19th Level

One of my favorite supplements for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG is Malleus Monstrorum . Though written for the 6th edition of the game, in my experience it can be converted on the fly to other editions. It is out of print, with physical copies selling in excess of $100.00. It is available digitally from Chaosium and DrivethruRPG . The book is about 300 pages long and is illustrated in black and white, as was typical for pre-7th edition Chaosium books. Regrettably the book is not bookmarked, something that would have been rather useful. The artwork is somewhat unconventional - a combination of black and white photographs, sketches, pictographs, drawings of statues, etc. Malleus Monstorum  is essentially a "Monster Manual" for Call of Cthulhu. It is divided into various classifications, such as servitor races, independent races, gods, animals, etc. It has a lot of creatures from the works of HP Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, H...

I've had the opportunity to clock in a decent amount of time playing the  Call of Cthulhu  7th edition RPG since its initial release in 2014. Like the previous editions, characters from one edition are very much compatible with previous editions, though the rules themselves have undergone a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning. So what changed? Looking at the character sheet the first thing you notice is characteristic scores no longer are in the 3 to 18 range but rather in a percentile range. You generate characteristics in the same way - 3d6 or 2d6+6, depending on the stat, but you multiply by 5. This makes it perhaps a bit easier to make percentile rolls against abilities but it doesn't affect gameplay very much. Looking at the quickstart rules for Chaosium's upcoming RuneQuest revision it doesn't seem like this change will carry over there. Perhaps the biggest change is the addition of a full difficulty system. In previous versions of Call of Cthulhu , there w...

For a number of older D&D players, their introduction to the game came from the D&D Basic Set as written by Eric Holmes. It wasn't my start - I began with the magenta set that followed it - but some of the people I gamed with had the Holmes Basic Set. The Holmes Basic is an interesting artifact, an intermediate step between the Original and Advanced D&D rules. Michael Thomas a few years ago developed a retroclone of the Holmes Basic rules, called Blueholme Prentice Rules . Like the original Basic Set it was a low level game. With the Journeymanne Rules the game covers levels 1 to 20. It's a well done book that fits a lot into a slim volume - when I received it I was amazed how much it crammed into its 112 pages. This review will assume familiarity with D&D which I presume is a reasonably safe assumption. Like every D&D game it has the classic six ability scores. As is often the case in older versions of D&D these scores aren't as importa...

I was never able to get a copy of the Traveller RPG as a kid. The local hobby shop, long since departed, had the Traveller books, but I never knew where to start. I saw little black books -  Books starting with 4, Supplements, etc. But I never knew where to get the first three books.  My first science fiction RPG was Gamma World  but shortly after it I obtained Star Frontiers . Gamma World scared me a little bit. This was the early and mid 1980s. It was a time when nuclear war didn't seem all that unlikely a possibility. Yes, Gamma World  was over the top and wild, but the setting of a fallen Earth always made me feel a little down. Star Frontiers , on the other hand, was something I could get into. Gleaming towers, hover cars, laser pistols etc.  Let's talk a little about the setting of Star Frontiers. It takes place in the "Frontier", a region close to the center of the galaxy where four species have come together to form the United Planetary ...

It's very strange doing a "first impressions" type of review of a game from 1984 but Chill was one of those games that I never managed to get ahold of when it first came out. I remember the numerous advertisements in Dragon magazine at the time for Pacesetter Ltd. RPGs - they all looked interesting to me but alas, my middle and high school funds to did not allow me to pick them up. Though for some reason I was sorely tempted to splurge on Chill so I could get the Elvira adventure compilation. I suspect puberty may have had something to do with that... I've recently had the opportunity go through the original game. It's definitely an old-school game, based around percentile-based ability scores and skills. There are two types of task rolls, general and specific checks. A general check is a straight percentile roll, looking to roll equal to or below your stat. With a specific roll you do a lookup on a table to see how well you did, using your margin o...

With a brief break from our Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea game taking place due to some travel going on in our group, we recently had the opportunity to try out Cthulhu Dark . It was just three of us, myself and two players, which in my experience can work pretty well for horror games. Cthulhu Dark  is designed for Lovecraftian horror. It is about as stripped down a set of rules as I could imagine. Your investigator has a name, a description, and an occupation. He or she has one stat, Insight, which begins at 1. If it reaches 6, your investigator is pretty much insane. Game over, man. How do you resolve tasks? It's pretty straightforward. If your task is something a human could do you doll a d6. If it is related to your occupation, you roll another d6. Finally, if you are willing to risk your mind to succeed you can roll an Insight Die. You pretty much always "succeed" unless Failure Dice are bing rolled. Your overall roll is the highest of a...

