in a Deathmatch, and you can only use Redacted Acquisitions when you are using Redacted to do things “off book” to gather secrets from the organization.

There are also additional traits that a contest may have, including the following:

• Dangerous–you mark Injury instead of Fatigue if you fail
• Exhausting–you spend 1 Fatigue to enter the challenge due to effort
• Restricted–you can only use Redacted Acquisitions

If you use Acquisition to add a weapon to your pool, the contest automatically becomes Dangerous, because you escalated the situation. On the other hand, any challenge that is a Deathmatch is automatically Dangerous.

Phase Two is the climax of the island, where everyone must participate. This is the big event that all the followers are . . . following? Phase Two has its own smaller sections, Scouting, Scramble, and Battle Royale. Scouting lets you engage potential threats that will happen if you don’t address them. The Scramble is a challenge that gives one competitor an Advantage to use in the Deathmatch. If the PCs don’t mark their last Injury, they survive, but some competitors won’t make it to the next island.

Between islands, characters debrief, which is where you find out which NPCs survived and what else happened on the island. After the debrief is Theory Crafting. Theory Crafting is where the PCs get together and talk about the clues they have learned from Redacted activities. It’s worth noting that there isn’t one “truth” about what’s going on, and as the PCs start to come up with in Theory Crafting is probably what you should lean into as the “truth.” The theories are all grouped into broad categories, which are Political Project, Entertainment, Big Experiment, or Weird. The PCs can also build trust with other PCs by sharing flashbacks they have about parts of their life that they couldn’t remember, that are now becoming clear again.

There are three islands to a season, and each island has a larger bonus added to the dice of the individual challenges, representing the increased threat of each location. Island Three has its own quirks, because it’s the end of the season, and everything has to come to a head. By default, players secretly select if they are going to try to break the game or play to win. If anyone is playing to win, and the other PCs are breaking the game, that character gets an Advantage on the others, because they’re betraying the team they’ve been with the whole time.

Endgame

If someone playing to win makes it to the end, and kills the last (PC) competitor, there are a few questions to answer about what happens next. This is probably some version of you blacking out and waking up back in your normal life, before or after getting to celebrate your win.

If the characters breaking the game survive and there are no PCs playing to win, they still have to fight their way through the remaining competitors. If they win the Battle Royale, they get to pick from a list of damage they can do to the organization, like getting evidence, killing operatives, or blowing up something important looking.

While the islands all have the same procedure, there are different casts that you can apply as a template over the island. This gives you some specific encounters native to that cast, some specific NPCs, and a thematic set of things weaving in and out of the NPCs and their encounters. There are also some questions to answer about the motivations of the cast members you choose, to help determine how they will act.

The game has a range of ways that you can set it up. Your PCs can all have randomly determined aspects, including your motivation, which by default you don’t share, but which you can share if you are playing New Game+, or if you just want to cut down on the potential player versus player activity. You can start with New Game+ if you just want to play characters that know about the game and the organization, and you want to go straight to tearing it down.

Champion For Life

 The game does a great job of using the structure of Agon and framing a different narrative that uses the same toolkit. 

The resolution for this game is simple and intuitive, and while the procedures can look intimidating, there are several places where the process is spelled out in flowchart-like references. There are some delightfully weird Redacted secrets to find out when poking around the island, and some subtle humor tucked into the details. The game does a great job of using the structure of Agon and framing a different narrative that uses the same toolkit.

It was Purgatory

While it is completely intentional, the default mode that allows for player versus player resolution may turn off some players not interested in the potential for that kind of play, even with the optional rules for calibrating those aspects. For some players, it may be less intuitive to switch between narrative roleplaying and in-character roleplaying. It may be daunting, knowing that different phases of the game inform which approach is most appropriate. That’s not so much a flaw as it is a consequence of a game with a very specific personality, which this game shares with its forebear, Agon.

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

Any caution that I express about picking up this game isn’t because the game does anything that it doesn’t intend to do, and it’s certainly not because it misses the mark on the narrative it presents. If you are a player that doesn’t mind structured roleplaying games where you do specific things in different phases, and you like weaving in and out of being in the “writers room” and being “on set” as an actor, this is still going to be a pretty safe bet, so long as the genre itself appeals to you.

A new version of the roleplaying card game For the Queen is upon us, and as I prepared to write this review I thought, “I just wrote a review for this game.” Then I realized that it’s been almost four years since I wrote this review, and the enormity of the progress of time, how long I’ve been writing reviews, and how close death is to claiming me all hit at once. I’m better now. Composure is back. So, let’s take a look at the new edition of For the Queen.

Disclaimer

I am working from a review copy of the game provided to me by Darrington Press. My previous review, based on the initial publication run of the game, was based on a copy of the game that I purchased myself. One of the first games I picked up when I finally resolved to run games via VTT was the digital version of For the Queen on Roll20. I have played this game quite a bit and have even gotten a few rounds of play for the new version under my belt as well.

For the Queen

Publisher: Darrington Press
Game Designer: Alex Roberts
Editor: Meredith Katz
Cultural Consultant: Cai Kagawa Game
Production Manager: Alex Uboldi
X Card: John Stavropoulos
Graphic Design: Matt Paquette & Co
Artists: Arlei Dormiendo, Arthur Riel Cabezas, Brady Evans, Caitlyn Kurilich, Céline Vu, Cheseely Li, Chelsea Ortega, Constance Bouckaert, Denis Freitas, Eleonor Piteira, Esther Tejano, G.C. Houle, Hamahmeyo, Jeong Kim, Kelsey Eng, Lemonjuiceday, LABillustration, Lara Georgia Carson, Lauren Covarrubias, Malia Ewart, Maxine Vee, Nicole Gustafsson, Karina Pavlova (WeirdUndead), Silly Chaotic, Tasia M S

Consulting the Deck

This edition of For the Queen contains all the content of the previous edition, except the art on the previous run. All the queens have been reimagined and reinterpreted. The original game had 82 cards, while the new edition comes in at 91 cards.

The previous version of the game had a top slide deck box, meaning that you pulled the cover off from the top, and if you grabbed the deck from the top, the bottom of the box would fall out. This version is designed to look like a book and has a magnetic clasp to seal the box shut.

All of the Queen cards are now double sided, with one of the cards having each of the queens’ “names” and artist listed. Each card’s name is a descriptor of what kind of queen they are, for example, one card is the Carnival Queen.

The previous edition of the game was already an attractive game with great artwork, especially the queen cards. This version of the game manages to push the envelope further, with an amazing box and a wonderful set of new artwork for all the queens. You need to see it for yourself, but if you ever looked at your copy of For the Queen and wondered, “what would a computer program, cyberpunk, or murderous prom attendee look like as a queen,” this deck’s artwork answers that for you.

The cards break down something like this:

• Game Content Card—1 card
• Queen Cards—13 cards (25 illustrations, 1 list of queens and artists)
• X-Card—1 card (X on each side)
• Rules Cards—17 cards
• Question Cards—60 (including “The Queen is Under Attack”)

If 17 cards of rules feel intimidating, don’t worry, the cards are meant to be read out loud to set the stage and explain how the game works. Each card has a short paragraph of explanation on it.

What’s the Deal?

I’ve played this game with my former game group at the local game store and at various conventions. For a new review, and a new edition of the game, I wanted a fresh perspective. Once a month on Saturday, I run a D&D game for my daughter, my daughter-in-law, and their friend – all in their late 20s to early 30s. I asked if they would be interested in playing the game, and I got an enthusiastic yes from all of them. The concept was already selling the game for them.

For comparison, I also brought along the previous edition of the game. I wanted the group to have a chance to see the difference between the editions. I asked them not to consider the dinged-up corner on my first edition box, where I launched it out of my backpack at a convention. After we took some time to look at the cards from both boxes, and we decided where we were going to set up the game, we started.

If you haven’t played the game before, I’ll summarize it the way I did for my Saturday group. Each player takes a card from the deck on their turn. There is a prompt asking you questions that range from who you are to the queen, how you feel about actions the queen has taken, and how you feel about other players. You improvise your answers to these prompts, and as you are answering, you get a general idea of who you are. Other players can ask follow up questions when you answer a card, but you don’t have to answer them.

While there is no formal process for creating a character, an image starts to take shape the more questions you answer, which helps to inform the next question you are asked. I’ve seen people get a general idea about who they are by the end, and I’ve seen people weave some deep narratives based on the prompts. There is a single card in the deck that says “The Queen is Attacked,” and when that card is drawn, you decide, based on how you have answered the questions, if you will defend the Queen – and that’s how the game ends.

If there is a prompt you are uncomfortable answering, or one you just don’t want to answer, you can touch an X-Card, and the prompt card gets discarded. If you don’t want to answer your prompt, but you don’t want to X-Card it, you can pass it to the next player, to see if they want to answer the prompt.

Game Number One

To decide on which queen we were going to use, I held up each card, then showed its opposite side, and asked everyone to vote on which side we would keep. Once we decided on which images to have face up, we narrowed down our options from there. We settled on The Witch Queen, in large part because my daughter-in-law wanted to boop the dragon in the picture. This became very important. One of the players said, “she’s so cute, we’re probably going to make her into a monster.”

We took the bottom third of the deck, shuffled “The Queen is Under Attack” in, and started the game. Because of how the table was laid out, it was easier to make sure everyone could reach the X-Card if I pulled the card from the original edition and placed it on one side, with the new X-Card on the other side. Once we had the placement of the deck sorted, we started playing. The group asked me to pull first, since I’ve played it so many times before.

From the first card that I drew, I started going deep into answering from the perspective of a vulnerable individual, to the point that one of my player’s mentioned, “you’re in therapy mode right now, aren’t you?” Maybe.

In addition to my emotionally compromised character who was defensive for how the queen talks about his family, we had someone that had killed 42 men, and only disappointed the queen when she failed to kill 43. We had another character begin to emerge that kept the queen’s menagerie of animals but was never allowed to touch the dragon. She was also kept in a cage and eats people. Our final character had her freedom curtailed by various means, is similarly bound, but does not, in fact, eat people.

When “The Queen is Attacked” was drawn, we found out that the keeper of the menagerie was a demon who can turn into any creature she touches, which is why she wanted to touch the dragon. She did not defend the queen. Our killer was a sell sword looking to avenge her father, who did not defend the queen because the queen was complicit in covering up who killed her father. Our bound but not human devouring character was an old friend of the queen now in indentured service, who did not defend the queen in hopes of regaining her freedom. My character did defend the queen, because I was from a disgraced noble family that had to flee our homes, and when my loss of station meant I couldn’t marry the queen, she still provided a place at court for me.

That was a lot. One of the highlights was my daughter asking her friend if she was Inigo Montoya, at which point she answered, “damn it.”

Game Number Two

From previous playthroughs, it was my experience that having different people draw the same cards, while envisioning a different queen, leads to a much different experience. I was excited to play through a second time, and so were the other members of my Saturday D&D group. We looked through the other queens that we hadn’t used yet and selected the Undead Queen. “We’re totally going to make her into a sweetheart, I bet.”

The second time through, I think we had our creative neurons firing, because almost everyone started coming up with a deeper backstory after just a few prompts. We had one prompt passed on, and then X-Carded, but it was mainly because it just didn’t work for what either player wanted to answer, rather than causing a safety issue. Still nice to have the X-card available if it had been the latter.

The further the game went, the more it seemed like we had two, maybe three, people related to the queen, and two others that had practiced magic with her in the past, and possibly in the present. One had saved her life, and another had feuded with her publicly. I kept her tomes of necromantic spells at hand for her, as well as her other magical implements. “We went really high fantasy this time around, didn’t we?”

By the time the queen was attacked, we found out that she had taken in one character, a refugee of the lost royal line that the queen’s father had wiped out. Another character was the queen’s mother, and the queen had killed her father to free her mother from him. Because the queen mother was from the previous royal line, that meant that our refugee and the queen mother turned out to be cousins. Our other character was the princess, who had refused to marry someone to forge an alliance with another country, meaning her mother then had to do so. Through my answers, we determined that the queen was operating under a curse, so she had to learn both dark and light magic, and as her apprentice, I was deciding which path I was going to take. I was the only one who didn’t defend the queen when she was attacked, because I wanted her to be free of the burden of balancing light and dark, because I had seen how much the dark magic pained her to use.

Apparently we are incapable of generating maximum drama. We all had a blast, although I pointed out, we only made the Undead Queen a qualified sweetheart, not an unmitigated one.

Accolades from the Group

 This is a great game to play in general, and a good option on those nights when you have nothing prepared, or a player is missing. 

Everyone in the group enjoyed the game immensely and said we could play it any time and they would be happy. They liked that the prompts pushed them to think about things and answer questions that forced an emerging picture of themselves and the queen. They loved the artwork for the queens and started coming up with ideas about the queens from the pictures alone. They all agreed that they would buy additional cards that were just new queen artwork.

Setbacks Along the Path

There were two things the group agreed on, neither of which were major issues. Because we used X-Cards on both sides of the table, they thought it would be a good idea to have at least one additional X-Card to help with making the card accessible to everyone seated at the table. The other criticism is that when they compared the game to the previous edition, they noticed that the queens were not double sided, meaning you could see all of them together, at a glance. The new artwork is amazing, but half of the queens are hidden from view, depending on which side of the card you are looking at.

Strongly Recommended–This product is exceptional, and may contain content that would interest you even if the game or genre covered is outside of your normal interests.

The last time I reviewed this game, I thought it was amazing. Now that I’ve had the chance to play it even more over the years, and after seeing the new packaging and additional artwork, I’ve only grown more fond of it. Unless you really are not comfortable answering guided, but pointed, questions, it benefits almost any roleplaying enthusiast to have a copy of this game. This is a great game to play in general, and a good option on those nights when you have nothing prepared, or a player is missing. It remains one of the ultimate “bring this with you to a convention for impromptu gaming” products.

You started at 0 level, ended at 10th level, and you gained a level at the end of each adventure. The adventures were short and mostly designed to be run in one session. The game allowed for the kind of multiclassing combinations that a lot of gamers wanted but built it into the game in a manner like D&D 4e’s Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. Unlike 4e, it allowed for more mixing and matching instead of connecting the Paragon Paths to a particular class.

While those were some of the design concepts, the setting broke from the assumptions of games like D&D, Pathfinder, or 13th Age. You were playing in a world in decay, one that was likely to fall into an apocalypse by the end of the campaign. The game was built on the idea of a campaign template to show how the signs of the apocalypse were happening. Characters accumulated mental and spiritual damage. There was literally no such thing as good on a cosmic level.

The game seized a lot of imaginations, but the nihilistic overtones made it harder for some gamers to engage fully with the setting, and the built in consequences of some game options made it more difficult to port the system to a less morally devastating setting. That brings us to 2023, and the Kickstarter for Shadow of the Weird Wizard, a game that builds on the mechanical structures of Shadow of the Demon Lord, but with a smidge less nihilistic dread.

Disclaimer

I did not receive a review copy of Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and my copy comes from backing the Kickstarter. I have not had the opportunity to play or run Shadow of the Weird Wizard, but I have both played and run Shadow of the Demon Lord.

 Shadow of the Weird Wizard

Writing, Design, and Art Direction: Robert J. Schwalb
Foreword: Zeb Cook
Editing and Development: Kim Mohan
Additional Editing: Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, Jay Spight
Aid and Assistance: Daniel K. Heinrich, Danielle Casteel
Proofreading: David Satnik, Jay Spight
Cover Design, Graphic Design, and Layout: Kara Hamilton
Cover Illustrator: Matteo Spirito
Interior Illustrations: Yeysson Bellaiza, Andrew Clark, Biagio d’alessandro, Çağdaş Demiralp, Nim Dewhirst—Kasgovs Maps, Rick Hershey, Jack Kaiser, Katerina Ladon, Britt Martin, Maria Rosaria Monticelli, Victor Moreno, Mitch Mueller, Matthew Myslinski, Eduardo Nunes, Mirco Paganessi, Claudio Pozas, Phill Simpson, Kim Van Deun, Sergio Villa-Isaza, Cardin Yanis
Character Sheet Design: Daniel K. Heinrich and Kara Hamilton

The Weird Wizard’s Grimoire

This first impression is based on the PDF of the Shadow of the Weird Wizard core rulebook. I should be receiving the hardcover, but it hasn’t been released as of this writing. The PDF is 274 pages, and is broken down to the following:

• Cover and Back Cover–2 pages
• Credits–1 page
• Table of Contents–2 pages
• Index–6 pages
• Character Sheet–2 pages
• Setting Map–1 page
• Secrets of the Weird Wizard Ad–1 page

If you have seen any of the Shadow of the Demon Lord releases, it shouldn’t be a surprise to know that this is filled with quality artwork. Compared to the Shadow of the Demon Lord art, this art is still often shadowy and ominous, but less grimy and dark. Where the headers and font on Shadow of the Demon Lord were blood red and a little intentionally rough, the headers and fonts in Shadow of the Weird Wizard are purple with a more pleasantly flowing font.

