The greatest tabletop role-playing adventure ever penned.

I generally agree with Vincent's review from 2011. Laws presents a system of terms and symbols for tracking story beats, whether the narrative is moving towards hope or fear, and illustrates the use of them through close readings of Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No. I enjoyed those close readings in themselves. But several things struck me as odd about this book; it's missing quite a lot I would have expected.

The first thing that struck me as odd is that several times, Laws points out that the relative intensity of a story beat is very important. Yet there's nothing in the terms or symbols to reflect that.

The second thing that struck me as odd is that Laws never explains what is the point is of analyzing story beats in this way. He occasionally refers to the fact that a narrative has a lot of downbeats, or that there's a series of downbeats interrupted by an upbeat. But he doesn't really discuss what patterns to look for, merely implies that we ought to be looking for patterns.

The third thing is, he doesn't really explain how to apply this to role-playing games. In most role-playing game systems, there are mechanics to introduce uncertainty into the narrative, and what is uncertain is precisely whether the outcome will be a downbeat or an upbeat.

In the game system FATE, for instance, players can accumulate FATE points when they experience significant downbeat outcomes, and use those points to make an upbeat outcome more likely. So there's a pattern of failures leading to an ultimate success. However, this pattern is baked into the structure of FATE; it's probably obvious to most people that players would most enjoy a game in which the characters have setbacks but win in the end.

Arguably, Laws's system would suggest that a GM should adjust the difficulty of different challenges to make success or failure more likely, given an understanding of patterns of upbeats and downbeats in classic narratives and the significance of those patterns. So the lack of direct discussion of patterns of beats, and the effects of those patterns, is what is most obviously lacking from this text.

It's as if a literature professor told you to make a note of syllabic stress patterns in Shakespeare's plays, but never mentioned iambic pentameter, or the significance of when he uses it and when he doesn't.

The system is swift and flexible, and gives the player quite a bit of agency if the GM understands the mystery, and how the different scenes can branch off each other and respond to the player's interest. I was able to quickly improvise responses when needed. The game experience was much more satisfying than I had expected a one-to-one system to be!

Such a wonderful game. If you like high-powered heroics in the style of Conan or Lies of Locke Lamora, this is THE game for it.

The system is masterfully tuned for its specific genre and tone, and the author does a great job of explaining it.

The city of Eversink is really unique and brimming with adventure hooks. Hell yeah!

Mutant City Blues is a very clever implementation of the Gumshoe system for investigating superheroic crimes. Imagine a mash-up of Law & Order and Heroes (without the writers strike).

The super powers any single person can have are subject to scientific rules, according to something called the Quade Diagram, so you can logically reason out the powers of suspected perps—it worked surprisingly well in the starter adventure provided in the book.

This is a very niche game, however. I would only recommend it to groups who watch tons of police procedurals. As GM, I had all the rules of evidence and probable cause (the TV versions, at least) in my head, but I was shocked to learn that this was not in fact universal knowledge.

Highly recommend if you have the right group.

This is a short and sweet adventure that can work either as a one-shot or as the starting point of a longer campaign. It does everything it needs to do: a short intro to all the different aspects of the rules, the setting, and a very moody adventure that gives you a great idea of what the game is about, while short enough to be played in about 4 hours. Definitely worthy.

I feel like the rules are poorly explained and I had trouble using them. There are also lots of spelling mistakes that can make some of the information harder to parse. There are some good tools in there, but I was disappointed overall.

Very good book enjoyed it. Noir. I like the main character and the monster was cool.

13th Age is a game I've really enjoyed running, though I haven't had the chance to try it as a player. It does a great job at combining narrative and gamist elements without bogging down into bloat. Some of the concepts seem a bit heavy-handed at first, but when you get past the moderate learning curve, they become very easily internalised. I've read comments online that there aren't many viable character builds. Personally I haven't run into that problem yet, so we'll see. In any case, if you're looking for a game with excellent combat and a powerful narrative system, 13th Age is worth taking a look at.

Thoroughly enjoyable story to read and run. Exactly what I was looking for as an introductory adventure. Well set out, good ideas of skills to use. Nice story you can edit to fit your own needs. Generally great all around. I wish Pelgrane would release more like this, like an Arkham detective tales they did for trail of Cthulhu. But for this system. Please do more.

