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Over, Under, Around and Through
Over, Under, Around and Through; Yolanda Divine; 2019
When I was a kid I was very lucky: I lived on the edge of a forest. It was a fairly small one, with paths through it. I could walk through the woods to the local rec center, get to my friend's house, or just spend time pretending I was walking with Ogion (from A Wizard of Earthsea) and appreciating the land.
My family also watched a lot of nature documentaries, since PBS was one of the few channels we could get. I liked vicariously experiencing Antarctica, the Yukon, the Sahara, and the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean.
Over, Under, Around and Through (OUAT) is a solo RPG where you describe visiting all the things you wish you could see and the places you wish you could go when you were a kid. It doesn't have an extensive list of prompts like some solo games. Instead, it gives you a guided path through your own memories. What do you remember doing? Where did you go? What was on the edge of that? If you could have kept going, where would you go? What do you imagine it would smell like? How hot or cold would it be? What would you play on? Would you live there, or keep traveling?
OUAT also has a section on urban explorations - finding abandoned subway tunnels, hidden staircases to the top of skyscrapers, alleyways with spraypainted murals. It has a section about visiting fictional places too. Most of those are more about people - there aren't a lot of descriptions of lands in novels that don't revolve around the people there - so it's often not a perfect fit. You have to be willing to write a little fanfiction. The game recommends bringing a childhood friend (imaginary or real) with you on that kind of journey, so you have someone to experience it with.
The art and layout are, sadly, kind of amateur. The art is all stock photos of places, and their placement in the PDF doesn't line up with anything in particular. It could really benefit from some more avant-garde layout that uses the curves of the sand dunes or the arch of trees in the construction of the page.
OUAT is a little more "exercise" than "game", but it was a fun way to relive bits of my childhood in a positive way. It's a nice way to spend an hour or three. You can find it on Ms. Divine's itch page.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#childhood me#childhood memories#don't wait until you're old to travel
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Doorkickers
Doorkickers, Kevin "Spike" Boots, 2017
Doorkickers is a punk-ish dungeon crawler. It's not "dungeonpunk", as the modern D&D/Pathfinder aesthetic has been called. It's not all the way over in Sigmata/Misspent Youth territory. It's approximately as punk as Gutterpunk. Yes, I am the arbiter of what is punk now; come at me and my semicolons.
I started writing this review with a lot of that kind of comparison - not as complex as X but more than Y, not focused on money like A or fame like B, etc. - but that sort of approach robs Doorkickers of what it actually is. Here's the gist.
You are terminally pissed off people at the margins of society. People who are just barely better off than you have asked you to help. The default setup is that their friends or family have been kidnapped into the bowels of a nearby catacombs. The guards won't help, the authorities don't care, so they turn to the only people that the guards and the authorities won't touch: you.
The system is basically an OSR-ified version of True20. Classes are Marauder (fighter), Lurker (skill monkey) and Devil (caster), but with stronger niches. If you don't have a Marauder, do not attempt to maraud. It will not go well. Spells come with drawbacks, but there's no backfire roll until after the fight, when your massive built-up stash of chaotic power either subsides or explodes.
Monsters are entirely non-humanoid, and mostly non-sentient. Spike's take on the monster/person divide is pretty similar to my own - if you can have a conversation with it, it's a person. The monster art is great. The character art is not as great, because while the artist was awesome at drawing oozes and monsters made of chains and manacles, their grasp of human anatomy is lacking. The cover is done by a different artist, and it fucking rules - door blasting open in splinters, boot coming straight at your face, knives and talismans being brandished in the darkness behind the axe-wielding maniac in the foreground. Great stuff.
I say the game is punk-ish rather than punk because you never end up causing problems for the people whose fault this really is - the guards and their masters, those in power. The game could have done with a "second stage" where you bring the problem to the guilty. But you do play some pissed-off people putting it on the line to help others, and damn if that isn't a core piece of the punk ethos.
Spike self-published Doorkickers on Lulu for a while. Lulu does decent PoD, but you'll never see it in stores because their printing costs are too high. Still, the quality is good, so if you track one down they won't fall apart.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#I saw Arbiters of Punk play the Middle East in '05 it was nuts
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This Game Is Familiar
This Game Is Familiar, Beebo Bunkums, 2022
There are so many jokes one could make here about TGIF and "but I haven't even seen it before" and "In Soviet Russia...", so hopefully you can fill those in yourself.
In This Game Is Familiar (TGIF) you play spellcasters' familiars. The game uses the term "witches, wizards, and warlocks", so I guess the implication is that warlocks are non-binary, which I think the NB folks I know would be down for. You could be helping your caster succeed in school or work, rescuing them from their nemesis, keeping from embarrassing themselves, etc. It's much more on the "beer and pretzels" side than the "serious games about serious topics" side. Or maybe on the "together they fight crime" side.
The mechanics are in the Honey Heist / Lasers & Feelings area, with two axes instead of one. Axis #1 is Size vs. Speed. Axis #2 is Power vs. Personality. Each axis has to add to 7 independently, and you do the usual 1d6+stat. After that comes a power system that's pretty similar to the one in Everway. I think it evolved separately, but it's possible that (checks author credit) (checks it again) Beebo Bunkums did read Everway and decided to house-rule things. There's a page full of d66 tables with personality quirks.
It's a little unusual to see any substantial add-ons for a L&F hack. In addition, the powers don't really mesh with the rest of the mechanics - they're more in the "it works or it doesn't" category, like flight or not having to breathe. I wonder whether BB is actually two people who mashed their games together.
