I've been waiting for the full-blown version of this setting since the slim BRP version published by Chaosium in 2010 ... this is now officially my favourite science fantasy setting. It's a deep, lore-rich setting with dozens of human, human-related and wholly alien ancestries (my favourite of them being crab-like creatures and something that looks a little bit like a land jellyfish), with in-depth descriptions of cults and societies and cultures, with a cosmology of deities and demons (both probably more some kind of extradimensional entites) ... and with a millenia-old empire that's encrusted in its rigid traditions and seems unable to change it ways, even when threatened with extinction - so there's dire need for adventurous souls with a propensity for lateral thinking.

The setting is both similar in its core assumption to Numenera's Ninth World and even to Troika! (and I love the latter), but also totally different in tis approach -as I said, this one is a deep setting, nothing is handwaved away as just some millenia-old mystery that can't be explained. Future Earth breathes its future history. Like Numenera and Troika!, it is also a setting that feels colorful, and the art is suffused by a sense of hope and adventure. There's dark stuff in here, for sure, but it never feels dominant.

The system in this iteration is "Cosmic Fate", which is basically a crunchy version of Fate Core with d6-d6 for added swinginess, a cap on bonuses from aspects and crits and fumbles. It leans heavily into the "Fate fractal" where everything from a contact to a demonic weapon to a mount can become it's own little entity with aspects. It looks like it needs some investment, it's definitely not a variant of fate I'd fly by the seat of my pants, but I like both the increased swinginess and the cap on aspect spamming.

It needs to be said that this seems to have pretty much all the rules, but there's still a GM book and a setting book coming. For now, this is just a great read for me, but I really hope I'll be able to get a campaign going as soon as all three volumes are out.

I thought I'd never touch another RPG going to the Lovecraft Well, but this one is truly different. This one is not another "take" on the same endlessly regurgigated Mythos tropes "(It's Cthulhu, but this time with aether-powered biplanes!") - it an unassuming RPG that emulates modern cosmic horror literature; and it has me as excited as back then when I first laid my hands on "Call of Cthulhu" by Chaosium, which was just as slim and unassuming and clearly knowing what it was doing.

The introduction of M&P talks about the ambivalence of xenophobia and xenophilia that runs through Lovecraft's work and that has been critically explored by several current authors who write tales of cosmic horror - specifically, Ruthanna Emrys is mentioned, but I could easily see M&P emulating the athmosphere and themes of stories by a lot of current horror authors, Lovecraftian or not, like Laird Barron, John Langan or Livia Llewellyn. It's about Seekers - people who can't let the unknown alone, to whom the terrors they encounter always hold the promise of wonders and epiphanies. It's not a "Let's play the cultists!" take, but more like: Let's play people who are curious and tough enough to dig deeper when they find out that the world is not what they thought; who find their own way to deal with their harrowing experiences that doesn't have to be "shoot at/run from everything that has tentacles!"

The Seeker's Handbook is pretty barebones in a lot of ways: It's pretty much just the rules and a long example of play, with no bestiary and no mythology (for those, you need the Gardener's Handbook). It has no illustrations beyond the (powerful) cover and a few chapter headings, and the layout is just text on a page. It's fine, really - a lot better than thinking you have to throw at least tone color illustration on every page, regardless of the quality of the art.

The core mechanism is: Roll a skill's pool of dice (usually 3-5) for starting characters and count successes (all dice showing a 5 or 6). One success is usually enough to, well, succeed. There's some twists (if you roll with disadvantage, only the 6s count, if you roll with potency, double the number of your successes after the roll). Beyond the skill list, there's three core attributes (Physicality, Acuity, Willpower) - usually, you don't roll these, but they serve as Hit Points for your body, mind and soul, and you can spend a point from them to buy a success in a skill roll. They're also tied to a neat little mechanism called Challenge, where you roll a test of them to avoid suffering a narratively defined consequence - if you roll to low, you can decide to either suffer the consequence or lose points from the relevant ability. This is mostly used for interpersonal skills - if you're trying to talk someone down, for example, you'd roll your Persuasion or Charm skill, and your successes set a difficulty to their challenge. Now they roll to see whether they shrug it off or whether they have to decide between lowering their weapons or losing a few points of willpower (which might lead to them being penalized on further rolls).