I just received my backer PDF for the 2nd edition of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Often when a backer PDF is released I'm playing something else so sometimes it may take days or even weeks until I get around to downloading it. Since I'm actually GM-ing an AS&SH campaign currently, I actually downloaded it right away. I've given the original version of the game a review as well as a more recent actual play impressions . This isn't a full review of the new edition - I've only had time for a quick skim. But from that skim it's worth noting that the game hasn't changed - there's some rearrangement here and there, some tweaks, and a bunch of additions. So it's important to note that my earlier reviews are still very much applicable. Indeed, unlike many games, the fact that this is a new edition isn't even advertised on the cover. This reminds me of the way revisions to the D&D Basic and Expert sets were released ...

We're currently working our way through The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in our AS&SH game. It adapts pretty well and at a later point I might write up about adapting the series. This post however is simply a brief review of the adventure itself. If you're in my group it's probably best to hold off in reading this until we're done, though I'd not be surprised if some or all of you have played or run this in the past, as it is a fairly common adventure from the 1st edition... The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh  is an adventure from the UK branch of TSR, copyrighted to 1981. It has a bit of a different feel from most adventures of the period. It has a bit of a heavier plot than most adventures back then - it's not like later adventures which sometimes go so far as to render player decisions moot. Rather it has a set of NPCs with their own agenda who aren't likely to sit waiting for the PCs to arrive. Saltmarsh is a two-part adventure as well as being ...

Including a character generation session, we had our third session of AS&SH last night. I reviewed it over four years ago but sometimes there's a world of difference between reading a game and playing it. So how does it play? As I've mentioned, as far as the rules go it is in many ways a cleaned up version of AD&D. A bit more complicated than Swords & Wizardry  but nothing anyone with gaming experience would have trouble with. Having played it a few sessions there's a few things that I've noticed in play. First, despite being based on AD&D, the lack of demi-humans makes a big difference, even when you aren't going for deep immersion characterization. It definitely gives off the swords & sorcery vibe that the game is going for. While it lacks multi-classing, it does give some sub-classes that represent a number of fantasy and swords & sorcery tropes. For example, it is possible to play the traditional fighter/magic-user as a warlock. ...

One of my more humorous moments explaining a gaming book occurred in the mid-1980s. I was in the back seat of my grandfather's car flipping through Role Aids ' Elves  book while we were stuck in traffic on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. My grandmother asked what I was reading and I showed her the book. She misunderstood the title and thought I was reading a book about Elvis, not Elves. To this day when I look at the cover of that book I keep thinking it does kinda look like he's getting ready to rock... Since the 3rd edition of D&D Wizards of the Coast has embraced third party adventures, though they were perhaps a bit less receptive in the 4th edition era. They had made the discovery they made their most money on books that everybody bought - rulebooks and supplements. Adventures might be needed but they didn't make nearly as much money. Prior to that, the original owners of D&D, TSR, was rather draconian about allowing 3rd party products. They did lic...

The version of Golden Age Champions that I have dates back to 1994 and was published by Iron Crown Enterprises for the 4th edition of the Champions RPG. The first 30 pages deal with the campaign premise. It discusses possible campaign lenses such as a more Dark Champions campaign (with characters more like the Spider, the Phantom, etc.), super-patriotic games, and something in-between. It gives a brief history of the Golden Age of comic books, different types of package deals for characters of the period, a discussion of draft deferments for those characters who will not be participating in World War II, etc. Next up is a large section of historic source material. It covers people and organizations of the period, a glossary of WWII and homefront terminology, and three parallel timelines - the real world, the Champions universe, and and "Axis Victory" universe. Regretfully these timelines only cover up to 1946 - it would have been interesting to see them go a bi...

I Kickstarted the TimeWatch  RPG in early 2014. It was supposed to be delivered in November 2014, so it was definitely late, having just arrived at my door today. For the most part, communications were pretty good, with a few quiet periods here and there. It was one of those projects were stretch goals definitely increased the scope of the project. I've had various PDF drafts of the project as time went on so I had a pretty good idea as to what I was getting but the finished product was definitely impressive. What I'll be doing here is giving a high level overview of TimeWatch , possibly followed by a full review should my group take it for a spin. TimeWatch  uses the Gumshoe system, as seen in games like Trail of Cthulhu  and The Dracula Dossier . It has a few things that distinguish it from most RPGs: General Abilities are things like fighting, athletics, etc. To test them you roll 1d6 and add nothing. 4+ is typically a success. Add nothing? Are you crazy? Well,...