The game's setting is just sort of an assumed-D&D-type world. There's nothing explicit beyond the existence of spellcasters and some sort of magic society, so you could theoretically play this in a high-tech setting if you wanted. You'll just have to do the work of setting-building yourself.
The art is part scratchy b/w linework and part greyscale watercolor, which lends a little more credence to the "two authors" theory. The linework has the "creepy but friendly" style, where that crow could stop snacking on an eye long enough to give you a hand with the stuff on the high shelf. The watercolors are more in the Addams Family style, morose but morbidly funny.
The game's on itch, but you probably figured that out from the title and author. It's only 13 pages but it's nice and cheap.
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Stickshift
Stickshift, Final W Games, 2007
Did you watch Initial D? So did the folks at Final W Games! Did you have no idea whatsoever how to adapt it to an RPG? Same for the folks at Final W Games!
Stickshift is a driving RPG that focuses on a drift-racing team (your PCs) as they try to win illegal street races.
Most of the mechanics for Stickshift are fine. Well-designed, even. Your stats are all either social or tie directly into driving. There's a "risk tolerance" factor that tells you how much your character is willing and able to risk in a given situation, and your risk tolerance goes up when something you care about is at stake. I love that. Dice are a unique d6 rating where you add 4, 5, and 6, and subtract 1, 2, and 3, which gives you a weird bimodal distribution. You're more likely to get higher or lower rolls than mid rolls.
However, I said "most" mechanics. And the one that hurts the most is that the racing mechanics are trash. You can put together the solid base mechanics and the risk/reward tradeoffs and your car's maintenance level and... it's all still just a time/distance meter that you fill up on your own. There's no real sense of competition. Roll dice, add to total, keep rolling, keep adding, whomever gets to 100 first wins. You might as well all be rolling separately, and then comparing afterward. There aren't any real tactics you can take advantage of that aren't blindingly obvious. You could make bad choices, but it's obvious that they're bad, so you don't. How do you make a driving game where the driving is not fun?
Another unfortunate thing in Stickshift is that most people have no idea how to describe driving. We've all seen fights in movies and TV shows. Most people come up with Star Trek technobabble or noble intrigue plots without too much trouble. How do you describe driving fast? "I shift into 3rd and floor it," sure, but how many different varieties of that description do you have? I played in a group where one person had seen Initial D, one had seen Tokyo Drift, and the others hadn't seen either, and boy did it show. Stickshift might have benefited from a big chart of descriptions that people could throw into the game.
The art initially looks like it has three clashing styles, until you get to the two-page spread in the middle of the book, when all three styles are used in the same piece you realize that there are three teams of drivers, each with their own art style. That two-page spread slaps. Anime-style guy high-fiving spraypaint-grunge-style guy while newspaper comic guy looks on with disrespect? Yes. The art direction is on point. I say guys because they're almost all guys. Gals are generally in the three classic "chick" stereotypes - the extra-femme girlfriend, the short hot-tempered driver who has to prove herself, and the mechanic with extra-baggy clothing who is secretly super-hot. There are worse stereotypes, I guess, but there's a much wider range of representation they could have gone for than "the standard 3 chicks".
Grab a copy if you want to scavenge it for parts, but most of it you can leave in the junkyard.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#car puns#if you want to know why it's called initial d you can find out on anime stackexchange#did you know there's an anime stackexchange?#I sure didn't know
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Unwelcome Saviors
Unwelcome Saviors, Ray Detler, 2004
Rachel Detler, whom you may remember from my previous review of Everything Sucks, enjoys making some fairly oddball games. Unwelcome Saviors has three premises:
The end times are nigh, and angels are here to teach us and guide us. They are among us.
We are not the least bit interested in guidance from them, and have vowed on our hearts that they shall not change us.
But also this is grade school.
It's the sort of game that would fit in well with Jenna Moran's oeuvre (yes, she gets an oeuvre) or with Zach Weinersmith's Bea Wolf (no oeuvre for you yet, Weinersmith). You are children, and yet you are freedom fighters. They are teachers and janitors, and yet they are invading angels, here to take you to the promised land - kicking and screaming, if they must.
Characters are rated on Wits, Presence, Infiltration, and Phys Ed. Wits covers thinking fast and sneaking. Presence lets you recruit other kids and hold the group together when all seems lost. Infiltration is lying and going unnoticed in plain sight. (It measures how much of a goody-two-shoes you look like to the teachers.) Phys Ed is mostly stamina and flexibility, since the angels far outmatch you in strength. You're rated at 1d6 to 4d6 in each one, with a specialty that gives you a flat +3. If one of you is exiled to limbo (solo detention, sent home, etc.), you roll up another character quick and get in the game.
To do something that needs a roll, you make a bet with the GM. "I bet you I can run across the parking lot and climb the tree before the angel gets me." "Three dice says you can't." "Bet." And then you roll, and whomever rolls higher gets it their way. No partial successes in this game. No hit points, either. If you fail, you progress along a status track that ends with being removed from the game. Actually I kind of like the track - here's what it looks like.
OK
Shut up I'm fine
Trouble
Big Trouble
Little Missy (or Mister or other address of choice)
The Waiting Room
The Great Beyond
In the end, you cannot escape the angels. You will ascend; you will graduate. It is only a question of how you go.