Combat is an extension of the core rules and keeps it simple and sensible: You won't be dodging bullets here, though you can run for cover. On paper, it looks pretty deadly - or at least, scarring. If any of your 3 attributes falls below zero (-5 means your dead), their negative value is converted into afflictions at the end of the scene, which linger. If your've been shot and are at -3 Physicality, this will haunt you at the very least until you've spent three Downtimes recovering - with a Downtime being a flexible amount of time, but it is assumed that it is about a month of not doing anything terribly stressful. So chasing someone, you might end up having to give up because two months ago, someone shot you and you're still not quite over it.

Mind/Soul damage works the same way - you don't have some special sanity score, you just get scarred mentally; most of these scars just take a long time to heal, but they can be permanent as well.

There's a hint of a "class system" in M&P as well, though it is only relevant for advancement: You choose a "study" (stuff like Marital Arts, Scholarship or even getting wealthier) which is your current focus. Whenever you engage with a problem in a way relevant to your study, you earn XP which you can spend on advancement rolls and some special abilities provided by your study. (alternatively, you can spend advancement rolls to recover attribute damage if there's no time for Downtime). Advancement comes with some hard choices, especially because even paying XP, you still have to roll whether you succesfully advance a skill, as in BRP games. Maybe it's a little too harsh, I don't know ... that's something I'd have to find out in play. It is, however, very thematic and flexible (you can change your study at any time) while still giving you some kind of framework for advancement.

Regarding gameplay: When it comes to investigation, M&P takes a different route than the Gumshoe engines, where you get all essential clues for free. M&P is a lot more old school in that you usually have to roll to get information and might very well fail; but it also assumes a more sandbox scenario structure, where there#s always another clue to chase down, where the characters lead the narrative and try to make whatever skills they bring to the table matter. I'm not sure it's for everyone, but the good thing is that as with practically any system, you can always apply the "Gumshoe rule" to M&P and just give the players what you consider core clues.

All in all, the system is well designed and very evocative of the kind of fiction it seeks to emulate; It's no terribly detailed, and there's certainly a lot of edge cases necessitating GM fiat, but the system looks robust enough to support all kinds of on-the-fly solutions. Oh, there's also an abstract wealth/income system included that, on paper, looks like it might actually provide results that make sense (which would be a first for me).

The long example in the end does double-duty as a kind of opening fiction: It's both atmospheric and makes sense as a gaming session, and it gives a good idea of the kind of horror that M&P emulates (hint: no tentacles to be seen).

I haven't read the Gardener#s (GM's) Handbook yet, which contains all the magic, the creatures and other mythos, supernatural and GM only stuff; to get a full-fledged horror RPG, you obviously need both. But even on it's own, the Seeker's Handbook provides a concise and original system for modern-day campaigns that knows what it's doing, and if you're just playing a gritty modern-day campaign or feel fine with coming up with your own horror mythology, it might be all that you need (though in the latter case, you'd have to design your own magic, creatures and advanced studies, so you'd probably want to get the Gardener's Handbook, anyway).

Yay, one of my favourite authors and publishers is back on the scene - and doesn't disappoint!

Sarah Newton's Lair of the Leopard Empresses is based on the Monsters! Monsters! rules, which are based on Tunnels & Trolls, which means that they are from a family of RPGs I've only ever had the most fleeting contact with. My takeaway after reading most of the rules chapters of LotLE is that it's a system where the players have to start thinking out of the box, and quickly, if they find themselves outmatched. Your randomizers are usually 2,3 or 4d6, added to stats than can, even at the beginning, reach values like 30 or 50, so even a stellar dice-roll might often not allow you to come close to what a superior opposition has in store. I've decided to consider this a feature and not a bug, because at the very least, it is interesting and new (to me), and it really leans heavily into a "rulings, not rules" philosophy.

Combat will look strange to anyone not familiar with Tunnels&Trolls or Monsters! Monsters! (like me), It's basically both sides rolling all their attack/damage dice (which are the same thing), comparing the totals and the side with the lower total suffering the difference as damage to be freely distributed among them. There's special cases like missiles, spells, triggered effects and, most importantly, stunts to mix things up. Stunts are free-form with some guidelines and will probably often be about trying to distract the most dangerous opponents for a round so that you get a chance to chisel down on the others, weakening the opposition. The core system is as simple as it gets, but there's an extended combat example that shows how things can get pretty complex and tactical. (You should also definitely read the example to understand how missile damage worked - I feel that this is not made clear in the rules.)

