An excellent resource for creating locations and situations across the US.

The Comae Engine is still new to me, but I really enjoy its straight-forward approach the d100 family of systems. As it stands, it is a great system for creating characters that are capable, but still quite human, and scenarios for those characters. While there isn't a huge roster of NPCs or monsters, there is a quick and very good system for creating interesting NPCs at the table.

An excellent set of very detailed generators for generating characters, locations, conflicts and details for a wild and wonder-filled fantasy city.

A grim vision of the near future, building on what is already here. The player characters are operatives, not unlike traditional cyberpunk, but there is much focus on the grind of such a life. It is well-written and quite believable.

I've had a tone of fun playing the 'Zeroeth' edition, as a player and a GM. The present edition is even better. Macchiato Monsters sits comfortably between the known (it has D&D's six stats hit dice etc.) and the freeform. As a player you have a lot of choice when it comes to making and defining your character, but you still have to navigate some fruitful limitations created by random stats and rolls on the very creative equipment tables. It is easy to make the game fit your personal idea of fantasyadsventure (or other genres).

The central idea of this steting is that the world consists of dead gods. They are the terra firma, the source of food, magic and people. In fact food is an earlier stage of people.

The book starts out with four new character classes (in the style of LotFP).

The Conspirator is a sort of mastermind character. They plan crimes or serve as thief-takers and security experts. They have a number of Planning Points which lets them affect outcomes of rolls and such. I like this very much, but would like to give them a bit more oomph. The Corpse Worker is a damage-sponge and laborer, mining the god-corpses for raw materials. The Prize Fighter is an orphan or slave who escape their dire circumstances by knocking seven shades out of people. They dish it out as well as the LotFP fighter, but can't take it (as well). The Witch Doctor is a sorcerous mad scientist with the ability to perform Experiments.

Experiments are procedures somewhere between folk magic and Victor von Frankenstein. They are gross, and often involve trade-offs that would give a sane person pause.

As a whole the classes are good and flavorful, but I wonder if they're meant to work alongside or instead of the LotFP ones.

The geography of the dead gods is very quickly dealt with. Too quickly for my taste. In LotFP you usually have some historical setting to fall back on (the Thirty Years War etc), but here the basics themselves are weird. I would have liked some more info on daily life, or maybe a sample village or other location.

The monsters are cool, icky, and fit with the general body horror aesthetic. I would use them, even if I didn't use the setting.

Then we have an adventure location. It is fun if a bit brief.

The Appendicies are a random monster generator (I love it and will use it a lot) and a good list of inspirations/appendix N.

The illustrations are by Scrap Princess, and I'm a big fan.

Upshot: I like the product very much, but I'd like a bit more setting perhaps. (I have the .pdf, but not the physical book (yet)).

Since From Unformed Realms is essentially system-less, it serves as a great resource for creating new strange monsters for many games. I have personally used it for The Black Hack itself, and for Portal Rats, but not for The Cthulhu Hack itself (yet). Next up I plan to use it for Macchiato Monsters.

A collection of fun and creative magic, using the brilliant level-less magic rules in Wonder & Wickedness. Some of the magic schools are idiosyncratic, but is never silly.

A fun and colorful post-apocalyptic game, based on the elegant Into The Odd rules. Character generation is fast and throws you a few curveballs, getting you ready to play within minutes.

I hope to have a printed version some day, as the art really deserves it.

A brilliant and light-weight fantasy rpg. While it owes something to THE fantasy rpg, it has flavor and interesting rules-choices, and does not feel like 'yet another OSR game'. Mageblade is pleasantly terse, and works well as a rules-reference, without being dry or bland. For me Mageblade strikes a balance between hardcore let-the-dice-fall-as-they-may old school gaming, and giving meaningfull and fun choices during character generation.

The game is built so that it complements Lost Pages' two brilliant magic sourcebooks (Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons) but does not requre them. As I own these two (and recommend them as well) I see that as a plus.

(And I'd put that Joson Sholtis cover on my wall if I could).

The Chthonic Codex is a cornucopia of creativity. Too often magic in rpgs is presented in a very pragmatic and bland way, but in this book every spell has flavor and adventure hooks for magic-users of all stripes. A vast and vibrant setting is indicated, without limiting or locking things in place. I would suggest that you read it cover to cover, with a notebook close by, as you are likely to come up with a wealth of uses for the ideas within. Greco's writing style is compelling and strong. It is colorful, without being too florid or verbose. The organization is not terribly intuitive though, and reading the Codex feels a little like reading a wizard's grimoire, I view that as a positive, but you may want a few bookmarks if you want to reference it at the gaming table.

A solid character sheet, and some good and varied pregens. Each character has a short backstory which offers good hooks without feeling limiting. The character art is good and has a comic book feel to it, which suits CHILL well.

I bought this back in '12. The music is atmospheric and good, but each track ends with a voice saying 'this book (?) was purchased from drivethrurpg, order number etc." That ruins it for me.

City of Clocks Review

City of Clocks (CoC in the following) is a systemless industrial fantasy setting. I am reviewing the .pdf version.