The physical form of Unwelcome Saviors was made with a spirit duplicator. The output of a spirit duplicator degrades over time, so all of the originals have either crumbled to dust, or now appear to be plain white paper side-stapled for no reason. Luckily, two different versions got scanned before then, and you can find PDFs of both on Detler's Myspace.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#thought that was a mimeograph all these years but no#if you haven't read bea wolf you are missing out
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In Through the Airlock
In Through the Airlock, David Starkins, 1981
In Through the Airlock (ITtA) was one of the earliest avant-garde RPGs. Writing and playtesting started about a year after Traveller was released, but it wasn't until 1980 that things really took off. That was the year Led Zeppelin's album In Through The Out Door was released, and it was a major influence. Starkins said he listened to the album almost exclusively when writing the game's major revision and its companion setting book. The album is widely considered one of Zeppelin's worst, partly because it doesn't fit with the rest of their work. Lots of synth, a straight-up country song in the middle of it, different instruments at the forefront.
The few years before this game came out were a prolific time for new sci-fi. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were obviously the biggest deal, but Mad Max, Alien, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, The Black Hole, installments of both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and even the utter nonsense that was Moonraker all came out within three years of each other. ITtA was spoiled for choice when it came to inspiration. Of that set, the major influences were definitely Alien, BSG, and Flash Gordon. ITtA blends them, the ten-years-earlier 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the mechanics of early Traveller into a military sci-fi game with a distinctly oddball feel.
In ITtA your characters are tasked with taking over capital starships with the least amount of damage possible to the structure. (Why sink a ship when you can take it over instead?) They cut through the airlock, re-seal it with some specialized gear, cut through the inside, and commando their way through the halls with stunners and nets. As the game goes on they're supposed to learn more about a (never detailed) threat coming from interplanetary space and galvanize people to fight against it. Starkins cited this particular stanza from Carouselambra as a major inspiration for the setting:
How keen the storied hunter's eye prevails upon the land
To seek the unsuspecting and the weak
And powerless the fabled sat, too smug to lift a hand
Toward the foe that threatened from the deep
Who cares to dry the cheeks of those who saddened stand
Adrift upon a sea of futile speech?
And to fall to fate and make the 'status plan'
But no one there had heaven within their reach
It's definitely on the harder side of sci-fi, at least for what was known in 1981 (before the personal computer). For example, the game emphasizes repeatedly that there's no sound in space - that your characters will be floating through the void, hearing only radio static and navigation beacons from the moment they leave their ship to when they enter. The art (b/w line drawings) shows people floating rather than standing. The game ran more or less like Classic Traveler, but stripped down to just what you would need for this particular premise.
I mentioned "avant-garde" earlier. Production quality was very high for a game of its time. ITtA was three paperbacks (character + rules, ships + gear, GM book), but it shipped in a multi-album record box with a black cover and the name inlaid with "holographic" paper. It even came with a cassette tape (irony) containing a somewhat amateurish audio drama, attempting to set the mood for the game. It spoils a little of the reveal of the impending big bad, but that might not be a bad thing. Starkins gets an A for effort.
Unfortunately, as with a lot of art-project games, the cost became the problem. Even in bulk production this game might not have made its money back. At $40 in 1981, and frequently miscategorized into the record section, it didn't sell many copies. If you don't want to spend an unreasonable amount on auction sites, check a used record store.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#open the pod bay doors#holographic glitter leather reflective faux deep space deluxe edition#And powerless the fabled sat too smug to lift a hand
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The Actual
The Actual, Roll For Press, 2017
The Actual (TA) is a game that looks more and more bizarre the longer you look at it. It's like one of those family Thanksgiving photos where you slowly realize that one of the kid's dolls is holding a knife and the door is being opened the wrong direction from its hinges and there's a bat-signal out the window.
On its surface, TA is a fairly generic D&D-like with a couple features brought in from PbtA and Shadow of the Demon Lord. Classes are on the low-magic side. Combat is pretty typical, with not a ton of tactical options beyond what abilities you choose to use. There are some basic subsystems for skills and backgrounds, which are more mechanically robust than most games and give you techniques/powers/abilities in addition to just letting you roll for things that the skill covers. The GM advice is particularly good, benefiting from both PbtA's "fronts" and SoDL's "shadow" templates. The setting is set in a universe named "The Actual", in which you are called to battle creatures from "The Unreal" who are invading your world to destroy it and return it to unformed chaos. It's a classic setup.
But then you look a little deeper.
TA's Thief class has an ability that allows them to climb. Not "climb walls at 60% chance" or "Roll 1d20+Dexterity vs. DC", no, it's "Climbing is the ability to move vertically by means of..." and "Unlike most people..." as if it were unusual. The Boatsman background says "You have the ability to perceive sound." full stop no explanation. There's a Magician spell that enables you to write with a quill pen. Rangers have an ability that lets them breathe air. You would think that maybe these are bad writing or unfinished sentences, but then...
Then you see the really odd things.
One background goes out of its way to note that you are five-fingered, and none of the others do. "Strange storms" sweep the land, which are mostly normal except that after they pass "a fearsome yellow-white ball of light appears in the sky." The Priest and Demonologist level charts and abilities are word-for-word identical from level 8 onward. There's a monster that, on a roll of 4-6 on 1d6, recharges its ability to move forward through time. There is no indication of what the hell else is going on there, or in fact in any of these.
The art is black-and-white line drawings, most of which have something strange going on. Actually, they probably all have something strange going on and I just haven't yet found it in some of them. Actually-actually, it's probably all but two of them just to make me think there must be at least one more. Some things are obvious, others are well-hidden.