Anyway, I came for the setting, not the rules (though I think I might stay for the rules), because it's by Sarah Newton, who has written Mindjammer and Chronicles of Future Earth, two settings that are practically exactly what I would have come up with and how I'd done it if I had the time, the talent and the discipline.

LotLE is your basic gonzo ancient world stuff with a decadent empire, lots of terribly dangerous places to visit and a few twists: For example, there's something along the lines of forest elves living at the bosom of nature, but they are more like jungle elves, and instead of being tree-hugging vegetarians, they love to eat other intelligend kindreds after having toyed with them a little. Okay, there's also proper forest elves, and while LotLE clearly is a Sword&Sorcery setting, it also has the Tolkien stuff - dwarves, hobbits (here they're called Hobbs) and orcs, some of them with nice little twists attached, others pretty much how you already know them. The overall vibe, though, is more Talislanta than Westeros and more Fafhrd then Frodo. It is also more Glorantha then Forgotten Realms: There's really a sense here that cultures, realms, species and languages are in flux. You won't play a fantasy viking who speaks fantasy viking, lives in the realm of fantasy vikings ruled by the fantasy viking queen and who prays to the fantasy viking god. There's a short historic overview at the beginning that makes it clear that rulers and cults have come and gone, that borders keep changing and that a realm or nation not always equals a culture. Admittedly, that also means that you'll have to dive a little deeper to make sense of the setting, but it's worth it. By the time you reached to Cults&Brotherhoods chapter (around page 100), this will already feel like a living, breathing, complex word. Luckily, the system supports mixing and matching of disparate character elements, because in the end, it's all about picking whichever 2 or 3 special abilities from your kindred, class and cults lists you like best. (Which means that you can even go classless by just picking from your kindred and cult lists.)

And while this is a big book (400 pages) with lots of setting material, Newton really excels at concise, atmospheric and flat-out funny descriptions of setting elements. Take this NPC description:

An ancient Leopard Cultist who never leaves the Empress' side. She has only two teeth: One tells the future, the other the past.

(I'll let that be the one glorious quote to represent the fun that is reading LotLE.)

I have only read about a third of LotLE yet (maybe half, if you count skipping ahead a few times), but it really makes me pump my fist - YES, that's how you do a proper fantasy RPG! Intertwine the setting with the rules, but don't lose yourself in point-buy micromanagement, trying to represent each and every character detail in the rules. (LotLE doesn't even have a skill system, and I strongly feel that it doesn't need one. It does have dozens of spell lists for different magical traditions.) Create interesting species, cultures and organizations for the characters to be part of, but don't box them in. Make the world feel like a real place by giving it a history that creates hybridity and diversity. Most of all, have FUN writing it and let it show.

Finally, LotLE feels very much like a played-in combination of setting and system. The setting clearly flows from a love of the rules system, but it's also obvious how the setting then has changed the system, and how actual play has lead to tweaks and clarifications. The result is a beautifully organic whole that really just makes me want to play it.

(This review is from my blog swanosaurus.blogspot.com)

Clarence Redd debuted his Frostbyte Books a few years ago with M-Space, a stripped-down science fiction rules set based on Mythras. I suspect that M-Space is pretty good, though due to a certain necessary blandness, it never quite clicked with me - I was never sure why I should choose it over something more flavourful like Traveller or Frontier Space.

However, M-Space brought an interesting innovation to Mythras and d-100 gaming in general: Its own extended conflict mechanism, which basically consists of a series of opposed rolls, where the winner deals damage to the loser's conflict pool (the conflict pool being based on one or two of the core characteristics). Comae Engine, Clarence Redd's new RPG, takes that as its core mechanism: Characters are defined through about a dozen broad skills on a scale of 1-100 and through four conflict pools (Body, Intelligence, Power, Charisma). At first glance, the conflict pools seem very much like other games' core characteristics, being on a scale of usually 8-18, but they have a very distinct function in CE: They don't really tell you how inherently good you are at something (that's for your skills to say), rather, they are a kind of endurance for different kinds of tasks. This is most straightforward with Body, while Intelligence should maybe rather be called Concentration (it's about how long you can try to figure something out before you just have to give up). Power and Charisma might be a little tricky, they're both mainly about self-confidence, though power can pull double-duty as all kinds of mystical energy. I guess Power is basically your "soul energy", while Charisma is more about your composure in difficult social situations.

