I'm not a critic. I simply know what I like and what I don't. And I really liked "No Loyal Knight". I love good mash-ups of genres that I enjoy...and Noir/PI + Supernatural is a biggie for me. Gets me reminiscing about the Blood Shadows RPG and the movie (doesn't hold up well from my childhood viewing) "Cast a Deadly Spell".

The only question I have is, are there any more Jefferson Carter, P.I. novels, novellas, anthologies out there?

I have really mixed feelings about this. From one hand, it's a collection of 3 really cool scenarios, each one with original aspects and all tied togerther by a fascinating fil rouge. On the other hand, though, it seems that the author gets easily carried away by its own creation, giving a lot of details and ideas on certain parts and leaving you totally clueless on some, important others. Sure, it needs a lot of work by the Keeper, and that's not only ok but necessary, but sometimes the holes left behind are just too big. And there are a lot of discrepancies: handouts spoken of but never shown, some details repeated again and again, others saying opposite things. In particular, the first scenario is well made even with its holes, but the second one, which is narratively speaking the most difficult to play, is just a big mess in my opinion. An AWESOME concept, but little or no info on how to get away with it and some self-congratulation. So, buy it if you want great ideas and a blueprint on how to generally play these scenarios, but not if you are looking for ready to go or coherent scenarios. Still, a good product, but the laziness of the second part just bums me out too much, I'm sorry. A second, better made edition might be worth 5 stars.

Beautifully streamlined BRP System, easily approachable mechanics with just enough ~crunch~ to satisfy, while the mechanics greatly support, even enhance, the storytelling aspects of the game for the actors among us. ❤️

Make your own land and banners, adapt existing settings like GOT/ASOIF or WOT, or use the examples in the book.

I love how time passing is a big part of the game compared to a lot of other RPGs. It really lets you see your banner grow, and alliances ebb and flow. Plus you really get to see the fruits of romances play out; as each year passes, children grow and as your current character ages out of relevance, you can switch to playing your offspring, or the offspring of another character at the table! Definitely worth checking out, especially if you're a fan of games where players have more narrative control and true collaborative story-telling reigns supreme.

I LOVE Banners! It is so streamlined and yet SO personalize-able! Each Banner, land, character, and detail can have so much variety, while the rules are so streamlined to make it so easy, stories and epic adventures just flow! Every player gets so invested and involved. I am always just waiting for the next session thinking about more details and what the next season will bring. Being able to play and flesh out other characters or offspring from your banner or another banner, or from making another vassal banner, just keeps me wanting to play more and more! The only drawback is that there is only one of me to play at a time with my friends and the new friends found by playing!

I love that you can keep the best things from the Banners fantastical time eras from folklore and fantasy and ditch any problematic issues and have so much variety of locales, peoples, and personality types mix while running across cool styled banners and mythic creatures! Why can't game night be every night?

I'm conflicted (even though I have given 'Banners' a 4/5 rating) The rules and the setting/genre "template" are great. I've been looking for a Romantic (capital R) Adventure game (especially like the author's previous work 'Houses of the Blooded') with a more traditional/approachable(for players accustomed/expecting a DnD style of gameplay) and streamlined ruleset, and 'Banners' is that game. The book however is poorly edited with conflicting statements, some rules/edge cases that are ignored, and several instances where an example would be helpful. Easy fixes, that hopefully will be retroactively applied to this edition.

I have mixed feelings about this module.

On the one hand, my group had great fun with Digging for a Dead God. The emergent gameplay can be amazing. The characters and their relationships are well constructed.

On the other hand... Michael's review is spot on. This is a very vaguely defined setting that requires the Keeper to do most of the heavy lifting. The locations are littered with Chekov's guns, without any further explanation or game plan. If your players want to follow up on anything, you'll have to make something up on the spot. The story is almost entirely player-driven, so at times it feels like a seven-keeper improv session.

A lot of stuff is intentionally left up to interpretation, as "any kind of plans you make for this scenario go right out the window". I feel that's probably because there isn't much to interact with, so there's no natural progression of the story that would help with anticipating what's to come. Many elements of the setting are nothing but a writing prompt, without any sort of background or explanation.

As the author's site is defunct, there's some content that is no longer accessible. Soundtracks, variant handouts for Act II. There's supposed to be a "sidebar" that's not present in the PDF, but should contain crucial information.

I don't regret spending $10 on this module, but unless inspiration sparks, I will probably give Acts II and III a pass.

a horrible mutilation of the original RPG - best avoid

First thing to disclose: Since this is now a "pay what you want" title, I downloaded it for free, figuring I'd do the old "pay the suggested price if it was good" thing. I'm glad I didn't pay actual money first.