TA is probably not playable rules-as-written. I can imagine people playing it rules-as-assumed pretty easily. I enjoy absurdist discussions of things that don't really exist and hints toward a reality that isn't really there, so I had fun with it. Your mileage may vary. I especially like how all the oddities could be in-game, in-universe weirdness, but others clearly tunnel straight through the fourth wall.
This was Roll For Press' only game. I'm not even 100% sure I'd call it a game; it's more of a piece of performance art cloaked as a roleplaying game. It went up on NotCoC.jp a while back and as of early 2024 it's still there.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#unreality#unreality but it's inside the game#notcoc.jp does print-on-demand but it only ships to the least useful continent
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Unwise Entanglements
Unwise Entanglements, Longspear Games, 2003
There's a period of gaming history where people were starting to get sick of games that spent absurd amount of space on physical combat while totally neglecting social interactions. Unfortunately, we had no damn idea what to do instead.
Unwise Entanglements (UE) is focused around a king's court, with the king recently dead and no clear heir. Naturally, everyone is angling for the throne, or at least for the power behind it. A few minor characters are detailed, with the major roles left for the PCs, an excellent choice in my mind.
There are six stats: Charisma, Manipulation, Stubbornness, Wits, Perception, and Body. They're a nice inversion of the usual D&D set. There are also a bunch of skills, with some names clearly taken from White Wolf (Subterfuge, Presence, etc.) and some from D&D3e (Diplomacy, Gather Information, etc.).
Here is where things... I don't know if it's going off the rails, running into a wall, or falling off a cliff, but it's definitely a mistake. Your character has Resolve, which are social HP. They have an Integrity score, which is their social AC. They have social "techniques" which are weapons. They have saving throws and area-effect social magic and letters as ranged weapons and who thought it was good to bring in a grappling equivalent I ask you. No no no no no no NO. No. Bad game designer. No Ennie.
The result is a game where you're battering down someone's HP until they're taken out, just with words and stuff, and with all the entertainment value of "Can I just roll to hit?" It is all the worst of "social combat" systems packed into one game. It even had the inversion where instead of being able to circumvent a fight with one massive Diplomacy check, you could circumvent a long argument with one massive Assault check.
Ironically, if the game had come out while D&D4e was in vogue, it might have leaned more into the tactical maneuvers that game had and ended up with some more interesting moves. Instead, it was just a combat system with social-sounding names.
Coincidentally, Unwise Entanglements came out the same year as Dynasties & Demagogues, the social-rules supplement for D&D3e which in fact did win an Ennie. That book you can still find in PDF format; this game is long gone.
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Slap-Chop
Slap-Chop, Kung Fu Dojo, 2002
No relationship to the kitchen gadget or to any actual kung fu dojo.
Oh thank god a shorter game. After reviewing a pair of maximalist games, I could really stand to relax with this 84-page martial arts game instead of-- awwwww goddammit it's racist.
(deep breath in... deep breath out...)
Ok, so why have this as a full review and not just a drive-by?
The combat system is worth stealing. It's the fastest "real-world" martial arts system I've seen. By "real-world" I mean that it's using punches, kicks, evasion, blocks, and not energy blasts or flying or wire-fu. Having been in sparring matches, things happen FAST, and every other game I've seen has shifted toward the "complex" side of things rather than the "snappy" side of things. Slap-Chop goes for fast.
Your character has a set of techniques - jab, elbow, low-high roundhouse kick, double block, sidestep dodge, etc. They go in a grid on a card. None of the moves are better than each other, per se, but having a wider repertoire can be helpful, especially since you have three ranges ("in", "out", and "behind") and some of the techniques only work in one of those ranges. If you want to change ranges, you put a Footwork card face-down during a technique, and so does your opponent, and then you flip and you both move in the direction you chose. If you're already "out" or "behind" and you both move back, you end up circling each other out of kick range, which also provides a rest where you can restore some tokens.
Speaking of which: you all have a number of tokens (generally 10-15). Those tokens can be poker chips, checkers, glass beads, anything that can fit on the grid. You take turns calling out techniques and placing tokens on your grid. You attack, they defend; they attack, you defend; and so forth. Each attack technique has a set of defense techniques that work against it. If you don't have one of those defenses available, you get hit. You can put a token on the same technique you've already used, but you better not do it again, because your third placement automatically fails as your opponent has seen it twice before in this bout.
The result is that combat goes basically as fast as you can say "Hook kick!" "High block! Jab!" "Pass! Chop!" "Simultaneous block-strike!" and so forth. There are more details in terms of how many tokens you get, how refreshes work, how damage works, etc. All of those help to balance things out. I could definitely imagine adapting this system to a setting that does use higher-powered martial arts. You could do a rad DBZ game with this.
You might wonder how anything that's not 1:1 sparring goes. The setting says that no one fights two-on-one, but the rules say you just use the same mechanics, which means the lone person is going to lose real quick.
That's what's worth taking from the game. You can pass on the rest of it. No I'm not going to explain precisely how this martial arts game set in an Asia-esque setting is racist. You probably figured out half of it already just from that description. You do not need details. It is not novel or interesting in its racism. (Honestly, nothing ever is.) I'm not telling you where to get it either.