Shadow of the Weird Wizard is less of the full core book, and more like the Player’s Handbook of the game, explaining the general rules, character creation, and player facing options. The sections of this book include:

• Introduction
• Creating a Character
• Game Rules
• Equipment
• Magic
• Expert Paths
• Master Paths

Because this is more of a player’s handbook, there isn’t a lot of discussion of best practices for running a game, and the only monster or NPC stat blocks are ones associated with elements like summoning monsters or hiring retainers. Now that we’ve established the basics, let’s take a deeper dive into what’s in all of those chapters.

Setting and Concept

While the setting isn’t marching towards oblivion the same way the world of Urth is in Shadow of the Demon Lord, it isn’t a bright high fantasy setting. Players portray characters fleeing from the collapse of the Old Country, into the lands once controlled by the Weird Wizard, a despotic spellcaster that dominated the land, warping, twisting, and summoning strange things into his domain.

Characters don’t start off at 0 level as they do in Shadow of the Demon Lord, so the story starts with the player characters in a position of more competence, but the general feeling is less that the PCs are mythic heroes confronting mythic threats, and more like the PCs are competent mortal beings trying to protect humans completely unprepared for a land dominated by dangerous folklore. PCs feel like they are acquiring more and more powers to give them more tools to engage with the supernatural spaces of the world, but until their Master Paths, the PCs feel much more like outsiders trying imperfectly to interact with a mysterious world than fantasy heroes integrated with the supernatural.

On its face, the setting and its tropes almost feel like they play into older concepts of “taming” a wild land for human habitation, regardless of the previous inhabitants, but the game is more aware of the story it’s telling. The humans pushing into the former lands of the Weird Wizard don’t have the option of staying in the Old Country. The exodus of the Weird Wizard has forced the inhabitants of the lands to come to terms with how oppressive their magical despot was. Campaigns are as likely to involve finding detente with fey creatures near their settlement as they are to destroy magical mutated beasts. At this phase of the human migration, it feels much more like the theme is learning how to integrate into the lands rather than dominating them and building new kingdoms.

The perspective of Shadow of the Weird Wizard is distinctly human, although later supplements will provide rules for playing other ancestries. The tropes of fantasy RPGs are remixed with folklore, meaning that some things on their surface appear to be callbacks to older gaming, but with some wicked twists. For example, orcs are a violent threat, but unlike orcs in a setting like D&D, they are the product of a magical disease that makes them more like rage zombies than what most people associate with the species in modern fantasy. Some conflicts with fey creatures may be unavoidable because of absolute interpretations of promises made, but there is also the possibility of finding a way of turning absolute alien understanding of agreements to the mortal’s favor. In some ways, this setting feels like the kind of setting where creepy Muppets from 80s fantasy movies would be at home.

Setting information isn’t presented in a gazetteer fashion. The description of the setting exists in the introduction, with additional elements revealed in discussion of different Paths, magical traditions, and deities. This isn’t radically different than how Shadow of the Demon Lord presents its setting, where even later products that drilled down into particular regions were rarely more than 10 pages, with a few emblematic NPCs, but not a deep dive into exact distances, populations, or heavily detailed timelines.

Rules and Resolutions

The core resolution of the game is to roll a d20, plus or minus an ability bonus, compared against a target number. The target number usually defaults to 10, unless it’s a roll against a character, whose defenses may be determined by their level or degree of threat. Advantageous circumstances grant you a boon, while detrimental circumstances assess you a bane. Boons allow you to roll a d6 and add it to your roll, while Banes have you roll a d6 and subtract it from your result. Boons and Banes cancel one another out, and if you have multiple Boons or Banes, you subtract or add only the highest die to your roll. Critical successes are results that are a 20 or higher, and critical failures are rolls that are 0 or lower. When someone is afflicted with an ongoing effect, sometimes a character may make an ability check to resist or remove an effect, but often, characters make a Luck roll to see if an effect ends, which is a d20 roll that is successful on a 10 or higher.

There are a number of afflictions that can affect your character. These are adjudicated with a variety of options, often by assigning banes that come into play under certain circumstances, or persistently. Some assess a boon to those acting against you, and some cause you to suffer damage at different intervals until they are removed.

Ongoing afflictions that cause damage bring us to another distinction in the rules. Characters have a Health score, but when you get injured, you don’t subtract from your Health, you total your damage and compare it to Health to see if you can still function. One of the reasons for this distinction is that some effects directly damage Health. For example, if you’re on fire, you take damage, but if you are poisoned or diseased, you may subtract numbers from your Health. Characters are injured when their damage equals half their Health, and when a character’s damage is equal to their Health, they are incapacitated. When you’re Health is 0, you die, and many times when you are incapacitated, you remove Health every round until you pass a Luck check.

There are no skills in the game, but a character’s profession either grants them narrative position to do something other characters cannot, or a boon if anyone could attempt the action, but a professional would have a greater chance to accomplish the task. There are some simple but structured rules for discerning information and interacting with NPCs. For example, a character can make an Intellect roll to know something useful to the situation, and there is a list of what is common knowledge in the setting and what can be added to that list of common knowledge based on professions.

Social challenges have different rules depending on what the challenge is. For example, the rules define the following social challenges:

• Transaction
• Appeal
• Argument
• Alliance
• Coercion

Each type of challenge explains the requirements for the interaction and what abilities are used, as well as any situations that would grant boons or banes. For example, an appeal is resolved with Will rolls, while an argument is resolved with Intellect. In some cases, some of these interactions have guidelines for what critical success or failure looks like in the interaction.

Combat assumes tactical positioning, in as much as it assumes actual ranges rather than conceptual ranges or zones. No one rolls for initiative. Instead, there is an order of operations:

• Combatants under the Sage’s control, in any order
  • Combatants under the player’s control can use reactions if applicable, when triggered
  • Roll to resolve any end of turn ongoing effects, in any order
• Combatants under the player’s control, in any order
  • Combatants under the Sage’s control can use reactions if applicable, when triggered
  • Roll to resolve any end of turn ongoing effects, in any order

Characters have one reaction per round, unless some other rule grants them additional reactions. In addition to the standard reactions a character can take, a character can burn their reaction to Take the Initiative and act before the Sage’s characters.

Characters pick their abilities from a standard array, and their Novice Path options are Fighter, Mage, Priest, or Rogue. Characters gain a natural defense score, health, language, and starting path ability from this choice. You gain additional benefits from this path at 2nd and 5th level. At 3rd level, you pick an Expert Path, which grants you additional features at 4th, 6th, and 9th level. At 7th level, you pick your Master Path, which grants you path abilities at 8th and 10th level. The progression looks something like this:

• 1st Level–Pick Novice Path
• 2nd Level–Novice Path Abilities
• 3rd Level–Pick Expert Path
• 4th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 5th Level–Novice Path Abilities
• 6th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 7th Level–Pick Master Path
• 8th Level–Master Path Abilities
• 9th Level–Expert Path Abilities
• 10th Level–Master Path Abilities

This means you may not have your full character concept locked in until you reach 7th level. The Expert Paths are grouped under Paths of Battle, Faith, Power, and Skill. The Master Paths are grouped under Paths of Arms, The Gods, Magic, and Prowess. These correspond to the initial four paths, but characters don’t have to pick a similar path at Expert or Master level. A Fighter that chooses a Path of Battle and a Path of Arms is likely to be very specifically a toe-to-toe combatant, but some paths synergize well across concepts. For example, depending on the type of weapon and tactics a fighter uses, Skill and Prowess paths often work well for various concepts.

Some paths are specifically about synergizing elements across paths. For example, the Spellfighter Expert Path of Skill is all about being a martial combatant that also uses spells in addition to weapons. Some character classes/archetypes that have become familiar from games like D&D, Pathfinder, or 13th Age don’t show up until the Expert Paths, which reminds me a bit of BECMI D&D. For example, Berserkers, Commanders, Martial Artists, Rangers, Paladins, Artificers, Druids, Psychics, Assassins, Bards, and Warlocks don’t show up until the Expert Paths.

Depending on the path, a character might pick up a special ability they can use a number of times per rest, a number of extra spells, a new magical tradition, or bonus damage on their attacks. Multiple dice of damage present an interesting tactical choice, because you can sacrifice 2d6 of damage to make another attack, but that attack must be against a different target. If you get additional spells, you pick them from the traditions you already know.

Since we’re talking about magic, spells, and magic traditions, let’s move on to talking about those things in their own section, because 90 pages of the 274 pages (about 33%) are devoted to magic traditions and spells.

The Many Faces of Magic

Spells in the game are all arranged into thematic traditions, which each feature several supernatural talents in addition to the spells grouped under that tradition. When a character discovers a tradition, they gain one of the talents from the tradition, which are separate supernatural abilities compared to spells. Some of these talents are like cantrips, where they are recurring minor supernatural abilities. Some are more powerful, and once they are used, they don’t come back until you make a Luck roll for them to recharge, or in some cases, until after you have a chance to rest. The traditions listed in the core book include:

• Aeromancy
• Alchemy
• Alteration
• Animism
• Astromancy
• Chaos
• Chronomancy
• Conjuration
• Cryomancy
• Dark Arts
• Destruction
• Divination
• Eldritch
• Enchantment
• Evocation
• Geomancy
• Illusion
• Invocation
• Necromancy
• Oneiromancy
• Order
• Primal
• Protection
• Psychomancy
• Pyromancy
• Shadowmancy
• Skullduggery
• Spiritualism
• Symbolism
• Technomancy
• Teleportation
• War

When you learn a spell, the entry tells you how many times you can cast the spell before you rest. You can pick the spell multiple times to gain the ability to cast the spell more times per rest. Spells under their individual traditions are also grouped by Novice, Expert, and Master spells, meaning if you are allowed to learn new spells when you gain a level, you must pick from a level that is equal to or less than your current character tier. In other words, you can’t pick Master level spells from your available traditions until you are at least 7th level.

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons magic schools, these aren’t cosmic absolutes. Two spells can do very similar things, but will be in two separate traditions, because of the narrative elements of how they create the effect of the spell. For example, Shadowmancy and Teleportation may both create a point from which someone can enter in one place, and exit in another, but Shadowmancy rips a hole through the void, and Teleportation bends space to make two points touch.

Shadow of the Demon Lord always had extremely evocative ways of explaining what could otherwise be perfunctory effects. While Shadow of the Weird Wizard is a little less gruesome in its descriptions, it’s no less evocative. For example, there is a spell that splits your opponent into two creatures exactly half the size of the original creature. An Astromancy spell flashes a foe with ultraviolet light, burns them, and impairs their agility, because they develop a rapid onset of severe sunburn. One of the spells of the Chronomancy tradition allows the caster to summon themself from the future to aid them. One of the Necromancy spells summons a psychopomp to swoop over the target, bringing them closer to death. A master level Technomancy spell lets you summon a huge moving fortress equipped with a massive cannon, which is both extremely hard to destroy and blows up spectacularly if you do manage to destroy it.

Because these traditions contain both talents and spells, many of these traditions play into the theme of different paths as well. For example, Technomancy or Alchemy both pair well with Artificer, to produce a “magical scientist/engineer” with a much different feel. While there isn’t a starting path that indicates that a character is psychic, taking the psychomancy tradition can help flavor a Mage as a psionicist before they make it to 3rd level and take the Psychic path.

Overlapping Shadows

Shadow of the Weird Wizard has a lot in common with Shadow of the Demon Lord. It’s very clearly an evolution of the same system. But I wanted to take a few moments to summarize some of the changes between the two. I know I’ll miss some, but let’s give this a go:

• Shadow of the Weird Wizard starts at 1st level instead of 0
• The scale for health and damage is higher for Shadow of the Weird Wizard
• Insanity and corruption are not tracked for player characters in Shadow of the Weird Wizard (although at least one path introduces corruption tracking for a character with that path)
• The round structure doesn’t use the Fast Turn/Slow Turn structure of Shadow of the Demon Lord
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard adds d6 damage progression to attacks
• Shadow of the Demon Lord paths occur at different levels, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard doesn’t have an option to take a second Expert Path instead of a Master Path
• Shadow of the Demon Lord spells always provided a number of castings based on a spell rank determined by paths taken
• Shadow of the Demon Lord traditions don’t provide talents based on tradition
• Shadow of the Demon Lord’s core rulebook includes GM/campaign advice and a bestiary

Both books are the same size, but Shadow of the Demon Lord had 16 Expert Paths and 64 Master Paths, as well as 30 magic traditions, and 5 additional ancestries in addition to humans. Shadow of the Weird Wizard has 42 Expert Paths, 122 Master Paths, and 33 magic traditions. Obviously the big expansion of player materials is in the Expert Paths and Master Paths, but the Magical Traditions take up more space as well, due to the inclusion of the talents associated with the tradition.

If you were hoping the two games would have compatible material, that’s unfortunately not the case. Health and damage scales differently, making Shadow of the Demon Lord monsters a bit underpowered in comparison. Traditions aren’t compatible because of assumptions about power levels and talents. Novice, Expert, and Master paths all key in their options at different levels between the two systems.

Final Thoughts

One of the reasons I wanted to write this as a first impression rather than a full review is that while the Shadow of the Weird Wizard book is available in final form in PDF, Secrets of the Weird Wizard, the “GM” book for the line, is still in beta. You can purchase the PDF, but it’s still in development. You can play other ancestries or use the monsters and NPCs from that book, but it’s still in the process of being finished.

I enjoyed the customization of Shadow of the Demon Lord when I first encountered it, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard is continuing this trend. While Shadow of the Demon Lord was working towards a very specific feel, and almost everything in that game does play towards the concept of the game, it’s definitely a wise move to remove things like Insanity and Corruption from a core high fantasy experience that doesn’t lean into horror.

When running my Shadow of the Demon Lord game, one of my friends observed that he wanted to make a character that was an effective fighter mage but had a hard time finding the right options to make it work. I feel like the options that are meant to allow for a “multi-classing” feel in Shadow of the Weird Wizard are a lot more transparent in how to mix and match concepts and make them work. As far as spellcasting goes, a lot of that transparency comes from not worrying about the power level and what traditions boost that rating to increase your castings.

While this is much less nihilistic and horror driven than Shadow of the Demon Lord, this isn’t a system that can seamlessly swap in or out for a setting that was written for D&D or Pathfinder. This is less dark than Shadow of the Demon Lord, but the game still has an edge to it, drawing from folklore and older versions of fairy tales. It’s still a game where heroes doing everything right may still see the consequences of evil that they can’t fully mitigate. They might be able to make the world better within a limited scope, and the world isn’t necessarily marching toward oblivion within the next generation, but the supernatural will always be dangerous and at least a little hostile, and life may become less challenging, but will never be easy.

Because this resembles 5e SRD fantasy superficially, I think some people may be unsatisfied or conflicted if they don’t realize that the game is pulling on a more specific subset of influences than a lot of modern fantasy utilizes. It’s easy to infer that a human centric game where PCs fight monsters in a land they are trying to tame, with tropes like “all orcs are evil” is playing in a less mature, older fantasy RPG paradigm. On the other hand, I think it’s intentionally playing in the same space as a game like Symbaroum, where it’s fully aware that people “taming a land” is a fraught narrative, and that the satisfying play space is to understand where to introduce hard decisions and moral choices.

I’ve seen one of the adventures for the system, and even without reading through more of the setting information and campaign advice in Secrets of the Weird Wizard, I’m pretty sure this is a game that wants you to know your heroes can be wrong, but that they also aren’t being relentlessly pushed into spaces where they can’t find a better way. With the number of rules about combat and the number of combat spells, I can see people losing the thread on options that don’t involve reducing enemies to ash. I think the game is deep enough to present more options, while still acknowledging that people want to kick butt once in a while.

Looking To the Future

I enjoyed Shadow of the Demon Lord, not only for the system, but also for the way in which the rules reinforced tone and theme. It was (and still is) a game that can be very satisfying if you know what kind of game it wants to deliver. Shadow of the Weird Wizard is going to be able to do the same thing, with even more clarity of design and transparency of intent with its player facing rules. I’m looking forward to seeing the final version of Secrets of the Weird Wizard, and the rest of the line.