Basically, Coma Engine is either simply "d100, if you roll under your skill, you succeed. Doubles are extra good/bad", or it's and extended conflict (for combat, shouting matches, picking an especially complex lock under time pressure or scaling a mountain), where one side will sooner or later run out of pool paints. Player characters can push through when they hit zero, continuing the conflict, but at serious consequence - pools under 0 are regenerated much more slowly (in combat, that would be where you go from bruises and exhaustion to pierced organs and broken bones). It's all pretty simple and abstract - I'm not sure whether it feels like an iteration of BRP any more, but I'm also not sure whether it needs to.

As it is right now (Dec 28th 2022), Comae Engine isn't quite finished - there's placeholder text instead of examples, and some elements of the rules feel half-baked. When it comes to weapons and armour, I think the system can't quite decide yet what it wants to be, sticking to the traditional BRP rules. It is made clear that CE, for the moment, is a BETA and will be updated regularly. The core, though, is pretty great and extremely flexible. It's interesting how it finds a clear distinction between the role that characteristics (conflict pools) and skills play mechanically and thereby avoids the "What do we need characteristics for, anyway?" question that often arises in BRP games.

Comae Engine reminds me a little of Chaosium's QuestWorlds; both are focused on opposed conflicts. QuestWorlds extended conflicts feel a little more regimented, while Comae Engine tends to say: "Do what makes sense", for example, when it comes to wo takes damage in a conflict with multiple characters on one or both sides. CE has the advantage of being more immediately compatible with BRP games, and from reading it, it's also a little easier to figure out how things work. I have played neither yet, yo take that assessment with a grain of salt. All in all, I'm really looking forward to the finished CE.

I've been meaning to review this Mythras scenario since I ran I more than a year ago, but somehow, I'm only now getting around to it ... full disclosure: I'm working on a few small, Mythras-related projects with its author Matt Eager, but that's actually only because I've reached out to him after reading and playing the scenario.

I'm not going into details here, but still,

SPOILERS AHEAD

Hessaret's Treasure bills itself a fantasy spaghetti western, but since I'm not that studied in that genre, that didn't tell me much. The core idea is that the characters have to navigate two factions of shady NPCs who both hate and need each other to hunt for the eponymous treasure. As such, I would call the adventure story-focused, not in terms of being a railroad, but in the literal sense of it being focused on the dramatic story elements it brings to the table - the goals of and relationships between the NPCs, how they might interact with the goals of the PCs, and how they might form relationships with them. Both sides need the PCs as go-betweens to keep the other side from just trying to kill them off.

That's the core of it; and consequently, while running the scenario, I mostly referenced the extensive NPC descriptions in the back - that's where the meat of it is. You get four major players here, two on each side, and they're all multi-layered, with strong passions about their friends and foes. I found it easy to find their proper voices in play, because the ground-work laid by the text is rock-solid. The characters could believably side with any or none of them - my players gravitated towards each one of them in turn over the course of the adventure, only to doubt later whether their trust was misplaced.

Don't let yourself be fooled by the adventure being structured in scenes: Especially in the beginning, Hessaret's Treausure reads like it very much wants the characters to follow a particular order of events with a pre-determined outcome. Partly this is to get them into the tight spot between the two rivaling factions - but there's plenty of other possibilities for this to come about, and frankly, even if this central conceit doesn't work out as planned - like the characters getting what they need to go treausure-hunting on their own, or the characters clearly siding with one faction -, the adventure offers all the material you need to just keep playing. Part of Hessaret's Treasure might look like a railroad, but the material is really so encompassing and well-organzied, and it all makes so much sense - which is not at all a given in story-focused scenarios, where twists and turns are often deployed quite unmotivated and at the whim of the author - that, at no point, it would be a problem to go off the rails.

That being said, the central conceit is pretty cool, and it is well worth the effort to get your players to buy into it. As a GM, you'll have to be ready for some intense PC/NPC interaction. With a larger group of PCs, I can imagine that it might be a bit overwhelming to keep track of that - luckily, I ran this scenario with just two other players, which, to me, seems like the ideal number for Hessaret's Treasure. It not only made for intense role-playing, it also meant that the PCs really had to play their cards well to keep both factions at bay, since they wouldn't have been able to overwhelm any side on their own, and maybe not even with the help of the other faction.