Instead, I recommend checking out Asians Represent - they'll give you the insider perspective on much better-known games and how well or poorly they handle a variety of Asian cultures.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#martial arts#not like phenomenally racist but it's not exactly hidden either#i love Exalted's setting but massive dice pools and dice tricks will never be fast#looking at you too Weapons of the Gods
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Monster Wranglers
Monster Wranglers, Pamphlet Play Press, 2009
It's Pokémon X Monster Rancher, with a standard 2d6+skill roll-over system. You know this setup. Most of you could write it yourself. Let me get to the interesting parts.
The corebook for Monster Wrangler is a 24-page center-staple production, at 5.5x8.5 size. Layout is nice. Short, compact, no wasted space but doesn't entirely eschew whitespace. Monsters peek in from the margins rather than taking up a lot of the page. It lays out the premise, gives you some stats, provides a map of your monster caravan loop, gives you some rules for monster catching, breeding, and battling, and provides 8 monsters.
Only 8 monsters? Well, only 8 in the corebook. There are about 300 total. Because there are 163 supplements for this game.
One hundred and sixty three. Across fifteen authors.
Each of them is a single-page tri-fold pamphlet. There are usually two monsters, one on the outside and one on the inside. Each one gets an illustration, base stats, leveling formulas, a few techniques, and notes about where they can be found. The techniques are all keyworded, so your older monsters can often use techs from later supplements.
Some of the pamphlets are just one monster - a jumbo-sized behemoth with more techniques and a piece of microfiction to go with them. These were generally my favorites. They just drip flavor.
Naturally, just like in most of these games, the monsters are not particularly well-balanced against each other. You'll see this issue show up again in an upcoming review about a game with 150 classes - only about 20 of these monsters are really viable, and you're going to spend your time catching them and ditching your old pals. They clearly tried to tweak the leveling formulas to account for this, but they didn't succeed. That goes double for multi-monster interactions, when one player's monster can buff another's in a repeating loop while a third shields them all.
The supplements got weirder and worse as time went on. The layout kind of degenerated, and there were too many variants on the same techniques. Occasionally you'd get one where it was clear that one author hadn't read another's pamphlet and there was no central database, because two techniques would end up with the same name and keywords but different effects. The original four artists moved on, and the ones they got to fill in had totally different styles. Still, each supplement was only a dollar, so you can't complain about the price. At least on an individual level. If you want to catch 'em all it starts looking a little steep, but if you just want to pick up the few that were good fighters and cool-looking, you could throw down ten dollars and get exactly what you want.
Notorious tongue-twister Pamphlet Play Press eventually got bought up by would-be gaming conglomerate Megagame, who went bankrupt in 2011 after finding out that there are dozens of dollars to be made in the TTRPG industry. All their stuff is out of print now.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#pocket digital monster hunter pro plus#pick and choose#min-maxing at its maxiest
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SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION
SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION, Keetoms, 2024
Hot. Off. The. Presses. Directly into my hands before the edges were even trimmed or the cover placed on it. Seven hundred pages of raw ancient retro-future. The author gave this to me on January 2nd and it took me until now to actually read the whole thing.
SPULTURATORAH!! 2ND EXTERMINATION (S2E from here on out to avoid overwhelming us all with Teh Capslock) is a gonzo mashup of different game styles, settings, and genres. The original game (S1E, I guess) is a classic of maximalist game design in a tiny package. In fact, it's so small that there are more pages in S2E than words in S1E. That's ultra-maximalist game design for you.
So what did they do with the 698ish new pages? A lot, thankfully.
30 pages total of ToC, index, thanks, and license. It has its own bespoke license that I am not good enough at lawyer to understand.
10 pages of extra explanation for the original ruleset, which honestly it needed.
20 pages of gonzo backstory for King Gilgamesh. I appreciate that they did not in fact explain where he got the Levitating Darkness Throne. They did a great job folding in the new chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was discovered only recently.
A 40-page adventure set in the Ziggurat of Ur, complete with a Narrative Dungeon linking this place to the Eternal Realm of Narrative Awesome.
9 pages of random-roll tables you can use for Trait One, Trait Two, and Trait Prime.
2 pages to explain the difference between what you can use for the numbered traits and what you can use for the prime trait.
30 pages of alternate uses for TRAIT ZIGGURAT BARLEY.
18 pages of equipment.
31 pages of vehicles and riding animals.
2 pages on currency.
14 pages of hacking rules.
7 pages of rules clarifications from the unofficial 1.4th edition. Nice to see them supporting fan works.
114 pages of monsters, each of which is a mutated version of King Gilgamesh from another universe or a shattered piece of our own, come to drag you back to his den and devour you. There are big ones, scaly ones, porcupine-like ones, multiple fragmented body parts moving together, one rolled into a beholder-like shape, one fused forever into a throne of pure orange light, all kinds of stuff. I like this.
A 6-page writeup of the God Shamash, which is sort of unnecessary but interesting anyway.
A 4-page running edge-to-edge map of Babylon and its rivers
8 pages of word jumble. I think it's a code. I am not entirely certain.
115 pages of adaptations from S2E to other rule systems: Deadlands, Torg, Fate, Altaplana, Numenera, Dungeon War, MSR, and Fantasy Wargaming: THLOA.
Good lord 700 pages is a lot of pages.
1 page accidentally taken up by a single dangling word ("it") at the end of a sentence. I have been there. Doing layout sucks sometimes.
96 pages of color art plates. Right in the middle of the book. The rest of the book has no art. The center has almost 100 solid pages of pinup Babylonian future barbarian blade hunter psychics. It's all the work of one mad genius who is credited as a bunch of black rectangles with diacriticals above and below them
A 3-page essay on why Nobilis is the greatest game ever, which has an acrostic that disclaims the entire section.
