Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/25/book-review-sail-away-sweet-sister-shadowrun/

Sail Away, Sweet Sister is the latest piece of “enhanced fiction” for Shadowrun. Enhanced Fiction simply means that at the end of the short story you get stats for the characters you just read about and maybe a few brief bits of mechanics. Sail Away, Sweet Sister is actually a direct sequel to a previous piece of enhanced fiction, Another Rainy Night, which was released a little over two years ago. That’s a long stretch between stories that are only two dozen pages in length, so I did find I had to re-read Another Rainy Night to remind myself of everything that happened in the previous tale. It’s worth noting that Sail Away, Sweet Sister can be read as a standalone, but it works FAR better if you read them both back to back. Otherwise you’ll miss some details and nuances that only carry over if you are familiar with both tales. The story is written in such a way that assumes you are familiar with Another Rainy Night which may cause a little bit of confusion in those that pick this up first. You’ll see reference to previous events and players that aren’t explained at all here, but were in Another Rainy Night, so just a head’s up there. Unfortunately, Another Rainy Night still has the $4.99 price tag attached to it. I was happy to see that CGL read my review of Another Rainy Night, because I said the sweet spot for a short piece of fiction like this would be $1.99. Lo and behold, that’s the price tag on Sail Away, Sweet Sister. Now if only they could go back and reduce the price on Another Rainy Night, everything would be awesome.

Sail Away, Sweet Sister also plays off another long untouched Shadowrun plot thread, this time from Storm Front, which closed out Shadowrun, Fourth Edition in April of 2013. In this case, we finally get to hear more about how vampires, ghouls and other “undead” are becoming more photosensitive while also suffering from stronger urges and hunger pains. Like Another Rainy Night, I’m glad to see someone over at CGL finally doing something with these dangling plot threads left over from 4e, but unless you’ve read both Another Rainy Night and Storm Front, you probably had no idea about the changes in the HMHVV community, both physically and socially. So for people to Shadowrun Fifth Edition, you’re probably going to feel out of the loop with this story, especially since it happens smack dab during Fourth Edition dates-wise. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it, just that you’re getting a story that is a few years (in-game and real life) behind the current meta-plot currently featured in Shadowrun.

When we last left Dr. Thomas McAllister and Knight Errant copy Lydia Bowen, they had finally put an end to the Mealtime Killer, a notorious serial killer who had killed roughly two dozen people before it was finally put down. In Sail Away, Sweet Sister, we learn that much like Doink the Clown, there is more than one MTK, perhaps many more. While the first MTK was someone obsessed with Thomas McAllister, the revelation of who the second is hits far closer to home with our main character as it is his sister. We also learn more about the Fear the Dark organization, which appears to be either a vampiric terrorist organization or a group of vampire traditionalists who want a return to the pre-Twilight version of vampires who are the natural predators of meta-humanity, which fears and loathes them. Hey, maybe it’s both! We don’t really get enough details on Fear the Dark, which heavily implies this will be continues in either another short story, supplement or sourcebook. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another two years to get the next part.

We get a lot of new characters with Sail Away, Sweet Sister. There is the enigmatic Minotaur, Jericho and the dwarven vampire Seamus, which really makes me think Patrick Goodman (author of the story) is a big wrestling fan as there seems to be a lot of subtle nods to it in his stories (hence the earlier Doink reference). I liked both characters, especially Seamus as he is a good reminder that not all Sixth World vampires are turning into second rate Vampire: The Masquerade wanna-bes. I also liked his fire elemental sidekick. I have a soft spot for friendly fire elementals as one of my own characters from back in the day had one. You’ll also meet Thomas’ ex-wife and of course, his sister Lenore. The cast is really well done in this book and even characters who only show up for a cup of coffee, like the two Lone Star agents, have very fleshed out personalities. There’s more character development in these twenty-four pages than you see in some gaming-licensed novels, which is impressive.

That’s not to say that the story is flawless. I felt it was a little too paint by numbers in that I’ve read several vampires stories with the same basic plot and resolution. The only difference here was that it involved a Shadowrun setting. I had déjà vu for much of the story, knowing exactly how it was going to go down long before I reached the actual pages confirming what I already suspected. The ending also really falls apart for me as it got really cheesy and flew in the face of the character development we’ve seen in not just this story but Another Rainy Night as well. It wasn’t hackneyed, but it was paint by numbers. I also really didn’t like that the story seems to be setting up Sixth World vampires for becoming VERY White Wolfish, complete with a Beast (or Monster as it is referred to here) that can control a vampire’s action when hurt or hungry. I’m really hoping this was a one-time case of schizophrenia (or some other mental derangement equivalent) brought on by being a vampire rather than have it turn out HMHVV is going to cause sufferers to have a more bestial second personality (or god forbid demon or extraplanar entity possession) as that’s not only stupid, but it takes away a lot of the uniqueness of Shadowrun “undead.” If I want angsty vampires fighting themselves over the eventual erosion of their humanity, I have V:TM or V:TR for that…not to mention that old Shadowrun/cyberware guide for V:TM that was published back in the mid 90s. So overall, I’d say I’m happy we got a continuation of Another Rainy Night but that Sail Away, Sweet Sister is nowhere as good or original a read. I’m hoping this was just ring rust after being away from the characters for so long and that the third installment in the series (if there is one) will be back up to the same level of quality we had in Another Rainy Night.

I should end this review by bringing up the “enhanced fiction” part. You get stat blocks for Thomas, Lydia, Lenore, Karla and Colonel Anne Ravenhurst. You’re also getting Fourth AND Fifth Edition stat blocks for each of the aforementioned characters. The 4e stats for Lydia and Thomas are ripped straight from Another Rainy Night, which is a good thing as it shows continuity. If the stats blocks were wildly different, I’d have to wonder what was up. I’m really glad to see stats for the two latest editions of Shadowrun as is helps ease edition wars and lets fans of each game use the characters without having to do any conversion. We also get two new SR5 positive Qualities, a few new weapons and a page of mechanics on drug called Renfield and how it affects those who take it. All in all, there is something for Shadowrun fans who like the fiction and/or the mechanics, so everyone who picks this up should find something to enjoy here.

So if you’re still with me, here’s what you need to know. Is Sail Away, Sweet Sister as good as Another Rainy Night? No. Should you still pick it up? Absolutely. While the story isn’t as good, it is still a fun read and even with the flaws I talked about earlier, you’ll end the tale wanting to know what happens next. That’s a good sign. It’s also a LOT cheaper than Another Rainy Night. The mechanics are well thought out and if that’s all you want from one of these releases, Sail Away, Sweet Sister is definitely the better choice, although Another Rainy Night DOES have some neat vampire hunting ammo. While not great literature by any means, Sail Away, Sweet Sister is entertaining and gives Sixth World fans the continuation of the story they have been waiting over two years for. The price point is perfect too, as even if you don’t like the story, it will only set you back two bucks. Again, let’s hope we don’t have to wait another two years for another installment of the continuing adventures of Thomas McAllister or a year for another slight update on the changes to HMHVV sufferers in the Sixth World.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/24/tabletop-review-dungeon-crawl-classics-82-bride-of-the-black-manse/

As a big fan of Dungeon Crawl Classics, I love it when Goodman Games gives us an adventure that is actually two in one. Similar to the Free RPG Day 2012, The 13th Skull, and a few other adventures, you’re actually getting two adventures in this release for the price of one. How can you not love that? The first is Bride of the Black Manse, as you could surmise from the title. The second is Blood For the Serpent King. Black Manse takes up the majority of the booklet, with Blood For the Serpent King taking up the last eight. Both adventures come with fantastic art, maps by Doug Kovacs (The best in the industry) and are fully fleshed out so that gamers will really get their money’s worth. Of course with two DCC adventures, it just means more opportunities for PCs to die horribly. Let’s take a look at each adventure in this piece.

Bride of the Black Manse is designed for four to eight 3rd Level Characters, and the party should include one priest and one thief. Unlike most Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures which are heavy on well, dungeon crawling and light on nuanced in-depth story-telling, Bride of the Black Manse is sort of the mirror opposite. It is primarily story-telling and mystery solving, while being very light on the combat. Don’t worry hack and slash fans, there is combat, and even though it is sparse, expect to see at least one PC eviscerated. Hey, this is Dungeon Crawl Classics after all. You play this game expecting characters to have a short life span, Call of Cthulhu style. Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, Bride of the Black Manse at times feels more like an adventure for that setting due to the amount of talking, discovery and otherworldly horror involved. Now if you’re a DCC fan that wants more roll-playing than role-playing, Bride of the Black Manse is probably not for you For everyone else though, you’ve got a great adventure that should appeal to longtime fans of the system., while also appealing to those who have eschewed DCC for being too combat heavy.

It’s also worth noting that Bride of the Black Manse is designed to be played in a single four hour session. This makes the adventure a fun one shot as well as a great choice to run at a convention. However the time constraint does mean that players have no chance of running through the entire Manse. Huge portions will be left undiscovered. This is okay. It’s part of the adventure. Some GMs may want to ignore that the adventure was designed for a single four hour session and let players go hog wild, exploring every nook and cranny. Whether that actually adds or detracts from the overall experience will depending on the GM and their troupe’s playing style, so mileage may vary. My suggestion is to play the adventure as is first. We’ll see why below.

So what is Bride of the Black Manse about? Well, it’s a tale about the fall of House Liis and how one person offered their soul to the devil Mammon in exchange for unholy power and the chance to rule. Well, they got their wish and like any good weasely antagonist, they found a way to protect their soul from Mammon’s clutches even if they couldn’t outright void the contract. Still, if there is one thing an immortal being has, it is time and so Mammon has waited many years to claim his prize and on the anniversary of the original deal being struck and the last of the wards losing their power, the PCs enter the picture. It’s up to the GM as to WHY the players have gone to the Manse, but that’s not too hard. The key thing is getting them there. Once inside the Manse, players discover they are all either reincarnations of members of House Liis or that the ghosts of Liis family members each chooses a PC as their champion. This is a key part of the adventure, so if you are the GM, make sure you know which path you are going to choose and which House Liis member corresponds to which character. Not keeping close track of this subtle but highly important detail can destroy the adventure.

Once the characters are inside the Manse, they must unravel its mysteries, deal with the plethora of evil spirits that dwell within and so much more. Of chief importance is keeping track of the time. The adventure begins at 9pm as the players enter the Manse and discover what they are in for. From the tolling of the first bell, the adventure then begins to unfold IN REAL TIME, which is why I mentioned you should play the adventure as written. An hour into the adventure it will be 10pm and the bell well toll once more. When this happens, the Manse will change in certain ways. This is also true when the bell tolls 11 and 12. Midnight is of course when the devil himself comes for his due. This gives players one last hour to solve the mystery of the Black Manse. Running the adventure in real time, really gives Bride of the Black Manse a unique feel as players will be scrambling rather than slowly inching their way through a dungeon. Having to rush through the Manse means things will be overlooked or missed as PCs have to make some tough choices. Some players won’t like being forced to play in real time as they are used to spending minutes agonizing over actions that would take seconds. Others will love the feel of the adventure and be quickly able to adapt. Again, it’s all in who you have at your table.

Bride of the Black Manse is simply an incredible adventure from beginning to end. I loved the creepy atmosphere, the mystery to be solved and the overall feel of the adventure. There’s nothing quite like Bride of the Black Manse and it’s worth picking up for any fantasy RPG, be it Dungeons & Dragons or one of its many retro clones. It’s the best horror adventure of 2014 so if you like pieces reminiscent of Ravenloft, you should stop reading this review right now and download/order this. Of course we still have another adventure to go in this twofer, so let’s start looking at it now.

Blood for the Serpent King is a more traditional adventure, designed for six to eight 2nd Level characters. It is a quasi-sequel to both DCC #16 Curse of the Emerald CobraThe Known Realms. You don’t see a lot of sequel adventures for DCC, so that makes this one special in its own right. It is worth noting that knowledge and/or experience with the two aforementioned adventures are not necessary. It’s more an Easter Egg or sly nod than anything else.

Blood for the Serpent King is a pretty straightforward affair. A group of serpent-men are looking to make a sacrifice on a very (un)holy night which will revive the Emerald Cobra himself, Xiuhcoatl. At the same time, the PCs wander in. There is no real setup for the adventure save for “Hey, ancient crypt! Let’s check it out.” Some GMs will want to put more of a story behind the reason why the PCs are tomb robbing while some know greed and looting are the only motivations their PCs need. Once at the crypt, players will have a straight up dungeon crawl. There are seven locations, each with their own encounter designed to whittle down PC hit point totals, if not outright murder them dead. You have your final climatic encounter with Xiuhcoatl, and that’s it folks. As I’ve said this is a pretty paint by numbers adventure, ESPECIALLY compared to Bride of the Black Manse, but that doesn’t mean Blood for the Serpent King isn’t a fun short little one shot for DCC fans. It’s a more traditional hack and slash affair and it makes a fine juxtaposition to the many mysteries of Bride of the Black Manse. Would I purchase Blood for the Serpent King on its own? No, I wouldn’t. Is it a great extra to have bundled in with the feature presentation? Definitely!

I absolutely loved this adventure set and it continues the trend Dungeon Crawl Classics has had this year of just putting out top notch outside the box pieces. With each adventure release in 2014 I wonder how Dungeon Crawl Classics is going to top itself…and then it does. Goodman Games is really on fire this year and like Intrigue at the Court of Chaos and The One Who Watches From Below, I can’t recommend Bride of the Black Manse enough. Even if you’ve never played DCC before, you should pick up all three adventures because they are so good you’ll want to pick up the core rulebook immediately afterwards and start converting your friends to the game. So far, 2014 has shaped up to be the year of Dungeon Crawl Classics and I’ve yet to see anything come close to touching it. Again, with three straight adventures that have blown me away, there has never been a better time to get into Dungeon Crawl Classics – so get started already!

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/21/tabletop-review-call-of-catthulhu-deluxe-book-1-the-nekonomicon/

Back in September of 2013, I reviewed an awesome rules-lite game entitled Call of Catthulhu.It was an adorable game about house cats being the last stand against the Great Old Ones. You played as a cat and you dealt with fun parodies of Lovecraftian lore. In the back of the book was the promise of a Kickstarter campaign for a deluxe version of the game. Well, the Kickstarter ran from October 30th, 2013 through December 2nd, 2013 and was highly successful, netting a little over $41K from 783 backers. The project ballooned to multiple books, a boxed set, miniatures and more. A few days ago, the first book for Call of Catthulhu Deluxe, The Nekonomicon, was released in PDF form (we’re still waiting for physical copies) with the promise of the next two books (Unaussprechlichen Katzen and Whirls of Catthulhu) to be released in May and June. So how does The Nekonomicon fare? Is it worth delving into the new version of Call of Catthulhu, or should you stick with the much cheaper basic edition of the game? Let’s take a look!