Licensed games usually take the approach of presenting material that can happen far away from the canon events of the setting. This works especially well in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, where there is a literal galaxy of locations available for storytelling. Player characters may hear about canon events, and there may be a butterfly effect on some of their options, but the assumption of the game is that the player characters aren’t going to be directly confronting and potentially contradicting the fictitious history of the setting.

Despite this, there are some fans who want exactly that. If they are playing in a game about a given setting, they want to be present for the events they have read about or seen on screen. They may or may not want to step into the shoes of an existing character, either by playing that character, or by playing a character that replaces the canon character in the game table’s narrative. If you want to play through a campaign where it’s possible for Luke Skywalker to miss the shot that destroys the Death Star because a PC failed to keep a TIE Fighter off his tail, that’s largely on the game facilitator to navigate.

Modiphius has taken an interesting approach to this with their Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. While it largely assumes that player characters will be engaging in house politics in other corners of the galaxy or touching upon Arrakis in moments between galaxy shaking events, it has also introduced products that directly engage the canon narrative. The primary example of this has been the Agents of Dune boxed set, which places the player characters and their house in the place of House Atreides, inheriting Dune from the Harkonnens by decree of the emperor.

The adventure we’re looking at today also places player characters directly in the path of galactic history, presenting a campaign that takes place just before, during, and in the aftermath of Paul Atreides’ takeover of the imperial throne.

 Dune: Fall of the Imperium

Creative Lead Andrew Peregrine
Line Editor/Canon Editor Rachel J. Wilkinson
Writing Richard August, Simon Berman, Jason Brick, Jason Durall, Keith Garrett, Jack Norris, Andrew Peregrine, Dave Semark, Hilary Sklar, Devinder Thiara, Mari Tokuda, Rachel J. Wilkinson
Graphic Design Chris Webb, Leigh Woosey, Jen Mccleary
Art Direction Rocío Martín Pérez
Cover Artist David Benzal
Interior Artwork Artists Amir Zand, Joel Chaim Holtzman, János Tokity, Simone Rizzo, Jakub Kozlowski, Carmen Cornet, Eren Arik, Hans Park, Mikhail Palamarchuk, Mihail Spil-Haufter, Lixin Yin, Susanah Grace, Alexander Guillen Brox, Imad Awan, Louie Maryon, Justin Usher, Jonny Sun, Olivier Hennart, Pat Fix, Avishek Banerjee, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, Simone Rizzo
Proofreading Stuart Gorman
Project Management Daniel Lade
Brand Management Joe Lefavi for Genuine Entertainment

Disclaimer

I am not working from a review copy of this product and did not receive a review copy to work from. I have received review copies from Modiphius Entertainment in the past. I have not had the opportunity to play or run this adventure. I do have a familiarity with the 2d20 system, having run and played multiple iterations of the rules.

Layout and Design

I am working from a PDF of the adventure. The adventure is available as a PDF or a physical book. Additionally, there is a Roll20 version of the adventure for sale. The PDF is 146 pages long. The content of those pages breaks down to this:

• Covers–2 pages
• Inside Front Cover Art–1 page
• Company Title Page–1 page
• Product Title Page–1 page
• Credits Page–1 page
• Table of Contents–1 page
• Shuttle Map–1 page
• Map of Arrakeen–1 page
• Modiphius Product Ads–3 pages

There is some glorious artwork in this book, and the design of most of the outfits, vehicles, architecture, etc. match the recent movies. While this book assumes the continuity of the original novels, the licensing is all bound together, meaning they don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to producing artwork. The pages are in a light parchment color, with geometric flourishes under the text. There is artwork throughout, especially depicting notable characters. Each of the chapters starts with a two-page spread of full color art.

The layout varies depending on the purpose of the text. Most of the adventure is in a two-column layout, but background material and overviews are formatted in centered text boxes or single columns that run down the middle of the page. Sidebars are often in the lower right- or left-hand side of the page.

The Judge of the Change

This adventure is the framework for an entire campaign, if you couldn’t glean that from the introduction. The book itself is broken into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Act I: The Gathering Storm
• Act II: Muad’Dib
• Act III: Fall of the Imperium
• Act IV: War Across a Million Worlds
• Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib

Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib is a section that details the kind of setting assumptions that should be considered for playing the RPG during the establishment of Paul’s reign. This includes the differences between the chaos and violence of that era, contrasted against the political maneuvering and quick betrayals of the previous era.

Each act of the campaign has its own set of acts, which are the primary adventures that characters will engage with as that leg of the campaign progresses. This means that within all four acts, there are three adventures, each with their own three acts.

While I mentioned the Agents of Dune campaign boxed set above, unlike that product, these adventures assume that the events of the novels happen when and how they are detailed in the source material. There are a few notes on what might happen if the GM and the players want to deviate from the story, but most sections assume that the path of history rolls forward unabated.

Who Are You?

The PCs are playing agents of their own house, managing their interests in light of emerging events. For several parts of the campaign, this means you’ll be dealing with the cascading effects of galactic history, rather than being right next to it. However, there are several places where the adventure narrows back down to canon events so the PCs can be present as witnesses.

There is an interesting sidebar at the beginning of the adventure which I both agree with and think oversimplifies the situation, especially when it’s applied to the players and the decisions they are making. The sidebar mentions that both Paul and the Harkonnens are nobles whose people toil for the profit of their rulers, and that while the Harkonnens are vicious and violent in their tactics, Paul starts a war that kills billions of people. All on board with “Paul isn’t the Good Guy.” But it also frames this as “there are no villains,” which, no, that’s harder to take. Paul isn’t the good guy because of the repercussions of his actions, but it is hard to say that the Harkonnens aren’t villains. I think it’s pretty easy to conceive of a story where there are no heroes, only villains, rather than saying there are no heroes or villains.

Part of why this sidebar exists, however, is to reinforce the concept that making decisions for a House in the Landsraad often means choosing between multiple bad options. If the PCs ally with the Harkonnens for a time, they aren’t suddenly the villains of the story, they may just be doing something very distasteful for them in order to help their house survive. There are several places in the narrative where characters have the option of throwing in with different houses against other houses, which means being allied doesn’t always mean being long term friends or business partners.

As agents of a Landsraad House, there are a combination of missions you can undertake for the betterment of your house, which also happens to give you insight into the greater events unfolding. For example, trying to secure a hidden smuggler’s cache of spice after the Atreides take over Arrakis lets you stumble upon some Harkonnen records that may lead you to the hidden base of operations of a Sardukar agent, and so on.

While the adventure has several places where events unfold at a distance from the events of the novels, there are a few key places where the PCs are funneled back into the main narrative. These include:

• The night House Atreides falls
• The Death of Rabban
• The Death of Leto II
• The sequence of Paul’s ascension to the throne and all the events surrounding it

If you read “The Death of Leto II,” and thought, wait, I don’t want to be there for that, I completely understand. That particular aspect of the adventure kind of underscores some of the problems the adventure has whenever it funnels the PCs back to major canon events. It’s very clear you are pushed into those events to witness them. If you play the adventure as written, you are sent with the Sardukar on their raid of the sietch, and you arrive at the scene just after Leto II has been killed.

In many of the “up close to history” scenes, your characters are rolling to avoid getting in anyone’s way and hoping to pick up some things beneficial to your house on the periphery of bigger events. One exception to this is the death of Rabban. The PCs have several paths to this point, but almost all of them involve someone wanting them to kill Rabban in the lead up to the most tumultuous events preceding Paul’s ascension.

This would be a really neat, “that was your characters!” moment, except there are still some heavy handed sections where his location is a bait and switch, so you must encounter Feyd, and you can’t kill Rabban all by yourselves, Gurney Halleck will show up and either try to do it before you, or help you out.

The Wide-Open Galaxy

Act II is especially open compared to the rest of the adventure. Your characters are negotiating for spice as Harkonnen production slows. You chase spies on a ski resort planet. You skulk around backwaters looking for blackmail information and encrypted documents. In one of my favorite moments in the adventure, your characters navigate a night of betrayal that is both thematically calling back to the attack on House Atreides, but both more subtle and distinct. It’s one of those places where it really feels like the adventure delivers you a very “Dune” experience without just using canon Dune events.

Act IV is strange. While it deals with events we know happened, broadly, i.e. Paul’s crusade ravaging worlds that failed to show their loyalty, the places where these adventures take place generally don’t have a lot of canon surrounding them, meaning that the PCs actions can have greater effect. The downside is that in many cases, the reason they are in the path of these events is very thin. In several cases, Paul issues an imperial decree for the PCs to go to a place, where they may work against his agents, and the next time they see Paul, “he sees something in their future that keeps him from acting against them,” and then they can go somewhere else and either discreetly or overtly defy him.

The culmination of the entire adventure/campaign is that a House that has long been associated with the PCs’ House is accused of treason. The PCs can find out what is going on, disassociate themselves from their allies or exonerate them, and determine who to screw over and who to align themselves with to keep one of Paul’s lieutenants from declaring their House as an enemy of the throne.

Mechanical Resolution

An aspect of the adventure that I really enjoy is that it leans into the 2d20 concept of creating traits. If you aren’t familiar with traits in a 2d20 game (which have slightly different names depending on the 2d20 game in question), they function in a manner similar to Fate aspects. They are a broad description of something that is true. Depending on the narrative, traits either grant narrative permission to do something that wouldn’t be possible if the trait weren’t active, or it adds or subtracts from the difficulty of a task if it is relevant to that task.

Depending on how the PCs resolve different scenes in the adventure, they may acquire different traits, which will be available for use either by the PCs or the GM if they are still active. For example, in many cases, PCs that ally with a house will gain a trait that denotes that they are “Ally of House X,” and any time that’s relevant, it might make a check either more or less difficult. They may also gain traits that reflect their reputation; for example, if they resolve a scene by hiding, they may get a “Cowardice” trait, which might come into play whenever dealing with characters that are proud of their martial accomplishments.

There are also events that remove traits. For example, early in the adventure, it’s a lot easier for the PCs to pick up the “Ally to House Harkonnen” trait, which they may end up shedding if, later in the adventure, they advocate for the emperor to strip them of their rights to Arrakis.

Like Star Trek Adventures, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium makes provisions for a player running characters other than their primary character, usually in circumstances where the PCs wouldn’t want to personally be involved in the activities they are directing. This is separate from, but adjacent to, Architect play, where PCs can say they are using resources from a distance to manipulate events, making checks for broad actions they are taking, to influence events.

For example, if a character has troops as one of their resources, and there have been smugglers raiding their holdings, they could use Architect mode to send troops to take care of the smugglers without ever going to that location, rolling to see how well their orders are carried out versus the difficulty of the outcome they want. The downside to Architect play being that it’s hard to get specific granular results. In the example above, you might be able to get rid of the smugglers, but the GM may tell you that unless you show up yourself, you can’t expect your troops to capture a smuggler alive for interrogation.

There are a few places in the adventure where broader goals are mentioned as something the PCs might attempt with Architect mode, usually in the periphery of events that surround the political maneuvering in Act II. There are also a few brief mentions of using supporting characters during certain events, especially if the player character in question isn’t a particularly martial specimen, and they tackle a mission like killing Rabban.

Because these are excellent tools, I wish the adventure had spent more time expanding how they could be used to greater effect in various scenes. While I don’t think any scene where the PCs have most of their agency removed is going to be fun to sit through, I could see several of the “you must go this direction” encounters being easier to swallow if those scenes were expressly meant to be carried out by secondary character operatives. I suspect that this wasn’t done in part because the adventure wants your primary PCs to be present at these major events, not just a character you are playing.

Having a few lines referencing, “they could get X, likely through Architect play,” isn’t nearly as satisfying as a more detailed list of resources or events that the PCs could undertake that had a direct effect on the narrative and the position of their house in each act.

Aftermath

When I first saw there was a section on Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib, I was thinking something along the lines of the one-page mission briefs from Star Trek Adventures. This is, more precisely, tools and mechanics available to reflect the differences in the galaxy after Paul’s ascension to the throne and the spread of his religion. It introduces the faction template for the Qizarate, as well as six new talents that are either tied to that faction or involve interaction with Paul directly.

While there aren’t “mission brief” style adventures, there are sections on what resistance to the throne looks like in this era, some of the espionage that might be going on, and a few adventure seeds surrounding interacting with Paul, the adherents of his faith, and the changing allegiances in the Imperium. These are generally short, one paragraph long descriptions.

 I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments 

The Mystery of Life Isn’t a Problem to Solve, But A Reality to Experience

I really appreciate the ambition of this adventure. It really shines in Act II, and a bit in Act IV, where the PCs have lots of options available to them, and the main thing that is determined by canon are the stakes they are navigating. I absolutely love the Night of Slow blades section of the adventure, because it hits that sweet spot of “this is tailored for your PCs” and “this feels like exactly what would happen in the novels.” There are also some other scenes across various acts that shine. While not everyone may take the road that leads to this, I really liked the details of negotiating with Baron Harkonnen, as well as the scenes where the PCs can debate with other agents of the Landsraad houses in court with the emperor.

An Animal Caught in A Trap Will Gnaw Off Its Own Leg to Escape. What Will You Do?

I wish that when the adventure pushes the PCs into “witness” mode, there was more for them to do than observe and make a few checks to see if they pick up a new trait or asset for themselves or their house. There are some brushes with canon events early on that feel especially frustrating. You may get into a fight with Rabban the night of the Atreides attack, but he’s got plot armor. You might see Jessica and Paul being herded onto an ornithopter in the distance, but you’re too far away to do anything about it. The absolute worse example of this is being present for Leto II’s death. I don’t expect the adventure to give you the opportunity to stop this from happening–it’s a pretty pivotal story beat. But I don’t know that my desire to witness the noteworthy events of Dune included helplessly traveling with the people that murder Paul’s infant son.

Tenuous Recommendation–The product has positive aspects, but buyers may want to make sure the positive aspects align with their tastes before moving this up their list of what to purchase next.

I don’t want to be too brutal. I think that if you are a fan of Dune (and I’m not sure why you would be buying Dune RPG material if you weren’t) you will find some use for this adventure. On the other hand, I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments. That’s a shame, because there are some wonderful moments in the adventure that tie the PCs and their house to events with a little more room to breathe, that would be great to see attached to an adventure that didn’t funnel you back into your front row seats for a show you can’t really affect.

Game of the year?

I’ve reviewed so many other things, and I feel like I’ve been missing a fundamental item in all of this. It’s key to understanding all of my other reviews. Today, I’m going to review the process of reviewing.

I’ve literally been reviewing things from the time I was born. I remember my siblings showing me Land of the Lost, and when I saw the Sleestak for the first time, I said nope. My very first review, and a lot more succinct than I would become once I had a better vocabulary.

Disclaimer

I was not given permission to discuss the process of reviewing the review process. I have had many opinions over the years. I have not had the opportunity to see if all of my opinions are correct, although I strongly suspect they are.

Credits

Current Human Beings Varies
Popularized Reviews as Entertainment in and of Themselves Siskel and Ebert
The Internet Al Gore
The QWERTY Keyboard Christopher Latham Sholes
Modern Internet Culture Satan, probably

Popular Review Formats

Human beings review things all the time. One of the newest trends popularized by the internet is Extreme Vibes. In this technique, when you see something you like, especially if someone else doesn’t like it, you can classify it as the Best Thing Ever. Literally, it can’t be the Best Thing Ever if anything else is the Best Thing Ever, but this technique doesn’t really hinge on nuance.

There is an additional aspect to Extreme Vibes, and that is The Absolute Worst. The process goes like this:

• You dislike something
• Someone else likes it
• You realize they are wrong
• You rate it the The Absolute Worst

As with The Best Thing Ever, it is not literally possible to be The Absolute Worst. In addition to the reasons listed for The Best Thing Ever, i.e. if there is another Absolute Worst, there cannot be another Absolute Worst, so previous reviews are immediately invalidated, the Absolute Worst has another reason it remains an imprecise measure. Human beings are extremely talented at coming up with additional things that are worse than the last thing they did.

While this form of review started in the simple format of message board posts and social media responses, it has matured much like more traditional forms of review. In a move reminiscent of the sudden placement of television reviews on every news program in the 1980s, various forms of new media blossom with Extreme Vibes in video format, either in long form, as the most venerable YouTubers work with, or the more succinct micro Extreme Vibes videos that can be seen on Tik Tok.