4 pages of detailed wargame rules.
22 pages of domain management guidelines.
12 pages of "spoilers". I still do not know what most of these mean.
A 2-page spread of Gilgamesh's family tree.
15 pages of writeups for miscellaneous folks on said tree.
28 pages on the language used in ancient Babylon, complete with cuneiform how-to.
A 16-page "node map" of the retro-future Babylonian cybernet that leads to outer space, where the planets are manifestations of deities.
21 more pages of detail covering the strange planets of our solar system as the Babylonians knew them: their cities, their rulers, little adventure seeds, advice for GMs for running stories in them. I do kind of wonder if someone else wrote this section.
1 page of probability notes, which is all you need for a 1d6-roll-under system really.
An 8-page character sheet, which is a bit excessive for characters with 4 traits.
2 pages that just contain the original game.
I will admit - there is actually too much in this game. I'm not sure it would have worked to make it a string of 50ish short supplements, but it's still an awful lot to absorb. The "maximal game, minimal package" has turned into "ultra-max game in a doorstop package". If S3E ever arrives (presumably with three exclamation points) I hope they do some judicious trimming.
I have no idea if this behemoth will make it to stores, or whether the shipment will collapse under its own gravitational pull and become a black hole. Either way, heck of a collector's item.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#Trait Ziggurat Barley#keetoms#700 pages is a whole lot of pages#did you know that tumblr has issues with keeping your place on the page when you move through text in large documents?#guess how I know
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Worst Contact
Worst Contact, Space Swabbie Games, 2014
Here's the setup: You are the crew of an interplanetary trading ship in the implausibly near future. Humanity has expanded across our solar system. You pushed the ship too hard on its trip through the asteroid belt, and a small impact left you off-course, floating slowly to your death in deep space, too low on fuel to ever make it back. You have enough food and air for months, maybe years, you just have to hope someone rescues you. And then this D'deridex-sized ship warps in near you and hails you, asking if you want a ride home with the first aliens anyone from Earth has ever encountered. You get to make first contact.
The catch: this game was heavily inspired by Redshirts (which was released a year or two before). Your ship is full of misfits and losers who would fit in well with The Lower Decks and the funnier parts of Firefly. Hilarity ensues.
Characters are primarily defined by their Profession and Motivations. Professions are what you'd expect: engineer, trader, commander, helm, explorer, scientist, security, plus a make-your-own system available that works nicely. Motivations are actually more locked down. You choose several from a set of 12, including things like "money", "fame", "entertainment", and "escape from the law". Those get ranked. You roll d10s based on Motivations and add bonuses from Professions. It's vaguely Silhouette-like, nothing new. Success chances are fairly high. You get more luck points by playing into your Motivations, so you'll have a lot of them, and they max out fairly quickly to encourage you to spend them.
The game's best mechanical innovation is the Mistake Spiral, where every failed roll looks like a success but puts a mistake (a written-down fact) on the table. Every mistake makes it more likely that another failed roll - especially one where you spend a Luck point - will cascade into a disaster, with badness proportional to the number of mistakes there were. Every failure after that point is a critical failure until the problem gets fixed, at which point you reset the spiral. I like that you all get to look competent until it all goes to hell. There are separate spirals for physical/mental rolls and social rolls.
Art is minimal, mostly starship renders on a level somewhat better than Babylon 5 but not fantastic. Setting details are mostly generated by random roll. There are 20 alien species described in brief detail. Your ship has one of 10 standard technical problems. The aliens have five words from this d100 table that they definitely do not understand the correct definition of. There's a d100 random-roll table to determine your weird cargo that will never be delivered. It's all small details. The game is mostly social, unless you get stuck in the chompers.
Worst Contact could be a one-shot, and is probably intended to be 2-4 sessions. There's no XP system. I feel like it still has a lot of potential for a 10-12 session campaign. Even after you deal with the actual contact with aliens, there's the matter of what happens when you get them back to civilization. I would totally play it, but I also have a soft spot for sci-fi games that commit to their premise.
Space Swabbie Games put out Worst Contact on USB stick, which has never worked out well. At least they open-licensed it, so if you get the PDF you're more than welcome to pass it around to others. Just watch out for the malware on the thumb drives.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#this episode was badly written#programming is like one big mistake spiral#no xp is sometimes the best xp
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Shadow Rangers
Shadow Rangers, Iron Games, 2006
No connection to Power Rangers, any Forgotten Realms stuff, or apparently an old Trek BBS.
To the extent that they were ever in style in the first place, D&D-alikes never went out of style. Shadow Rangers is a game that attempted to simplify D&D 2e in a different way than 3e did, with a much narrower focus.
You play the eponymous Shadow Rangers, a group of monster-hunters and thief-catchers living in the wilds of... some fairly generic fantasy nation, it didn't really stick in my head. You're all "rangers", but there are seven different kinds, each with their own abilities: Tracker, Druid, Whirlwind, Skulk, Trapster, Trickster, and Scout. Some overlap a bit too much, like Tracker and Scout, but it's not too bad.
The standard D&D setup is there: levels, HP, AC, the usual six stats with some renamed. It trims the game down to 10 levels. The first 6 are about levels 1-6 in regular D&D, with levels 7, 8, 9, and 10 having bigger power gaps - they correspond roughly to levels 9, 13, 16, and 20. It stole the Fort/Ref/Will saves from 3e, plus the skill list, upwards AC, and attack bonuses. From 2e they took demihuman level limits, the less expansive spell list, the less comprehensive magic items, some of the weird bonuses for stats (bend bars / lift gates, resurrection survival), weapon speeds, and "thief skills" being outside the usual skill system.