I'd only ever played a single one shot of a GUMSHOE game prior to picking this up (Night's Black Agents), and found the system to not be to my liking, but oh man has Swords of the Serpentine turned me around. This is one of few systems that I actually think I'm more excited to run rather than play, cause of how much excellent guidance is packed into this book. The adversary creation system is robust enough to handle a ton of ideas, and the implimentation of traditional and social combat is really exciting for fast but meaningful conflict. As someone who runs a lot of one-on-one and two player parties, I love the attention payed to scaling character power levels, and the freeform magic. Eversink as a seting is wonderfully fleshed and feels fresh as someone who has been playing RPGs for over a decade at this point.

I can also see the base of this system being easily hacked to run more traditional D&D fantasy, but if you're a sword and sorcery fan, this is perfect as is. I'd love to see this system get all the love in the world, expansions, more adventures, further setting books!

The indispensable companion volume to the 13th Age rpg. If you play 13th Age you want this book. The "no one true. way philosophy really shines here but it is pure gold. that can only make your game better

What a great application of the GUMSHOE system. As a GM who is frustrated with many games at this time, this game provides a great new way to play fantasy games. The setting, the artwork and the maps are all top notch. Most rpgs deal with social combat and reputations poorly, but this game with the GUMSHOE system, allows for games of investigation, intrigue... Truley Amazing. To anyone who has not read the new rules, soo many things can be done with manuvers, I was worried about how it would deal with combat. I am happy to say, the combat is great.

Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/08/100-days-of-halloween-lilith.html

Continuing my mini-dive into Lilith in various games.

Lilith

This book is by RPG luminary Ken Hite. It is only nine pages but it presents some background on who Lilith is including her "Herstory" (look if you don't know who Lilith is and why "herstory" is FAR more appropriate than "history" then I can't help you.)

We get an overview of her time in Babylon. A bit on the Burney Relief (the cover takes its cue for that) and how they are working under the assumption that it is Lilith or Lilîtu. (Personally, I like the idea that it is Ereshkigal.)

After this there are sections on what Lilith is doing in various Pelgrane Press games like Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists, Mutant City Blues, and the Dying Earth RPG.

Wonderful concept.

The zip file comes with PDF, MOBI, and EPUB versions of the book for ease of reading.

There are very few historical characters you could do a product like this with, so I really admire this choice.

I ran a whole campaign in Night's Black Agents and my players and I had a lot of fun. It's extremely well designed for genre emulation combining investigation, horror, and action. You really do feel like you're in Ronin and then you learn the bad guys aren't working for the IRA but Count Dracula (or mutant zombies or the nosferatu or some kind of Lovecraftian god). One thing I especially loved is that there's not just one type of vampire but a generation system that lets you build different types of vampires. Very different types of vampires that go well beyond the goth aristocrat from some minor province of the Hapsburg empire. Among other things, this avoids the problem of the players having read the bestiary and memorizing all the stat blocks. Go ahead and read the GM section, you'll enjoy it but you'll still be surprised by the vampires in my game. I have a few reservations, all related to Gumshoe rewarding system mastery: 1) If you're not used to Gumshoe, a few of the mechanics can be a bit confusing. For example, in theory the distinction is just investigative (I get clues) vs general (I engage in combat or other action) abilities, but some of the general abilities have complicated rules about how fast you get points back and this gives the resource management aspect of the game an aspect of system mastery. For instance, the noob might choose to put points in network and thereby make their character more flexible, since you can use network to recruit lackeys who can do anything ... except network points don't refresh. The rules make sense once you understand them, but there's a learning curve to it.
2) Character generation is a classless system based on point buys and this can make character gen a bit hard. (There are archetypes, but you still have to spend your remaining points). Pelgrane's character generation website The Black Book helps with the mechanical aspects of character generation but you still have to make choices and there are better and worse ways to do it. 3) You can spend points on a roll, the outcome of which is that you lose more points of the same type. This means that instead of thinking about how scared your character is that he just saw someone rip someone's throat out and drink their blood you're thinking about probability theory of spending points vs taking a straight roll. (FWIW, the expected value is worse if you spend points on the roll so don't do it unless you're in danger of going insane). I suggest a house rule that you can't spend points on stability rolls.

These reservations notwithstanding, I still think it's a great game. I enjoyed the campaign I ran and would gladly run it again for new players or play in someone else's campaign.