Young Centurions is an implementation of the Fate Accelerated RPG which I reviewed here a few weeks back. Young Centurions is a prequel to Evil Hat's first Fate RPG, Spirit of the Century . In both games the premise is on the first day of every century, at the stroke of midnight, are born a bunch of heroes, Centurions, who will embody some aspect of the spirit of the upcoming century. They aren't superheroes, but they are definitely a cut above your regular person. They make things happen, whether as inventors, psychics, explorers, crimefighters, etc. They are opposed by Shadows, their counterparts born on the last day of the previous century. They represent a negative aspect of the new age. Only a fraction of the babies born on these dates become Centurions or Shadows. Centurions and their counterparts live long lives, to the extent that there will be some who survive long enough to serve as mentors to the next century's Centurions. Spirit of the Century  ...

Fate is a difficult system for me to grok. I like it conceptually, but I have a difficult time when it comes to running it.  Fate is what's considered a narrative game. Instead of modeling a simulation of the reality of the RPG setting, it is designed at supporting a story. I've seen arguments as to whether or not this makes it a "real" RPG. I think the whole debate is a bit silly, dealing with issues of "bad wrong fun". Truthfully the challenges I have with it are largely a function of me being a grizzled gaming grognard, gaming since the early 1980's. To paraphrase Yoda, I must unlearn what I have learned. I've a hunch that I'd actually have an easier time grokking Fate were I to know less.  Overview With that prelude behind us, let's take a look at the Fate Accelerated game. It is a variant of the Fate Core game. Fate Core looks a lot like what one would expect from an RPG book - pretty thick, lots of skills, stunts, etc. F...

In the early 2000s one of the complaints I recall about Wizards of the Coast's d20-based  Star Wars RPG   was it was simply "D&D in space" vs. the previous Star Wars RPG as put out by West End Games. While I had a number of fun Star Wars games using the d20 versions, I have to confess to a bit of a preferences for the West End Games versions. Though in a sense, you could have called that game "Ghostbusters in space". Alas, my copies of Ghostbusters suffered in the regrettable basement flood several years ago triggered by the kiddies forgetting to turn off the bathroom sink. Oops. I've managed to reassemble some bits of it and hypothetically speaking there might be some scanned copies out there. Of course with the new movie coming out I saw a copy of the original RPG going for $3000.00 on Amazon. I'm thinking some automatic pricing algorithm is going a little loony right there... Anyways, recently flipping through the original version of the...

The first thing that struck me about the Delta Green Agent's Handbook  is just how dark a game this is. Reading through it I see a game that like it's parent, Call of Cthulhu , puts our protagonists on the front lines against ancient horrors with life and sanity on the line. But Delta Green has more ways to make the agents fall to pieces. There's rules for abusing stimulants on a mission, game-related reasons for seeking solace in the bottle. rules for sacrificing - or just losing - pieces of your personal life. If you are lucky you'll end up in Cthulhu's tummy. If you're unlucky you'll wind up losing your mind, your marriage, your job, and/or your freedom. What I really like is there's rules - simple rules - for all of this. A bit of a rewind is in order. Delta Green is a take on the Call of Cthulhu Mythos. First published in the 1990's as a Call of Cthulhu supplement, it dealt with dueling government agencies and conspiracies trying to des...

In the dark ages prior to the internet, learning about new games was extremely challenging. If no one in your circle was familiar with a game you depended on magazine reviews, advertisements, or your own purchases to learn about new games. My circles did not have anyone familiar with RuneQuest. There was a lot D&D and its variations and some people I knew played a lot of FASA Star Trek. I found my way to Chaosium games through a roundabout journey. The March 1985 issue of Dragon magazine featured "The Dolphins of Known Space", detailing Dolphins for Chaosium's Ringworld game. I was unfamiliar with both the game system and its setting but was intrigued by both and wound up checking out both the game and the novel.  I was curious about the RuneQuest, which I'd begun hearing about. In 1986 my uncle got me a copy of the 3rd edition of RuneQuest for Christmas. I found it an interesting game but not really one appropriate for the gaming I'd been doing a...