Time for another entry in my regular series of articles on game supplements which have caught my eye and inspired some brief thoughts. This time around, it’s a Basic Roleplaying special; with spooky season closing in, the emphasis is going to be on the more eldritch end of that particular family of games, with two Call of Cthulhu releases as well as a visit to Delta Green (not technically under the BRP brand umbrella, but unquestionably a fork from the wider family tree – and come to think of it, it may be advantageous for them to consider shifting over to the ORC licence under which BRP has been made widely available for use, to provide the legal coverage the used to get under the OGL before Wizards shatthebed), but there’s also something more genre-neutral to look at.
No Time To Scream (Call of Cthulhu)
In terms of its format, this is another release in the same general vein as Gateways To Terror. Like that book, No Time To Scream is a collection of three mini-scenarios which are designed to be playable in an hour or two if you’re brisk about it but can be elaborated upon or expanded as desired, and are equally suited to being one-off pick-up games or slotting into appropriate points on an ongoing campaign.
A Lonely Thread offers a classic horror setting – a cabin in the woods! – and packs in a bit of roleplayed conversation, a bit of exploration, and a bit of peril, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in how the scenario might unfold. Bits & Pieces confesses to having a pulpier tone – and the concept, whilst fun, may risk descending into farce unless groups do a really bang-up job of maintaining a horror atmosphere; there’s just something a tad slapstick about the spectacle of investigators running after a bunch of dismembered body parts.
Time for another entry in my occasional series of mini-reviews on game supplements I have thoughts substantial enough to write about, but lean enough that I don’t want to dedicate a whole article to them. For this go-around, it’s sci-fi comedy time, with one supplement taking its parent game in a funnier direction and a couple of adventure releases for a classic comedy-based game.
Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide (Star Trek Adventures)
As the title implies, this hardcover supplement offers a range of material drawn from Lower Decks, the Star Trek animated sitcom which turned out to be far better than anyone dared expect. Obviously, the main thrust is all about running scenarios inspired by Lower Decks – funny examinations of the sillier foibles of the Star Trek setting, focused on lower-ranking characters. Hell, even the front cover is a parody of the (dreadful) cover art for the first edition Star Trek Adventures core rulebook. That joke, however, will become a little dated now that the 2nd Edition core book has come out with much better cover art. So too will some of the system concepts in this need a little amendment, due to the shift in the system away from using D6s for some rolls.
Nonetheless, this book can work for both editions rather well. With character species being built on essentially the same scale between the editions, for instance, you can use the new character options here in either edition more or less as-is, and whilst some of them are a bit niche, others could absolutely be used with a more serious spin. Heck, even the niche ones can have their uses – there’s rules for Cetacean characters, for instance, which admittedly may have limited use in most scenarios but does open up the scope for unusual away team missions to water worlds where the players play their main characters whilst aboard ship and play a Cetacean away team exploring the ocean depths.
That’s kind of the genius of this book – you can absolutely use it for the sort of comedic tone Lower Decks goes for, but a lot of the ideas in it can also be used for more serious Star Trek scenarios, something which is possibly largely because Lower Decks pulls off a clever trick of laughing along with Star Trek but also taking it somewhat seriously at the same time. For instance, the concept of a “second contact” visit to a world which has previously experienced first contact but is now expecting the Federation to follow through on its initial promises can absolutely be played straight, and the refereeing advice here also includes a breakdown of major Star Trek tropes and how Lower Decks uses those to derive comedy, but at the same time the recurring tropes are also a rich source of ideas for more straight-down-the-line missions.
With baseline Star Trek Adventures already providing scope for throwing in lower-ranking supporting characters mid-mission (something turned on its head here with the guidance for throwing in higher-ranking supervising characters for much the same purpose), a supplement expanding on that is decidedly worthwhile – Lower Decks provides the perfect excuse to do that, and to offer a glimpse of the state of play in the galaxy after Voyager wraps up but comfortably before Picard season 1 fucks everything up.
Though Star Trek Adventures, particularly in its tightened-up second edition, is my current gold standard when it comes to Trek-based tabletop RPGs, it’s hardly the first game in that sphere. As I outlined in my review of Star Trek Adventures‘ first edition, there were a fair few officially licensed Trek RPGs that preceded it – along with Prime Directive, the RPG line associated with the Star Fleet Battles wargame that uses its own weird version of the setting as a result of an overly-favourable licensing deal that Paramount have been unable to wriggle out of, and profoundly unofficial attempts to do Trek with the serial numbers filed off (sometimes not with much filing-off going on) going at least as far back as Starships & Spacemen from the 1970s.
Some of those have more of a legacy than others. Arguably the most successful Trek RPG prior to Star Trek Adventures was the version originally published by FASA in 1983. It wasn’t the first one, and there were several attempts in between FASA losing the licence in 1989 due to Paramount abruptly deciding they weren’t respecting the canon and principles of the show enough and Modiphius making their own stab at it, but FASA Trek and Star Trek Adventures are the two Trek RPGs with the most longevity, and so have had more of a chance to make their mark and hone their approach; in other instances the licence was either roughly yanked away mere years after a core book being published or simply left on the shelf for years at a time.