Right now, I'm gearing up to revive my Mythras campaign with a sequel to Hessaret's Treasure - Arkannad is still out there and wants revenge, and by now, he has had time to not only catch up with the PCs, but also to get some back-up ...

This is really a great scenario - it's also a good read, but I recommend reminding yourself once in a while that things might go very different then suggested. The whole set-up is full of possibilities that can easily be explored with the material presented.

5 treacherous scoundrels out of 5

By the end of this review, I well tell you that Legacy of Blood for vsD is worth buying - after picking it apart in bloody pieces. Really, I'm positively angry about many things this scenario does, BUT it features a great premise and enough material to actually make it work. This could be a great, complex, atmospheric scenario about falling from grace (and maybe rising again) - instead, author Jonathan Hicks for some reason decided to write LoB as a railroaded mediocre dungeon romp that doesn't make much sense. It's a mystery, and not one of the good kind, but it leaves enough to be salvaged and turned into something beautiful.

What's it about? [SPOILERS from here]

The premise is that after the long and undeserved fall from grace of the noble Leoric family, its current Lady, in her desperation, has secretly allied herself with the Darkmaster and invited his servents into her home. Most good souls have been driven away from her seat at Windown Castle, and a subtle shadow has fallen over her holdings. Her handmaiden Amberly Ash knows all about this and doesn't approve, so she steals a magical key that opens the door to a cache of magical items hidden in Castle Dulgroth, formerly owned by the Leorics, which lies in ruins these days and has been claimed by as lair by the dragon Delveniul. She gives to key to the heroes, imploring them to get the magical items so that they don't fall into the hands of the Darkmasters servants. She knows of a secret way into Castle Dulgroth, through the old family barrows beneath it. Naturally, the servants of the Darkmaster will find out about the stolen key and set out after the characters ...

As an added complication, the Gelbreth family, old rivals of the Leoric, want to get their hands on some of the documents kept in the cache that could stain their good name, and send out an agent.

What's right with it?

We get good write-ups of the central characters - Lady Leoric, her handmaiden Amberly Ash, the two major servants of the Darkmaster living in Windown Castle and a spy of the Gelbreth family. Lady Leoric is a tragic character - her families name has been wrongfully smeared for generations by corrupt kings, her holdings have dwindled, and she finally had enough of it and taken the outstretched hand of the Darkmaster (she's even supposed to get a Theoden moment at the end of the adventure that turns her around). The servants of the Darkmaster, Varus and Eorin Darkelm, who are father and son, are pretty straightforward bad guys, but still get some delightful pieces of characterization that should make them fun to interact with. Amberly Ash is a classical everyday hero who just does the right thing, and Stry Hemborn, the Gelbreth spy, is characterized as a capable adventurer and smart manipulator with few scruples who will try to remain on the good side of the characters as long as he can. This is rich material for interaction.

We also get some introductory mini-adventures along the lines of "clean the ghouls out of the old watchtower" to establish the characters in the area and make them likely candidates to approach for Amberly Ash. These don't go beyond giving out a mission in one or two sentences and providing some adversary stats, but they still make sense in the broader context of the adventure.

Together with the backstory, that makes for the first third of the scenario, and if that sounds appealing to you, I'd say it's worth the price of admission.

What's wrong with it?

Basically, that the rest of the adventure decides against doing anything with the good stuff - more so, if you play it as written, it actually seems to try to keep you away from interacting in any meaningful way with Lady Leoric, the Darkelms and Amberly Ash (beyond her role as the one who sends the characters on their mission).

As written, the characters are supposed to meet Amberly Ash in an inn. How hard would it be to suggest that the characters - after, for example, cleaning out a watchtower full of ghouls - might actually be Lady Leorics guests at Windown Castle, where they could meet the bad guys in person and maybe sniff out that something's wrong about them? It's possible to spin the scenario that way, but there's no guidance for it, and while we get good NPC descriptions to work with, there's next to nothing about Windown Castle itself.

So the adventure presupposses that the characters go relic hunting without ever having met Lady Leoric or the Darkelms (and without worrying about what will happen to Amberly Ash, as well), which is the first big wasted opportunity of the scenario as written, because it robs later encounters with the Darkelms and the likely epilogue with Leoric of a lot of its possible impact.