Physically, the setting is very detailed. There are maps of a lot of places - groves, caves, thick woods, streams, hilltops, ruined forts, etc., with each of them including a battle map and a GM's version showing some secrets. There's no regional map - they encourage you to use the smaller pieces wherever you need them. There are very few NPCs mentioned, all antagonist group leaders except for the obligatory king. Art is purely of locations and landscapes, and is fairly amateur but usable.
Shadow Rangers is admirably restrained compared to a lot of D&D clones. Most of them are of the "more, bigger, broader" variety, and this one went the "less, smaller, focused" route. Bonus points to them. It still sank right into the swamp when it came out, but I have to give them credit for reining themselves in.
Shadow Rangers was printed in perfect-bound only (no hardcover) from a relatively low-quality print shop. Used copies are therefore somewhat rare, as they tend to fall apart. Look for three-ring binders instead of full books.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#fantasy heartbreakers#dark means cool ok#fewer classes! not as many spells! play a limited range of heroes you can imagine!#ahead of its time really
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Lesbian Death Glare
Lesbian Death Glare, Dot Park, 2022
There was a wave of extremely queer games in the late '10s and early dicketies. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is the best-known, but you also have Dungeon Bitches, This Party Sucks, Violet the Menace, Lichcraft, etc. Lesbian Death Glare goes the "Eye Beams" path that has not, perhaps, been as well-trod as some others. It's also an in-joke. (References for those who aren't familiar: Lesbian Bed Death, Lesbian Death Bed)
Your characters are hella gay lesbians who were caught in the blast of a ghost-rock gamma bomb and all gained weird mutations. None of them are physically obvious. They all leave minor traces on your bodies (eyes that change color, hair that is always moving a little, a spine that sticks out just a little) but they're hard to spot at first. Each of you has a high-side-effect superpower. For example: the titular death glare that also partially calcifies people and things caught behind the target. Flight sprouts wings of blue fire that scorch people near you unless you're holding them tight. A painful deafening shout, a force field that slowly locks you in place, a light that everyone has to fight to avoid looking at. I feel like there's some good allegory here.
Chargen is mostly pick-lists. You could roll a character in 10 minutes, counting the time it takes you to fill in the character sheet. Players are encouraged to come up with new skills and powers with their GM's assistance.
The game uses a simple but somewhat unusual die-step system. In your weak point you roll 1d4. For most things you roll 2d6 and take the highest. Your highest normal stat or a weaker superpower rolls 3d8 take the highest. A standard superpower rolls 4d10 take the highest. When you get a bonus you can either roll an extra die or step up a die to the next-highest level, and you can pick up multiple bonuses without much trouble. High-level abilities have pretty serious dominance but can still occasionally lose.
What the game lacks compared to most of its kin is a sense of place. There isn't much for setting here, and the art is too scattered to really be effective at conveying a feel. It doesn't have the high-concept action of TSL or the raw brutality of Dungeon Bitches. That's a shame, because I love the basic idea of superpowers that are metaphors for femininity and/or queer experiences and/or just plain human emotional nature.
Dot Park is working on LDG2, which addresses those issues. The rules are staying mostly the same, but she has an artist picked out (after firing the first one for using generative AI), the setting is getting more detail, she's writing some play advice... and until then the original game is offline. Fingers crossed we get to see it soon.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#never take your first game offline while you write your second#unless you were accidentally racist#then you should probably take it down
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MiDDDle Space
MiDDDle Space, Stacked Studios, 2002
@identityuniverse sent me a copy of this and I would like to return it please.
The map of Middle-Earth is, as many fantasy maps are, roughly page-sized. It fades out near the edges of its flat world. It is extremely rare for someone working with Middle-Earth to fill in the least bit of that blank space. This game does it in a very unusual manner: it fills that blank space with outer space. It's a little bit Spelljammer, but it's more Starfinder. Elves and Ewarves and even the occasional Ent colony in space, with big ol' spaceships.
"But why the weird spelling?" you may be asking. Well, that's because it's a cross of Tolkien and extremely horny 90's cult TV show Lexx. You know. DDD like a bra size.
Which also explains the name of the game studio.
The setting doesn't bother explaining how anyone got into space or talking about that obviously-Middle-Earth-shaped postage stamp in the corner. It's all about "planet of the Warriors of Men" and "planet of the Dwarven smiths" and "ice planet of the Elven sex clothiers". I like the "Forest Asteroid of the Ents" but that might be more because I love space-forest stuff and Ents. NPCs are bog-standard stock characters who also want to bone.
The rules look kind of like they started off as Rolemaster (MERP, really) hack before shifting over to d20. It uses some custom classes to cover things like the Animist, Mentalist, Mystic, etc. It has plenty of critical hit/fail tables. It ports in some MERP skills directly, overwriting some d20 skills with them. There are places that refer to MERP mechanics like Maneuver rolls, which were not ported in. It's mostly playable if you're willing to do a fair amount of house-ruling.