So when I had the opportunity to get a job lot of FASA Trek material – the core set, some supplements, some adventures – I decided to give it a shot, just to see what it was like and to see what could be harvested for Star Trek Adventures purposes. Surprisingly enough, it felt simultaneously like a very different take on the Trek universe – inevitably so, given that the material I received was all written before The Next Generation graced our screens – and one which feels like a really solid precedent for Star Trek Adventures, leading me into some speculation as to why sometimes when a game comes out with a new version with a radically different system I feel like it’s a whole different game, and sometimes I feel like it’s either a continuation of the original or at the very least a spiritual successor.
The version I got was the second edition, in the UK printing put out by Games Workshop. This is divided into three brief booklets; the Star Fleet Officer’s Manual covers character generation and basic gameplay, the Cadet’s Orientation Sourcebook is a setting guide, and the Game Operations Manual gives refereeing guidance and advice. What is notably missing is any sort of detailed system for ship-to-ship combat; there’s brief guidance on adapting the existing system to tasks during starship combat in a very low-tactics, theatre of the mind-oriented fashion, but if you want more meat you are directed to either get the Star Trek III Starship Combat Game for a wargame-style simulation or Enemy Contact: Bridge Alert, a supplement designed to handle starship combat through a less wargamey, more character-oriented approach (so in effect a more elaborate version of the suggestions provided here).
Age of Vikings is a brand-new RPG from Chaosium… or rather, it is and it isn’t. Age of Vikings is certainly a new brand for them – but its author, Pedro Ziviani, had previously written the Mythic Iceland supplement for use with the Big Yellow Book version of Basic Roleplaying, which has recently been revised and rereleased as the Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine. Both Age of Vikings and Mythic Iceland have essentially the same concept: your characters live in the unique society of 10th Century Iceland, whose inhabitants spurn the rulership of a King like their European peers in favour of the sovereignty of the Althing, their assembly which is arguably the oldest surviving Parliament in the world, with the “mythic” side of the equation coming in because the game depicts a world in which the myths and legends believed in by the Icelanders are essentially real, but enough historical detail that if you wanted to use the material to run a more purely history-based game (with some departures for playability) that’s absolutely something you can do.
Given the circumstances, you might be forgiven for thinking that Age of Vikings is just Mythic Iceland given a new title and with all the required system bits from Basic Roleplaying folded into it. You might even be sold on that idea; Mythic Iceland was one of the more acclaimed supplements that came out for the Big Yellow Book under Charlie Krank’s stewardship of Chaosium, and an update of that tweaked to stand alone to avoid flipping about between two books feels like a worthwhile endeaovur in its own right. However, Age of Vikings is a significant development of and embellishment of the concept, drawing on a deeper bench of material than just Mythic Iceland.
Arguably, both Mythic Iceland and Age of Vikings are in their own right descendants of RuneQuest Vikings – a supplement for the game’s third edition that is, alongside Land of Ninja, regarded as the high water mark of the “Mythic Earth” concept that edition explored before pivoting back to focusing on Glorantha (giving rise to the short-lived “RuneQuest Renaissance“). As a result, it makes sense that Age of Vikings has looked to how the latest edition of RuneQuest has folded in concepts from Pendragon to update its presentation, and proceed accordingly.
In particular, Age of Vikings adds in rules for Passions and a method of exploring your character’s family history during character generation, both of which are Pendragon innovations which have become more widely embraced across the Basic Roleplaying line. As with the original RuneQuest-style hit locations and skill categories are used, both of which seem suited to the material, whilst bespoke systems for reputation and status better-targeted towards Icelandic society, along with magic systems tailored towards the folklore, allow the material to work better than attempts to crowbar the standard RuneQuest magic systems into the setting. Whereas Mythic Iceland used the “Allegiance” concept from the Big Yellow Book – derived from Stormbringer – to model characters’ dedication to their patron gods, this utilises the idea of Devotions, which is similar in concept except better-integrated with the Passions rules and with somewhat different game mechanical effects.
As a result of the work necessary to incorporate these ideas, there’s major differences between this and Mythic Iceland, though a good amount of text from the original survives (with revisions for readability and the like). The “History of Mythic Iceland” chapters from the original all get largely reproduced here, for instance, though not necessarily in the same order (and history post-977, the assumed start date for Age of Vikings campaigns, is glossed over). The main excision is the rather terse notes on using Iceland in Cthulhu Dark Ages – in fact, Mythic Iceland rather bizarrely included a Cthulhu Dark Ages sample scenario instead of a Mythic Iceland one!