The Nekonomicon is essentially the Player’s Handbook for Call of Catthulhu Deluxe. Unlike the basic game, which has a little bit of everything to allow you to play, this first book focuses specifically on PC creation and the core rules. Playing Call of Catthulhu is quite easy. You just get a bunch of six sided dice and roll them when the rules and/or GM feels it is necessary. A 1 or 2 is a failure and a 3-6 is a success. An Easy challenge needs one success with two dice being rolled. A Normal challenge needs one success with a single die rolled. A Difficult challenge needs two successes on two dice. Pretty cut and dry, right? If you fail a roll, you can cash in a Treat (each player starts with one at the beginning of the game and can earn more through good roleplaying) to roll again. So don’t worry about volumes of rules and all sorts of mechanics. I just summed up the core rules for you in a few sentences. The game is really easy to learn and a lot of fun to play as long as you have a group that has a whimsical sense of humor.

Making a character is pretty easy too. You have five classes for your cat to choose from: Catcrobat, Pussyfoot, Scrapper, Tiger Dreamer and Twofootologist. Your choice of roles determines which tasks are easy ones for you. There are no stats or attributes. You pick your role and this is the only part of your character that really determines mechanics later on in the game. The rest of the character is all based on roleplaying. What type of cat are you? What color is your fur? Is your cat a feral, house cat or show cat? What breed is it? What colour are the cat’s eyes? What is its personality? This is all fairly standard stuff. As I’ve said, Call of Catthulhu is very rules light. It’s a game for role-playing and storytelling. The game also gives you thirty possible character backgrounds to help you flesh out your character if you choose. You look at your axis of roles and lifestyle and the cross reference gives you an option or two. This is completely optional, but a great way for newer or younger gamers to get the hang of a game where the dice see little use except in dramatic moments.

There’s a lot of adorableness in this game, from the custom cat dice you get for it down to the fact the GM is called the Cat Herder. However, this is a game with Lovecraftian tones, so injury and death of your kitty can occur. To prevent this, make sure you are a good die roller, have plenty of treats and always send out the right cat for the job (RCFTJ) to make successes more likely. After all, if you have a daring feat of dexterity that needs to be accomplished, you want to send the Catcrobat instead of the Scrapper or Tiger Dreamer. Dire Challenges preset the opportunity for injury or death, and there is always the Blaze of Glory option that means your cat will die (but also succeed) in an attempt.

It’s worth noting here that cats get three strikes and the cat is out. One sad cat face on a Dire Challenge is injury, two is disabled and three is dying. So be careful with your kitty. After all, no one wants to see his or her beloved puss hurt or worse. Now, the game does have a “Nine Lives” rule, where cats can pull off a chance to survive their would-be demise, but each brush with death requires a notably harder roll to survive. As you might imagine, the maximum times a cat can do this is eight, for a total of “nine lives” the cat has lived. This is a nice touch that lets people get some more rolling in while also holding true to cat folklore.

The Deluxe version of the game offers some new rules. There are two optional rules where Snake Eyes equals an embarrassing failure and double sixes gives the cat an extraordinary success. Of course, this means only easy or hard challenges can have something go really well or astoundingly bad. There are also new contested challenge rules (usually used for fights). There are also a few advanced combat rules for multiple cats in a fight, surprise attacks and grappling. Yes, cats do grapple. Our kitten wraps herself around our elderly cat as if she was Dean Malenko, so it was great to see holding actions as an option in the new rules. There are also Rules of Paw for better role-playing, such as characters only being able to use sounds (not words) when they are out of visual range from one another, or cats only being able to carry one thing at a time and leave scents on up to three objects before the oldest one disappears.

The Nekonomicon ends with a few DM notes, such as good times to ask for die rolls and a reminder of how stupid the hairless two footed ones are when it comes to understanding the eloquence of their kitty superiors. There’s also a note that cat PCs gain Experiences rather than Experience Points. Experiences are simply bits of knowledge and reminders of what a cat now knows about the true horrors that lie between the thin veneer we think of as reality.

Overall, Call of Catthulhu Deluxe is off to a great start with The Nekonomicon. As the other books start to come out you’ll get information on Mythos creatures, other animals (some of which can even be PCs) and other settings for Call of Catthulhu, like high fantasy and superhero gaming. If you don’t already have the basic version of Call of Catthulhu, you should definitely pick it up in tandem with The Nekonomicon, as it does have things that the first book are missing, like more background on the default setting and Kitty Lovecraftia. Of course, all of those things are coming in May’s Unaussprechlichen Katzen, so if you’d rather just get Call of Catthulhu Deluxe releases, you won’t have that long of a wait. Whatever way you choose to go, Call of Catthulhu is a fantastically fun (and funny) rules-lite RPG which gamers of all skill levels can enjoy. What little mechanics are in the game are solid and easy to understand, and the roleplaying opportunities in this one are limitless. I’m really looking forward to the subsequent releases and being able to use the miniatures of our pets I got in the Kickstarter (two cats and a rabbit) in a game once the boxed set has finally made its way to my home. Hopefully Malice, Shelly and Baby will fare better than many of the Investigators I have had in a Call of Cthulhu game!

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/18/tabletop-review-advanced-sorcery-basic-roleplayingmagic-world/

Advanced Sorcery is the first sourcebook for Magic World, which is a remake and update of previous Chaosium fantasy releases like Elric, Runequest and Melniboné. This means some parts of both Advanced Sorcery and Magic World are roughly thirty years old while others are seeing light for the first time. Why did Chaosium do this instead of just re-releasing the original games in a new edition? Well there are lots of reasons from the cost of licenses to a decision to just combine all the fantasy releases into a new overarching banner. If you really want the original games, you can pick up old Elric and Stormbringer releases on the secondary market or pick up Mongoose publishing new version of Runequest. For those that still want to stick with Chaosium’s new releases, you have Magic World.

Although Magic World came out in early 2013, Advanced Sorcery is the first (and only) new release for it. This isn’t a bad thing as Magic World contains everything you need to play the game in its single core rulebook and too many games put out a steady stream of unnecessary supplements that bog the core product down. Quality, not quantity is king with a system and the core rulebook for Magic World proved just that. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing for Advanced Sorcery. It just did nothing for me adding too many new optional rules variants that aren’t as good as those in the core release. It also doesn’t help that the first new release for Magic World is so laden with new and different rules that it feels like Advanced Sorcery is saying “Magic World isn’t very good. Use this instead!” I personally don’t feel that is true, but when your first sourcebook wants to reinvent the wheel, it gives off that sort of negative impression. It’s also worth noting that Advanced Sorcery feels like it belongs to a completely different system/setting rather than something that compliments Magic World. The spell systems, mechanics and terminology are so wildly different that the two books feel like they were competing ideas and Chaosium published them both instead of making a firm decision on which to go with. Again, I doubt that is the actual reasoning behind it but rather a good example of what happens when you try to put thirty years of rules and edition changes into a new unified product. D&D Next felt this way too in the early stages, which is fine for alpha and playtesting purposes, but definitely not for a final product. A truly great example of this is that in both books, certain monsters are repeated, but with completely different sets of stat blocks and descriptions. Why would they be that different from core rulebook to sourcebook? Again, the end result is that Advanced Sorcery feels like its own beast or a separate Basic Roleplaying supplement rather than a product for Magic World.

At the end of the day, I just didn’t care for Advanced Sorcery at all and feel a Magic World game is better off without it. That said, my opinion and tastes are those of one man and not the be all and end all of the industry. Advanced Sorcery certainly has some intriguing ideas and some gamers will no doubt really enjoy the contents betwixt its covers. As we look through each of the eight chapters in Advanced Sorcery, perhaps you will find something more to your liking that it was to mine.

The first chapter is “Advanced Sorcery.” I know it’s always weird/awkward when a chapter shares the same name as the book’s title, but hey, that’s not my call. This is simply a list of new spells to use with Magic World. All of them are pretty interesting and well done, although many like Phantom Illness, Create Monster and Domination are Shadow oriented. Shadow was a lot more powerful than Light or Balance in the core Magic World game and these spells only increase that. Still, this is what much of Advanced Sorcery should have been – just a lot of well-designed spells that don’t require any new mechanics to use. 1 for 1.

Next up is “Deep Magic.” This is a new system of magic than can be used as an alternative to the core Magic World rules. This version of magic involved eight spheres of influence (Earth, Flora, Fauna, Water, Spirit, Fire, Flesh and Air) and then eight Glyphs of Power (Inhibition, Diminution, Summoning, Creation, Direction, Enhancement, Dismissal and Transmutation). You then end up having a mix and match of the two categories in order to cast spells. The rulkes for Deep Magic and nebulous, cumbersome and completely unintuitive, especially compared to the original BRP and/or Magic World rules. It’s also hilarious to note that part of casting the spells involves creating a personalized wheel of Spheres and a wheel of Glyphs. Each player picks on Glyph and one Sphere that they specialize in, which makes them much easier to cast. Everything else is more expensive based on the position on the characters wheel. However, the actual pictures of the wheels don’t always show up in the PDF version. I’ve tried it on different devices (Kindle Fire, laptop, desktop, iOS devices) and the wheels seem to only show up half the time. This is only true of this one picture in the entire book. Everything else shows up fine, so I’m wondering if it is a layering issue with the PDF. This is terrible beyond description because you can’t make Deep Magic work without it! When you can get the wheels to show up, they’re pretty bad in design anyway. The opposite of Water is Air rather than Fire for example. WHAT? The opposite of Flesh (man) is Fauna (animal)? Shouldn’t those be more closely aligned. Air is almost the opposite of Fauna too, because animals sure don’t need air. Oh dear god, this is bad. No, Deep Magic is pretty terrible in all respect and you are better off pretending it doesn’t exist. A bad idea with even worse follow through. 1 for 2.

Our third chapter is “The Summoner’s Art” and it revolves around summoning magic. Again, this is an alternative form of summoning magic that can take the place of the version in the core Magic World rulebook. Again, why introduce an entirely new way of doing something when your system is (technically) only a year old and this is your first supplement. This is just a bad business and system decision in every respect. This chapter is a little too rules heavy when it comes to summoning, and most gamers will instantly prefer the core rulebook version. “The Summoner’s Art” is pretty much for people who prefer roll-playing to role-playing and want far more mechanics than they actually need. It’s not all that bad though as the section does give you a lot of information on crafting demons as antagonists or NPCs and you are given a ton of powers to help flesh one out. The section also talks about elementals in addition to demons. While better than “Deep Magic,” “The Summoner’s Art,” just feels thrown in for the sake of padding the book out. The demon and elemental bits are nice, but the new alternative magic rules are just unnecessary. Still, two out of three aren’t bad so I’ll give this a point in the yay column. 2 for 3.

“Necromancy” is the fourth chapter in the book and this is another section littered with so many issues, I can’t believe it made it to print. This is the section where we see all monsters with stat blocks and descriptions that don’t match up with the core Magic World book. You would think there would be some sort of continuity between the two books, especially as they are the only two Magic World releases right now, but no. I’m not even sure why they reprinted so many of the same monsters. Those are pages that could have gone to new and/or different content. Anyway, the section of Necromancy is pretty bad. Of course, nothing really lives up to The Complete Book of Necromancers for Second Edition AD&D, which everyone should read even if they don’t play that version of D&D because it is THAT GOOD. This version of Necromancy is just terrible designed. The chapter starts off talking about how all necromancers are evil or power hungry and how each spell cast from this category ties you to the Shadow alignment. Then it gives you happy Light oriented spells like Spirit Shield and Exorcism. This just feels terribly done from beginning to end and is up there with “Deep Magic” as sections that really needed to make it through a more stringent vetting and/or editing process. 2 for 4.

Chapter Five is “Rune Magic.” This is another optional form of magic. Like “Deep Magic” and “The Summoner’s Art,” the rules for this Balance oriented magic are poorly devised. The rules are very vague and sparse, which means gamers are going to interpret them very differently and thus this will cause both confusion and consternation amongst Magic World players. Thankfully though Rune Magic is primary both defensive and touch based which should give people a common ground to work with. It’s not like a runecaster will be whipping runes at a demon or troll in any campaign. Still, this section really needed a lot of work before it saw print, which is sadly true of a lot of Advanced Sorcery. Some great ideas, but the end result just isn’t very playable. 2 for 5.

“Arete” is Chapter Six, and although you might start thinking of Mage: The Ascension with this one, the Arete in this game has nothing in common with the stat/play mechanic from White Wolf’s magic oriented game. This section focuses on what happened when a Magic World character gets more than 100% in a skill. Each skill gets a different ability. Brawl with a 101% or better gets an extra 1d3 to damage while a Swim with over 100% lets you move twice as fast. The rules and benefits are a little more complicated than this, but it’s a great idea well worth implementing. Of course it’s rare a character will ever reach this level with a skill, but it’s great to see someone thought this out. It’s definitely the highlight of the book and well worth spreading to other games that use the BRP system. 3 for 6

Our penultimate chapter in Advanced Sorcery is “Herbalism.” It’s a short chapter (five pages) that gives us ten plants that can be used to make potions and require no magical skill whatsoever to produce. It’s nicely done and can let even non-magical characters like warriors and rogues act as a healer for the party. 4 for 7.

The final chapter in the book is “Fey Magic for the Southern Realms.” Once again, we get a new type of alternate magic that can be used instead of or in tandem with the core Magic World rules set. Again, the rules for this new type of magic just aren’t as intuitive as the core rules and by introducing five new optional forms of magic, a less experienced or younger game is going to end up confused and/or overwhelmed here. God forbid some Keeper actually tries to implement all of these rules in a single game or you get a group of players that each wants a different bit in the game. This is just a pretty big train wreck across the board. Anyway, Fey Magic is the easiest to implement of the five as it’s essentially the same rules for Sorcery in the core rulebook, but characters spend POW instead of Magic Points. Why? Who knows! It’s completely arbitrary! There’s no reason why these spells need their own slightly different rules. Just put them under Sorcery spells with their specific caveats. I just can’t fathom the thought process behind much of this book and how multiple people thought it was a good idea to present all of this in the manner it saw print. 4 for 8.