After that, we get a heavily scripted wilderness chase sequence, in which the GM is told quite explicitly when the heroes are supposed to hold their ground, when they should flee due to overwhelming numbers and when Stry, the Gelbreth spy, shows up to save their asses and endear himself to them with a cooked up story about him being a friend of Amberly's. The dramatic timing of all these events might look excellent on paper, but really, dramatic timing is best left to the GM, because it's highly dependent on what's actually happening at the table. I'm not buying a scenario because I want it to tell me a dramatic story, I'm buying it because I want tools I can use to create a dramatic story together with my players. At the same time, there's very little help provided for running the actual encounters. One of them is heavily dependend on missile combat, so you'd think there'd be some guidance about how far the opposing sides might be apart ... but no. Instead, it is stated that if, at a certain moment, none of the heroes loose an arrow at Eorin Darkelm, Stry will do so and kill him with one shot. Because you know how much players love it when NPCs steal their thunder ...

Oh yeah, did I mention that Eorin Darkelm is following the heroes with a warband of orcs ...? Until now, it looked like the Darkelms operate with human henchman. Them having orcs at Wondown Castle would have certainly been a huge red flag in the implied setting of vsD that might have been mentioned before. And if the orcs are not from Windown Castle, they must have camped somewhere around - but there's no orc camp to be seen on the map of the surroundings. While reading, this was the point where I started to wish that LoB would have just followed the scenario format of the other two vsD adventures, which would have provided just that kind of information.

So after the scripted chase follows a trip through the barrows. Again, there's some nice scenes here, but in the end, the whole sequence lacks coherence and is full of ill-judged ideas. For example, each time the characters disturb a grave or rob a piece of treasure, an undead guard will awaken - but in a room at the very end of the barrows! So the worse the heroes behave on their way through the barrows, the more opponents they'll have to face in the end ... but there's no way for them to know that or find it out. So either the GM rubs their noses in it in the end ("You were very, very bad, and here's your just deserts! Ha!"), or the whole thing is pretty pointless. Also, in terms of trying to guard your graves from graverobbers, it just makes zero sense.

Even worse is the room where, if you rob a piece of treasure, you'll be cursed to not gain any XP as long as you don't get rid of said treasure - and the adventure text explicitly tells the GM not to mention anything and let the players figure it out for themselves. Yeah, that's going to go down well: "You're not getting XP this session." "What, why?" "Go figure!"

These two things actually made me angry (I'm still angry!), because they seems to be written for GMs who feel the need to punish their players for doing "bad things". I hate this. It's not about the actions of the characters having consequences, because for that to be true, the players would have to have at least a slight chance to figure out the consequences of their actions and think them through on an ethical and/or practical level. This is just "You better behave, or you'll see what happens!"

Apart from that, vsD has truly great rules for cursed items that can provide lots of role-playing fun for players as well by giving them new, problematic passions ... why not use them, instead of coming up with a simplistic and mean-spirited punishment for grave-robbing characters and their players? (Actually, LoB seems to be reluctant to engage with the rules of vsD on several occassions.)

And then there's the grand finale that takes place in a vault right under the room where the dragon Delveniul is sleeping. Delveniul remains a purely abstract threat - if she awakes, she will send down a burst of fire, but she won't be able to fit into the corridors to come down to them. Though I shouldn't write if, but when she awakes, because once again, it is a foregone conclusion that she will not wake up while the characters sneak around in the vault beneath her, but that she will wake up as soon as the bad guys catch up with the characters and make a racket. At least, that will leave the characters with some decisions to make about whether to save treasure, magical items or information.

Once again, it feels like LoB is afraid to let the characters interact with the major players while the actual adventure is underway, because that might lead to things going off the rails laid by the author. So you have a dragon, traditionally a monster with personality, a threat that can not only be avoided or defeated, but also negotiated with, and instead of doing something with it, you reduce it to a burst of flame at the showdown.

There's an epilogue to let us know that Amberly Ash has (against all odds, it would seem) survived as a prisoner on Windown Castle, but it is really the first time that it is implied that the characters might care about her fate. Strangely enough, in the next section, that deals with Lady Leoric shedding the influence of the Darkmaster, it is implied that, on the contrary, her handmaiden has died and that she is heartbroken about that. Both these conflicting outcomes are not described as options, but stated as fact. Finally, we get several good suggestions for follow-up adventures, including dealing with Delveniul, who becomes more destructive once plunderers start to venture into the now re-discovered barrows under her castle, and investigating the shady Gelbreth family. While I could well imagine running the former with the material provided, there's next to nothing on the Gelbreth family in LoB, which is quite a shame.