The physical thing

The document is 176 pages of text and black & white illustrations. It loads and reads well off my small off-brand e-reader (with e-paper), as well as off my clanking old laptop. It feels as though it is made with the reader in mind. The editing seems to be pretty good, and I've not found any errors worth noting. There is no index, but the table of contents is very good and thorough.

The art is mostly characters, with very few representations of the city itself. It would have been nice to have examples of buildings, streets and shops, but it is really a very minor complaint. The character art is very good in that it feels like representations of actual people. The characters have character I guess you might say.

Chapter 1 The setting starts with a history chapter, or to be more specific a mythology chapter gradually becoming history. The mythology, or creation story is quickly done away with, and mostly consists of generations of god-like beings betraying their creators/parents. This happens three times by my count, and when we came to the humans and other species overthrowing the Luminaries (self-made demigods) I was smiling a bit. The Luminaries created the original city of clocks, and their legacy is many undiscovered or ill-understood secrets, among which are the Incarnae, humans with great powers. The rest of the mytpothological bits seem to be of little import to the setting. The human history on the other hand is full of neat tidbits and conflicts. Clashes between religions and between patricians and plebs gradually turn a democracy into an oligarchy and a police state. Along the way we are introduced to merchants, nobles and even an economist, all of whom have shaped the city through good and bad times. The writing is a bit dry, but I see that as a good thing. It never becomes self-indulgent and overly florid, but gives the reader a ton of well-sketched ideas to build on. It comes across as potential and not a straitjacket.

Chapter 2 The second chapter is a primer of sorts. 'What every citizen should know', you might say. The chapter is short but sweet. It tells you abut the species: constructs (sapient androids built long ago by and ancient species), Geks (a man-sized ant with four legs and two arms, centaur-style) and Sentenni (long-lived near-humans with and alien culture). There is a section on technology, describing firearms, walkers and airships powered by 'ice', which is primordial chaos in frozen form. It is thus neither steam-driven nor clockwork, and the aesthetic does not seem to be terribly 'steampunk' either. There are articles on law enforcement, class, family, timekeeping and architecture. The information is ample, yet kept fairly brief. There is a modular feel too it as well. It's there if it is needed, but it's not the sort of thing a GM or player will need to memorize.

Chapter 3 Chapter three contains maps of the city, as well as a neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to the city. It is clearly written and easy to reference via the table of contents and the maps. Here's where I'm reminded by Over The Edge and its setting Al Amaja. It feels like a densely populated and bustling place where interesting things are happening in every corner. Here's a patrician's mansion full of mysteries, a run-down clockwork amusement park where nightmares emerge from the ground, Sentenni ghettos (and there is an amusing reason for why that word is used in-setting), crime-ridden tenements and pubs where the resistance buy their guns. There are many story-seeds in the City of Clocks.

Chapter 4 The City is full of power groups, city-wide institutions and conspiracies, and they're the topic of this chapter. Each group has its own potted history, a description of their power base, as well as people of importance within the group. There are some very evocative 'head shot' illustrations of these people (and constructs, ant-people etc). In this chapter one finds the low-down on the Clergy (the powerful church), the Cabal (a mysterious secret society going through an internal conflict), the Emotes (artists and sybarites, reminiscent of Planescape's Sensates), the Soldat (a fraternity of law men and soldiers), as well as farmers, librarians and capitalists. This chapter is chockful of intrigue, mystery and conflict. There's enough here for a bunch of long campaigns of action and politics. Chapter 5 Chapter five deals with the nine noble houses who influence much in the City. This chapter is structured in the same way as the previous one, but it makes sense to to have the Houses in a seperate chapter, since their power is so pervasive and well-consolidated. The Houses are (with one exception) families, each with their eligible bachelors, senile patriarchs and black sheep. Chapter 6 A very short chapter dealing with the Incarnae, humans who have been endowed with the ability to manipulate reality. Some are servants of the City's parliament, while many others have shrugged off their conditioning and rebelled. Incarnae have powers based in an archetypal or ideal version of themselves. A soldier wil thus be THE soldier and so forth. The Incarnae and their powers are not fully understood, as the process of creating them is invented bu the Luminaries. Chapter 7 The final chapter deals with the secrets of the Luminaries (the species of City-building demigods described in chapter 1), their influence, the threat they pose, and how to use them in a game. They ARE an ancient evil, but there is nothing Lovecraftian about them. That may be a comfort to some.

So, what can you do with all this? Well, the setting does not assume that players take on specific roles. It's easy to come up with pitches for a campaign or scenario.

Legal advocates fighting for truth in a system which favors the powerful and well-connected (something like the BBC series Garrow's Law). Uses a version of Gumshoe. Incarnae as flawed supers in league with the underground resistance. Uses ICONS (or whichever supers-system you like). Brutal slice-of-life drama in a bustling fantasy City (using the rules of In A Wicked Age, but you have to create an Oracle for that). Gritty crime drama where Civil Enforcement officers must navigate between cutthroat crooks and entitled patricians. (Uses the free MiniSix, 'cos I like it).

The fact that the setting is systemless gives a great deal of freedom to play around with the various groups in the setting and the various systems on your shelves.