If you’ve made it this far you can see that Advanced Sorcery needed a LOT of work before it was released to the general public for purchase. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and we have what we have. This will no doubt be a disappointment to Magic World fans who have waited a year for some kind of follow up release to the system/setting. At least the book isn’t a total loss as there are some part of Advanced Sorcery well worth reading and adding to your Magic World campaign. This is not a book I can personally recommend though, especially with its current price tags. I’d let it drop below ten dollars for the PDF version before considering picking this up and I can’t imagine ever being able to recommend the physical copy as only half the book is worth looking at, especially since it’s nearly twice as much to get. Some gamers might find the book for useful than me, and more power to them, but right now, the kindest thing about Advanced Sorcery that I can say is that there are some decent pieces to be had amidst the really terrible unfinished bits.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/18/tabletop-review-magic-world-basic-roleplaying/

Magic World is over a year old, but we’re just reviewing it now as it got a soft re-release on DriveThruRPG.com, which provided me with a review copy. I’m not sure why we didn’t get a review copy when it was originally released in early 2013, but I’m sure we got the review copy now since they also sent us a review copy of the first sourcebook for Magic World, Advanced Sorcery at the same time. You can’t review the sourcebook without knowing the core rules, am I right? Well, better late than never as Magic World is a fine alternative to other fantasy RPGs like Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons and what have you. In fact, the core of Magic World is actually older than a lot of current fantasy RPGs. Magic World has essentially taken the rules and themes from many of the fantasy RPGs it no longer publishes like Elric, Stormbringer, RuneQuest and their respective supplements and merged them into a single cohesive package, not unlike Constructicons forming Devestator. The end result is a game that is somewhat new, somewhat familiar, and completely free of the costly licenses Chaosium would need in order to reprint the originals. Don’t think that Magic World is a complete reprint though, as new pieces have been added and some rules and/or wording have been reworked.

It’s important to note right off that bat that Magic World is its own stand-alone game. Unlike a lot of other Basic Roleplaying titles which require the system’s core rulebook in order to be used, Magic World has all the rules you need to play it tucked into its 276 pages. So there is no need to purchase anything but this one core rulebook in order to play the game. If you do already own Basic Roleplaying or other games that use nearly the same system (Like Call of Cthulhu), you will find that magic is done and wielded VERY differently. Keep that in mind lest you suffer a bit of culture shock.

For the most part, character creation is similar to that of BRP of CoC. Skills are different. You won’t have Mechanical Engineering or Physics as options. You will however, have potions, physic (healing), trap and scribe. Skills are also rearranged from alphabetical order into five major categories: Physical, Communication, Knowledge, Manipulation and Perception. Sanity and Know stats are replaced by Effort, Charisma, Stamina and Agility (all attribute x5 pieces). Occupations are also changes, to better fit a high fantasy setting rather than 1920s real world occupations or the like. You’ll also find something called “Allegiance.” Throughout your characters life they will gain (and/or lose) Allegiance points to Balance, Light and Shadow. Think of this as the alignment system for Magic World. Evil acts net you Shadow Points, Good acts net you light and thinking of nature and other life forms can net you Balance. Have an overwhelming amount of Allegiance points in one category rather than the others and you’ll get some in-game bonuses. This bonus increases if you ever hit 100. Shadow bonuses are a lot more powerful similar to Dark Force over Light Force points in the old d6 Star Wars game, which shows evil is an easier path to take.

The game system is very similar to BRP as well. You basically role percentile dice (d100) to see if you succeed or fail. There are critical and special successes if you roll especially well and fumble rolls if you roll poorly. The resistance chart is the same as it has always been. You earn experience in skills and attributes rather than in levels, which is how BRP games have always worked. So on and so forth. What’s different? Well, Magic primarily. You can’t cast magic unless you have a POW of 16 or higher. Compared that to other games where your POW score only means your potential and/or skill with magic. Look at Call of Cthulhu for example. You could have a POW of 13 there and be a damn good spellcaster. In Magic World, you don’t even have the ability to cast the simplest spell in the game. Again, this will take some time to get used to unless you’re an Elric vet. You’ll also find Magic Points regenerate fully in a 24 hour period. This means magic is a lot more powerful than in many other BRP settings. Compare that to Hit Points which regenerate at a speed of 1d3 a week. Magic is definitely king in Magic World. I should end this section on magic by saying anyone with a POW of 16 of greater starts the game with three spells. Those who take the occupation of Sorcerer during character creation get INT/2 spells. Priest, Shamans and Cultists get 1d6+3 spells.

As you can imagine, since Magic World is a more combat oriented game than other versions of BRP, there is a massive section on combat. This is the deepest and most detailed version of combat I’ve ever seen for a BRP game. Inside the combat section you’ll discover all sorts of grisly wounds that can befall both your character and its opponents, rules for ranged and mounted combat, how armor works, what a siege engine can do and so much more. This is probably the chapter you’ll want to spend the most time with, even if you are a longtime Basic Roleplaying fan, just due to all the options and changes that combat sees in Magic World.

Besides huge sections on both combat and magic, there is an entire chapter devoted just to seafaring. I was not expecting this to be honest as this is a topic usually reserved for supplements, if it even gets covered at all. Not so with Magic World. Here you get twenty full pages on ship stats, sample boats, how to make your own seafaring craft and lots of mechanics. Swimming in armor is here and well worth taking a look at. Most fantasy games seem to ignore how hard it actually would be to swim while wearing full plate.

What else will you find in Magic World? There’s a pretty thorough Bestiary ranging from real world animals to monstrous opponents. There’s a chapter for DMs on how to run a Magic World game, which also gives some magical artifacts and clockwork creature options. There’s also a long section on “The Southern Lands,” which is the default location for a Magic World game to take place on. It’s an interesting, if someone generic location with warring fantasy races, intrigue amongst Houses and lots of information on the Fey. The Southern Lands chapter also included story and campaign seeds that a GM can use to create their own adventures. Of course, if you’re looking for full-fledged published adventures, we’re more than a year into the existence of Magic World and none exist yet. In fact there is only the Advanced Sorcery supplement which just came out. This is because Chaosium is pretty wrapped up with Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and the Horror on the Orient Express remake. It is what it is. Magic World early purchasers may be a bit disappointed to see the game getting the short end of the stick, but take heart! One supplement is just the start and if you are really wanting more content for the game, just pick up some Runequest, Legend or Elric releases. They are mostly compatible and will serve you well. The key is just taking the time to track some down.

Overall, Magic World is a really well done release. It’s great to have some sort of Elric/Stormbringer remake available to the general public. The Basic Roleplay rules and system are exceptionally easy to learn and remain one of the best overall systems ever devised for tabletop gaming. Magic World is a great alternative to other high fantasy games and I know I’d play this over Pathfinder in a heartbeat. If you’re looking for a new fantasy style game to enjoy, definitely consider Magic World. It’s a year old, but many people are getting to hear about it for the first time with its release on DriveThruRPG.com. Better to pick up a high quality game late, rather than never, yes?

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/17/tabletop-review-astounding-adventures-basic-roleplaying/

Usually I review stuff right when it comes out, but Astounding Adventures has been out for almost a year now. I didn’t get a review copy when it first was released, but I DID get one about a week ago when Chaosium ported Astounding Adventures over to Drivethrurpg.com. Better late than never, I guess, ESPECIALLY since I have wanted to take a look at this BRP supplement for some time. Thankfully April’s been a real lull in terms of interesting releases, so I can cover this one in a timely manner for its DriveThruRPG.com debut.

Astounding Adventures IS a supplement for Basic Roleplaying, so you’ll need to core rulebook to make proper use of that. That said, because BRP and Call of Cthulhu are about 95% the same, you can probably get away with owning the core rulebook for that game and the two will work together almost seamlessly. This is true not only because of the rules, but because both use the CoC sanity statistic and because the time periods are very similar (CoC is generally set in the 1920s while Astounding Adventures takes place in the 1930s). The general difference between CoC and AA is that Call of Cthulhu has you dealing the machination of Lovecraftia based antagonists while Astounding Adventures lets you encounter those as well as any other pulp based villainy from that era. As such, you can’t go wrong with owning either Call of Cthulhu or Basic Roleplaying to make use of this supplement, but you DO need one or the other.

Astounding Adventures is a tribute/homage to the old pulp magazines of the 1930s. Weird Tales. Amazing Stories. Dime Detective. You’ve heard the names even if you haven’t read them. The emphasis is on action packed adventures where heroes are chiseled, brave and true and villains are as strange as they are evil (also usually foreign to American soil). Characters are a bit more two-dimensional than in other forms of literature, and things tend to be pretty black or white on the morality scale. Astounding Adventures also takes after the cinematic version of pulp. Do you remember those serials you sometimes saw on TV or before a shorter episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000? Well, the game lets you replicate those as well by having cliffhangers and a constant rise of action. As an aside, doing a pulp cinema style campaign also lets you play the game in short regular bursts instead of the usual long 4-8 hour sessions tabletop RPGs are known for. Play for two hours, end the session on a “same bat-time, same bat-channel” note and it will be a very different feel that the general gaming stereotype.

One of the great things about Astounding Adventures is that you can do any form of pulp with it. Want to run a campaign where you fight robot Nazis? You can! Want to deal with a cabal of Chinese sorcerers? You can! Want to deal with Lovecraftian beasties or play heroes like The Phantom or The Shadow? You can! Want to mix them all together? You can! All of these possibilities are thought of and discussed within the Astounding Adventures supplement. It might sound weird to do a pulp mash-up but remember, Defenders of the Earth was based on such a concept and it was a successful cartoon for a few years.

It’s also worth mentioning that all the narratives in Astounding Adventures use the same three characters and the core antagonist. So over the course of the book as you learn things like mechanics, character creation and the rest, you’ll thrill to the exploits of Rex Stone and his pilot Dottie Blaze as they seek an ancient Egyptian treasure. This is very well done and it’s rare you see an entire book stick with the same in-game narrative from beginning to end. Just a nice touch that deserves mentioning.

Much of Astounding Adventures is a condensed version of Basic Roleplaying. You’re given the slightly different character creation system for this game, a list of powers and resources (characters get one or the other), a tone of information about the pulp era, tips for the Keeper on how to run a Pulp game and how it should stand out from other tabletop settings, and a ton of equipment and potential enemies. You’re even give a random adventure generator which is quite amusing to fiddle with. I wouldn’t recommend using it for all your Astounding Adventures games, but who knows – rolling a few dice and checking the results might get your imagination flowing.

There are also three premade adventures to read and/or use. Each of the adventures looks at a different version of pulp. They don’t really string together well because of the different tone and atmosphere in each adventure, but they all make great one-shots that a Keeper can use to test the waters with. “The Perils of Sumatra!” have characters in a race against time AND the Third Reich to find the Staff of Lost Souls. This wielder of this powerful artifact can unleash overwhelming fear upon its enemies…or they might go stark raving mad. It depends. Either way, such an item is too powerful to let the Ratzis get their mitts on it, right? So it’s up to the PCs to deal with enemies, traps and an ancient mummy – all to keep the world safe from Hitler!

“The Dynamo of Doom” is less “Indiana Jones” and more in line with the sci-fi pulp pieces of the era. Here a mad scientist plans to hold a town hostage with his Telecution Helmet. Thanks to a case of mistaken identity the PCs are made aware of this threat. Can they stop the Doll Faced Man and his Metal Men in time? This is a pretty straightforward adventure but it captures the feel of those old pulp serials nicely. The final adventure is “The God of the Airwaves” and this is a Weird Tales style piece that should make Call of Cthulhu fans happy. It’s the Golden Age of radio and no show is more popular in the locale where the PCs reside than “The Night Watchman.” Unfortunately the show turns old to be a way for a cultist to brainwash listeners AND help summon an ancient and nearly forgotten deity into our plane of existence. Can the PCs stop the cultist or will they be overwhelmed by the dark forces plaguing their fair city?

Across the board, Astounding Adventures is simply fantastic. I’m actually surprised this hasn’t been done before for BRP, but I’m glad it exists now. This is a fine supplement to your CoC or BRP game (or just the mechanics) and Astounding Adventures is as much fun to read as it is to play. Going digital might be your best bet since it costs half as much as a print copy. The book is well laid out, easy to follow, concise and contains everything you need to play a pulp based BRP game except the core BRP rules themselves. If you’re a fan of Chaosium’s rules set, you should definitely consider picking up Astounding Adventures. it’s a great twist on an old classic and with the upcoming Horror on the Orient Express remake getting a two fisted pulp option added to , this will be the perfect book to get you in that mindset!

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/16/tabletop-review-accursed-long-dead-and-twice-slain-savage-worlds/

Long Dead and Twice Slain is another short adventure for the Accursed campaign setting, which uses the Savage Worlds rules system. Unlike Half-Light which was more a story seed than an adventure and which was very systemless by design, Long Dead and Twice Slain is a fully fleshed out (albeit short) adventure and has Savage Worlds mechanics interspersed throughout the piece. While these are mainly stat blocks for NPCs and antagonists, it’s nice to see that this adventure leans more towards The Banshee of Loch Finnere in quality, giving Accursed a second quality published adventure for GMs to pick up instead of having to homebrew their own.

Long Dead and Twice Slain is eight pages of content (the other two pages are the cover and credits/table of contents); there is a ton of adventuring packed into this short little PDF. While the adventure can be played in a single session (and is designed for such) an enterprising Gm can probably pad things out for a second session if he or she wants to put forth the effort.

The adventure begins with the characters already knee deep in action. For some time cauldron-born undead have been besieging the land and rounding up new victims for some unknown experiment or torture. Accursed and humans alike have been fighting back and striking back against the witches and their unholy armies whenever they can. At some point the PCs come into contact with a band of nine human warriors – all that remains of an original fighting force that stood their ground against the witches. The two groups, PC and NPC parlay just long enough to see one of the NPCs die horribly by some mystical means. Together the two bands team up to figure out what is plaguing the humans. Could it be a curse, a ghost, or something else? The only way to find out is by playing the adventure!

The adventure is a branching one, giving players a choice of two beings to question. Neither is right nor wrong, but each provides you with a very different playthrough experience. The beginning and the end of the adventure is a constant, regardless which path you choose, but the fact the middle is quite different gives this adventure some nice replay value if you’re looking for that sort of thing. I prefer the Witch path to the Clock Maker one personally, but only because it’s more atmospheric and Ravenloft-y. Your mileage may vary.

The final battle in this piece is a pretty tough one and some PCs probably won’t make it out alive. Once the battle is dead the adventure wraps up quite nicely and without any loose ends. The end result is a tight little piece that gives more advanced Accursed characters their first published adventure to play through. I suppose the only problem is that the game hasn’t been out long enough for characters to naturally progress to this piece. No one says you can make “Seasoned” characters and just play this though. You’re also getting a pretty good deal here cost wise. Another Accursed adventure, The Banshee of Loch Finnere costs six dollars for twenty-one pages, so Long Dead and Twice Slain gives you a better content to cost ratio, and definitely a better one than Half-Light which is $1.25 for four pages – only two of which are content. Remember though, you’ll need three or four books to play this $2.50 adventure – the core rulebook for Accursed, the Savage Worlds core rulebook, the Savage Worlds Horror Companion and maybe the Accursed Player’s Guide as well. Suddenly, you’re spending a lot more than $2.50, aren’t you? Still, if you’re already invested in Savage Worlds, and/or Accursed, Long Dead and Twice Slain is a great adventure to pick up. It’s well designed, won’t hurt your wallet and most of all – it’s a lot of fun.

