A Dark Night is an adventure module specifically designed for the Stara Szkola (“Old School”) version of the Codex Martialis system, i.e. an OSR take for those who want a bit of medieval authentic violence without the need to attend HEMA courses.

A Dark Night is set in and around Erfurt in Thuringia, somewhere the players might reach if they ever make it out of Silesia (the setting for the author’s previous Monsterberg trilogy). The package includes a guide to the city and the settlements and countryside nearby. Erfurt is very civilised but no one can hear you scream in the Thuringerwald. Just as in Silesia there is weird menace afoot in Thuringia. Any magic that might raise its ugly head is detailed in the book.

Being Stara Szkola the adventure is fully laid out for lightweights like me. Look, there’s SIX factions, think you can remember that? The town at the centre of the action has NINE districts, colour coded on the map. The players just have to say the district they want and go there. That’s not too difficult for you to track, is it? If they go into an important building, here’s the floor plan. Let’s lay out the adventure in linear form at the beginning: you can run it in that order, in another order of your choice, or just ignore it altogether. Can’t go wrong.

And its certainly not dumbed down: the factions in play have various members with different personalities and interests that might suddenly become intra-factional competition, rapidly increasing the number of cross-currents if a GM wants to stir the pot.

I won’t say much about the nature of the menace since this is a new adventure. However, the GM can, in any case, just use the setting details and personalities and run A Dark Night as a pure sandbox. It’s all laid out in nicely spaced type, so easily assimilable. All the names are Germanic: anyone who can manage WFRP will be fine here (indeed with a bit of work the adventure could be ported over to The Empire). The whole thing runs to one-hundred-and-four pages.

I’m very glad to have this one for my collection.

Excellent! The rules live up to their tagline, 'D100 Gaming Made Easy.' The result is a smooth play style, unburdened by the snowflakery to which percentile systems so often succumb.

There is a great deal of fun to be had with BB:SS but it does not always succeed in its purpose. BB:SS offers a stripped down version of the D&D engine without a magic system. Magic systems are a notorious cause of rules bloat and are the bane of solo play, which requires mechanical consistency from the rules in order to differentiate gaming from daydreaming. BB:SS's 'sinewy' combat feat system is much more useful. On the other hand this set is hobbled by an unintuitive approach to saving throws: notably the designer himself has abandoned the the BB:SS ST rules in his more recent Blood & Treasure 2nd edn. BB:SS also imposes a cap of sixth level on character advancement; the level cap has been a bugbear of 'basic' rules since Holmes Blue Book. The Armsman, however, is an exceptionally fun version of the Fighter to play. In the end I hacked BB:SS with elements of Blood & Treasure and Bloody Basic: Weird Fantasy - the 'out of the box' experiment failed, but in fruitful fashion.

BTW is two games in one. The headline game emulates a particular genre of low-fantasy fiction by deploying Dungeon World-style playbooks and a collaborative world-building mechanic. Under the bonnet lies a very intelligently house ruled D&D engine (the only real irritation is the old school five saving throw system). The stripped down rules can be hacked into low magic playstyles quite different from the assumed setting. BTW could work for Hyboria or, of all things, Glorantha - the three tier magic system looks a bit like spirit magic, Rune magic, and ritual magic if one squints. Some iPad users may be driven to distraction by Flatland's love of the .zip file.