Schauermarchen is not well developed. You're a child trapped in a creepy abandoned village. There is a Bad Man (who is not consistently named—he’s also the Grinning Man, the Man of the House, The Man from the House, etc.) who comes out at night and is going to do bad things to you if he catches you. In terms of childhood terror that’s pretty evocative, but it’s also something I would think just about any GM could come up with. The writing is good enough, but it doesn't live up to the German fairytale horror the title would imply. There aren’t any described child NPCs, though we’re told kids who’ve been in town longer come up to the orphanage every day to explain things. There are three other adult NPCs: An Old Man who buries the children for the Bad Man; a madwoman in the woods (who I admit gets a good and creepy description); and the Lady in Blue, who is… just kind of there, working with the Bad Man. She doesn’t even speak.

Look, I’m a sucker for horrific German fairytales—Struwwelpeter and the less sanitized Grimm stuff, for example—but I didn’t find that here. Herein lies my problem: If I wanted to make a game about children in an abandoned, spooky village trying to avoid the clutches of the Bad Man, I would look to traditional bogeyman stories and season with the billion different “children in peril with nary a friendly adult” scenarios in fiction. If I wanted to give it a German scarytale flair, I’d look again to the Grimms and Heinrich Hoffmann—heck, I’d look to E.T.A. Hoffman while I was at it. Forget his adult works, The Nutcracker has some pretty darn creepy stuff in it. But I’m getting off topic. This book is just kind of unnecessary, save for introducing certain mechanics.

The basic idea is that when your PC makes an action aligned with Hope (being brave and selfless, etc.) you gain a Hope Point. When you get Hope Points equal to your current rank in Hope, you go up a rank. Fear (being cowardly or selfish, etc.) works the same way. It’s in your best interest to try to act consistently, because you get bonus dice for Risk rolls equal to your rank in Hope or Fear when performing actions based on Hope or Fear. Also, a rank up in one stat means you drop a rank in the other.

I will admit, this is actually a much better system than I first thought. You are faced with a dilemma: Trying to have a high Fear rank will make cooperating with your fellow PCs difficult. Trying to have a high Hope Rank will interfere with your ability to run and hide, which seems like the best course of action for most of the game. This is good design as far as I’m concerned, and that alone is worth a star.

Leaving aside fluff and crunch for a moment, I need to take a moment to talk about the author’s tone. From the bit explaining the Hope and Fear mechanics:

"'Not all actions have good or bad intentions.'

Wrong. All intentions have intent. Even if it’s just idle curiosity. Every action has motive; people who do dangerous or risky things for no reason at all… well, that’s the definition of'“insane.'

Every action has intent. Nobody does anything for no reason at all. So, how do you judge whether or not a mundane action is out of Hope or Fear? Easy.

Any action that isn’t either out of Hope or Fear isn’t important enough to justify a die roll."

Let’s break this down a minute. First our author introduces an idea just to shoot it down. He then sets up a strawman despite having clearly written the original proposition in the first place. Saying “Not all actions have good or bad intentions” does not contradict the proposition that “all intentions have intent”—and incidentally I’m pretty sure he meant “all actions have intent". If he did not, that's worse, because he's setting up an extra strawman that still has nothing to do with the original premise. All the statement “Not all actions have good or bad intentions” implies is that some intentions are neutral.

He then goes on to contradict himself again by admitting that some actions are not made out of Hope or Fear, and that you just shouldn’t roll for them. In other words, don’t roll for neutral intentions. This is an acknowledgement that there are such things as neutral intentions. If he had just started from “Every action has intent” and left out the prior bits, we would have lost nothing except an incoherent attempt at condescension. If it hadn’t been for this mess, I’d be giving the game three stars. You might call that petty, but remember Schauermarchen is, excluding the title page and backmatter, seven pages long. Little things stick out.

Schauermarchen isn’t terrible. What little there is of it is written well enough, and the setting of the village could be useful. If I were a GM, though, I’d be adding detail like mad. Is there a society among the children? How does it work? How long has the most senior child lived here? Has anyone died of hunger, thirst, or exposure, or does the Bad Man always get them before that happens? It’s mentioned some kids tried to make a boat to cross the ocean to the south; did anyone ever go to the mountains in the north? Are there any notes or books in town that might explain anything at all, or give cryptic hints? Any lore among the children themselves? Are the Bad Man and the Blue Lady the only monsters in town?

You could argue all this detail ought to be handled by GMs individually. Fair enough. But I am not going to shell out five USD to be told to use my imagination when I can do that for free. And I’m not going to call this good because of what my players might make of it-- the scenario is too basic. Any creative things they do is credited to them, not the author of this game.