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/16/tabletop-review-shadowrun-run-gun/

Run & Gun is our second major Shadowrun release of 2014, with the first being the awesome Digital Tools Box. Usually Shadowrun has several small PDF releases a month, but Catalyst Game Labs has really cut back on that with the release of Shadowrun, Fifth Edition. For those that miss all those little one to two dozen page PDF stat block collections like Gun H(e)aven 3, Parazoology 2, Used Car Lot and others like them, you’ll be happy to know that a huge chunk of Run & Gun reads and feels like an omnibus of those pieces. There are roughly seventy pages of new armor and weapons in this this sourcebook! That should keep you busy well… until Sixth Edition rears its ugly head. Seriously, this book is a one stop shop for things to murder (or be murdered) with. Best of all those thirty page stat blocks tend to cost $7.95 EACH. So for Run & Gun, you’re getting the equivalent of a little more than two of those supplements (which would run you $16), but you’re also getting another 148 pages of content as well. Hopefully this knowledge upfront helps ease the sticker price of this sourcebook. I know my first instinct was, “THIRTY DOLLARS FOR THIS? WHAT THE HECK???” Once the shock wears off however, you can see that you’re getting a much better deal cost-wise with Run & Gun than with all those little (overpriced?) PDF supplements. So for some of you, the lack of prolific releases for Shadowrun 5e will be made up by the sheer value of this weighty tome.

Of course, there is so much more to Run & Gun than exotic items like space armor, harpoon guns and monofilament garrotes. The format of Run & Gun follows the usual Shadowrun motif we have come to expect from CGL. You get short pieces of fiction interspersed with metaplot told from the point of view of JackPoint (a Shadowrun Matrix group for those of you who are new to the game with 5e) and a bunch of mechanics. It’s worth noting that unlike a lot of Shadowrun books, Run & Gun breaks from the Jackpoint POV to straight rules and back with little or no warning. That might make the book seem like a chaotic mess at first as you’ll wonder why the speaker du jour suddenly started talking in mechanics, but you’ll get used to it. Perhaps my biggest complaint about the book is this constant narrative style shift. It could have been a lot more seamless. While long time Sixth World fans are going to find the constant flipping back and forth weird but navigable, newcomers will be confused more often than not. Considering this is the first sourcebook for a new edition, Run & Gun should have been more newcomer friendly than this. Still, the book is very easy to navigate, ESPECIALLY if you get the PDF version so you can quickly turn to bookmarks and the like. Due to the twenty dollar difference and the power of CTRL+F, I’d definitely say the electronic version of Run & Gun will be a lot easier to use in your Shadowrun, Fifth Edition games. It’ll be easier on your wallet and take up less space/weight to boot!

The first third of Run & Gun are the weapons and armor stats blocks mentioned earlier. This is probably the section that will get the most use by players and GMs alike. After all, if you want to make an arctic saboteur, you’ll want the Ares Polar Sneak or Coldsuit. (Actually the art for Ares Arctic Survival Suit is a direct rip-off/homage to the Snow Serpents from G.I. Joe. I’m not sure if that is intentional or not, but it is awesome). If you want to relieve Games Workshop’s Chainsaw Warrior board game, you can do it in style with an Ash Arms Combat Chainsaw. So on and so forth. There is something for everyone in these two areas. Now that doesn’t mean ANYONE should buy a full sourcebook if all they want is a single weapon or piece of armor from it. A GM however, can really get use out of Run & Gun if only by throwing new weapons and armor at the PCs. Tired of the same old mooks and grunts? >Spiffy them up with a new machine pistol or give that gang some bike racing armor. This is especially good if you have players that have all the items in the core rulebook memorized and love to rules-laywer.

The other two thirds of Run & Gun are all new tactics and options that can be done during combat. It’s always great to see some new options in combat, but Run & Gun gives you an incredible amount. So many that there is no way even the most anal retentive player is going to memorize all, or even HALF of the options in this book. As such, even veteran players may be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options and eventually a group is going to be split on what they want to allow and what they won’t. In a worst case scenario a bad group will want to use all of these and pressure a player into feeling like they MUST purchase Run & Gun. A good group will realize this is not a mandatory Player’s Handbook 2 set of canon rules ala what you see in D&D 3.0 or Pathfinder. If you think forty+ different Martial Arts (Yet the options are still missing Savate, Sumo, Sambo, and a ton of others) is too much for everyone, trim it back to what is workable for your group. The key thing to remember with Run & Gun is that the book is more New World of Darkness where you have a buffet you can pick and choose from than Classic World of Darkness where the books are written in a way where everything is canon and woe to you that can’t afford the latest release or who lack a set on index cards cross referencing everything. Yes the sheer amount of options are INSANE, but remember the focus should never be rules and mechanics first. It’s fun first, so if any of these optional rules don’t work for you or some players don’t have access to them, DON’T USE THEM! It’s that simple.

Our first section in this area is entitled “Sixth World Combat Tactics.” You get an overview of the basic tactics players and their characters know after spending a little bit of time in the Sixth World. “Geek the Mage First” and “kill the Decker second” sort of things. It also talks about the importance of team tactics similar to what you would see in a video game ala X-Com or Shining Force. There’s some really good commentary about how to work as a team and make sure everyone has a specific function or role when drek hits the fan. I’m actually surprised this piece wasn’t in the core rulebook because it’s advice Shadowrun players of all experience levels should read. This section also gives you eleven combat maneuvers which allow two or more characters to tactical options which will give them slight bonuses in specific situations. Case in point, you have a four player team that wants to attempt the “diamond maneuver.” This characters in the shape of a diamond moving in the same direction, thus giving them 360 degrees of sight. If you get four successes on this team attempt, all members doing the diamond maneuver get a +1 bonus to surprise/ambush checks and +2 to their Initiative rolls. This is nice. You get a small, non-game breaking reward for actually performing and moving as a team. Although there are only eleven of these options, an enterprising or creative GM can easily think of more. This section then ends with odd little tools like pain grenades (suck it invisibility spells!) and battering rams.

“KIllshots and More” is where things really start to get intense. You get six different OPTIONS for combat. These range from no action phase limits for simple actions to armor piercing options. My personal favorite is the alternative initiative where characters get rewarded for extremely high rolls and their quickness. Instead of getting one action per round, each player rolls their initiative and then goes in the usual highest to lowest order. Then everyone subtracts 10 from their roll. If they have a roll above 0, they get to go again. Repeat until everyone is down to 0 initiative and start again. I know I already made a World of Darkness comparison to this already, but in many ways this initiative option, gives extremely quick players something akin to Vampire: The Masquerade‘s celerity and I like that. Previously a high initiative “just” let you go first. Now you might be able to go first and get a couple extra attacks in to boot. This option also really lets mages get more out of slow and haste style spells. Of course, just because I like it doesn’t mean you have to. These are all optional rules; I can’t stress that enough. More options are always welcome while more forced canon rules appearing outside the core rulebook are rarely welcome.

This section continues with even more new combat options a character can take when his or her turn comes up. “More Called Shots” gives you twelve attacks that are more about style or positioning instead of damage. “Location, Location, Location” lets you take aim at sixteen different body parts (Yes, including genitals). “Ammo Whammy” gives you special actions to take with uncommon round types. For example, you can try to aim your Toxic round into a part of the body that will absorb the poison faster. You can’t obviously use an EX-Explosive round for an action designed only for a tracker however.

From there we get to one of the low points in the book. “More Actions” gives you over forty NON-optional actions. These are canon and are now part of the permanent action options so no doubt you’ll see them pop up in adventure with only a reference to Run & Gun, meaning you will have light pressure to buy this book to properly understand the published piece. That’s not cool, and although 4e was REALLY guilty of this, I was hoping 5e wouldn’t start off with it right away. Why these half dozen pages weren’t in the core rulebook for 5e is beyond me. They either should have made this a separate addendum, put them in the core rulebook or not done them. Most of these are common bits to begin with, so it’s more than a little inexcusable to have them in Run & Gun.

After that you have five new ways to spend Edge, seven new positive Qualities and one negative one. Then it’s the plethora of martial arts options I mentioned previously in the review. Besides all the martial art styles I mentioned, you also have techniques, which are the equivalent of called shots for martial artists. All of this is great if you are a physical adept, but these fifteen pages might have been better off as their own separate PDF so that more detail could have been added. As it stands, it’s a lot of options, but none of them have enough depth or detail. Basically this was a great idea on paper, but not enough follow through.

Can you believe there is STILL MORE CONTENT to talk about? At this point we’re only 145 pages into the 218 page PDF. The last third of the book is pretty much two chapters, “Staying Alive” and “Blow Up Good.” “Staying Alive” talks about real world hazards characters can face. After all, it’s not just bullets, dragons and magic that will kill you in the Sixth World. Here you are given mechanics for dealing with extreme heat, cold, radiation, pollution and more. Each of these topics only gets between one and three pages of content, but Space Combat gets about seven. How does magic work in space? How do laser or bullets? What happens if your character specialized in flame magic and he’s out in a vacuum? What happens when your suit starts to leak or the hull of your craft is breached? All of these are covered here. This is great stuff, especially with the earlier space suit bits in the armor section towards the front of the book. There are also two positive and three negative qualities in this section for characters to take as well.

The last real chapter in the book is “Blow up Good.” After that, it’s some short fiction and metric ton of tables. “Blow Up Good,” as you might have surmised, is all about explosives and/or things that explode. This is a pretty detailed chapter covering various types of explosives, different detonators, accessories, rules for cutting charges and even how to blow things up via your rigger’s drone. This is really well done for people that are interesting in sabotage or whose characters go around saying, “And so he says to me, he says, ‘You want to be a baaaaad guy?!’ and I say, ‘Yeah, baby! I want to be bad!’ I says, ‘Surf’s up, Space Ponies! I’m making gravy without the lumps!’ Ah ha ha ha ha haaaaa! ” Oh god. Now I want to make THE EVIL MIDNIGHT TROLL STREET SAM WHAT BOMBS AT MIDNIGHT. If however this isn’t your cup of tea, that’s thirty pages you can just skip over. “Bad is good, baby! Down with government!”

Overall, Run & Gun is well done, but it feels like a hodge podge of small PDFS supplements thrown together until they had enough of a page count to sell it as a physical release. This means that most gamers will only use a portion of the book and excise the rest from their Shadowrun, Fifth Edition campaign. Although it’s a lot cheaper to get the weapons, armor, tactics, actions, martial arts, explosives and environmental hazards as one big bundle rather than as seven or eight supplemental PDFs, the pieces in the book aren’t for everyone. A Physical Adept fan will enjoy the martial arts and action bits but not have a lot of use for the rest. Street Samurari’s will make great use out of the weapons and armor. Mages and Decker players don’t have a lot of use for this book at all. So the amount of use you’ll get out of Run & Gun really depends on what type of character you play and how much of a Shadowrun completionist you are. Remember, those supplemental PDFs tend to run eight bucks a pop, so purchased separately, the wildly divergent sections of this book would cost you between $56-$64 bucks. Instead you’re getting them bundled for $29.99. That’s a great deal price wise. However, if all you wanted were the weapons and armor, you’re stuck paying twice as much as you would have if you could buy each section separately. So the value for Run & Gun will vary greatly depending on your play style and how much of a Sixth World junkie you are.

Can I recommend Run & Gun? Most definitely! It’s not for everyone and the very different topics at hand make the sourcebook feel like more like a Frankenstein’s Monster type of deal rather than a cohesive collection, but the content is all quality stuff. In the end, no one gamer is going to make use of every aspect of this book, but there will be at least one section you’ll really enjoy – if not more. I’d definitely suggest going electronic over physical and remind gamers that if you look at Run & Gun as a bundle instead of sourcebook, the price tag on this thing looks a lot better. Whether or not it’s worth the full thirty dollars is really going to be up to each of you reading this and if you like the wide range of content we’ve looked at today.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/15/tabletop-review-accursed-the-banshee-of-loch-finnere-savage-worlds/

Unlike the short story seed, Half-Light, which I reviewed a little bit ago, The Banshee of Loch Finnere is a full length, fully plotted out adventure featuring an exciting plot and some gorgeous artwork. The cover by Alberto Bontempi is almost worth the six dollar cover price alone. I have to admit that, while both reading and experiencing The Banshee of Loch Finnere, I almost forgot this was an Accursed product and found myself viewing it as a Ravenloft one. That’s high praise indeed. In fact, this adventure has probably surpassed The Festival at Glenelg as my favorite Accursed product.

Caer Kainen is under the control of The Morrigan, as are many lands these days. Although Clan Finnoul has been humbled, decimated and dominated since the end of the Bane War, their mind is on a more pressing horror – that of the Banshee of Loch Finnere. While sitting around nursing old grudges and being on the losing side of the war, a vengeful apparition roams your ancestral home with the single minded purpose of wiping out what remains of Clan Finnoul. At the time of the adventure’s start, three members of the clan have died, and the player characters are there to see if they can prevent any more deaths. What follows is a three act adventure that should last roughly half a dozen play sessions, and it features a nice mix of mystery, intrigue, investigation and violence. GMs running The Banshee of Loch Finnere should be familiar with the Cairn Kainen setting (it’s in your Accursed core rulebook).

I really loved this adventure. It’s well laid out, offers a decent amount of back story regarding the location and core antagonist, and gives a list of locations in the general vicinity for players to visit and for GMs to craft subquests around. I also liked that the adventure focused primarily on investigation and discovery rather than constant combat. After all, there is a mystery to be solved rather than a dungeon to crawl through. In fact, I counted only eight combat encounters in the whole adventure, several of which can be avoided altogether based on the choices the PCs make and/or how good they are at thinking things through rather than hacking and slashing. Of course, there are gamers out there who want non-stop combat, and Accursed CAN be that type of game if a GM runs it that way, but this is certainly not the adventure for those gamers. Rather, The Banshee of Loch Finnere makes a great way to bring in fans of Call of Cthulhu, Chill, WoD and other slower paced horror gamers into the Accursed fold.

I really liked the pacing and progression of this adventure. It’s slow moving like an old Victorian ghost story, and it really gives the GM a chance to set a somber yet spooky tone for the adventure. As Accursed is a game of monsters fighting monsters, it can be hard to really craft something frightening for the setting. After all, if you’re playing a mummy or a Dhampir, are zombies really going to terrify you? The local townsfolk, yes, but not the PCs. The Banshee of Loch Finnere, however, creates an atmosphere of dread because the PCs really can’t punch a curse in the face or do battle with the banshee directly. For all their combined powers, the PCs greatest weapon against the evil in this adventure is their wits. By the end of the adventure, players may have pissed off two major powers in the Accursed world, as well as either helped the banshee to find peace or destroyed her outright. There are a lot of ways this adventure can unfold, and it’s nice to see this isn’t an on-rails piece where PCs are simply along for the ride.