What can be done?

However much I might have written myself into a rage, this doesn't change the fact that LoB offers a great premise and good scenario material, especially when it comes to NPCs. I do want to run this, but certainly not remotely as written. There's so many options that the scenario fails to explore, support or even hint at. For example, it would make so much sense to have the characters actually visit Windown Castle before starting their quest. How would the atmosphere in this shadowed place of former greatness be? Will the heroes figure out that Lady Leoric and the Darkelms serve the Darkmaster, and if they do, how will they react? Will they confront them? Will they pretend to be agents of the Darkmaster themselves? Even if they pick a fight with the Darkelms there and then ( "You, Sir, are scum, and I will call you such!"), there's ample room to still let the treasure hunt unfold after that. And it would make so much more sense for Amberly Ash to approach them if they turn up as guests at Windown Castle.

And a dragon - always a golden opportunity to let the characters negotiate for what they want! They could ask Delveniul to just let them go with the coveted magic items and offer her to bring her the treasures from the barrows instead. They could even ask her to guard the magic items against the Darkmaster (but could she be trusted not to ally with him of he makes her a better offer ...?). There's so much potential here that the adventure seems to actively try to cut off by stating that the dragon will just kill anyone who ist stupid enough to venture further up into the castle. Oh yeah, and I would probably just throw out most of that barrows nonsense ...

What I really don't get: Nothing about LoB calls for that kind of railroaded wilderness/dungeon chase that takes up most of the pages of the written scenario. Quite the contrary - after reading the first 8-10 pages, I was really baffled by what came afterward.

In the end, this one gets 3 out of 5 grumpy dragons for all the good stuff in the first pages that, for some reason, it doesn't want you to use.

This review is from my blog at swanosaurus.blogspot.com

I fear that I might be a little unfair towards this adventure: It is a good one, but I'm reading it right on the heels of "Shadows of the Northern Woods", which is a tough act to follow. Especially since a lot of motives and themes of Dawnfell are reminiscent of SotNW: Again, there's a small village to be saved, free folk who have become estranged from each other and must be brought back together, a magical McGuffin that the bad guys are after and a climatic battle where the outcome depends hugely on how many checkmarks the characters were able to make on their adventurous to-do list in advance. In both adventures, we have spiders in the woods and ancient burial sites hiding treasures and answers. Even some of the NPCs feel like variations on a theme when compared to SotNW (Annis/Beltine, Wulfric/Brynjar, Morcant and his She-Wolf/Urgusk and his Mountain-Lion). It's hard to say if, playing both scenarios back to back in an actual campaign, this would feel like a thematic throughline or rather like "Oh well, another troll with a vicious pet and another problematic thane."

But while SotNW uses its sleepy, rural setting as a springboard to dive deep into the (admittedly vague) mythology of vsD's implied setting, Dawnfell firmly sticks to being an adventure about saving a village from a band of trolls. Which is actually a good thing, because it makes Dawnfell truly self-contained and also thematically more suitable for a group of 1st level characters. As such, one might say that Dawnfell is better at being what it is than SotNW, but it is also a little less impressive.

Going into detail, Dawnfell is again very reminiscent of classic ICE modules in being mainly a collection of NPCs and places that are all connected to a backstory. The enchanted tower bell that has been protecting the village from the nearby troll clans has been stolen, and there's a troll chieftain out for revenge, so the characters are on a ticking clock to bring back the bell and find some allies. The latter is complicated by twenty years of distrust and bull-headedness by the local Thane.

The NPC's and their relationships to each other are well thought out, and I can see this scenario go any number of ways - if the characters fail to mend relations with the elves in the woods, they can still try to strike a deal with the bandits or even with the trolls themselves. The investigative element of the adventure is pretty basic, and the village of Dawnfell can be saved without solving it at all; the characters might very well be able to locate the bell without ever finding out who stole it in the first place, or saving Dawnfell without ever locating the bell.