If you feel like paying money for a rules-light horror experience, I suggest something like Don’t Walk in Winter Wood. That has a similarly dead-simple mechanical system, but it's got illustrations, brief descriptions of how society in the setting actually works, a few sample scenarios, and perhaps most importantly several short stories to set the mood and direction of the game. If you want, you can even play children in that. I already see ways you could combine the mechanics in that game with Schauermarchen’s setting.

Since you can download Schauermarchen for free there’s really no reason not to give it a look, but I have to reiterate I don’t think this is worth the suggested price of five dollars.

It is a nice standard versitile multi-system character sheet. I am going to be using on a different game.

I feel that there is a lot here that can make a good game. I really enjoyed the fact that the system is collaborative in its own way, with ways for players to interact with and help create the narrative. The downside, I feel, is the large amounts of flowery language, which can at times make it difficult read through. Even if I never play a game in this system itself, I think that it has taught me some very important things that I can utilize for a more immersive game system.

It's interesting to read through this game as a look at one designer's process, since the text walks through playtesting.

It's frustating to actually try learn or play the game. There are at least a few rules missing and there are a number of fiddly little bits of book keeping that don't seem to add much to the experience. On top of that, the game takes a particularly dour view of the magical teenager experience without really motivating that sufficiently for my tastes. For example, references to dating are made only in the context of making the characters' lives worse with doomed relationships, not in creating more complicated situations with the potential for interesting drama. A sidebar recommends a mechanization of this process that reinforces both the doomed and detrimental nature of young relationships.

Tongue in cheek, perhaps, but an unfinished tongue in a mean spirited cheek.

Wow. So, I don't know what that other reviewer is smoking. My review is based entirely on the first Act - Digging for a Dead God.

Folks, if you want the adventure, here it is: Nazi officers find the entrance to an ancient tomb in the jungles of Africa and if they open it a ghost escapes and whispers evil shit into their ears and they are Nazis so like do that evil shit -- inside the tomb is a skeleton, some treasure, and a podium with a hand print (think the end of Total Recall).

THAT'S IT. That's the whole fucking adventure. Sorry. "Sandbox." No other details are provided about the tomb. What happens when you put your hand in the imprint? No fucking clue. Make it up. What is the skeleton? No fucking clue. Make it up. What happens when characters stare upon the Yellow Sign? No fucking clue. Make it up. Or, as the author puts it: Nazis find a door, open it, and bad shit happens.

It couldn't be summed up any more plainly because that's literally the meat of the adventure.

Seriously. In large part, Wick puts the onus on the players and the Keeper to actually write the adventure. Well, for fuck's sake. If I had known the synopsis on the product description was THE ACTUAL ADVENTURE I could have saved $10 and dreamed up all the cool shit myself.

Here's what is NOT in this "scenario":

• an interesting location to explore beyond a veneer of "tomb with some unexplained shit"
• insight into any fucking thing that might be why this place is here or what its purpose might be
• more nuanced and interesting character motivation
• some actual fucking psychological effects for failed sanity rolls in this place
• any number of possible events that might occur during the session for the Keeper to draw from (e.g. a British soldier is captured, one of the villagers starts an uprising against the Nazis, a list of spooky events to randomly roll or pick from, OR ANY FUCKING THING THAT I COULDN'T JUST COME UP WITH RIGHT NOW TYPING THIS -- it's YOUR JOB AS THE AUTHOR TO PROVIDE COOL SHIT SO I DON'T HAVE TO)
• Something fucking interesting to say about the Man in Black, especially what he might want the various specific characters to do

Also, this is not a fucking "sandbox". A sandbox has interesting choices to make based on the environment. Calling this a sandbox is an insult to every actual gaming product providing some semblance of an actual location-based scenario. There are supposed to be "sidebars" with conditional effects that are entirely missing. What happens when the players use dynamite instead of strength to open the door? "See non-existant sidebar".

I would give this 1 star, however, there are a few tidbits of character motivation in the admittedly neatly designed character folios. It's nothing mind-blowing: one of the Nazis wants to kill everyone, one has a secret that another is using to blackmail him (though the actual handout doesn't fucking explain this to the player who has the secret... so the Keeper is once again required to do the heavy lifting here), one is a spy, and one wants to "keep his men safe" (barf).

DO NOT BUY THIS MODULE. Just read the synopsis and use that to flare up your imagination -- that's all you'll find here anyway. And, you can find the map and character handouts here: http://www.johnwickpresents.com/yellow/act1.html

Delightfully devious, especially for those GMs dealing with experienced players who think they have "seen it all."

The best example of one-shot horror writing I have ever seen.