Again, the core plot piece of finding out who the Banshee is and why she has her heart set on the destruction of Clan Finnoul is straight out of the old AD&D Second Edition version of Ravenloft, as it highlights the power of a curse, how horrific and/or terrifying a run of the mill monster can be if written correctly, and it just oozes atmosphere. It also helps that there are squabbles between the dark rulers of this setting similar, to those that occur in the Dark Domain. Because of this, D&D gamers might want to pick up this adventure as well and do a bit of tweaking so it uses 2nd or 3rd edition rules rather than Savage Worlds mechanics. Note that this is a LOT easier than you might imagine, as the entire adventure is stat-free/systemless except for the last two pages of the PDF, which gives monster stats in Savage Worlds terms.

In the end, The Banshee of Loch Finnere is exactly what I’d give to someone who was curious about Accursed. I’d have them play through this adventure and, if they had fun, lend them the core books to decide if this is a system they wanted to invest in. Of course, Accursed is a pretty expensive game to pick up, as you’ll need the core rulebook, the Savage Worlds core rulebook and the Savage Worlds Horror Companion just to get started. That can be a pretty pricey undertaking. At only six dollars, The Banshee of Loch Finnere is a great way to see if Accursed is the horror fantasy system for you without spending fifty to a hundred dollars in books you might not actually use. There’s absolutely nothing negative I can say about the adventure itself. So if you’re a fan of horror fantasy at all, definitely make a note to yourself to pick up The Banshee of Loch Finnere when you get a chance. You won’t be disappointed.

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/14/tabletop-review-achtung-cthulhu-dossier-tales-from-the-crucible-call-of-cthulhusavage-worlds/

We all like free stuff, right? Well, Modiphius has given us our first free Acthung! Cthulhu supplement in Tales From the Crucible. This thirteen page PDF is fully compatible with the Savage Worlds version of the setting as well as the classic Call of Cthulhu game put out by Chaosium. In fact, you could use this PDF with ANY system you choose, as there are no mechanics to be had anywhere within its pages. In a way, the PDF is to sell you, the reader, on its core six characters that you’ll find throughout the Achtung! Cthulhu universe, the same way Paizo has its Pathfinder iconics or the characters that proliferate Fantasy Flight Games’ Cthulhu titles like Arkham Horror, Elder Sign and Eldritch Horror. These are the characters you see in art, short stories and (soon) miniature form. This PDF lets you know more about the reoccurring characters and aims to make you care more about them so that you continue to pick up the Acthung! Cthulhu products with a price tag attached to them (especially the upcoming Secret War campaign), so that you can thrill to their continuing adventures. In essence, Tales From the Crucible is an excellently done tease designed to hook you into wanting more.

The six characters profiled in Tales From the Crucible are:

•Natalya Petrova – a Russian tank driver who appears to have picked up an otherworldly hitchhiker.

•Professor Richard Deadman – the typical American Call of Cthulhu protagonist whose delving into things man was not meant to know has rewarded him with great knowledge, great magical ability… and little sanity.

•Captain Eric “Badger” Harris – The commander of a unit within the secret British Intelligence organization known simply as Section M. He feels like a bit of a British Nick Fury. Of course, HIS commandos aren’t the howling type, literally or figuratively – YET.

•Ariane Dubois – a beautiful and stealthy member of the French Resistance. One of the pictures in the PDF makes her look like Kitty Pryde with that dragon type thingy on her shoulder. Of course, this creature is not quite as benevolent as Lockheed, but at least it is on her side. (A bit sad that two of the four come off as VERY inspired by Marvel Comics characters.)

•Corporal Akhee “The Eye” Singh – Although on the side of the Allies, Singh may be a bigger threat to his comrades than the Axis. As long as the eye on his pendant remains closed and his powers are kept in check (We don’t speak of “the Black Mist incident”), Singh is on the side of the angels.

•Sergent Brandon Carter – An All-American army grunt who is never without an Elder Sign nor a SMG with a mind of its own.

There isn’t a lot of content here, maybe a page or two on each character, but the snippets are well written and enough to make you want to learn more about each character so – mission accomplished. As a freebie teaser, Tales from the Crucible is a great peek at Achtung! Cthulhu and what it has to offer you as a gamer. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick this up. It is free, after all. Who knows? You might just find yourself deciding to pick up the Keeper or Investigator’s Guides after you’ve flipped through this.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/04/14/tabletop-review-grimtooths-traps-too/

So this is interesting. The Grimtooth’s Traps series has been around since 1981. Each book contains dozens of traps useable for whatever gaming system you prefer. Sure, being a systemless collection means that the DM has a little bit of work to do to make the trap fit the mechanics they are using, but the Grimtooth series is generally as fun (and funny) to read as it is to drop some of its traps into your campaign. Now, back in 2011, Flying Buffalo released PDF versions of Grimtooth’s Traps 1 and Grimtooth’s Traps Fore, each of which we have covered here at Diehard GameFAN. I’m not sure why they are being released out of order, or why it’s been three years since the last release (I’m assuming Flying Buffalo is simply hard at work with Tunnels & Trolls Deluxe), but I’m just happy to have them back where all gamers can get these classic books, as they definitely withstand the test of time. The fact you can get this book for only $4.95 should have long time old school gamers squealing in glee… or begging for mercy. I guess it all depends.

Grimtooth Trap’s Too contains 101 traps for DM’s to unleash upon their unsuspecting players – all of which are sure to hurt, maim or murder all but the most paranoid of characters. Every page is tinged with dark humor though, so don’t be looking for a book that takes its macabre mayhem too seriously. Grimtooth the Troll is a wonderful narrator, in the style of EC Comics’ Cryptkeeper and other comically evil characters. The introduction by Grimtooth himself sets the tone of the tome perfectly, and the artwork is pretty fun too.

The book is divided into five sections, each of which is dedicated to a different type of trap set. As well, each individual trap is given a skull rating. The more skulls on the page, the more lethal the trap is to explorers and adventurers. First up are Room Traps, which tend to be over the top and anything but subtle. These traps are designed to turn an entire room into a deathtrap. Sometimes they are the simple, tried and true teeter-totter floor that sends characters into a pit. Others are far more complicated and might even have decoy traps to distract players from the real deathdealer in the room. There are fun traps, like a safe where each wrong turn of the dial causes a foot of floor to fall away, or a metal bridge that transforms into a cage. Each room trap is fiendishly fun, and it is this section you’ll probably use the most.

Corridor Traps are for use in hallways, and help to add a little flavor to the dull drudgery of walking down a dungeon or underground caverns. These traps change hallways from places to rest or to encounter wandering monsters, into a fresh new hell to keep PCs on their toes. These traps range from the non-lethal, humorous variety, designed to warn characters that worse awaits them if they continue on, to fun takes on pressure plates or spring loaded pieces of floor. I also like the bee-hive trap, which actually shoots out metal darts instead of bees. There are a ton of great ideas to be had here.

Next up are Door Traps, which are obviously twists on the old trap door motif. The first one, aka “Double Trap,” is a classic. The door is actually a false one, and trying to unlock it causes the door to reveal itself as a giant spring loaded plate, which sends the PC (most likely a rogue) toward the opposite wall, which now happens to be littered with spikes. Another great one is where the keyhole to a door actually sets off a bomb. There are even gruesome takes on classic practical jokes. You know the one where you stick a bucket of water above a door and when it’s fully open a person gets wet? Well, replace the bucket of water with a five hundred pound granite block or swinging set of spikes!

The fourth set of traps in Grimtooth’s Traps Too are Item Traps. These are booby-trapped pieces of loot. The book cautions you to use these sparingly, as not every item a player touches should burst into flames, and having too many item traps can suck the fun out of a game. I agree wholeheartedly with these statements, but the occasional item trap can be a lot of fun. Magnetic gauntlets or armbands for example. A lot of the traps under item traps are non-lethal, like gems that are actually glue or extremely smoky torches, but there are definitely some literal killers amongst this collection. A bird cage with a blanket over it turns out not to be a parrot, but a basilisk! That’s a good, but obvious, one. So is the shield covered with a scentless flammable liquid or oil.

Section five is simply titled Items. This is a catch-all section for potential traps that don’t fit anywhere else. These include things like rocks that are actually napalm, coins that are actually a living hive mind that control their possessor, or a webbed doorway where the web is actually a fuse or trigger for a bomb. Another great one is the two swords mounted above a fireplace. If either is touched, a sack of gunpowder falls into the fireplace. BOOM! These traps tend to be the most bizzare and amusing in the book.

After these five sections of traps, you’ll notice you are only sixty-seven pages into this ninety-eight page book. What could possibly be left, right? Well, you have a two page commentary by Grimtooth, followed by a fun seven page comic strip about the character. After that, you get five pages of puzzles, like a maze, word search and rebus. It’s kind of bizarre to see those in a gaming book, but they’re entertaining at least. After that, the book closes out with what it calls the “Fudge” system. This is basically a way to help gamers convert these traps from the systemless designs they have to the mechanics of their choice. It’s quite interesting, and younger or less experienced gamers will find it a real blessing. Older or more experienced gamers won’t need this, though, as they’ll most likely be quite adept at converting things to their game of choice.

All in all, Grimtooth’s Traps Too still holds up thirty-two years later, which is pretty impressive for a systemless piece. Even gamers who feel they have seen it all, trap-wise, will be surprised or foiled by some of the traps in this book. Best of all, there are several other books out there along the same line bearing the Grimtooth name, so if you love this one, you’ll want to start picking up the others as well. Again, with a five dollar price tag for the PDF, this is an absolute steal and well worth downloading. Whether you play D&D, T&T or even a modern era RPG, you’ll find something to use in Grimtooth’s Traps Too.

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/04/22/tabletop-review-the-house-of-rlyeh-call-of-cthulhu/

The House of R’lyeh is a collection I’ve been excited to get my hands on for some time. This is because, for the first time, there is a Call of Cthulhu adventure collection that ties heavily into not only actual stories by H.P. Lovecraft, but over a dozen other published adventure collections of campaigns by Chaosium. In a sense, The House of R’lyeh is the first real piece for Call of Cthulhu tying together enough published works that the system could now have a slight semblance of a metaplot. Unlike systems like Shadowrun or Vampire: The Masquerade, where every book released seems (or seemed in the case of V:TM) to build on the metaplot, and sometimes were written more for said overarching story than for gamer accessibility, the metaplot suggested here in The House of R’lyeh is both optional and nebulous. This means, thankfully, that Call of Cthulhu will never be one of those games where you feel like you need to purchase every release to understand what is going on, but that those interested in the light trappings of a metaplot presented here can track down the adventures, supplements and stories (many are out of print though, both physically and electronically) to fully realize the “bigger picture” presented by authors here. I’m very happy about the interconnectivity of all these adventures being so light, because had it been otherwise, this could have been a massive train wreck. Instead, The House of R’lyeh gives us five interesting adventures, each of which is primarily tied to a story by Lovecraft, thus acting as a quasi-sequel to the events in those tales. There are ways to connect all five adventures into a min-campaign, and many references to other stories and adventures, in case the Keeper wants to go to use these adventures as a starting point or link for something else in his or her collection. I really like how all these hints, homages and nods to other Cthulhoid publications come across, as I admit, I’m getting fatigue from certain other RPGs, where the books are unabashedly written in such a way that you MUST own previous releases to make heads or tails of what is going on in it. So a big kudos to Chaosium for presenting a collection that tries to pull previous releases together in a light form of metaplot/cohesiveness while making sure all the way it is optional, AND providing enough information about the inspiration material that the Keeper doesn’t need to search out and/or purchase the other pieces of writing in question.

I will give one word of warning to those who are interested in picking up The House of R’lyeh. These are exceptionally long and in-depth adventures, and they will no doubt seem daunting to casual or less experienced Call of Cthulhu keepers. Not only are the adventures themselves crammed with an amazing amount of information about the plot, potential NPCs and pratfalls, but they also include everything from a quick synopsis of the story that inspired them, a massive amount of information on the area in which the adventure takes place and everything the less detail oriented Keeper won’t even think of, like full rail charts (and length of trips) or the cost of various items for the time period. I won’t say the adventures come off as anal retentive or OCD, but they are so jam packed with information that you will either find The House of R’lyeh to contain everything you’ve ever wanted to see in an adventure, down to the most minute detail, or to be extremely superfluous and cause your eyes to glaze over as you fathom each page’s multitude of information. It’s going to be one extreme or another. Either way, my advice is not to try and read this book in one sitting. Maybe one adventure at a time, and for the longer 60+ page adventures, perhaps a few sittings each, and take notes during each one as, while running the adventure, there’s just no way to remember where every last detail is. Just remember, HoR contains five adventures and clocks in at 224 pages, while something like Atomic Age Cthulhu has nine adventures and a mini source book for the 1950s to boot – all with the same page count as this collection. So, yeah, let’s just say The House of R’lyeh is INTENSE, and whether that is a positive or a negative is really up to what you want from an adventure collection.

The first adventure is “The Art of Madness” and it is a sequel to Pickman’s Model, arguably one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories (Cthulhu knows it’s been turned into a plethora of low budget, but varying quality films/TV episodes over the years). I will say the the characterization of Pickman is completely off from the Lovecraft story, and certainly it’s different from the Pickman we see in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, which will no doubt draw the ire of some Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos fans. It’s the problem any time a character is adapted into someone else’s work. I will admit it is an inaccurate portrayal of Pickman compared to his Lovecraft penned pieces, but it is well established that becoming a ghoul is a painful and maddening process. In Pickman’s Model we see the beginning of Pickman’s descent, but in “Kadath,” he’s not only quite sane (more or less) but an ally of Robert Carter. I suppose if this was Marvel Comics, I’d try and earn myself a No-Prize by saying that “The Art of Madness” takes place when Pickman hits the zenith of his insanity and slowly begins to rebuild himself at the conclusion of the adventure, perhaps with a stark clarity that only comes with being mad and hitting rock bottom. Or, in Call of Cthulhu gaming terms, he’s failed one too many sanity checks and is temporarily insane, but eventually gets better, or as much as a cannibalistic undergrounding dwelling humanoid mutated by his own dark nature can be. That said, I loved this adventure because it’s one of those stories that seems so obvious that I can’t believe it hasn’t been written before now. The plot is so simple it’s ingenious, and can be played for stark terror or even with a Blood Brothers-esque tongue-in-cheek feel to it, because the premise is as absurd and potentially comical as it is creepy as all get out.