You have a choice of five ships, with build-your-own ships in a supplement that's "coming soon" (it is not). One of the ships is very Lexx-looking, with the insectoid feel and the phallic look. It's very powerful and extremely unmaneuverable. You can also get a Spelljammer-like galleon with sails and everything, one that looks like an Elven Armada vessel, a vaguely Millennium-Falcon-like ship, or you can each get your own small ship to flit around in. I kinda like that last option. There is never any crew; the ship flies fine with just however many PCs you have. Regardless of which ship you pick, you're going to have a very rock-paper-scissors setup against other vessels and utter domination against anything ground-based.
The art is halfway between Elfquest and Dr. Voluptua. It's all greyscale. I do kinda like that you can see the artist improve in their anatomy and backgrounds over the course of the few years it took to create the game. It does not have a fun-and-sexy sense of humor, and the game plays things straight in multiple senses.
Honestly the thing that makes me unhappy about this game is that it's lazy. If you want to make a horny elfgame (or a horny-elf game), you do you. There are plenty of them out there, another one is fine. But don't make it a knockoff of two or three different IPs, with mechanics from two more, and nothing in it that really provides commentary on any of the above. Do something different or do satire, don't just push out content.
MiDDDle Space was swamped in the d20 tsunami. There were only about 200 copies made in the first place, so it's a bit of a collector's item in some corners.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#some people get surprised when they find out there are clothes that use the rest of the alphabet
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The Department
The Department Susan Cathleen Powell, 2019
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Sabrina Hawthorne is a fellow enthusiast of rare RPGs. She's the one who actually found a write-up of The Revolution by a GM for a table of players who didn't want to read the whole thing. We originally met at a mini-golf course, of all places (fuck you, windmill), and ended up chatting about mechanics in card-based games. When she told me about this one I knew it was a perfect fit for the blog and invited her to write a guest post. Here it is!
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You know the SCP wiki? You know those articles that dive super far into the deep history, where characters straight out of the Hebrew Bible use arcane orbital lasers to wage a planet-wide war on mutant flesh monsters, and bigfoot is there too?
The Department is one of those, in the form of a hack for The Quiet Year.
You play as the board of directors for the titular Department, who are the SCP foundation in all but name. Your researchers have come across an anomalous archaeological dig site, and it’s your job to guide the organization to learn as much as they can about it – and the secret world history it’s a part of - before it’s destroyed by the vague sleeping horror that you disturbed when the site broke ground.
For the most part, the game runs the same as The Quiet Year, but with spookier and more bureaucratic flavor text. There’s a phase at the end of each round called a Board Meeting that’s a bare bones hidden role board game that doesn’t really feel as scheme-y or capitalistic as it wants to, but other than that it runs smoothly.
The real life of the party is the Countdown mechanic. Whenever a player draws an Ace of any suit from the deck, the Countdown advances, causing more strange occurrences and anomalous dangers to crop up around the dig site. When the last Ace is drawn, the game ends, and players are strictly forbidden to tie up any loose ends that their improvised story left hanging. And since in this one you pull from a combined deck of 52, those aces can come randomly at any time.
There isn’t any art in The Department, which makes sense. It’s 12 pages, and it’s only that long because of a very thorough section on consent and safety tools. Nonetheless, it’s packed with exactly the kind of style that this game needs. The front and back covers look like a manila folder, and the whole thing looks like a partially declassified government document.
Susan Powell apparently sold a few of her games through her onlyfans page, alongside more of what you might expect of an onlyfans page. I got my copy from a friend though, and I haven’t been able to track Susan down anywhere on the internet.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#unreality#scp#guest post#fuck you windmill#not the first time SCP has shown up on this blog and i'm sure it won't be the last
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Slab
Slab, Medical Hospital Games, 2012
Thank you to @chrisg97124 for pointing me toward this game. It's a little-known game, very much off the beaten path, and will either be one of your favorites or annoy the hell out of you.
Slab is a medical/police/political drama RPG. Your characters are specifically medical examiners and their assistants. Your job is determining the cause of death for crime victims (or suspected crime victims), to help solve the crime. That's maybe 25-30% of the game, with the rest being interpersonal drama and B-plots.
This is a game where the resolution mechanics totally pivot the feel of the game. The pitch so far might make the game feel like if someone threw House, ER, Law & Order, Madam Secretary, and General Hospital into a blender. The book treats it that way too. However, the way you resolve your medical investigations makes this game feel more like someone blended Scrubs, Brooklyn 99, and Veep.
It uses the game Operation.
Attempting an exam requires beating a difficulty number from 1 to 3. That's how many times you have to extract a "bone" in a row in order to succeed. You get 5 attempts. Not getting your streak means a failure. Getting 3 or more failures out of 5 means a critical failure, where you learn something incorrect about the case.
There are no rules for the social parts of the game. It's a 40-pager that is mostly player advice, NPC examples, and a sample scenario. There's no art beyond a copyright-violating photo of Operation, and the layout is extremely mediocre.
This game does have the advantage of making Operation slightly more fun, assuming you have people who are into the drama part. There's also a definite tension to reaching in with those tweezers. But look at that board. Look at the light-up nose. There's no way you can run a serious game with that nose staring you in the face. The game really could stand to either lean into its goofiness, or use a different resolution mechanics. Even Pick-Up Sticks would be more dignified. Plus, it would come with a built-in pacing mechanism! There you go. Free ideas.
Slab was self-published in center-stapled, half-page format. Covers are usually green paper, though I've seen an orange one as well that I think was an earlier version.
#ttrpg#imaginary#indie ttrpg#rpg#review#operation#bzzzzzzzzzzt#ideas are cheap - implementation is what costs you
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