Shooting Stars

This technique only works within the framework of another review process, specifically sites that allow you to rate a product by using symbols, often stars, but sometimes more esoteric symbols, like cupcakes, circles, or rhombuses. This is an extremely impressionist technique, even when compared to the Extreme Vibes method. The key isn’t that you need to express even your slightest tendencies as extreme antipathy or sympathy.

The real key to the Shooting Stars technique is that you put people in mind of what a review should look like, then you challenge them to engage with the review and it’s connection to the product in question in a process not unlike art appreciation. The product isn’t what’s making you feel something, the review is!

You may want an example of this. Some of the most masterful of these reviews include the following:

• Rating a product with one star, because you love it, but UPS destroyed the box, leaving you to contemplate if an author should have a star rating that incorporates frustration with a shopping company.
• Using absolute language while not engaging with either side of a scale that can measure extremes. Examples include a two star rating that cites a product as the worst thing the reviewer has encountered, or a four out of five star review that is “the best.” This leaves you contemplating the nature of extremes, and the connection between objective math and creativity.
• Writing a review that contains a long anecdote from the reviewer’s personal life, which only near the end tangentially touches on the actual merits of the item in question, or its lack of merits. This is a lesson in understanding that things need to be taken as a whole, rather than in discrete parts.

None of this should be confused with the Transcendent Narrative Review, which utilizes the review space to tell an epic story for which movie rights should be secured. The secret of the Transcendent Narrative Review is that it isn’t actually a review, but a separate artform that uses the review as its form.

Aggressive Aggregating

Probably the easiest genre of reviewing for anyone to get into. This involves logging in to a review aggregation site and clicking on a number. This is technically an advanced version of Extreme Vibes, and some reviewologists, instead of categorizing this as its own type of review, actually consider this Advanced Extreme Vibes.

I would still maintain this is a separate form of review, because in addition to the above, there is an added element of watching the aggregation percentage trending toward the direction you indicated. There is a certain anonymity to this form of reviewing that can really let someone free their inner monster. Because the key is to see the communal percentage go up or down, often reviewers in this genre will multitask by creating multiple logins for the same aggregate site, in order to express their opinions with creative resonance.

Positives

Honestly, reviewing is probably a necessary function of human beings. Without being able to express that we really do or don’t like something, reviewologists have posited that our heads would explode. They even point to some medieval tapestries that indicate peasants with exploding heads, watching the king’s favorite puppet show. It’s easy to extrapolate that their ability to provide reviews was impeded. So the big benefit to various review techniques is to keep our heads from exploding.

Negatives

Long term review work results in an effect similar to the effects that can be observed when living tissue is exposed to cosmic rays. Not the cool cosmic rays that grant superpowers, but the cosmic rays that start to melt flesh. Participating in Extreme Vibes for too long, for example, sometimes allows the reviewer’s head to explode anyway, because their opinion is forming faster than the reviewer can form words. There is also the problem of extreme isolation and listlessness for reviewers that operate in these environments and don’t use a more extreme medium like Extreme Vibes or Aggressive Aggregating, because all of the oxygen tends to be sucked out of the conversation as both extreme ends of the spectrum garner all attention.

Not Recommended–There isn’t much in this product gods forsaken process that convinces me to tell others to pick it up.

This quote doesn’t exist anywhere in the article you are reading. On one hand, that may be kind of confusing, but if you look at it this way, you’re getting new content rather than just seeing part of the article again, but bigger.

Never, ever start reviewing things. It slowly, or not so slowly, eats away at your mental health. I was normal before I started this job. Okay, that’s a lie. I never used to lie before I got this job. I’m lying about that. But it definitely changed me.

Every time you read through a product and see the love and care that went into it, and you recognize the craft employed in its creation, and you see someone say, “it’s junk,” you start to wonder if you were reading text that was only visible to you. Then you start to think, maybe it was only visible to me.

Every time you attempt to make a joke about some form of RPG that no one would ever attempt to create, some actual game arrives on the scene, either spectacularly daring the world to deny it’s genius or astounding you with the audacity to string together a mass of concepts, themes, and procedures in some simulationist echo of Frankenstein’s monster, threatening to hunt down and kill your family if you don’t make the perfect review mate for the game.

I watched SEO glitter in the dark near the Google Search Bar. All those reviews will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to join a new social media platform.

End of Line.

Editor’s Note: Jared, our review gnome, was asked to find a way to write a parody of an RPG without referencing any existing RPG properties or citing any similarities with them. Instead of that article, this was sent to us via a burner e-mail account. Jared has not been seen for the last two weeks, although the authorities believe they have a strong lead to his whereabouts.

But a lot of those memes assume that the concept of the magical girl is really about Sailor Moon style stories. You have young women living a normal life at school, with normal student problems, who are also superheroes that need to transform into their superhero persona and save the world. But the magical girl genre is broader than those tropes. In broader terms, the magical girl genre is about someone who has magical powers that aren’t common in the society they live in, dealing with the dual nature of being separate from the world they live in, while also living in it.

Two of the earliest magical girl creators in Japan, Mitsuteru Yokoyama and Fujio Akatsuka, have cited the American sitcom Bewitched as an inspiration. While I have watched many magical girl anime stories, I grew up watching Bewitched, so this makes a lot of things click for me. Samantha is a woman with magical powers. She comes from a culture that can’t be revealed to the contemporary American culture to which her husband belongs. She had to deal with complications in her mundane life, as well as using her powers to deal with the complications that arise from her connection to a magical other world.

Understanding that underlying concept of being an outsider who would be less conflicted if you could be what you are, all the time, and juggling the mundane complications that everyone in your position in society needs to deal with, along with additional complications that come with being who you really are, is really important to understanding the game we’re looking at today, Girl by Moonlight.

Disclaimer

I did not receive a review copy of Girl by Moonlight, and I was a backer of the crowdfunding campaign for the game. I have not had the opportunity to play the game, although I do have experience both playing and running Forged in the Dark games, the engine on which the game is built. I have played and run other magical girl RPGs, though, so I have that going for me.

 Girl by Moonlight

Publisher Evil Hat
Author Andrew Gillis
Editors Daniel Wood, Jenn Martin
Proofreader Jenn Martin
Cover Artists Lorne Colt, Kelsey Phillips
Design Consultant Luke Jordan
Indexer Sadie Neat
Art Director Trivia Fox
Interior Artists Carly A-F, Lonnie Garcia, Kelsey Phillips, Zak Goggins, Simon Sweetman, Raven Warner, Jabari Weathers
Sensitivity Readers Jess Meier, Takuma Okada
Layout & Graphic Design John Harper, Fred Hicks
Playtesters Allison Arth, Andi Carrison, Ash Mcallan, Emily Mcallan, John Harper, Luke Jordan, Melody Watson, Nadja Otikor, Violet Miller

Girl by Moonlight Format Power, Mark Up!

This review is based on both the physical copy of Girl by Moonlight, and the PDF version of the product. The physical copy I received is the limited edition cover, because I’m extremely weak against the powers of FOMO.

If you have any of the other Evil Hat Forged in the Dark games, the physical book matches the digest hardcover format of the other games they have released, like Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy, and Band of Blades. This also has the matte finish cover that those books have. The pages are sturdy, glossy, and hold the colors in a vibrant manner. The end papers display a repeating pattern of the symbols that appear in the game, in purple, blue, green, and dark pink.

The PDF and the book are 226 pages long. This includes a title page, a publication page, a two-page table of contents, a two-page index, a three-page summary of game rules, and a page of author bios. The PDF includes an image of the limited edition cover in addition to the standard cover.

The book itself has bold headers, many bullet points, it’s “side bars” are actually color bands that introduce their topics in the center of the page, and the layout is in single column format. I love lots of different book formats and flourishes, but I don’t think Evil Hat gets enough credit for maintaining very clear, uncluttered formatting that still looks very inviting and attractive. They make books that bridge the gap between bold, clear formatting, and stylish presentation, better than about anyone else. Girl by Moonlight is no exception.

The Magical Girl Power Source: Forged in the Dark

When Blades in the Dark introduced the Forged in the Dark engine to RPG games, it was built to portray heist-based action, where the story follows a predictable pattern that moves from gathering information, performing missions, dealing with consequences, and working on long term projects. While this makes sense for games about mercenaries trying to survive the winter, striving against an enemy force, or space pirates trying to get rich while dodging the authorities and avoiding political entanglements, it may not seem to be the most natural engine for magical girls.

Remember up in the introduction when I mentioned the expanded concept of magical girls that goes beyond the superhero style magical girl stories? This game uses the more structured, procedural format of the Forged in the Dark engine to make sure that characters think about each aspect of what the stories they are telling are touching upon. Right away in Girl by Moonlight, the book introduces the thesis of this game. Magical Girls, in this instance, are symbolic of people that belong to a marginalized community, drawing the most direct inspiration from the marginalization LBGTQIA+ people experience. If the only version of magical girls you have been exposed to has been the 90s version of Sailor Moon introduced in the United States, you may not realize exactly how apt it is to use the Magical Girl genre in this way.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about and want a quick course, go google Sailor Neptune, Sailor Uranus, or the Amazon Trio, especially if you’ve only encountered 90s Sailor Moon. Then come back. Is it clearer now? Okay, let’s get back to it.

It’s also probably important to point out that “magical girls” in this game aren’t limited to people whose gender identity is female. The genre leans towards portraying women protagonists, but includes characters that have a male gender identity, or do not conform to a gender binary. The term “magical girl,” however, does help to remind us that the default protagonist in these stories isn’t a straight cis male.

The structured nature of the Forged in the Dark engine makes it very clear how each aspect of gameplay contributes to the narrative of marginalized people living in a world that doesn’t accept them, while not being able to ignore the aspects of themselves that aren’t accepted. The phases of play in this game are:

• Obligation
• Downtime
• Mission
• Fallout

Each of these phases will look different depending on the series framework that the group agrees to use, but in general, this means that the characters will need to deal with what the mundane world expects them to do, choose what projects they want to focus on, attempt to fight back against the manifested destructed elements of the story in the mission, and deal with how the resolution of the mission affects the character’s long term goals and their daily lives.

While there has been a trend in a few more well known iterations of games based on the Forged in the Dark engine to move away from some of the more granular aspects of Forged in the Dark resolution, most of those standards as still present in this game. The baseline of the game is taking an action to resolve a situation, rolling a number of dice based on the ratings of the action being used, modified by help provided by others and additional dice provided by taking a dangerous compromise, and taking the highest result of the dice. If your highest die is 1-3, you don’t get what you want, if it’s a 4-5, you get it with a complication, and on a 6, you do exactly what you wanted to do the way you wanted to do it.

Downtime allows you to do things like recover from stress or start and advance long term projects. Mission objectives that can’t be resolved with a single action are tracked with clocks. Fallout can force the PCs to deal with enemy attacks when they aren’t ready, or see their opposition increase in tier, meaning that the PCs will  have a harder time advancing mission clocks against the threats they face (usually because it takes more successes to fill in a clock to completion).

Depending on the series playset, there are aspects similar to claiming territory in Blades in the Dark. You might expand your superhero hideout’s resources, the carrier ship facilities of your bastion, or shut down aspects of an ongoing conspiracy.

Transforming the Forged in the Dark Engine

One of the ways that Girl by Moonlight addresses the genre is by introducing Transcendence. When characters meet the conditions by which they transform, they gain access to the Transcendent special abilities on their playbook, gain the use of armor, pick up more dots in some of their action ratings, and gain increased effect. Remember when we said that the opposition tier might go up, making it harder to fill your mission clocks . . . this is one of the ways you can counter that. Of course, there are also some powerful forces that you really can’t act against unless you are transcended.

There are a limited number of actions you can take while you are transcended. Because actions, especially in missions, represent more than just punching someone once or lifting a heavy object, this doesn’t mean that you only stay transformed for a minute or two, but it does mean that you only have so many mechanically significant, player driven moments with your transcended powers.

In many Forged in the Dark games, when your stress track is full, you leave the scene and take some kind of long term mark or injury before your character returns to play. Instead of leaving the scene, a stressed-out character falls into Eclipse. Eclipse is like the concept of the Darkest Self from Monsterhearts. You don’t become an enemy fighting against your friends, but the actions you are taking are harmful to your psyche and push yourself beyond your personal boundaries. You leave eclipse when one of your allies performs the action that is listed on your playbook as your escape.

All of this is meant to show that you have to fight to act as your true self and make it count, and that because you can’t always be the self you want to be, you have these shadows that fall over you, telling you that you aren’t the person that you want to be.

The specific actions in Girl by Moonlight include:

• Defy
• Empathize
• Express
• Confess
• Forgive
• Perceive
• Analyze
• Conceal
• Flow

The playbooks that the game uses include the following:

• Enigma (the mysterious character that helps the others while hiding who they are even from their allies)
• Stranger (the character that doesn’t connect with others as well as they do with things)
• Time Traveller (someone that knows what happens in one version of the future, and is trying to change things)
• Harmony (two characters in such a harmonious relationship that they act together to accomplish things)
• Guardian (the honor bound hero)
• Outsider (the character with a shady past and a rivalry with one of their allies)
• Unlikely Hero (the normal person who helps the other protagonists, and may not see what’s special about themselves)

Before we move on from the playbooks, I would just like to quote how your character views the world if they fall into Eclipse as the Unlikely Hero: “you are not who they need you to be. You’re weak, useless, unworthy of their friendship. They have given so much to you, and in return you give them nothing.”

Girl by Moonlight. I don’t know why you need to attack me personally, but I’m telling my therapist about this.

Another unique aspect of Girl by Moonlight are links. You gain links with different characters, and you can spend them in a number of ways to help one another, like recovering stress, ignoring harm, boosting an ally’s action, or preventing them from falling into eclipse. This is to reinforce the fact that the protagonists aren’t just individuals working towards a common goal, but that working together is one of the protagonists’ goals.

The Series

A game of Girl by Moonlight is a combination of picking your playbook, and picking the series that you are going to play. Series may have special rules that affect the general rules of the game, like the shrines that grant special abilities in At the Brink of the Abyss, the modified means by which the characters must recover stress and transcendence in Beneath a Rotting Sky, the rules for bonding with your giant robot friends in On the Sea of Stars, or the intimate moment rules for In a Maze of Dreams. They also have specific series abilities that can be taken in addition to playbook abilities, as well as customized transcendent abilities.

While there is a general theme for each of the series, the group still customizes and details the elements when they discuss what series they want to play. For example, they will often define the form the series opposition takes, where the characters derive their powers, what the mundane obligations of the characters are, and what end they are working towards, or fighting against.

The series included in the book are the following:

• At the Brink of the Abyss (magical girls as superheroes fighting for a better future)
• Beneath a Rotting Sky (magical girls as supernatural hunters fighting against a corruption that will ultimately break them)
• On a Sea of Stars (magical girls as mech pilots defending the last vestiges of human society against a destructive alien entity and its minions)
• In a Maze of Dreams (magical girls as manifestations of the characters’ subconscious selves, investigating the dreams of others to uncover an ongoing conspiracy)

Each of these series not only presents a different collection of tropes to utilize in storytelling, but also uses these different settings to explore different aspects of characters dealing with their marginalization in the face of the challenges they encounter. Not every setting is about our protagonists fighting hard and prevailing in the end.

At the Brink of the Abyss is what many people will think of when they think of the magical girls genre. Characters have a mundane, day-to-day life, with responsibilities they must perform. There is a unifying villainous force that both infects day to day life, making it harder for our protagonists to be themselves, and manifested villainous monsters, which can be challenged with superheroic action. Monsters in the setting are usually regular people corrupted by the unifying evil force that heroes are working against and can often be “saved” by reaching the human within the monster and appealing to their better nature. While the PCs still need to deal with the evil force corrupting society, they can defeat evil and make the world better. Some of the people that are adversaries are just people that don’t understand how they have been manipulated. It’s an overall more positive and optimistic setting, emphasizing perseverance and communication to overcome bigotry.

Beneath a Rotting Sky is perhaps the polar opposite of At the Brink of the Abyss. A very horror-inflected series, the evil that is corrupting society is so entrenched in the world that it’s not likely that it can ever be cleansed. If characters want to remove stress and recharge their powers, they need to consume the hearts of the monsters they hunt. They must deal with an opposing group of hunters who act as their rivals. They are portrayed as survivors, doing the best they can for as long as they can, until they can’t anymore. They try to do what they do because they don’t want to give up, not because they can win. In some ways, they are never fully free of the taint that has affected society, even when acting against the monsters of the setting, and may even come into conflict with others who are just trying to do the same things that the protagonists are doing. This series really explores the stress of existing in a world that actively resists change, and rather than moving forward, sometimes actively moves backward.