Oh, what is the plot of “The Art of Madness,” you ask? Well, Richard Upton Pickman feels his art is unappreciated by the plebian human society he was once a part of. Pickman also feels that his style of art must live on in the surface world, and so he decides to open a school of the arts inside the ghoul warren he is part of. Now he only needs students, and so he begins to take a select few that show “potential” from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This is where the Investigators come in, although the missing students and teacher may not be the plot hook that initially sends them into this macabre foray.

I really like that “The Art of Madness” offers multiple hooks to get Investigators involved. After all, there are FAR too many adventures that rely on the assumption that the PCs are parapsychologists, a detective agency or just “know Cthulhu stuff.” With multiple story hooks, the Keeper can choose what works best for players, as well as the tone of the adventure. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t decide whether to play this adventure seriously or as somewhat comedic. I started off the adventure like it would be a normal CoC adventure, but when players interacted with the Portuguese janitor who is somewhat pivotal to the plot like he was Manuel from Fawlty Towers, I knew it was time to err on the side of farcical, which turned out to be the right call. I strongly doubt the author of “Art of Madness” wrote it realizing the comedic potential of the adventure, but then neither did Bruce Nesmith when he penned The Created for Second Edition AD&D, and look how that turned out. The adventure DOES work if you play it straight, as there is a good deal of creepiness, what with wandering into a Ghoul warren and discovering the fate of the kidnapped artists. No matter how you decide to run with “The Art of Madness,” it really is a brilliant little adventure you can’t help but have fun with. 1 for 1.

“The Crystal of Chaos” is the second adventure in the collection and it is meant to be a sequel to the Lovecraft story, The Haunter of the Dark. I always loved this story, and I’m surprised the creature from this tale hasn’t turned up in more Call of Cthulhu adventures. Here it is, though, as Investigators journey to Providence, Rhode Island to retrieve a mystical artifact from the long defunct Church of Starry Wisdom. Of course, said item bears a horrific curse that threatens the physical and mental well-being of the PCs, but really, isn’t that par for the course in a CoC adventure?

My only real problem with “The Crystal of Chaos” is trying to get players into the adventure. This is one of those that assumes players are all allies/co-workers and have some sort of Cthulhoid leaning background, such as professors, anthropologists or detectives. What happens when you have characters that run the gamut from Olympic gymnast to hobo? It’s going to be very hard to create a proper story hook for this one that actually fits a group of players who were given free reign during character design, which is MOST groups. “The Crystal of Chaos” would be awesome with pre-generated characters or as a one-shot adventure, but trying to come up with a reason why a circus clown, a wealthy dilettante, a longshoreman and a chemical engineer should team up to track down the Shining Trapezohedron from a ruined and possibly haunted church so that an Egyptologist can use it in his upcoming expedition is going to take a bit of planning out. This is why I love adventures like “The Art of Madness” where you are given multiple ways to get characters into the adventure. Ones with only a single plot hook like this that doesn’t really work as a catch-all is pretty much equivalent to, “Your party is in a tavern when…” for fantasy RPGs.

Now, with that out of the way, once you find a way to actually get your motley crew of characters to undertake the trip to Providence, you’ll find the adventure is a really fun one. The adventure provides five full pages just on landmarks in the city itself, meaning a good Keeper can really make Providence come to life, even if they have never been there. The Free-Will Church is laid out in exacting detail, leaving the Keeper with little to no work to do in order to run the adventure, save for memorizing all that it contains. There’s an unexpected mini-boss, so to speak, which I enjoyed seeing, and it’s now the second time in the past month a Call of Cthulhu adventure has featured this creature, which is funny as I mentioned in my Tales of the Sleepless City review that this particular monster of choice doesn’t get enough play in CoC.

The climax of the adventure is when the players find the Shining Trapezohedron, but in a sense, it starts something completely new, as now players have to deal with The Haunter itself and all that comes with it. It might be a good idea to break the adventure into two sessions, ending the first right when the players unwittingly do something with the ancient jewel that sends everything into chaos. Everyone loves a cliffhanger, right? Of course, everything goes to hell from there and what was originally a simple snatch and run operation becomes an event where the PCs may not only have to save the world, but one of their own. By the end of the adventure, at least one Investigator will be suffering from severe nyctophobia. Ouch. Again, this is a fun little adventure and players will probably be expecting one thing from the adventure, especially when they are told they are investigating an old ruined crazy cult church, and then end up getting hit with something quite different. It’ll definitely be fun to hear how various play sessions of this adventure went. 2 for 2.

The third adventure in The House of R’lyeh is “The Return of the Hound.” I’ve always loved that story, but I can’t say I cared for the adventure. It never connected with me. At times, it was just really dull, and at others it felt too over the top, like with the auction where a bunch of magic using occultists were there to examine the rare magic bearing tomes (including a Necronomicon!) up for sale. Part of it is that the adventure just felt far too long both in terms of reading and actual play. It dragged and felt heavily padded, which is never a good thing.

Now, that’s not to say the adventure was a complete flop. With some heavy excising and streamlining, this could work really well. As the adventure is basically two in one (part taking place in Amsterdam and the other in a small rural English community), you could just remove the Dutch part of the adventure and really focus on the weird British auction of the damned. However, the core of information the players need to get through the information is in the Dutch part so… I don’t know. My advice is that the seeds of an interesting adventure are here, but it’s just too bogged down to flow in an enjoyable manner. It feels like it was put together via a game of Mythos from the late 90s.

Basically “The Return of the Hound” has players not only having to deal with the return of this otherworldly canine, but a victim turned avatar of the Hound turned serial killer. The text is quite contradictory on the non Hound antagonist, as it’s mentioned to be an avatar, but still potentially being hunted by the Hound, which is nonsensical. It would be like Hastur trying to smack down the King in Yellow. It gets far more convoluted from there without any real rhyme or reason behind the Hound or De Slachter, and the adventure really needed a better editor to focus the writer’s ideas into a more comprehensible affair. It also doesn’t help that there is a TON of back story content, in-depth location descriptions and NPC bios to sift through. In a better laid out adventure, all this would be helpful instead of a hindrance. Unfortunately, the layout of the adventure has you flipping back and forth to make some sense of the story being told while trying to keep all the Keeper information separate in your head. I would have to suggest that this needed to be totally rewritten from the ground up. There’s just way too much going on here and very little of it is going to be fun or even interesting to the people playing through this. 2 for 3.

Our fourth adventure in this collection is “The Jermyn Horror,” and it is meant to play off of Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, which is a truly strange but memorable Lovecraftian story. I’m at odds with the adventure itself. Its connection to the Lovecraft story is tenuous at best and mere window dressing at worst, which is a shame, because it’s a really good adventure for the most part and it might have been even better had the core story been allowed to stand on its own instead of being tied to a previous Lovecraft penned tale. You could excise the entire Jermyn connection and the adventure would still work wonderfully. It just depends on if your players will like the slight homage to a previous Lovecraft story or if they will find it trite and unnecessary.

There are two other problems I had with this adventure. The first is a minor one, but it is the second in this collection that hinges around a PC being possessed by the antagonist of the adventure, and the third where the antagonist possesses SOMEONE to keep the story moving along. That’s… not good in my opinion, and shows a dearth of creativity in this collection. Fortunately for “The Jermyn Horror,” I can’t pin my disdain for the fact that 60% of this collection goes back to the same well on it alone. The second is that the adventure doesn’t really have a true ending set up, and that’s the big one. The adventure has the characters forcibly held in place by a fiendish thingy that tried to possess and convert their bodies, but the adventure doesn’t really give any way for players to “win” or even survive it. The creature in question is crazy powerful and has trapped the players. There is a way of delaying the inevitable destruction if players can find it, and a very obscure way of killing the creature you will pretty much have to hold the hands of players to lead them to, which is never fun for anyone. There really needed to be more outs for the Keeper and his or her players, rather than a single paragraph on what could be done including the sentence, “Other solutions might present themselves to inventive players.” as the way to end the adventure. This seems to be more of an editorial than a writer issue though, as it could have been easily fixed by the editor saying, “Could you expand this a bit more so that less experienced gamers or Keepers have more of an out?” I mean, Call of Cthulhu should be a deadly game, but the solution shouldn’t be so obscure that most players won’t figure it out unless it’s virtually handed it to them by the Keeper. The end result is this adventure reads and plays like it is the Keeper VERSUS the players, which should be a massive red flag for anyone, as we all know how those affairs turn out. It’s a shame too, because I loved the creature, the setup, the atmosphere and some of the goings-on in the adventure. With some fine tuning, this could have been a great adventure. Instead it feels like an incomplete one. 2 for 4.

“Nameless City, Nameless Terrors” is our fifth adventure, and after the two I gave a thumb’s down to, I’m happy to say The House of R’lyeh ends on a positive note. There is some combining of Irem and the Nameless City, which may cause squabbling between different camps of Mythos fans, but hey, it’s an adventure for a role playing game; it’s not like it’s going to magically retcon everything Lovecraft has written since the 1890s.

This adventure feels like a classic Cthulhu story from the 20s turned into an adventure, which is what I was hoping for with this collection. Players will be travelling to the Middle East (starting in Yemen) in search of Irem, and once again, I love that this adventure gives you multiple hooks to use instead of one rigid assumption about the Investigators and why they are along for the ride. You got a LOT of information on the Nameless City in the course of playing the game, so even if you hadn’t read the actual story by Lovecraft, you won’t feel like you are missing out on anything. There are also a lot of suggested optional encounters which can turn “Nameless City, Nameless Terrors” into a mini campaign, which is always a fine option. This allows the Keeper to adapt the adventure to the attention span of his or her players, as well as change things on the fly. Are the Investigators burning through the adventure with no problem? Then throw an optional event at them. If they are having a hard time and making little progress, there’s no sense in using them. I love when adventures do this.

“Nameless Cities, Nameless Terrors,” just has that “it factor” for me. It’s well written, it’s in an exotic locale yet well written enough that a Keeper who is utterly unfamiliar with Yemen can make it come alive. There’s a wonderful mystical quality that pervades the entire experience, and though much of the adventure is simply travelling and talking with NPCs rather than investigating or running from Mythos terrors, it’s a highly memorable experience. I also love the unexpected allies that you can gain in this adventure. One of which is a realistic portrayal of a Mythos creature and how, simply because something isn’t human doesn’t mean it’s out to destroy mankind or drive things insane. The other is perhaps the most famous creation of Lovecraft after Cthulhu, and while this will no doubt raise the ire of some Lovecraftian purists, I found it to be a nice unexpected touch. If you’re unsure if the introduction of this character will cause a dour reaction from some of your players, just change his name and have him be some other ancient figure with copious amounts of knowledge that no man should possess.

At the end of “Nameless Cities, Nameless Terrors,” Investigators will have picked up a lot of Cthulhu Mythos simply through osmosis, have made some powerful mystical allies, and will have encountered a veritable menagerie of things man was never meant to encounter. It’ll be interesting to see how many characters make it through this adventure with their sanity intact. This is simply a fantastic adventure that is best used as the climax or end of a long campaign before classic characters are finally to put to bed. 3 for 5.

So as we can see, The House of R’lyeh is a mixed bag. There are three excellent adventures in the collection and two I can’t recommend. Although the good does outweigh the bad in this set, I have a hard time saying it is worth the thirty-four dollar price tag of the physical copy. Twenty dollars for the PDF is more acceptable, but still a little high for the level of quality. As Chaosium is having a sale until April 28th, you can get the PDF for $14.26 which is definitely worth it (Five bucks per good adventure is a fine deal), but at the same time, you can then get other new-ish releases like Terror From the Skies for only $16.07 and Atomic Age Cthulhu for $12.68 and I’d recommend either of those over The House of R’lyeh without hesitation. There are FAR better Call of Cthulhu collections out there for the same approximate price tag, but by no means is The House of R’lyeh a bad or even disappointing choice.

originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/12/10/tabletop-review-call-of-cthulhu-terror-from-the-skies/

It’s been an amazing year for the Call of Cthulhu franchise. Chaosium has put out top notch pieces like Cthulhu by Gaslight Third Edition and Mysteries of Ireland. Goodman Games has given us A Dream of Japan and The Timeless Sands of India. Pagan Publishing FINALLY released Bumps in the Night while other new publishers like Modiphius and Hebanon games releases some quality adventures as well. As 2012 comes to an end, Chaosium gives us one last release in Terror From the Skies – a massive campaign containing over a dozen connected adventures, guaranteed to keep your players busy for the next few months. While it’s nowhere as impressive as say, Horror on the Orient Express or Masks of Nyarlathotep, you’re still getting a solid adventure that will test both the Keeper and the Investigators alike as they try to foil a scheme that, if left unchecked, will spell the extinction of the entire human race.

The primary antagonists in this campaign are the Insects from Shaggai, or the Shan, as they are referred to throughout this collection. Although the race is presented slightly different in tone and deed than Ramsey Campbell first portrayed them, they still make for a creepy recurring threat to your Investigators – especially with their legions of shantanks, star vampires and cultists behind them. There is a lot of combat here, especially for a Chaosium published Call of Cthulhu adventure, but if the players are smart, they’ll be able to even the odds by way of magic, stealth and even making an alliance with the Deep Ones. This adventure is pretty unforgiving, and much like those classic boxed sets from Chaosium’s past, everyone’s starting Investigator will probably be dead or mad before the campaign is through. In this respect, it’s almost like this is a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign, but with train rides instead of underground lairs and Cthulhu Mythos beasties instead of dragons or beholders. I’d suggest using characters that are well experienced if you want them to survive, as they would have Mythos skill points and some spells at hand, but then you risk losing a beloved character, and the first adventure is written in such a way that this is each character’s first experience with the Mythos. At the same time though, there are times when the adventure expects Investigators to have a pretty hefty Cthulhu Mythos skill percentage to make a few rolls, which is pretty jarring and at times impossible. This isn’t the only case where balance is an issue with the entire campaign. You’re going to want each Investigator to have an extremely high Psychology skill level, as it’s used for just about everything in this game. Other skills that are abundantly used are Spot Hidden, Hide and Sneak. It’s as if a team of Jungian loving Ninjas would be the ideal Investigators for this campaign. It would have been nice to see a larger spread of skill usage throughout the campaign, but it is what it is. Just don’t expect your typical librarian or Professor to make it through this unscathed. A Hobo or dock worker might have a better chance, which is kind of neat. Keepers may want to give hints as to what skills are best suited for this campaign if they are overly nice and generous, but it also may be fun to see how well the usual Call of Cthulhu builds hold up in this campaign.