The final battle of Dawnfell looks pretty good on paper - it is not quite clear how many trolls there are around Dawnfell and how many trolls Urgusk commands, but it can't be many, since he attacks the village with only two others; however, it is easily imaginable that three trolls are a major threat to some village out in the wilds, as well as to a first level party.

Some elements of the scenario don't quite ring true to me, however: For one thing, there's the aged hero Gwendoline, who slew the father of Urgusk the troll chieftain and must now be saved from him ... though if you take a look at Gwendoline's stats, it doesn't really make sense that she would need a lot of saving. My take at Gwendoline would be that, in her battle against Urgusk's father, she has suffered an injury that causes her great pain when she walks, and give her a loving husband who is not a fighter at all, but would do anything to defend her. Thus, it is clear why Gwendoline can't really join the heroes in saving Dawnfell, the heroes actually have two NPCs to save and not one (Gwendoline and her husband), and there's potentially lots of tragic and/or romantic moments to be had, from Urgusk just backhanding Gwendoline's husband out of the way when he goes for her to Gwendoline making a last stand suffering from the agonizing pain caused by her old injury.

A rather minor quibble is that I don't quite buy Urgusk's quirk - he's an art-collector, which is a nice touch, but the adventure does little with it; there's some paintings and statues in his den, but it seems a little far-fetched that he should have been able to obtain those intact, and also, it is of no real relevance to the rest of the adventure. I'd either drop this element or expand it.

All things considered, however, I'm quite happy with Dawnfell - it is a well-designed, self-contained scenario with reasonable stakes for a beginner group and gets a solid 4 out of 5 Darkmasters from me.

(This review was first published on my blog at: swanosaurus.blogspot.com)

Warlock has become my go-to gritty fantasy game ... okay, I've only played two sessions with it as of yet, but I'm pretty sure it will keep its promise of greatness in the long run, too. Like another great recent rpg, Daniel Sell's Troika!, the rules are in the tradition of a venerable series of British solo game books, and if you've ever been to Firetop Mountain or to the City of Thieves, you know what I'm talking about. The setting is inspired by another great classic of British roleplaying, Peacefeather FRP or whatever it was called. So, in terms of rules we get a very simple d20+skill value roll high system, that turns into an d20+skill value opposed check in combat, with the punchline being that whoever roles higher does damage, even if she or he didn't initiate the exchange. That means that on pretty much every exchange, someone takes damage, which makes for fast and furious combat. There's some additional stuff like the person who initiated an attack getting a bonus, but that is pretty much it, and if you think about it a little closer, you'll notice how this already takes care of things like multiple attacks, two-weapons fighting and all of these other things that tend to need spot rules in other systems. Setting-wise, the meat is in the character careers with their short, darkly humorous fluff texts and two mal tables each to roll background events on. It's perfect for just sitting your players down, having them roll up characters and then see where everything goes from there. Magic might take a little getting used to, with spells being actual physical scrolls that a wizard or priest needs at hand to perform them. The pay what you want Grimoire for Warlock expands on the context and also provides some fluff that makes this notion ring more true. Your wizards will have no choice but to go adventuring to get their hands on new spells ... If you need something traditional and rules-lite that covers you for all kinds of more or less gritty low-fantasy and isn't mired in D&D-type levelling, class restricitions, HP creep and "featism", definitely check this one out.

I think Troika! is going to be my favourite minimalist gonzo science fantasy game for a long time, maybe even forever. And by minimalist, I don't mean that there's little here - quite the contrary, the page-count might be relativeley low, but every character concept, every spell, every monster and even item is packed with implicit world-building. You'll have to figure out how it all fits together in your game, and you need to be open to just letting the setting develop in whatever direction it will take. The rules are based on the British Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but much more deadly. The quite random initiative system is strange (you are not guaranteed to get to initiate an action in a turn), but it works because in Troika!, if you attack someone, your opponent always has the chance to hurt you back, so you'll probably get to do something even if your initiative token doesn't come up in a given round. In fact, I'm very happy to get this kind of gonzo material with a system that is not about classes and levels; most of the weird, minimalist goodness always seems to be for Old School Dungeons & Dragons. The Troika! system is much more rules-lite, and, as I feel, much more functional. This is Planescape meets Monty Python, with some dashes of Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett and (I think) K.J. Parker.

There's a fuller review here on my blog: https://swanosaurus.blogspot.com/2020/01/troika.html