On a Sea of Stars splits the difference between the two previously detailed series. The humans’ last bastion isn’t as open and welcoming as it should be, meaning that the PCs may need to fight to make the surviving human society better in addition to fighting against the external forces trying to destroy humanity. It’s not assumed that the PCs will succeed, like At the Brink of the Abyss, but they aren’t doomed to eventually fall, as in Beneath a Rotting Sky. On a Sea of Stars puts an emphasis on building defenses and improving the human bastions, so that they can survive while the PCs are out taking the fight to the alien leviathans, which introduces the idea that big, grand gestures aren’t the only thing necessary to be successful, but also long term planning and change.

In a Maze of Dreams is the most conceptual of the settings. In superhero settings like the one detailed in At the Brink of the Abyss, the character’s heroic identity is often referred to as their “alter-ego,’ their self in a different reality. In a Maze of Dreams presents the concept that your transformed identity is really your “alter-Id,” your drives and desires given active reign over your supercharged form. The emphasis in this series is that there isn’t a big, obvious villain to fight, rather there are nefarious people that are subtly linked, causing harm as part of an established superstructure. Characters go into the dreams of people to determine how and if they are parts of the conspiracy, while also exploring desires and aspirations that the protagonist doesn’t fully understand. In a way, it’s trying to do what’s right, without knowing what’s right, while also learning why you really do the things you do.

Viewing the game through the lens of the series playbooks brings into focus what the game is trying to accomplish, using both the magical girl genre and the Forged in the Dark engine as tools to that end. Each of these series explores an aspect of surviving and interacting with society as a queer individual, each one asking, “but how would it change if you had to face this?” In some ways, it feels like the ultimate experience of this game would be to play through all these series and examine what they all say, and where those narratives overlap. That said, I can also see where some of these settings would be harder to engage with. For example, I could see running or playing in At the Brink of the Abyss or On a Sea of Stars, because when I’m gaming, I like at least the possibility of a happy ending. I may be able to engage with In a Maze of Dreams if I was in the right, introspective mindset, but I suspect that Under a Rotting Sky would be emotionally taxing for me in a way I wouldn’t enjoy.

That’s not a proclamation on what series are “good” or “bad.” I think, as a product, that Under a Rotting Sky and In a Maze of Dreams make the product feel more complete for the perspectives that those series offer. Other people are going to have different dials and perspectives they enjoy when they address these topics in a game.

Cosmic Heart Compact

 This game is going to be a great tool for using fantasy elements to explore important issues facing queer people in modern society, as well as exploring how marginalized people survive and work to change society in a narrative form. 

This is one of those games that I feel is just as strong as a commentary as it is as an actual game, but it balances that commentary and gamification well enough to be both. The specific phases of play support the exploration of the game’s themes by pacing the game in step with the topics introduced in the other phases. The four series do a wonderful job at touching on the same topics, while also turning the dials on the details up or down to explore the same philosophical questions with different priorities.

Losing the Crystal Star

I think anyone looking at this game closely will understand that it’s “magical girls used to produce a specific experience,” but it’s probably still worth noting that if you want a game that leans harder on blow by blow action against a villain of the week, the pace of this game is probably going to be more deliberate and more introspective than you want to scratch that itch. It’s not really a failing of the game, so much as an easily foreseen misalignment of expectations.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

This game is going to be a great tool for using fantasy elements to explore important issues facing queer people in modern society, as well as exploring how marginalized people survive and work to change society in a narrative form. In addition to its use as an active tool at the gaming table, both for having fun and exploring perspectives, I think that anyone that is concerned about queer marginalization, and who enjoys engaging with tabletop gaming rules will benefit from reading through this book, even if they never get the game into active use.

If you just want to punch evil in the face after your magical girl transformation, you may still get something out of this game, just know that the focus of the game isn’t squarely fixed on that aspect of the story as the primary narrative. Even at that, there are still some series and playbooks that lean more closely to what you may want out of the game.

Maybe someday, when enough people have played games like this, and internalized what they learn at the gaming table, they’ll realize that Samantha should have been able to be accepted as a witch even though she married a man. Her current partner didn’t make her any less of a witch, even when she wasn’t actively using her powers.

Many adventures had started telling the DM to handwave travel times or to narratively describe getting from here to there, because it wasn’t where the heart of the game lies. However, after cribbing some notes from The One Ring to make the 5e SRD Adventures in Middle-earth, Cubicle 7 created Uncharted Journeys, an expanded resource for traveling from one location to another, which engaged PC skills more actively, and created notable events that went beyond weather and wandering monsters.

In some ways, Cubicle 7 is doing something similar to A Life Well Lived. One aspect of The One Ring is the Fellowship Phase, an assumed period where the heroes aren’t actually adventuring, and they have time to remember what they care about most. A Life Well Lived feels like some of its rules, such as downtime, touch on similar themes. Does A Life Well Lived manage to freshen up “not adventuring,” the way Uncharted Journeys livened up overland travel? Let’s dive in and find out.

Disclaimer

I purchased my own copy of A Life Well Lived for this review. I haven’t had the opportunity to use the rules in A Life Well Lived in a game. I am, however, very familiar with D&D 5e, both as a player and a DM. And I have spent so much time, so much, thinking about topics like downtime rules and incremental task resolution.

 A Life Well Lived

Writing and Design: Emmet Byrne, Alex Cahill, Josh Corcoran, Hannah-Lital Goldfinch, Eleanor Hingley, Dominic McDowall, Pádraig Murphy, Ross Parkinson, Samuel Poots, Ryan Wheeldon
Editing: Alex Cahill, Alexandra Iciek
Production and Development: Alex Cahill
Cover: Antonio De Luca
Illustration: Oleksii Chernik, Runesael Flynn, Daria Klushina, Dániel Kovács, Elsa Kroese, Andrew Lowry, Sam Manley, Tumo Mere, Clara-Marie Morin, Brendan Murphy, JG O’Donoghue, George Patsouras, Ilya Royz, Gareth Sleightholme, Matias Trabold Rehren
Graphic Design: Diana Grigorescu, Laura Jane Phelan
Layout: Diana Grigorescu
Proofreading: Calum Collins

Cuddling Up with a New Book

This review is based on the PDF version of the product. The PDF is 144 pages long. That includes a credits page, a table of contents, a three-page index, and four pages of Kickstarter backers. There is also a two page A Life Well Lived character sheet, a patron tracking sheet, and a sheet for detailing the character’s home base.

The book is broken up into the following chapters:

• Lifepath
• Campcraft
• Downtime
• A Place to Call Home
• Who Pulls the Strings
• Hanging Up Your Sword

The book has a very clear and readable two-page layout, with many easily referenced tables. The artwork that appears in the book focuses on adventurers between moments of action, enjoying a drink at a tavern, telling stories around a campfire, and other similar scenes.

Let’s Make an Adventurer

The first section of the book is the Lifepath system. This isn’t the first lifepath system in RPGs. The most well-known, maybe infamous, is the lifepath system in the original Traveller game. Many modern games have incorporated a version of the lifepath, such as the Star Trek Adventures game.

This isn’t even D&D 5e’s first lifepath system. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything included the section This is Your Life, touching on origins, personal decisions, life events, and supplemental tables with further details. The Heroic Chronicle in Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is a very intense lifepath/backstory generator that has a lot of mechanical weight, generating very specific numbers of contacts and rivals, and providing extra magic items, skills, or feats in the Fateful Moments section.

A Life Well Lived probably sits pretty firmly between the two. There are mechanical connections to various aspects of the Lifepath, but A Life Well Lived redistributes the other places where D&D 5e assigns ability scores and skills. A Life Well Lived moves ability scores away from race/lineage (which, to be fair, D&D 5e has as well), and has moved skills away from Backgrounds. There are no backgrounds in this system, or rather, background is distributed more granularly across various life events.

The Lifepath is broken into the following steps:

• Lineage
• Origins (Ability Score Bonus)
• Early Childhood (Ability Score Bonus)
• Adolescence (Skill)
• Life Lesson (Ability Score Bonus)
• Pivotal Moment
• Occupations (Tool Proficiency, Skill)
• Quirks
• Class (Ability Score Bonus)
• Call to Adventure
• Starting Funds
• The Lies We Tell Ourselves
• Skeletons in the Closet
• Connections
• Goals

The steps in the Lifepath that don’t provide mechanical benefits usually stand in for the Trait, Ideal, Bond, and Flaw normally derived from Background. These are meant to be your Inspiration triggers if you play into them. The suggested Standard Array in this book is 14, 14, 12, 12, 10, and 8, versus the standard array in the Player’s Handbook of 15, 14, 12, 12, 10, and 8. Essentially it just adjusts for the additional step that provides another ability score bonus.

The Lineages presented include Dragonborn, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling, Human, and Tiefling. The lineages that previously had sub-races have been redesigned to remove that choice, and like more recent Lineages from WotC, these don’t assign skills or proficiencies based on culture, they just provide abilities. If you are using more recent Lineages with this system, it shouldn’t be too difficult, and if you’ve wanted a version of the Dwarf, Elf, or Gnome that is designed without sub-races, and you don’t want to wait until the summer, you have options.

Characters pick a Long-Term and a Short-Term goal. These goals act as XP triggers, including a chart showing how much XP a character should gain each time they meet one of their goals, based on level.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves and Skeletons in the Closet are interesting additions to the Lifepath, as they add a little bit of darkness, sadness, or tragedy to the character. There is plenty of that in the various other aspects of the Lifepath system, but if you have had a happy life up to this point, into every Lifepath a little rain must fall. The Lies We Tell Ourselves, in many cases, are like the Flaws from backgrounds, introducing something that drives a character, which is either unrealistic or drives them to selfish ends. Skeletons in the Closet give your character a secret, including the possibility that one of your previous Lifepath entries is the nice version of what really happened, because you don’t want to go into the real details.

I really like this Lifepath system. It doesn’t get quite as wild and potentially generous as the Heroic Chronicle, and adding mechanical weight to the various steps makes it feel more satisfying than This is Your Life. I could see having a whole session of players generating their characters, adding details, and connecting the characters, before the group even gets to deciding what kind of campaign they wanted to play. But that cuts both ways. I know some people want a backstory, but not as much as this chapter produces. Thankfully, each section of A Life Well Lived is modular, with most elements being able to be engaged without using the full book.

Campcraft and Downtime

While these are two separate chapters, they are very similar in the mechanics that they introduce. I had assumed Campcraft was going to be very focused on short trips, the kind you wouldn’t break out Uncharted Journeys to model. While that’s partially true, the real difference between Campcraft and Downtime is that Campcraft activities can be completed during a single day, often while PCs are doing something else, while Downtime activities assume around a week of free time to complete.

Many of these activities rely on a new resolution mechanic for modeling long-term tasks. “Long-term” meaning that these are activities that are, most often, not resolved with a single ability check. These tasks usually allow the character to make three different checks before the end of the time period (the end of the day, or the end of the week). There is a DC assigned to various tasks, but there is also a goal, a number that must be met to complete the task.

How does this work? Well, if you exceed the DC of the task, each point by which you exceed the task is added to the number that you are measuring against the goal. You can lose progress on your Extended Tests if you roll lower than the DC. Depending on the specific activity, what happens if you fail varies. Sometimes it means you just don’t complete the task. Sometimes it means the next time you attempt the same Extended Test, you do so with advantage on the rolls.

Quick Tasks

Campcraft can make gear that can provide very specific benefits in certain circumstances, create a limited subset of potions, or gather additional rations. Most of these have well defined mechanical benefits, but there are a lot of things to track if you start to prepare temporarily boosted weapons, make some special boots, and have a few extra potions floating around. All of this may sound like what you do sitting around the fire, but there are some items under Campcraft that are a way to adjudicate something your characters may want to do while they are also engaged with other things. For example, PCs can use Campcraft tasks to find a good place to buy gear at a discounted price, perform for a crowd, or lay a dead companion to rest.

Keeping Busy

Downtime activities are like these Campcraft activities, but writ large. If you combine the downtime activities in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and subtract the downtime activities that weren’t new, but were updated versions of the previous versions, you have about 18 Downtime activities. There are about 57 Downtime activities detailed in this section.

Downtime in D&D 5e is usually broken up into workweeks, meaning that for each 5 days that a character can dedicate to a task, they can attempt to resolve the downtime to see if the character gains the benefits of that downtime. Some activities take longer to resolve, so once you determine how many days the downtime takes, you subtract the days you put toward that goal and track your progress based on days.

Downtime in A Life Well Lived is broadly “about a week,” but it can stand in for an abstract period from a week to a month or so. It’s a relatively short break between adventures. Each character gets to attempt three downtime activities when they have downtime. Many of these activities provide a specific benefit for the character and utilize the Extended Test mechanics. Between the fact that characters have three downtime activities they can attempt per downtime, and the fact that most activities are resolved during a single downtime, it seems like characters are advancing on a lot more vectors than a character using the DMG or Xanathar’s. Some of that is true.

Getting Our Hands Dirty

For example, when it comes to learning tools or languages, characters often learn how to use something temporarily, and lose the progress they made if they don’t lock in their training by dedicating their next downtime to the same activity. I like this, because it means someone could learn a language very fast, from a narrative standpoint. If you learn a few words to get by, and don’t revisit that language anytime soon, you forget what you learned, which feels right. In other words, if you look at this abstractly, and don’t get too hung up on what the literal amount of time the downtime represents, the rhythm of learning a language or an instrument feels more natural than “I need to spend 5X days to learn this, and I managed to spend 1X days, so I only need 4X more downtime days to finish learning.”

The other thing that mitigates the number of downtime activities that the PCs get is that some downtime activities aren’t about the PCs gaining a benefit, they are a means of tracking what the PC values and what they want to add to their story. There are downtime activities like Appease a Patron, Find Companionship, or Rock Bottom. You may need to make nice with your boss, want to have someone to welcome you home after adventuring, or represent your downturn after running into a rough patch.

Why include downtime activities that are essentially just narratively saying you are doing a thing, and removing a “resource” by not performing a downtime activity that gives a direct benefit? This is going to be anecdotal, but I like representing downtime between adventures in my current ongoing D&D campaign. There are times that my players just can’t come up with something they want to do. Either their best options utilize stats that the PCs doesn’t have as their highest, or they just don’t have a good idea of what they want to start tracking. I’m almost certain that if I present my players with some of these narrative downtime activities, I’m going to know what they were doing between adventures, even if it wasn’t learning a language or a tool.

While some of these options can get heavy, especially when you are juggling three per player character, I also think it’s worth mentioning that tasks like starting a business are so much more logical and manageable than the rules presented in the DMG. I like a lot of these options, but it’s very much drinking from the firehose. The most manageable way I can think of to handle the sheer number of options in these chapters is to either have players that are willing to engage with the rules and internalize them, or for the DM to ask in broad terms what the PCs want to do, and then find a downtime that matches that description.

One important thing to note is that for all of the downtime activities introduced in this book, there are no downtime activities for creating magic items. Cubicle 7 has just recently finished a Kickstarter for two new books on crafting, focused on consumable items and permanent magic items. I don’t blame them for not trying to fit that into this book, as that’s a fertile space to rework and examine how the 5e SRD can be used.

A Word on NPCs

Some of the existing D&D downtime directs you to give the PCs contacts based on how the downtime resolves. But what do contacts do? Contacts are defined with a little more detail in this book. There are 18 types of contacts defined in the book. Each of these entries has the following sections:

• Suggested Stat Block
• As an Ally
• As a Rival

As an Ally determines how the contact is helpful if the PC is on good terms with them. This may be granting them advantage on certain tasks if the ally is present, or it may be that they can automatically provide certain requirements needed for campcraft of downtime activities. As a Rival determines what the character can do to make the PC’s life a mess.

A Place to Call Home

The next section of the book presents rules for the characters’ home base. This section is abstract where I want it to be abstract, and specifically defined where I want as well. What I mean by that is, it’s not too worried about the exact dimensions of the base. Base size tells you how many rooms the base can have, how much it costs to buy, and how much you pay each downtime for upkeep.

That means if your PCs want to have a large building as their home base, it’s going to cost them 5,000 gp to start, and it will cost them 120 gp to maintain each downtime period. They will be able to add 12 rooms to that building. Each room you build provides a different resource or benefit. If you fail to pay your upkeep, you don’t get access to your rooms’ benefits.

For example, if you have an armory, each downtime, you can count on it being stocked with standard weapons and having a certain amount of ammunition for various types of ranged weapons. If you broke a spear that you picked up from the armory last time, or you want to restock your quiver, every downtime you can count on new supplies as part of your upkeep. Some rooms may let you start with an extra hit die, or resist certain saving throws, as long as you spent some time in those rooms between adventures.