The campaign starts off innocuously enough, with the wedding of a dear friend. Unfortunately the wedding is to be held in a church with a hideous curse that plagues any who try to wed within it, thus setting off a massive chain of events no one could predict. The first adventure is an intro not only to the campaign, but could also work as an intro to Call of Cthulhu as well. There’s little, if any, combat, and it’s all about deciphering how the curse works and disabling it. It’s about as cut and dry as a CoC adventure gets. From there, though, each adventure is meant to lead into the next, but things start off with a rocky start. A character briefly met in the first adventure is the story hook for the second one, which takes place in Whitby. However, said character lived nowhere near Whitby in the first adventure, and for a campaign that is almost anal retentive on keeping track of dates and times so as to stick to a schedule of events, there’s no commentary on when this character moved or how long of a time elapsed between the two adventures. There’s also no reason for this NPC to have forged such a strong bond with the Investigators that he thinks to write them and ask for their help. In all honestly, I would have the first adventure, “Introduction,” take place a year or so before “A Whitby Vampire” and throw in two other short adventures between them to let the Investigators raise their skills while letting the players get some experience in the system. I’d also make this particular NPC, named Frederick Davis, a recurring character in them somehow to strengthen his relationship with the PCs and make it less jarring.

The second adventure is only connected to the first because the things behind the cursed church are also behind the serial killings in this adventure. That and Mr. Davis. Other than that, they aren’t as interconnected as they need to be for a true campaign feeling. Still, “A Whitby Vampire,” is a fun adventure, just like the first, and it really gives the Investigators full exposure to the Mythos while also making some truly strange allies. It also gives the PCs knowledge of the cult that does the bidding of the Shan and a hint towards the end goal of this alien race.

After “A Whitby Vampire,” the Investigators begin to follow clues leading them into a vast world-wide conspiracy. They’ll be traveling by train, motorcar, carriage and even ship as they follow leads all over the United Kingdom. Each leg of the journey puts them at odds with the Shan’s cult, while also gaining magic and Cthulhu Mythos points at an increasing pace. As mentioned earlier, there will be a lot of battles taking place, but with the right magic, players should be able to stand up to the creatures they encounter, even while their sanity slowly dissipates. As Investigators will (hopefully) gain access to the same summon/bind spells the cult has, they can just neutralize the creatures with their own kind, freeing up time to investigate, steal, assassinate and research. Like I said, a Ninja would work out really well in Terror From the Skies.

A good part of the adventure is figuring out who is in the Shan’s cult and who is also quasi-possessed by one of these creatures. This is where the massive amount of psychology rolls will come in. Every character will have access to the spell Cast Out Shan, which will help immensely, but it’s getting a person to a place where you can perform the spell privately that will be the trick, just like any other spell in the game. It’s not just spells and psychology rolls that will come in handy. Someone who is excellent with a sniper rifle will make the adventure pretty easy as well. There are times when the an Investigator with experience in this field (say a veteran of the Great War) will be able to take out a cultist easily. More importantly, it’ll keep from having to deal with Shantanks and Star Vampires. At one point characters may even try to infiltrate the cult. At the very least they’ll be sneaking into a few ceremonies and the like. Investigators might not have a problem foiling the plans of alien horrors and their pet monstrosities, but they might balk at having to kill a lot of cultists. All for the greater good though, right?

It’s not until the sixth adventure, “Newcastle,” where the Investigators will really have an idea of what is going on. Until now, they’ve just been dealing with a cult that seems to be spread across the country. Here, however, players will finally figure out what the Shan need, a flight around the world via the Graf Zeppelin, even if they won’t know why. For the next few adventures, players will be going after specific cultists and either neutralizing them or opening their eyes to what the Shan really are and the nefarious schemes they have in place. The good thing is that you can have some of these (hopefully) ex-cultists in line as replacement characters in case someone dies or goes irreparably mad from this point on. Basically, from here on, players will be trying to figure out what cultists are going to be on the Graf Zeppelin, and taking their tickets through a variety of means. These bits can range from helping free these people from their Shan infestation (if they have one. They might just be helping willingly) to doing a 1920s style Shadowrun affair, or just outright robbing and/or murdering them to keep them from bordering the most important blimp ride in human history. Of course, no matter what, the Investigators will have to figure out who (or what) a mysterious being known as The Carrier is and what exactly “Heliowall” is, and why it is so important to the Shan. Is it a person? A Place? An alien being? A technological device? Players will need to figure this out and invariably, it will probably lead them through a maze of challenges that will test even the most min/max’d character.

The campaign climaxes with “The Graf Zeppelin” and “The Last Leg,” where the investigators, now armed with the knowledge of what Heliowall is, must figure out which of the passengers or crew aboard the Graf Zeppelin is it. Then they have to find a way to neutralize them and prevent the Shan’s plan for world domination from taking effect. In essence, these two adventures are a logic puzzle similar to the old board game Guess Who? albeit with more lethal consequences. Players will have to mentally tick off who the Carrier could and could not be. A wrong guess can lead to disaster, imprisonment and even extinction of the human race. At the same time, they have but a limited amount of time, as they must stop The Carrier before the flight around the world is accomplished, so they can’t dawdle. There will be numerous occurrences where The Carrier will try to take the Investigators out, and thus chances for the players to compare notes and try to pinpoint who the Shan’s ultimate agent is. It may come down to one Investigator taking it for the team by coldly murdering the Carrier in front of witnesses, or even the entire team sacrificing the Graf by using Mythos creatures of their own to destroy it and the Carrier (along with dozens of innocent human lives). It all just depends on the players and the actions they choose for their characters. In the end, the Investigators will have hopefully stopped the Shan from their one and only chance of destroying humanity in exchange for earning the eternal enmity of this race of beings. With a good Keeper and some fine players, Terror From the Skies should be an immensely rewarding and entertaining experience for all who play through it.

As fun and lengthy as Terror From the Skies is, it’s not without flaws. I’ve mentioned a few earlier, such as the lack of balance with important skills and the sheer amount of combat and magic players will be engaging in. The other really noticeable negative with this book is the layout of the content. I really feel that each chapter, as well as the entire book, could have been laid out better. Terror From the Skies feels a bit ramshackle, like everything should have been placed in a different order for better cohesion and comprehension. For example, each chapter ends with a summary, when really, that should have been at the beginning to help the Keeper or reader understand how events are meant to play out. As well, there’s not enough detail or planning for an adventure of this scope. It’s written as if this was an old school video game, where things progress linearly and that there isn’t room or discussion of how events might go down differently. A little more depth to each chapter could have gone a long way, and I’d really have preferred to see alternatives to outright combat. What’s written in this book is as if it is set in stone, and that’s never good for a tabletop game. After all, players will ALWAYS think of something the Keeper didn’t prepare for, and the structure of this book, combined with the underestimation of what players may do, means that Terror in the Skies is best left in the hands of a VERY experienced Keeper, lest things fall apart quickly, especially with the lack of any real attempts at tying the first few adventures together cohesively. I will also say that I wish Chaosium had stuck with the original cover (which you can see here instead of the one we ended up with. The original cover was awesome and let you know exactly what you were getting. The final cover is a bit generic at best.

So all in all, is Terror From the Skies forth picking up? At twenty-three dollars, I’d say yes. It’s fun to read through even if you’re not going to play it. It’s well written, if not well laid out, and it’s great to see Chaosium still putting out full campaigns instead of monographs and the occasional remake or sourcebook. Again, it’s nowhere near as good as some of those other lengthy campaigns that the company is famous for, but it’s still going to make for a fun time for any group that loves to play Call of Cthulhu. I’d definitely recommend it with the caveat that a Keeper will want to flesh things out so that the campaign runs a little smoother.

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/10/30/tabletop-review-call-of-cthulhu-canis-mysterium/

It’s been a long time since Chaosium released a single stand-alone adventure. Usually (even as far back in the early 90s when I first started playing CoC), the company packs things together as a collection or put out an entire campaign like last year’s Terror From the Skies. As such, Canis Mysterium is a breath of fresh nostalgia, reminding me of the days I’d pick up cheap five to ten dollar single adventures for games like Ravenloft and Shadowrun. The only physical copy of a solo Call of Cthulhu adventure that I own is Alone on Halloween and that’s a third party release from Pagan Publishing, so this is nice. Luckily the cost of the adventure is quite low and the quality is rather high, making this one of the better Call of Cthulhu releases of 2013. Let’s take a look at why.

Canis Mysterium sheds a lot of the Call of Cthulhu tropes. Yes, your characters are from Arkham and most will even work at Miskatonic University, but Arkham is not the focal point of the adventure and I can’t think of a single Library Use roll that you’ll be making. The adventure is more of a psychological detective story instead of a “discovering something horrible plaguing mankind” or stopping the machinations of a Great Old One or vile cult. Sure, there’s a typical Lovecraftian beastie lurking somewhere in the adventure, but you don’t see much of it and the crux of the adventure is more about the evil mankind does to itself. In fact, the monster only comes into play in the adventure due to an act of kindness performed upon it by an NPC, which is another unusual twist to the adventure. If the adventurers fail the mission (in one of several ways), something supernatural does indeed occur, but it’s more of an All Flesh Must Be Eaten experience than a Call of Cthulhu one.

The player characters will be travelling to a small town of about 800 people named Coldwater Falls. It seems the town drunk has fallen prey to lycanthropy and Miskatonic University wants the PCs to help out with the situation. Now hold up. When I say lycanthropy I don’t mean a werewolf, but the actual mental disorder where a person believes they are a wolf. The poor old man is deranged, reduced to walking on all fours, growling and trying to attack people so that it can kill and eat them. In fact, the man is believed to have already killed an eaten a young girl on her way to the outhouse one cold October Eve. At least one PC should be a psychologist, biologist or anthropologist in order to have them be hired to study (and solve?) the man’s obvious severe mental impairment. Sounds like a pretty straightforward adventure, right? Well, this being Call of Cthulhu, it is anything but.

Once in Coldwater Falls, the players will discover the usual small town gossip along with a web of intrigue that will lead them to the source of the man’s insanity. Investigators will discover a scheme of revenge that is as revolting as it is potentially lethal to all the residents of Coldwater Falls. The climax of Canis Mysterium will have the PCs fighting five different enemies and so hopefully there will be at least one character skilled at combat, but expect at least one character to bite the dust. A TPK (Total Party Kill) is not out of the question in this battle either, so be warned that while the Sanity loss rolls are at a minimum here, physical dismemberment is not.

I really enjoyed Canis Mysterium as it ended up being intriguing and unusual, allowing players to really investigate the locale, while not being so open world that they could go off tangent and lose track of their original goal. Things are pretty straightforward once clues start to fall in place and although I wouldn’t call the adventure linear, it doesn’t leave too much room for sidequests or going off rails. This means you should be able to play the adventure in a single play session, or two if players like to explore every nook and cranny and do a lot of in-character talking to NPCs. Because the adventure does require several Investigators to have specific professions, Canis Mysterium does feel like it works best as a one-off with pre-generated characters. These aren’t included in the adventure, so you will have to make them yourselves. Alternatively, this adventure could be the start of a Call of Cthulhu campaign as you are provided five story seeds that work as sequels to this adventure. These range from returned antagonists to a trip to France for an ancient and evil grimoire. It’s nice to see some options for expanding this adventure into more than a one-shot, and as long as your Keeper is willing to put some elbow grease into fleshing out the seeds into something playable, Canis Mysterium can provide you with a wealth of gaming sessions. This alone makes it well worth the cover price.

I can definitely recommend Canis Mysterium as it’s well written and a lot of fun. It also helps that it doesn’t rely on the usual Mythos tricks and tropes. The digital version only costs six dollars, and that’s a crazy good deal. You can pick it up on Chaosium’s website and read it right away. For a few dollars more, you can have Chaosium or Amazon ship a dead tree version to your house. Personally, I’d say go for the digital version unless you’re expressly against that format. It’s cute to see a adventure for Call of Cthulhu released on its own instead of in a collection, but ten dollars might be more than you want to pay for single adventure that you might not ever run, especially if you’re used to purchasing collections of adventures. Either way you’re sure to be happy with Canis Mysterium unless you really only want tentacles beasties, squamous horrors and eldritch terrors in your Call of Cthulhu games.

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/02/22/tabletop-review-atomic-age-cthulhu-call-of-cthulhu/

Atomic Age Cthulhu is the newest release for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game by Chaosium. This adventure collection, which also contains a chapter on story seeds and also a primer on the 1950s is not the first time Chaosium or other Call of Cthulhu publishers have dug into the era of Leave it to Beaver and McCarthyism, but is the first full collection of adventures for that time period. Atomic Age Cthulhu is not a campaign setting tome like Cthulhu by Gaslight, but the book does contain enough information for any Keeper to understand the time period and mood of the era.

At first glance, the 1950s does seem like an odd period to set Call of Cthulhu adventures, especially compared to the 1890, 1920s, and 1930. After all, you really don’t think of eldritch horrors along with Dobie Gillis and Chuck Berry. However the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. After all, the 1950s are almost a perfect analogue for the Cthulhu Mythos tales. On the surface, everything is pristine and almost serene if you watch the TV shows from that era. Everyone is friendly and neighborly. Parents and kids gets along wonderfully. There is no hint of social or mental illness and every problem is solved positively and with a laugh. However when you skim off the propaganda, we see that the 1950s were a time of paranoia, fear, distrust and unabashed madness for the human race in general. I already mentioned McCarthyism, but it’s almost impossible to over-emphasize how crazy the hunt for the “Red Menace” got. People were constantly afraid of communists invasions or rebellions and we fought many a war in the 1950s about suppressing the threat of Russian and Chinese satellite countries. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Revolution, the Algerian War, and many others had their beginnings (and some ends) in the 50s. This was not a time of peace and happiness, but almost constant global conflict, either with bullets or dollars. The 50s were a dark time in world history, no matter how much Donna Reed might make you want to think otherwise.

Another aspect of the 1950s that fits Call of Cthulhu nicely is that the focus of horror went from the classical monsters like werewolves and vampires to otherworldly alien creatures whose very appearance could make a man go mad. Sound familiar? Although none of these were necessarily Lovecraftian in origin, and the films about aliens from beyond the stars were often cheesy (and eventually turned into MST3K fodder), the sci-fi of the 50s shared many an underlying theme with Lovecraft’s writing. Heck, 1959 was when The Twilight Zone first began airing, and several of its stories were outright influence by Lovecraft and his contemporaries. Alfred Hitchock Presents also started in the 1950s, both of which are excellent resources for Keepers wanting to do a campaign in this era.

Finally, you have the first underpinnings that society and government were out to get you rather than protect its people. Scandals like Twenty-One, the Hollywood “black list” and farces like “duck and cover” combined to all let people realize that perhaps, everything isn’t as the powers that be want you to believe it is. Again, another wonderful Lovecraftian analogue.

So Atomic Age Cthulhu is a great idea on paper, but the question is whether or not it works in practice, and that’s what this review is for. We’ll take a quick look at each of the nine sections of the book and show you the highs and lows of this collection. I should give a caveat that the adventures of this book are more Delta Green than the typical Call of Cthulhu adventure as in many, players will be cast as government agents or military operatives. So if you’re not a fan of Delta Green or running adventures that are more X-Files than tales about antiquarians and dilettantes researching musty old tomes in an effort to save humanity, you probably won’t be happy with Atomic Age Cthulhu. For those that like a little more hack and slash or action than the run of the mill Call of Cthulhu adventure, this will probably be right up your alley. Now let’s take a look at the contents of this book, shall we?

The first adventure is “This Village Was Made For Us” and has players reacting to the suicide of a worker in a government town dedicated to cracking atoms. This means players are either government employees of some sort of friends of the family. What awaits the Investigators is a town wide conspiracy where a particular Mythos race is attempting something nefarious. I know that description makes the adventure sound a little generic as that could describe dozens of CoC adventures out there, but that’s basically the core of the tale. There’s a little Native American mysticism thrown in as a counterpoint to the Mythos creatures, but it’s an adventure that could be told at nearly any time and in any location with only a little modification needed. In fact, much of the adventure is all too similar to Terror From the Skies which Chaosium published in late November 2012. Now these two adventures aren’t carbon copies, but the fact they have the same antagonists using the same methods to accomplish similar goals is enough to make me wince. It’s not the fault of either writer, but more Chaosium for letting the two hit back to back like this. It’s equivalent to “Oh that nutty Nyarlathotep is up to his old tricks again!” or, “Oh no, we’re in a coastal or island town and there’s been a strange disappearance of townsfolk acting funny. It couldn’t be DEEP ONES, could it?” Now all this aside, “The Village Was Made For Us,” is a well written adventure and it flows smoothly in terms of narration and unfolding events. Sure it’s a bit on the generic side and it could easily occur at any time post WWII rather than being truly unique enough that it has to occur ONLY in the 1950s, but I enjoyed it for what it was and feel that as long as you haven’t recently read or played through Terror From the Skies, you’ll have fun with this. I’ll be nice and say we’re 1 for 1 right now.

“TV Casualties” is an odd adventure and like “This Village Was Made For Us,” I have mixed feelings and still am not sure whether I like it or not. On one hand, the adventure is pretty unique with a small picturesque town slowly falling apart at the seams. It’s a truly wonderful analogy for the perception vbs reality of what the 1950s were like, as well as one for early detractions against the “Boob Tube.” Keepers will find that this adventure doesn’t necessarily NEED to be in the 1950s, as it requires only a bit of tweaking to set it in a different time period, but it works best here, especially if the Keeper fills Plainville with flowery image rife from Nick at Night episodes. On the other hand, the core antagonist comes off a bit too futuristic or even steampunky for an adventure set in “our” 1950s. It’s also a pet peeve of mine when someone just randomly creates an antagonist for Call of Cthulhu and says, “Oh, it’s a form of Nyarlathotep,” even when the actions and personality of said form go expressly against how Lovecraft wrote the character or described him outside of his fictional work. So in this respect the adventure irks me, but it’s not really the writer’s fault as this facet was created by someone else for a previous Call of Cthulhu release and as it is canon to the game, you might as well take advantage of it however erroneous its original creator was with its core concept. You can’t really blame the writer of this adventurer for using a visually interesting Big Bad who also fits the feel and theme of the story he’s trying to tell. At the same time, if the Keeper excises the antagonist from the tired idea of making it a facet of the Crawling Chaos, it’s an even more memorable encounter for players, both visually and roleplaying wise because now it’s motives and very existence are all the more unfathomable and bizarre. So it’s a personal nitpick, but not one against the quality of the adventure. Again, “TV Casualties” is a well written adventure that feels like you are acting out an episode of The Outer Limits, and that’s definitely a good thing. It’s creepy, atmospheric and it even exploits the inherent racism and one of the big anti-Semitic myths of the 1950s – that of Judeo-Bolshevism. 2 for 2.

Every adventure collection tends to have one that is an absolute stinker. In this case it’s the third adventure in the book, “The Return of Old Reliable.” My big problem with this adventure is that it’s so over the top corny/cheesy/laughable, that it just isn’t something players or readers will be able to take seriously. Unfortunately the adventure is written so seriously (although if the art doesn’t make you laugh in this piece, you might need to check your funny bone), it unintentionally (or maybe it is intentional and it’s just so deadpan compared to how other comedic adventures for CoC have been written in the past that the intention is hard to gauge.) comes off as if it belongs in one of the old Blood Brothers collections Chaosium used to put out. “The Return of Old Reliable” is an homage (intended or not) to the exceptionally terrible Sci-FI movies of the 1950s where some animal mutates and threatens Mankind. You know the ones. Earth Vs. The Spider. The Giant Gila Monster. The Killer Shrews. Terrible films that took themselves seriously but no one else could so they eventually ended up being fodder for the Satellite of Love. In this case “The Return of Old Reliable” features a Spider Monkey imbued with the spinal fluid of a byhakee and after given a good dose of cosmic rays, has mutated into something that may just devour mankind from the inside out. Unfortunately the concept is so farcical, I just can’t see anyone pulling it off in a way where players won’t crack jokes the entire time, thus deflating the mood it wants (but fails horribly) to invoke. I’m actually surprised the writer didn’t really play up the sheer camp potential here and include notes to the Keeper on how to salvage this thing by telling them to play it up. I’ve seen other adventures ranging from Shadowrun to Ravenloft do this thing an “The Return of Old Reliable” desperately needed something like that to keep this from being an embarrassing affair for any Keeper who tries to run it straight laced with a straight face. My advice is to just play the camp factor to a hilt and give your CoC players a one-shot affair for laughs. Seriously, when you monsters are basically Flumphs and a Spider Monkey with a brain the size of Detroit, horror and terror are hard concepts to invoke. 2 for 3.

Adventure number four is called “Forgotten Wars,” and unlike the rest of the collection, it takes place outside of the United States; Korea to be exact. Forgotten Wars takes place during the Korean Warm although Hawkeye and BJ Honeycutt are nowhere to be seen. Instead the players take on the role of a M4 Sherman Tank squad that gets into far more than they bargained for. The end result is a very combat heavy experience, which usually isn’t a good sign for an Investigator’s chance of making it through the adventure to the end. However in this case, players have a lot of high tech (for the time) weaponry including a freaking TANK. They’ll need it to as they’ll have to face not just a Cthulhu devoted cult, but also a Hunting Horror, a few Star Spawns and some other alien monstrosities to boot. I will say that I ran through the combat pieces of this adventure several times and found that even when you knew what was coming and could prepare in advance, the combat is just too overwhelming. There are just too many enemies for a pack of five players and their tank to deal with unless you are used loaded dice. Oddly enough the writer suggests optional ways to give the antagonists even more of an advantage throughout the piece instead of the other way around, which is what the adventure desperately needs. I’m surprised no one on Chaosium’s side didn’t catch this and requests some rebalancing as it’s now completely on the Keeper to do so. As well, using a M4 Sherman tank in the Korean is somewhat historically accurate, but the main tanks used in the Korean conflict were the M26 Pershing and the M46 Patton, another thing I’m surprised wasn’t caught in the editing/vetting process. Using one of these more powerful tanks would definitely gives the Investigators a fighting chance to survive this adventure. Otherwise your best solution is to add some weaponry to the M4 that it actually would have been able to have such as the t34 rocket launcher and/or a flamethrower.

Now aside from the need to rebalance the combat and/or modify the tank, there is one other small flaw with the adventure and that like how “This Village Was Made For Us” was a bit too similar to “Terror From the Skies” for my liking, I had several flashbacks to Goodman Games, The Timeless Sands of India while reading “Forgotten Wars.” It’s got the same Great Race of Leng Vs. Great Old One storyline going, and similarities right down to the “Here’s some lighting guns for your lesser beings to use!” Thankfully though, both adventures have very different locals and enough variance in the plot progression (not to mention his one has a tank) that you can play them both (although hopefully not back to back) and still enjoy them both without players nitpicking that they’ve already run through something similar before.

Now you would think after two paragraphs of pointing out the problems with “Forgotten Wars,” that I must have hated it, but I honestly really loved it. There’s so much potential for this adventure to be a memorable experience for everyone in your gaming troupe. The idea of all the players as a finely knit tank crew that have experienced the horrors of war is a fascinating one and that might even make them less susceptible to the usual things that drive CoC Investigators into the madhouse. It’s definitely well worth playing through and one of the highlights of this collection. 3 for 4.

Adventure number five is “High Octane” and it’s just a fun and surreal adventure from beginning to end. It incorporates the hot rod culture from the time period, the sheer paranoia about Communists living amongst normal folk (which in this case turns out to be true), the Hell’s Angels and a good dose of Serpent People all thrown together into one fantastic (cracktastic?) adventure from beginning to end. The writer could have easily gone over the top with the potential for camp this adventure had, leading to the same problems that plagued “The Return of Old Reliable.” Instead, everything is weaved together in a believable and yet ominous fashion. Everything is grounded in reality (except for the Serpent People obviously) and NPCS are presented as multi-faceted believable people rather than two-dimension stereotypes based on TV shows from the time period. The crux of the adventure is that, for once, not only are all the fears from the 1950s real (alien threats, commies, biker gangs and teenagers) real, but they all just happen to converge on the same town at the same time. You can imagine what unfolds. This is simply a lot of fun and it’s an adventure where players can openly and consistently crack jokes without running the mood or atmosphere of the adventure. This is definitely one of the highlights of Atomic Age Cthulhu. 4 for 5.

The penultimate adventure in Atomic Age Cthulhu is “L.A. Diabolical.” Here’s the thing, I really enjoyed this adventure, especially all the homages and in-jokes to real life people within it. The problem is this isn’t a 1950s adventure but a late 1960s/early 1970s one. All those aforementioned references and allusions? They’re from the 1960s, not the 1950s. Zander LeNoir is Anton Levay. The Church of Night is the Church of Satan. Jayne St. Jayne is Jayne Mansfield. Davy Samuels Jr. is Sammy Davis Jr. So on and so forth. Anyone who remotely catches the nudge nudge, wink wink aspects of this adventure will appreciate them (as I did) but also know that the time period for them is all wrong. So I’m torn on this minor aesthetic aspect. While “L.A. Diabolical” is a well done adventure it also doesn’t belong in this collection at all and should have been saved for something for befitting the story and actual time period it is referencing. It’s akin to having a collection entitled “Cthulhustock” and having all the adventures being psychedelic hippie fare, but then one being an homage to “That’s What Friends Are For” where all the world’s top music stars are brought together for a song to help ease suffering in Africa, only to have the whole thing be a ploy by the Insects of Shaggai to take control of the music industry in one fell swoop. Sure it might be pretty interesting, but it wouldn’t fit the theme or collection, now would it?

The catch is not too many people are actually going to pick up on the fact that this is a 1960s adventure masquerading as a 1950s one and really, besides pointing it out in a review (because hey, if a critic isn’t critiquing, they’re not doing their job.) only the most anal retentive rules-lawyerly of gamers is really going to have a problem with this factoid and generally we all know how to keep from gaming with those people, so most of your time with L.A. Diabolical will be fun and frantic rather than a discussion on the fact that a high profile cult of this nature simply wouldn’t be tolerated during the 1950s due to the spotlight on Hollywood for a supposed proliferation of communist sympathizers. It’s a game – have fun with it.

The adventure is one that is hilarious in concept but quite serious and dark in its follow-through and it works wonderfully. The concept simply is this: Small town naïve Great Old One worshipper makes it in Holywood but longs for the days of ritual sacrifice and communing with things of otherworldly origin. When the Church of Night makes it big, she readily joins up only to discover it’s a sham without any real magic or occultism going on. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I’m thinking a worshipper of things Mankind was not meant to know can give that lady a run for her money. This is just a fun adventure in all respects unless you are hell bent on chronological accuracy. I should point out Anton LeVay’s estate is highly litigious, so let’s hope they don’t find out about this one. 5 for 6.

The final adventure, but not the final section in the book, is “Destroying Paradise, Hawai’ian Style.” This adventure is a bit of an homage to the Elvis in Hawaii set of movies “The King” made…which were made in the 1960s. So see above for my little commentary on this exact issue with this aspect of the adventure. Unlike the previous adventure which was firmly set in the 60s in all ways, this one sticks hard and fast to actual 1950s history, save for the potential genocide of all life on the islands if the Investigators screw this one up. “Destroying Paradise” is set firmly in 1957, as Hawai’I edges ever closer to statehood. The Investigators are stuck in the middle between factions who want to see the USA get a 50th State and those who want to see the haole leave the islands. If that’s not enough each side has their own Cthulhu Mythos cult aiding them. This, my friends, is where the fun (and insanity…and deaths…and horrific monsters that defy description and…well, you get the picture) begins.

Investigators are going to have to keep the Elvis analogue’s movie filming smoothly, discover the machinations of the two cults, save as many lives as possible and eventually prevent a minor Great Old One from wiping out all life in the region. Also, the effects of nuclear testing in this region by American armed forces comes back to haunt the Investigators big time. This is just another solid all-around fun adventure for players and Keepers alike where I only have minor issues. In this case it’s aspects of the 1960s showing up in a 1950s collection and that the final bits of the adventure really need to be run by a very organized Keeper who is well versed in the game, otherwise it’s going to fall apart on them. 6 for 7.

Think we’re done? Guess again, there is still another twenty percent of the book we haven’t covered. Up next is “1950s Sinister Seeds” where the authors have provided you with twenty paragraphs, each of which can snowball into a full fledged adventure of their own. Sure you’ll have to do the legwork and put the thing together, but nearly all of these are top notch and should have you chomping at the big to try and flesh at least one of them out. 7 for 8.

The last bit of the book is “The 1950s Sourcebook” and it contains a lot of helpful information for Keepers. You need information about the presidents of the era? It’s here. Population statistics? Ditto. Pop culture factoids? You’ve got it. Everything from the House Un-American Activities Committee to views on race and sexual preference are covered in this section. It might even be worth it to read this last chapter first so you can better visualize what the 1950s were like. There are even some fun new occupations like Beatnik and Rock Musician. This alone is worth the price of admission. 8 for 9.

As we can see from the past six pages of commentary, Atomic Age Cthulhu is an exceptionally well done piece. Sure the adventures could have used some better vetting/editing, but the good definitely outweighs the bad in nearly all of them, making this a truly worthwhile collection to pick up. With the digital version of Atomic Age Cthulhu at almost half the cost of the physical version (which will also have shipping fees), I strongly recommend going PDF all the way as it becomes quite the deal. Here’s hoping the rest of 2013 follows suit for Chaosium releases!