While all of the sections of this book are modular, this is another example of how the different sections of the book can interact, if you want. Once you have a home base, you start rolling for local events that can affect your property, and some of those events require you to spend downtime to deal with emergent problems.

Patronage

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything introduced the concept of patrons to D&D 5e. I mean, I’m sure people know that they can have their PCs work for someone else, but Tasha’s gives some examples of patrons that might want adventurers as agents, and some motivations based on who that patron is.

The patrons section of A Life Well Lived expands this concept. There are twelve types of patrons listed, twelve motivations, twelve boons, and twelve liabilities. These can all be mixed and matched to create a unique patron, and once you assemble all of that, there are ten different example demeanors so you know how your PCs will interact with their boss.

In addition to the details that you can add to a patron to make them unique, this section also tackles salaries for those PCs that aren’t just donating their time. There are also Patron Events, to add in some events where the patron takes center stage, instead of providing the backdrop and the inertia for the PCs’ adventures.

Can You Retire

Ah, retirement, that thing that’s already a vanishingly rare concept for my Gen X rear end, and is even rarer for those generations following in our wake. But this is a fantasy game, and we get to pretend that eventually you can stop working.

I’ve rarely seen anything that addresses the end of a character’s career in a lifepath system. Part of this is probably because a lot of adventurers are lucky to reach their advancing age. There are several tables to help inspire the end of your story:

• What Made You Retire
• Showing Support (how do you still help your adventuring friends)
• Quiet Years (what happened in the last year when you aren’t adventuring)
• What Brought You Back (reasons you might come out of retirement)
• How Have You Changed (ability score modifications and new abilities to reflect your time away)
• Old Friends (how your relationships with your friends may have changed)
• New Faces (how you feel about the new members of your old adventuring party)

While most of us that feel the specter of not being able to retire can attest, we don’t stay as strong or as dexterous as time wears on. I can, in no way, play Castlevania the way I did in high school. But it can be tricky to say, “anyone past this age has these specific ability score modifications.” A Life Well Lived addresses this by making any modifications voluntary, and also adding in some additional abilities for PCs to pick up, as well as having different arrays for how a character’s stats might change that aren’t all the same.

Reading through the tables in this section, I felt the inspiration to start a campaign at tier 3, with a party of adventurers that have all been retired for 10 years, coming back together for “one last job,” that of course stretches out long enough to get a campaign out of it, and using several of these tables to reverse engineer the history of the adventuring company.

Happily Ever After

 Like Uncharted Journeys, A Life Well Lived stakes out a position in 5e SRD fantasy that hasn’t been definitively claimed by anyone else working in the space. 

A Life Well Lived isn’t trying to reinvent D&D 5e, but like Uncharted Journeys, it’s playing in the spaces that D&D is willing to leave in the shadows. It does a great job of fleshing out those aspects of the game. There are other products that attempt similar goals, and while enjoyable, they often err on the side of being too light and narrative, or playing with mechanics that don’t mirror the rest of the 5e experience well. A Life Well Lived knows the 5e fantasy feel it wants to create, and it projects that knowledge in a direction not often broached.

Endings Are Hard

A Life Well Lived covers a lot of territory, and in keeping the rules well integrated into the 5e SRD experience, it occasionally pushes up against the limitations of the game engine. Too many doubled proficiency bonuses start to break the expected difficulty range of bounded accuracy. PCs often have a lot of ways to gain advantage on their actions, making some benefits lose their luster. In some ways, A Life Well Lived is hindered by doing what it does too well. A group that embraces this system is probably going to have a lot of fun and tell some well detailed stories, but some groups may look at all of the options and not know where to start.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

Like Uncharted Journeys, A Life Well Lived stakes out a position in 5e SRD fantasy that hasn’t been definitively claimed by anyone else working in the space. If you love details, or enjoy seeing clever implementation of rules, this will be an exciting acquisition. On the other hand, if your game rarely strays from active adventuring, or your players aren’t as likely to engage in details beyond the heroic, this isn’t going to deliver as much for your game.

The city of Arkham has been detailed in many products involving the Cthulhu Mythos, but there have specifically been two previous supplements produced by Chaosium for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game. These include Arkham Unveiled in 1990 and H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham in 2003.

Today, we’re going to look at Call of Cthulhu–Arkham, a brand-new treatment of the eponymous location.

Disclaimer

I was provided a review copy of this product by Chaosium and have received review copies from Chaosium in the past. I have not had the opportunity to use any of the material in this book. I have played Call of Cthulhu in both 6th and 7th edition iterations, although most of that experience has been with convention play. I have run other systems using elements of the Cthulhu Mythos as well.

Call of Cthulhu – Arkham

Authors (1990 & 2003 editions) Keith Herber, Mark Morrison, Richard Watts, Mervyn Boyd, Lynn Willis, and John B. Monroe
Authors (2024) Mike Mason, Keith Herbert, Bret Kramer
Editorial Mike Mason and Bret Kramer
Initial Development & Additional Material Bret Kramer
Copy Editing and Proofreading Ken Austin and Susan O’Brien
Art Director Kuba Polkowski Cover Art Loïc Muzy
Interior Art Helge C Balzer, Irene Cano with Kasia Smalara, Nicholas Grey, Joel Chaim Holtzman, Ania Jarmołowska, François Launet, Wayne Miller, Loïc Muzy, Martyna Starczewska, John Sumrow, and Aleksander Zawada
Layout and Graphic Design Adam Szelążek, Loïc Muzy Cartography Matt Ryan
Arkham Advertiser Newspaper “prop” and Period Advertisements Andrew Leman and Sean Branney (The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society)
Licensing Daria Pilarczyk Marketing Director Brian Holland Producer Daria Pilarczyk
Call of Cthulhu Creative Director Mike Mason
Additional Art: Edge Studio – Asmodee Group. Used with permission.

Exploring the Tome

This review is based on the PDF version of the product, which is 274 pages long. It includes full color art, including two-page spreads of artwork introducing each chapter, half page artwork depicting various events and situations mentioned in the text, and many NPC portraits. I’ve looked at older edition Call of Cthulhu supplements, as well as earlier Call of Cthulhu 7e books, and the formatting is subtly different in this book, and I like it. For a dense book of information, the design decisions make this book easier to peruse.

A noteworthy section in this book is the Clear Credit page, which touches on all the previous Call of Cthulhu work that has been referenced going back to the beginning of the game. The book also includes a title page, a credits page, a dedication, and a table of contents. The appendices summarize the timeline of the city, collect game aids, such as random generators and common costs, a bibliography, and an index of maps. There are also biographies for the author working on the current version and the primary author of the previous version, from which much of this version was derived.

I didn’t have access to the physical versions of the books, but there is a standard hardcover, and a leatherette cover version in blue and yellow.

Structure

The book is divided into five chapters:

• An Overview of Arkham
• Arkham Investigators
• Arkham Miscellany
• Guide to Arkham
• Appendices

The bulk of the book is the Guide to Arkham, which includes hundreds of numbered locations on the maps of the Arkham neighborhoods, with details about each location and NPCs associated with it.

Where in the World is Arkham

The book starts with general information about the fictional town of Arkham. Maps show the Miskatonic Valley in Massachusetts, and the relative locations of various towns and locations that Lovecraft and other Mythos authors have created over the years. There is also a history of the region, including the displacement of the Indigenous people of the region. Much of the early Mythos history is tied to witches that survived the Salem Witch Trials, Keziah Mason and Goody Fowler.

To prepare for this review, I picked up the 2003 Arkham sourcebook. Compared to that source, this one spends more time grounding the region in non-Mythos history like the colonial settlers and their conflicts with the Wampanoag people, and Arkham’s place in the abolitionist movement leading up to the Civil War. The other historical information that isn’t directly tied to the Mythos involves the activities of various families whose names appear repeatedly across Mythos stories.

The broad information about Arkham includes what holidays are celebrated in the town, the structure and influence of law enforcement and organized crime, local weather, and travel times between locations in the region.

There is more game facing material about Arkham, as well. This includes how to find transportation, including renting, buying cars, or hiring drivers. There are local professionals, with an eye towards people to patch up investigators, and people to help them do research. Just in case your investigators need to satisfy more violent impulses, you can also find locations to buy guns and dynamite.

Recurring Villains

In the history section, Keziah Mason was mentioned, and there is a good amount of page space dedicated to the coven she founded, which is the impetus for a lot of the supernatural maneuvering in town (though certainly not the only source).

There are stats for all 13 members of the coven, each with its own NPC portrait. In addition to their game stats and descriptions, each member of the coven is given traits and motivations, and there is a section modifying their stats to bring them in line with the Pulp Cthulhu rules (if you aren’t familiar, Pulp Cthulhu rules generally make things a little more action oriented, while still using the same base system).

The coven members are threaded around different neighborhoods and are connected to different organizations and important individuals. These include banks, social clubs, manufacturing, retail, schools, hospitals, and law firms.

I know these characters are meant to be important antagonists, but I was surprised at the level of supernatural power these characters have. I’m probably not as surprised with Keziah Mason’s power level, given that she’s a recurring element in Lovecraft’s stories, but each of these characters is about as powerful as most “cult leader” style NPCs I’ve seen in other products.

I like the flexibility of having 13 different villains that the investigators can encounter. The structure of the coven means that if one of the members meets their demise after clashing with the investigators, there is a built-in story of finding out who replaced them in the coven. I also like that each of the coven members has a “code name,” meaning you can build up a lot of gravitas by name dropping without revealing the individual attached to that name.

I am a little disappointed that the members of the coven that are people of color are the ones that don’t have a position of power in Arkham. I’m torn on Abigail LaRue, who has an interesting backstory, but she’s a magic practitioner from New Orleans, whose explorations of the supernatural lead her to Nyarlathotep.

Mechanical Considerations

There are a few new rules included in this book, and a lot of contexts in which to use existing rules. There are tables that tie investigators to various aspects of Arkham, including people, motivations, and significant locations. Additionally, there are examples of the Experience Packages introduced in the Investigator Handbook and how they fit into characters from or relocated to Arkham.

The book also includes a few new skills:

• Navigate (Arkham)
• History (Arkham)
• Reassure
• Religion

The book mentions that the Arkham-based skills may be too specialized if the campaign regularly leaves Arkham and uses it as a home base. Reassure is a skill for alleviating the effects of damaged sanity that is more about intuition and empathy than Psychoanalysis skill. I was a little gobsmacked when I realized that Religion isn’t already a default skill in the game. This skill is meant to represent knowledge of beliefs or systems of faith that aren’t directly tied to the Mythos, but I can definitely see where that skill could come in handy for investigating the supernatural, especially if some element of the supernatural is either the basis of, or masquerading as, part of another religion.

There are several organizations listed where investigators can go to increase their skills beyond the usual “check and roll” skill advancement. There are different rules governing slow, standard, or quick skill progression, as well as the difference between increasing existing skills versus learning new skills. While some of these felt obvious to me, like going to the gun club to learn or increase your Firearms skill, I like that there were some surprising entries that feel very organic to the presentation of the town. For example, NPCs that teach driving lessons, which make perfect sense for a 1920s town with an increasing automobile presence.

Reputation is also introduced as an optional rule. Reputation comes in five levels:

• Celebrated
• Distinguished
• Respectable
• Shameful
• Notorious

Each of these levels of reputation has a number of bonus or penalty dice associated with different social interactions. During an investigation, when investigators might do something questionable, the Keeper can call for Luck rolls to see if anyone sees the activity, and how widely that knowledge spreads. I like this, especially when investigators might regularly do things that make perfect sense when tracking down supernatural malevolence, but without that context seem really twisted or dangerous.

A Sense of Belonging

Another aspect of the sourcebook I appreciate is the inclusion of clubs, societies, and potential investigator organizations.

Some of these organizations are more mundane, like theater companies, athletic organizations, school boards, and cultural clubs. While these can seem innocuous, they also provide some valuable networking, as well as access to NPCs that can provide research, services, or training.

There are other organizations that are much more obviously useful for investigators. Investigation might be facilitated by membership in the Historical Society, or the various University Clubs. Others, like the Eye of Amara Society and the Society for the Exploration of the Unexplained, are organizations that are delving into potential supernatural phenomena, even if they don’t quite understand the shape and scope of the Mythos.

In the Neighborhood

By far, the largest section of the book is the Guide to Arkham. This presents the town broken down by its traditional neighborhoods. There are individual neighborhood maps with numbered locations, and the Guide details each of these numbered locations. Despite the sheer number of entries, there are still a lot of buildings left unassigned for whatever the group develops as they explore the town.

The neighborhoods detailed include:

• Northside
• Downtown
• East-Town
• Merchant District
• River-Town
• Campus
• French Hill
• Uptown
• Lower Southside
• The Outskirts

Before detailing the individual locations, there is an Arkham Directory, which is composed of six pages summarizing the locations by various topics. For example, if you want to look up Professional Services, you can find a table telling you the name of the location, its number on the neighborhood map, and what neighborhood that location resides within.

The book refers to itself as presenting a “sandbox setting,” which directed how I looked at this section. To me, that means there isn’t a single narrative going on in the town, but various potential investigations that could emerge depending on which direction the investigators move. I think compared to using the term “sandbox” in a game like D&D, when Investigators stumble onto one of the elements of strangeness in town, there is enough to inform the Keeper on what’s happening, but it’s going to take some development to get a more satisfying investigation from following up on those secrets. That said, there are a lot of plot hooks in the book.

While there are a lot of “action oriented” locations pointing the investigators towards hauntings and extraterrestrial agents and even more mundane action like criminal enterprises, there are also a lot of mundane locations that aren’t presented as having any connection to the mysterious. While these entries could feel perfunctory, there are some nice “campaign building” elements in some of these locations. For example, the previously mentioned driving instructor’s business, or barber’s shops, where investigators might overhear rumors.

Every location has an address and a description of the location. In addition to the basic description, each entry has some, but not all, of the following sections:

• Notable Folk (characters that reside or work at the location)
• Historical (how the location fits into the larger history of Arkham)
• Strangeness (supernatural mysteries associated with the location)
• Look to the Future (story elements that will develop as the timeline moves beyond 1920)

The notable folk sections don’t always include a full NPC profile, but many of the locations do. When an NPC appears as part of a location entry, they have the following sections:

• Name
• Profession
• Age
• Game Stats
• Description
• Traits
• Skills
• Combat
• Pulp Cthulhu (characters that aren’t likely to get into fights or deal with the supernatural may not have any Pulp Cthulhu modifications)

These NPC entries do a lot of work with a minimal footprint. I appreciate the inclusion of the traits to help inform the Keeper’s portrayal of the character, especially if the Investigators just happen to wander into a part of town that didn’t originally seem to be their destination.

While much of this book builds on the previous 1990 and 2003 books, there are many modifications and additions to show the amount of work that went into this update. For example, there is an NPC who, in the 2003 book, is detailed as reacting badly to their family member’s mental illness. That story is expounded upon and has some wild additional details that turn this from an edgy setting detail into a full on mystery to explore.

While there have been sourcebooks dedicated to Miskatonic University in previous editions of Call of Cthulhu, and most lore in the Call of Cthulhu product line builds on previous products while sometimes sanding down the rough edges of the past, the Campus section has the most extensive look at the University in 7e. Because they made the decision to set this sourcebook in 1920s, allowing for investigators to become involved in various Mythos stories if that’s the direction of the campaign, many of the staff members of the university have sections detailing how their lives change as they increasingly encounter the Mythos. Notably, there is a timeline of the Derby-Waite family developments, Nathaniel Peaslee has a wild life ahead of him in 1935, and Dr. Henry Armitage creates the Special Restricted List after 1928’s The Dunwich Horror.

Speaking of The Special Restricted List, who doesn’t like more eldritch tomes? In addition to previously detailed Mythos tomes, there are eleven new Mythos related books detailed. Some of these aren’t histories of Mythos conspiracies or sorcerous conjectures, but professional journals that accidentally include information that touches on tangential information. On the other hand, there are some deep dives into the Mythos included, like the Arricurals of Passing or The Whateley Diary.

I will admit that when I initially looked at the sheer number of locations detailed, I was afraid this would come across as dry. While every entry doesn’t scream, “this is an investigation in the making,” way more of those entries contributed to the feel of the setting for me and kept me interested in the town. My biggest disappointment was the treatment of locations like East-Town. This disappointment isn’t because the African American position isn’t presented in a sympathetic manner. The section goes out of its way to explain how systemic racism has affected the community, but the reference to the effects of the Harlem Renaissance on the community immediately made me wish that we had more details on the African American community, in context of the supernatural and the Mythos. I would have loved to have seen what kind of details a designer like Chris Spivey, the mind behind Harlem Unbound, could have added.

Exploring Inclusivity

It’s hard to talk about an RPG product related to the Cthulhu Mythos without discussing Lovecraft’s racism and biases. Many modern Cthulhu RPG related products, like Fate of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Awakens, not only address Lovecraft’s failings, but specifically make sure that the game itself portrays greater inclusivity.

Early on in the book, there is a content warning, with directions to alter or avoid content that would diminish players’ enjoyment of the game. What’s interesting is that in addition to warnings about the types of horror and who may be targeted, there is a content warning about the era being portrayed. The warnings discuss the lack of diverse characters in positions of authority, and the attitudes many have towards marginalized people.

There is a comment in the book that I take some issue with. Regarding a lack of characters specifically called out as being LGBTQIA+ they say the following:

Just as the diversity of the investigators is in the hands of their players, that of the NPCs in Arkham is in the hands of the Keeper, who should ensure appropriate representation of all manner of folk in their games.

In other words, if the Keeper wants greater LGBTQIA+ inclusivity, it’s their job to make some of the NPCs align with these demographics. I really don’t like that abdication of responsibility for people designing the sourcebook.

History Inside and Out

Compared to the 2003’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, this sourcebook is much better at recognizing that people of color in a New England town of 32,000 people should only be unseen if you are intentionally looking past them. There are several areas of Arkham where people of different cultural backgrounds have gathered. East-Town and Lower Southside are both areas of the town noted for having a significant presence of people of color.

The text also mentions that LGBTQIA+ people are rarely open about their private lives due to the bigotry of the time. It mentions that they didn’t assign a sexual orientation or romantic connections for most NPCs, so the Keeper can introduce that element into the game. The problem with this is that there are heteronormative relationships established for many characters. Despite the disclaimer, there is a little bit of LGBTQIA+ content, although it revolves around a couple whose employee knows their secret.

There are several notable NPCs that are people of color, including several academic positions, as well as occupying several positions among the town’s villainous coven. The disclaimer isn’t wrong, though. Most of the African American characters are laborers, even those that are members of the coven. One of the “Chinese” characters is actually a white man hiding his identity. Unlike the previous Arkham sourcebook, this book doesn’t completely ignore the existence of Indigenous people in the history section of the book, but the potential motivation cited for a player character from the Misqat people who were displaced by the early Arkham settlers is to “protect the land,” and not, well, the same motivations anyone else would have.

Most of the more well-regarded and socially placed people of color have a position in academia or are moderately successful craftspeople in labor intensive careers. Even if there is a goal to present the 1920s “accurately,” introducing characters that play against expected norms can still help highlight the conditions of the time, if the group still wants to explore those themes. Having a wealthy African American family in town, or a gay couple whose close friend group knows about their relationship and accepts them for who they are, would allow for better inclusiveness.

A Good, Strong Elder Sign

 It will appeal strongly to the audience it’s aiming for and may even pull in some people that are only tangentially interested in the subject material. 

There is a lot going on in this book, and it manages to make that amount of content work in its favor. The book promises the ability to run satisfying campaigns just within the confines of Arkham, I think it delivers. There are so many solid plot hooks in the various locations, and solid information for running the NPCs presented. Not only does it provide narrative building blocks, but it does work to create the campaign’s connective tissue for downtime, with its focus on training, places to live, and organizations to join. It’s easy to envision various long-term games while reading through these contents.

Rolling High on the Luck Roll

The book feels like a much more modern, lively treatment of the 1920s than the older editions that I looked at as part of this review. The book doesn’t fail to widen its inclusive content compared to the past, but there are some aspects of how it deals with marginalized communities that feels like it could benefit from a more diverse viewpoint. There are a few elements that get slightly repetitive if you are reading the entire sourcebook and not just reading individual entries as a reference when running the game, like the obligatory connection between most of the graveyards detailed in the setting and communities of ghouls. I almost wish there was a larger connective narrative making those elements part of a greater plot thread.

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

I’m very impressed with how much information this book integrates from wider Call of Cthulhu products. This doesn’t just build on other Arkham sourcebooks but pulls in information from adventures and CoC sourcebooks with broader topics than a single location. I think it does a good job making a highly detailed setting into a compelling tool to use while running the game. I think that people that are running Cthulhu games that are more wide ranging, using Arkham as a home base, or those that just aren’t fans of minutia, probably won’t feel like this sourcebook is as satisfying.

This is obviously a carefully crafted labor of love. It will appeal strongly to the audience it’s aiming for and may even pull in some people that are only tangentially interested in the subject material. There is enough material divorced from game rules that it would be easy to use this product with other Cthulhu Mythos centered games. It’s very close to hitting all of the right notes but doesn’t quite stick the landing due to the narrower point of view from which the narrative stems.

This time around I wanted to do something a little different. We’re going to do a First Impression, because I wanted to address TTRPG gaming advice books that have made the transition to audiobook. Since it was recently released (as of this writing), I’m going to address this by way of looking at Kobold Press’ new Kobold Guide, Kobold Guide to Dungeons.

Kobold Guide to Dungeons

Essays: Keith Ammann, Keith Baker, Wolfgang Baur, Bryan Camp, Christopher M. Cevasco, David “Zeb” Cook, Dominique Dickey, Kelsey Dionne, Basheer Ghouse, Rajan Khanna, Sadie Lowry, Frank Mentzer, Bruce Nesmith, Erin Roberts, Lawrence Schick, James L. Sutter, Barbara J. Webb

Editor: John Joseph Adams

Warning

Frank Mentzer has an essay in this collection. I wanted to make sure to post a link to this article, that explain why Mentzer’s inclusion warrants a content warning. The further from an event that we get, the easier it is for important context to be lost.

Dungeon Layout

The primary work I’m looking at today is the Kobold Guide to Dungeons, which I own both in PDF and in audiobook format. I don’t have the physical book. The other books that I’ll mention later are all audiobooks that I own and have listened to prior to this article.

The Guide Itself

The guide is 110 pages long in PDF form, and the audiobook is four hours and seventeen minutes. It is broken up into an introduction, seventeen essays on the topic, and five pages of author biographies. The PDF also has two pages of ads for other Kobold Press products.

The Authors

Generally, I enjoy the Kobold Guides, and this one isn’t an exception. I don’t want to do a deep examination of each of the essays, since many of these are worth the read, and I wouldn’t do it justice. That said, there are a few notable essays and authors I wanted to touch upon.

Wolfgang Baur, David Cook, Frank Mentzer, Bruce Nesmith, and Lawrence Schick are all people that have been working in the RPG industry going back to the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. These are people with long term opinions on the topic, and some of them view the topic through the lens of having a hand in creating the expectations that shaped the games for the next several decades. It is interesting reading these essays in light of the author biographies, as some people stayed in the TTRPG industry, others moved on to video game design, and some move to a more ancillary role.

Another block of authors are professional writers and editors working in science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. Bryan Camp, Christopher Cervasco, Rajan Khanna, and Barbara Webb fall into this camp. All of them have the perspective of the RPG industry filtered through the lens of using the elements of a game to tell a specific story.

Keith Ammann, Keith Baker, Dominique Dickey, Kelsey Dionne, Basheer Ghouse, Sadie Lowry, Erin Roberts, and James Sutter are all people that have worked in the TTRPG industry in the eras from the 2000s on. I can’t speak for any of these designers, but these are designers more likely to have seen other RPGs in addition to Dungeons & Dragons while forming their views on how and why elements are used in games.

A Quick Tour of the Essays

Lawrence Schick, who worked on the team that created Baldur’s Gate III, had one of my favorite essays in the book. It provided a nice breakdown of the purpose of dungeons and how the dungeon modifies the core assumptions of RPGs. I’ve got my own preferences when it comes to RPG essays. I enjoy general advice and information, but in something that is a guide meant to help those that are playing or running the game, I like structured, actionable information. Schick breaks his essay into five parts. This lets him focus on each of these elements, breaking the topic into digestible information that can sink in to someone reading/listening to the essay.

Dominique Dickey’s essay was another strong entry for me. They also break their essay into clearly defined topics and subtopics, as well as creating meaningful subtopics. Additionally, they bring in adventure design tools that were introduced in other RPGs, like the Decipher Star Trek RPG. Sometimes it feels like when we discuss D&D and best practices, we veer from traditional D&D logic, and then attempt to rope in concepts and themes from less traditional and more narrative games. It’s nice to see some wisdom being drawn from other traditional games that may also have a looser structure and a greater emphasis in emulating narrative media.

While it touches on some topics that I’ve seen addressed elsewhere; I love the perspective that Basheer Ghouse introduces to the topic. While the essay is addressing the potential problems of adventurers resting in a dangerous location, it flips the topic to look at it from the perspective of when and how the denizens of the dungeon would need to rest and recover.

Many of the essays balance useful information with entertaining writing. Many of them present good information, but not information that is radically different from existing advice either in form or in presentation. Some of them rely on referencing adventures and famous dungeons from across the editions of D&D as examples of what to do, but with an eye towards pointing out what those dungeons are doing right.

One essay in particular wasn’t personally to my taste. It reads like it could have been written in the early 80s. By this, I mean that it enshrines the DM as an elite position and discusses the kind of people to whom RPGs appeal in a proscriptive manner. Additionally, there is a pedantic digression over what to call RPGs, and how the terminology isn’t actually correct. The digressions and overly officious tone make it hard to absorb useful information from the essay.

Dungeon Turns

This Kobold Guide is similar to most of the other Kobold Guides. Entertaining writing, solid if not revolutionary content, and a few gems. My personal preferences are towards easily summarized essays, with actionable information. This touches on a bit of what I wanted to mention when it comes to the audiobook format.

When there is an essay that speaks to something I want to implement, I’ll often reference those essays. Sometimes, it’s because there is a process to follow, and I want to make sure I cover every aspect of the process. Sometimes it’s because I can’t quite remember exactly the turn of phrase that appealed to me. However, in a book, it’s a lot easier to look at individual pages and identify the section you want to reference. It’s harder to do this with an audiobook.

I don’t mean to advocate against audiobooks. It is extremely convenient to be able to listen to content in audiobook format. Having a professional narrator reading the book makes it a lot easier to listen to the text to speech function on a PDF reader. I really want more content like this in audiobook format. I’m just not sure the best way to bridge the gap between that information that is more useful to reference out of context of the rest of the work. I don’t have a great answer for this. Given that Audible has a lock on accessible production of audiobooks, it may be harder to just bundle a professional reading of a book with a PDF at a higher price point. I bring this up because listening to the work, and then having the PDF available for specific references, is the combination I prefer using.

Deeper Into The Dungeon

This is where I want to transition to listing some of the TTRPG books that are currently available on Audible, which appears to be the provider of choice for most companies that have ventured into this format. I’m going to note which ones have PDF references included. These aren’t the text of the book, but usually key charts, worksheets, or other items that are better presented through visualization.

Keith Ammann

• The Monsters Know What They’re Doing
• Moar! The Monsters Know What They’re Doing
• Defend Your Lair

Robin Laws

• Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering (accompanying PDF reference sheet)

Kobold Guides

• Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding
• Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding II
• Kobold Guide to Magic
• Kobold Guide to Gamemastering
• Kobold Guide to Plots and Campaigns
• Kobold Guide to Dungeons

Monte Cook Games

• Your Best Game Ever

Sly Flourish

These are very interesting, because they include some of the first audiobook adventures that I’ve seen. Those audiobooks have some extensive PDF support in the form of maps and GM information but are short of the full book.

• The Lazy Dungeon Master (accompanying PDF reference sheet)
• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master (accompanying PDF reference sheet)
• Fantastic Locations (accompanying PDF reference sheet)
• Fantastic Adventures (a great example of an audiobook that works better with the PDF of the product)
• Ruins of Grendleroot (accompanying PDF reference sheet)
• Fantastic Lairs

Phil Vecchione

• Never Unprepared (accompanying PDF reference sheet)

There are several other books that are TTRPG advice and game philosophy books for which I would love to see audiobooks. With another Kobold Guide released recently, the Kobold Guide to Roleplaying, I hope to see that series continue to release audiobook options.

Even more than that, I hope that the market for professionally read audiobooks will become more accessible, so one company doesn’t have a monopoly on their sale, and I would love to see more work done to play with the synergy between electronically books in both written form and audio form. The more the RPG hobby grows, and the more people engage with the hobby, the more we need to change and adapt to make the hobby as accessible as possible.

In the time since this article was originally published, more information about Evil Genius Games and the business practices associated with the owner have come to light. While we still greatly respect the work done by all of the designers and other people that helped to realize this game and supplements, we did want to share this article from ENWorld to provide context in addition to the information in this article.

The Rise And Fall Of Evil Genius Games | EN World Tabletop RPG News & Reviews

The following First Impression is going to cover a lot of ground, because the RPG we’re looking at hit the ground running. The Kickstarter for Everyday Heroes ended in June of 2022, funding a core rulebook and what was called in the Kickstarter the 2023 season of cinematic adventures. These were all adventures based in various movie franchises, ranging from The Crow, Escape from New York, Highlander, Kong: Skull Island, Pacific Rim, Rambo, Total Recall, and Universal Soldier. If there was any question that the game was designed to emulate the narrative of action movies, the licensed adventures definitely worked hard to communicate that goal.

The impetus for Everyday Heroes was to create a new version of d20 Modern, the modern roleplaying game derived from the same game engine as the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. While the game never quite hit the same heights as D&D 3e, it did go on to produce several supplements, including Urban Arcana, d20 Menace Manual, d20 Weapons Locker, d20 Future, d20 Past, d20 Apocalypse, d20 Cyberspace, d20 Future Tech, d20 Critical Locations, and the d20 adaptation of the Dark*Matter setting, originally created for the Alternity game system. 

With all of that out of the way, let’s smash cut to how Everyday Heroes attempts to follow d20 Modern’s path, while carving its own way.

Disclaimer

Evil Genius Games did provide me with review copies of the core rulebook, as well as the Rambo and Universal Soldier cinematic adventures. To do a broader First Impression article, I purchased The Vault, as well as PDFs of the line of products as it currently stands, with the exception of some of the short PDF only expansions Evil Genius has been recently producing. I haven’t had the opportunity to play the game, but as it’s based on the 5e SRD, I’m familiar with many of the resolution mechanics. I did create multiple characters using multiple sources, and ran a few scenarios by myself to look at how the gears interacted. 

 Everyday Heroes

Publisher: D. Todd Scott
Editor-In-Chief: Owen K.C. Stephens
Producer: Stan!
Game Designers: Sigfried Trent, Chris “Goober” Ramsley
Additional Game Design: D. Todd Scott Design
Consultant: Jeff Grubb
Lead Editor: Michele Carter
Editors: Michele Carter, Matt Click, Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Proofreader: Russell Schneider
Art Director: D. Todd Scott, Bora Haxhirai
Layout: Bora Haxhirai, Charlotte Irrgang
Cover Art: Ned Chaushev, Wilson Andres Carreño Guevara
Project Manager: Jennifer Barnette
Community Manager: The Noir Enigma
Interior Artists: Ines Muñoz Diaz, Lorenzo de Sanctis, Abdelmounim Bouazzaoui, Jozsef Vajko

If you look at the credits above, and you played d20 Modern, you may recognize some of the names. While the team created their own game, they did have some consultants to explain the context in which d20 Modern was created, and why they made the design choices they made.

I’m going to be looking at a whole lot of books, but I will say this about the Core book and The Vault. These are massive, solid tomes. The artwork is solid for every volume that I looked at, but it does vary in style. That’s not a surprise. Even though the core competency that the system is trying to attain is to emulate action movies, there are a range of genres that can be expressed in action movie form. The Crow, for example, has different artwork than Highlander. There aren’t a lot of photographic references taken from the movies in the cinematic adventures. The artwork that does appear in the cinematic adventures, however, does make its way into the Vault, in instances where those images don’t expressly model the IP in the adventure.

The Core Rulebook

The Core rulebook is 460 pages long. At first blush, that may not be surprising for a game based on the 5e SRD, but Everyday Heroes doesn’t have the extensive selection of spells found in D&D 5e. What it does have are lots of customized rules bits that are connected to specific classes, equipment, and adversaries from different genres. It’s worth noting that while the book does talk about adventures, pacing, and improvisational moments at the table, it doesn’t spend much time talking about how to emulate the genres it includes. To some extent, it leaves that to the Cinematic Adventures.

The Core Rulebook has science fiction and supernatural creatures, but, at least in this volume, you are assumed to be, well, Everyday Heroes. This means, you may be hyper-competent, but you aren’t an alien yourself, genetically engineered, cybernetically enhanced, or able to cast spells. Those options are out there, but they are in the cinematic adventures and the Vault rules compendium. You also only have a ten level range for your character, to rein in the need for escalating abilities in the 11th-20th level range.

Archetypes

Like d20 Modern, one of the big building blocks of the system is framing characters by their attributes. There are Strong, Agile, Tough, Smart, Wise, and Charming heroes. Instead of framing these as classes, these are instead character archetypes. Each archetype in the book has three classes. So while the terminology changes, there are similarities to D&D 5e’s class/subclass setup.

Your archetype determines what classes you can take, and it provides two core gameplay mechanics for the archetype at 1st and 2nd level. After that, your archetype level is just showing you the progression of your defense bonus and some other element that is part of the gameplay of the archetype. 

As an example, Tough Heroes get a bonus to attack someone that has damaged you, and you have damage reduction that ramps up with your level. Strong Heroes get reckless attack at first level, and power attack at 2nd level. Most of the classes follow this pattern, except the Smart Hero and the Charming Hero.

Smart Heroes have a number of plans that they know, and genius points that they can spend. Charming Heroes have a number of tricks that they know. Plans and tricks are the closest we get to spellcasting. While you don’t do anything supernatural as a baseline Smart hero, you can spend your genius points to enact a plan. Some of these plans allow you to use a reaction based on the concept that you planned for the event that triggered the reaction, while others introduce something into the scene that you set up all along. Charming Heroes have tricks, which are usually more compact than plans, but unlike the Smart Hero, all of the tricks are unique to the class the character takes. For example, the duelist gets combat moves similar to a Battlemaster fighter in D&D, while the Icon gets tricks that intimidate others, make it more difficult to attack them, or draw attention to them.

I’ve seen a lot of 5e SRD games that adapt the system for other genres beyond heroic fantasy. There are a lot of mechanics, including spells, that are largely reskinned. Some of these work well, and others feel a little strained. In this case, I like that both plans and tricks are something you can wrap your head around if you understand spells in D&D 5e, but they aren’t 1:1 conversions of spells to an “action hero” flavor.

Classes

The archetypes are there to establish a playstyle, but what modifies and flavors those playstyles are the classes. Classes have a mix of new traits, and traits that modify that core archetype play style. For example, the Heavy Gunner gets an ability that lets them recklessly attack and power attack with ranged weapons, but the MMA Fighter gets the ability to attack and apply grapples and do more damage with unarmed attacks. The classes, as you might be able to glean from “Heavy Gunner” and “MMA Fighter,” can be very specialized. This is even more evident in the cinematic adventures.

There is no multi-classing in the game, and feats aren’t an optional subsystem. Feats are split between Major Feats and Minor Feats, and several of the Archetype advancements involve providing more feats. The only way to pick up abilities from other Archetypes and classes is to use the multiclassing feats. There are Archetype multiclassing feats that characters can take from 4th level on, which gives a minor version of the core gameplay mechanic of that archetype. There are also two class feats for each class, one that you can take at 4th level that grants a lesser version of the low level abilities, and an 8th level advanced class feat that gives access to some of the higher level class abilities.

I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed

Armor and Defense are different concepts in this game, and both of those interact with other rules regarding damage mitigation. Each Archetype provides a Defense bonus that goes up with level, and lets you add your Archetype’s primary ability bonus to your defense. That flattens out the expected defense at different levels, because it’s designed to scale for all PCs equally. Armor, on the other hand . . . isn’t damage reduction. When you would drop to zero, if the damage done doesn’t have a penetration value higher than your armor value, you get to roll an Armor Save to avoid the damage. So armor really only comes into the equation when you are in danger of taking damage that would reduce you to 0 hit points.

Damage Reduction does exist in the game. On the PCs’ side of things, this primarily comes in the form of a class feature for the Tough hero. Armor doesn’t usually have Damage Reduction, but some gear does, but specifies the type of damage the item reduces, such as cold weather gear providing damage reduction against cold. I’m a little surprised that the Penetration Value of weapons doesn’t seem to interact with Damage Reduction, because that would widen its usefulness outside of just when someone is about to drop to zero hit points.

Other Mechanized Tropes

Chases are one area where these rules deviate from the core rules. The chase rules don’t follow the pattern for chases outlined in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but follow their own structure. Chases are always abstract, and when a chase starts, the GM determines the limit to how many rounds the chase will last. Various actions cause characters to gain chase points, and various hazards can cause characters to add chase points to their opponents. The rules can also be used to model races, in case you live your life a quarter mile at a time. Speaking of genre specific rules, there are some specialized classes that have abilities that interact with chase points.

There are vehicle rules that work a little different than the vehicle rules we see in D&D 5e as well. In addition to having a few special rules for chases that specifically interact with vehicle rules. Additionally, vehicles have multiple condition tracks that works a little like Exhaustion in the D&D 5e rules. Vehicles have tracks for body damage, loss of control, and loss of power.

Dangerous Opposition

While the core classes are geared towards portraying modern action heroes, the threats detailed in the book pull from multiple genres. Some of the categories of NPCs and threats include:

• Criminals
• Cultists
• Spies
• Law Enforcement
• Military
• Security 
• Robots
• Animals
• Historic
• Science Fiction

Some of these NPCs serve as more proof of concept characters for different media properties. For example, there are unstoppable slashers, licker zombies, alien bug queens, and alien hunters.

Adventure Time

That was a very truncated look at a lot of material that exists in the core rulebook, but I really wanted to look at the line as a whole, so I’m going to stop myself from touring the core book, and start to look at the cinematic adventures.

As of the time of this writing, these are the available cinematic adventures:

• Escape from New York
• Highlander
• Kong: Skull Island
• Pacific Rim
• Rambo
• The Crow
• Total Recall
• Universal Soldier

About half of the book is a sourcebook for the setting, and the second half is an adventure set in the same world as the movie (but not running you through the events of the movie). Some of the genre GMing advice that wasn’t present in the core books is found in these books. All of the adventures have at least one new class, but the number of new classes vary from one (Pacific Rim) to six (Total Recall). These classes usually play with the themes of the movie from which they are derived. Pacific Rim introduces a class for playing bonded twins (important for being drift compatible for Jaegers), while Total Recall provides specific classes for different mutant abilities. 

As you may expect, each of these cinematic adventures introduces new rules modifications. Kong: Skull Island and Pacific Rim provide rules for dealing with Kaiju sized characters, The Crow introduces ritual magic, Total Recall introduces rules for mutations, and Universal Soldier introduces cybernetics.

In some cases, the license is very specifically for the movie in the title. Highlander doesn’t reference any of the other movies that don’t exist or the syndicated series. The Crow mentions the James O’Barr comic, but is only based on the movies, mainly focusing on the first movie and the first sequel. Others have a little more leeway in what information they can present. Pacific Rim has backstory information from both movies, and even references the Netflix The Black series, but doesn’t detail any aspects of that show. I was a little surprised that Kong: Skull Island references events from Godzilla Versus Kong, and details elements of the Monsterverse IP, including Monarch and the Hollow Earth, however, while Godzilla is actually mentioned when some of the events of the Monsterverse are recounted, none of the Toho monsters have stats in the book. 

All of the adventures assume that you can use the Archetypes and classes from the core rulebook, although some may be more or less appropriate in different adventures. An Icon might have a hard time using their celebrity based abilities in the Escape from New York adventure. Bringing a Heavy Gunner to Highlander or The Crow feels a little off tone, even though the military and heavy machine guns exist in those settings.

Back Together Again

I wanted to make sure I circled back around to one of the most recent products in the Everyday Heroes like, The Vault. The Vault collects most of the special rules that were presented in “season one” of the cinematic adventures, and collects them in one place, not attached to specific IP. These options are organized into standard options and Extraordinary options. Extraordinary assumes some degree of magic or science fiction surrounding those options.

Unlike the core book, not everyone has to be standard human, as the cinematic adventures provided rules for cyborgs, mutants, immortals, and synthetics that can be brought back into this volume. There are fifteen new classes, not counting the ten Extraordinary classes that have been reverse engineered from the cinematic adventures. There is a new chapter on mutations, as well a new section in the equipment chapter providing rules for cybernetics.

Not all of the rules included in The Vault came from the cinematic adventures, at least as far as I can tell. There are rules for playing kids, running a 0 level session, and exceeding the 10th level cap, although the rules acknowledge that they didn’t really design the game to break this cap. The levels beyond 10th function in a similar manner to the levels beyond 20th in the DMG for D&D 5e, where you are mainly picking up new feats to customize your character more as you level up. Absolute Armor makes it impossible to harm an NPC without a weapon with a greater Penetration Value than the armor. Cannon Fodder allows you to make “minions” out of NPCs, dispatching them in one hit. Cinematic Actions introduce a mechanic similar to Legendary Actions in D&D 5e, except they just allow the NPC to take an action out of turn when they spend one of their Cinematic Action points.

The broad concept of mechs is brought into this book, but not the Jaegers from Pacific Rim. Along with kaiju fighting robots, there are also kaiju. In general, I like that the Titan rules let you scale up a standard threat stat block. A Titan scale character fighting a titan scale character uses the same stat blocks as regular characters, but a regular scale character trying to harm a titan scale creature needs to do 100 points of damage to even start damaging the creature. Because of the scale rules, it’s much easier to have a regular character step into a mech where they can retain aspects of their regular stat block, and everything just runs like a normal encounter, as long as it’s between the mech and the titan.

One of my favorite parts of the book are the Titanic creatures they detail. While it probably would have been pushing it to have included some of the conceptually based Titanic creatures in Kong: Skull Island, a few of these ring some bells, and others are pretty interesting on their own. One of my favorites is the Meltdown Incarnate, not because it reminds me of any Monsterverse or Pacific Rim creature, but because it reminds me of the Apokalips-spawned giant Brimstone from the DC Universe. Just a giant walking embodiment of nuclear power, waiting to irradiate people with its atomic blast. 

Using the Toolbox

I am a simple person that is set in my ways. If you give me a modern action RPG, I’m probably going to test it by making G.I. Joe characters. This time around I decided to try one simple concept and one complicated concept. I made two characters, Roadblock and Snake Eyes. My goal was to see how many levels it took for me to feel like the character was a good representation of their most commonly portrayed abilities.

Roadblock was pretty simple. I knew I was going to do Roadblock as soon as I saw there was a Heavy Gunner class, because you might as well say “this is the Roadblock class.” Except that Hasbro would sue you. Anyway, there isn’t much to say about Roadblock’s build, except for two things. The first was a pleasant surprise–there is a minor feat called Great Cook. This really was built to handle Roadblock.

Unfortunately, even though the Heavy Gunner can ignore the mounted property of a weapon, meaning that you could carry around that machine gun that’s usually mounted, the bulk rules of the game make it a lot harder to handle this. Heavy Gunners don’t get a “discount” on bulk for the weapons they are carrying, so Roadblock couldn’t comfortably tout his trusty weapon until 4th level. That’s not terrible, but if he tries to carry around that big gun before you can pump up that Strength score, he’s going to be encumbered, meaning he moves at half speed and has disadvantage on Dexterity saves.

Snake Eyes was a bit more of a journey. In the Larry Hama series, Snake Eyes starts off in the military, is discharged, loses his family, is invited to join a ninja clan, and then eventually joins G.I. Joe. Given that we first see him in the military, I’m not expecting to model him at low level. Snake Eyes is an 80s ninja, so it’s going to be tricky to fit all of that into one package. I knew I wanted Snake Eyes to be able to catch things thrown at him, mainly because of one scene in the best G.I. Joe story ever where he catches a katana lobbed at Scarlett by Storm Shadow.

My thought was to start Snake Eyes as a Tough Hero, with Commando as his class, then multiclass into Agile Hero, and then into Martial Artist. That proved to be difficult, because if I wanted Snake Eyes to especially good with his sword, able to catch things thrown at him, and still have some room for ability score improvements, he was still coming up short by 10th level. So I widened my scope a bit and looked in The Vault. The Vault includes some military themed classes reverse engineered from the Rambo cinematic adventure.

That’s where I found the Combat Scout, which has a lot of ninja friendly features already built into it. It’s also an Agile Hero, meaning that I wouldn’t need to multiclass into Agile Hero to qualify for the Martial Artist multiclassing feats. I couldn’t take the second one until 8th level, but that’s okay. Because of how complicated Snake Eyes’ backstory is, and how many career changes he’s had, my main goal was to build him without going straight to 10th level. This version is sneaky, can assassinate targets, use martial arts, catch swords, and fight in the dark. He also gets to treat any non-heavy weapon as a finesse weapon, which I really needed for Snake Eyes’ trusty Arashikage sword. 

Problems Along The Way

You may or may not have heard that one of the cinematic adventures was going to be tied to the Netflix movie Rebel Moon, and that the company provided a lot of backstory for the setting. Netflix tried to back out of their deal, and while the Rebel Moon cinematic adventure isn’t going to be published, the lawsuit was settled out of court.

The Roll20 implementation for the game has been rocky. Reportedly, Roll20 was going to provide Evil Genius with the full “charactermancer” treatment, where you would have a guided experience creating your character, similar to the D&D 5e character creation process. Not only has this not emerged, but the game’s rules compendium is disappointing. When I was creating characters using Roll20, various feats and talents had important game text missing from them. I would have been better off cutting and pasting everything from the game book into blank feat containers on the character sheet than trying to drag and drop anything.

The implementation has been contentious enough that future VTT releases are moving to Foundry. Evil Genius is still working on how this will affect Kickstarter backers that were all in on cinematic adventures that they were to receive in VTT form, especially if those backers aren’t interested in moving their VTT games to Foundry.

On a tangential note, this isn’t the first “near” d20 game that has had complaints about Roll20’s implementation. After the initial Power Rangers releases on Roll20, Renegade Game Studios wasn’t happy with the roll out, and pulled preorders for the G.I. Joe and Transformers books from the site. It seems like Roll20 has a harder time implementing “near” d20 games than it does fully compatible supplements, or games that share no DNA with d20 SRD games. 

Final Thoughts

This is covering so many genres that there are a lot more options than you’re going to need to build your character, even if your concept is “retired military recluse that became a ninja.”

If you look at either the core rulebook or The Vault, there is an intimidating amount of information staring back at you. Even if you are comfortable with D&D 5e, some of the new terminology can be overwhelming. You can do things the way a poor, forlorn reviewer does, and read them front to back. That’s probably not the best way to engage if you aren’t planning on writing an article on the topic. I think the best way to break the ice is to look at one of the cinematic adventures, figure out what you need to know to get that up and running, and read the sections that pertain to that adventure. 

The reality is, it’s no harder to utilize than D&D 5e, as long as you don’t read too far ahead and scare yourself. This is covering so many genres that there are a lot more options than you’re going to need to build your character, even if your concept is “retired military recluse that became a ninja.” I’m not sure if there is a better way to layer the information so it doesn’t look as intimidating, but the shock and awe wears off pretty quickly once you engage with the rules.

I like that they gathered all of the new rules into a volume to act as the “capstone” for their season one cinematic adventures. I have to admit, while some of them look like a lot of fun, there are a few that I’m just not as excited about running or playing at the table. Knowing that the rules content is going to be available eventually in a consolidated format is good.

Future Wishes

Since they had Rebel Moon lined up, and all signs point to them continuing the cinematic adventure season model, I’m interested to see the next set of movies that are going to be appearing. This also has me wondering about cinematic adventures for shows rather than movies, or what it would look like for them to just straight up create a sourcebook for an IP that wasn’t dependent on a movie tie-in.

I’m sad about the state of the Roll20 implementation. I’ve got a lot invested in Roll20, and I’m not quite ready to start learning Foundry. I’m still hope that Roll20 will at least polish the Compendium implementation for the core rules and the character sheet. I also wish I had known that future Roll20 development is on hold, because I may not have picked up the Roll20 version of the core rulebook had I known.

My hope is to see The Vault volumes continue, as well as additional sourcebooks that may not be tied to external IP. From some of the places I stumbled upon while writing this, it looks like there is a military sourcebook in the works, and it looks like there are two cinematic adventure paths, longer for adventures, on the way for Kong: Skull Island and Pacific Rim. 

This one looked intimidating up front, but it was actually pretty easy going once you get to know it. Kind of like Roadblock.