That mistake isn’t repeated here; as well as a fully worked-out scenario depicting a visit to the Althing – which nicely means that it’s repeatable, since the Althing is a regular, structured event that can be visited again and again to do different business and get different results each time – there’s also a rather neat system for throwing together a Viking raid on the fly. All this, plus seiðr magic too in parallel with the rune magic? It’s a great deal; on the whole, Age of Vikings is a substantial improvement on Mythic Iceland by any metric, more than justifying its rather long gestation period. Norse myth and the Dark Ages are subjects which RPGs have drawn on extensively over the years, but Age of Vikings raises the bar appreciably, making it a highly useful release for anyone running a game touching on this era or its myths.
A while back I went to the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Worlds exhibition. As well as being absolutely fascinating in its own right, it was a decidedly worthwhile visit from the perspective of this ongoing article series – because whilst a lot of RPGs draw on the medieval era for inspiration, the sources they look to are often highly dominated by male narratives. After touring the exhibits I picked up a clutch of books which each in their own way seem to offer a route to redressing that balance, offering a broader insight into the period for those who want “realism” in the sense of actual authenticity rather than “realism” in the form of grimdark Game of Thrones-esque nastiness.
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich was an anchoress – a practictioner of a particularly extreme form of religious withdrawal from the secular world which entails being permanently confined to a single room or set of rooms, often to the extent of being bricked in there. Dependent on food and drink being passed to them through a window to survive, cut off from regular life so completely that it was not uncommon for the Office for the Dead to be recited as an anchorite or anchoress entered their cell to represent them being “dead to the world”, those who took on this demanding lifestyle were often revered as the closest thing to a living saint, with people seeking their advice on matters of faith.
Julian was something of a local celebrity in Norwich as a result, but the thing which she is most known more these days appears to have occurred before she became an anchoress, and may well have been the motivating incident which prompted her to do that. In 1373, when she was in her early 30s, she suffered a severe illness and was on the point of death; as she gazed at a crucifix held before her by her priest, she experienced a powerful mystical experience, in which she perceived ecstatic visions and believed she was also vouchsafed with important spiritual information by God, which he wanted her to report to the wider world. It would take years – decades, even – for her to sift through the experience and set it down, and when she did, she did it in Middle English, not the Latin a more educated person of her era would use. This account, usually known as Revelations of Divine Love, now comes to us in a short text and a long text, the latter providing substantially more commentary on and interpretation of the visions than the short text.
Released in Oxford World’s Classics in a new translation to modern English by Barry Windeatt, Revelations of Divine Love is an intriguing and accessible look at what the mystical, contemplative life prized by certain sections of the medieval Church actually entailed. It’s common for us to depict the medieval Church as an entirely doctrinally ossified place where there’s basically no room for anyone to say anything original or interesting, especially if they were women or writing in the vernacular, let alone both – but Julian’s text was part of a flowering of vernacular mystical texts of the era and presents a distinctly novel view of God, sin, and humanity. Though she’s quick to emphasise that she believes everything the Church believes and isn’t trying to challenge any of that, she also develops a theological position where God has no intention of punishing us, sin is nothing, the Devil is defeated, and “all will be well”.
The text by itself is largely interesting for getting a look at the sort of philosophical contemplation mystics of the period would get into; where the translation is useful is in the extensive notes assisting interpretation of the text and the expansive introduction, giving a discussion of Julian’s life (what little we know of it), the anchorite tradition, and so on. And far from being persecuted as some kind of heretic simply for saying something new, Julian was honoured in her life, an example of a woman who became famed for her faith despite her seclusion.
The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of scenarios for old-school D&D and its close relatives, designed by Emmy Allen, who I previously interviewed to showcase her Esoteric Enterprises old-school RPG. (Specifically, Gardens was originally playtested with a mashup of Swords & Wizardry, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and homebrew elements, so it works most naturally with OD&D and B/X but is suited to any of the various flavours of TSR-era D&D and games derived from those.) The two modules – Ynn especially, as the earlier one – are credited with innovating the “depthcrawl” style of scenario, and have most recently been rereleased by SoulMuppet Publishing, who’ve put them out with gorgeous new artwork and layout in delightful hardcover editions, bankrolled by a pair of successful Kickstarters. (The first one, to do this for The Stygian Library, raised £26,708; the followup, to give Gardens of Ynn the same treatment, drew £131,994.) Having read the books, I decided it was high time for another chat with Emmy, so here goes…
(Note: though we tried to avoid spoilers, there was one seed of info which was too juicy to keep back – so I’ve encoded it with ROT-13. You’ll know it when you hit the gibberish; if you don’t want spoilers, don’t decode it.)
Last year, Modiphius released the second edition rulebook for their Star Trek Adventures RPG. Back when I reviewed the first edition, I was rather favourably impressed, though when my Wednesday night group and I did a campaign we ran into some issues, the main one being that the page layout and arrangement of information in the rulebook wasn’t what it could be. This second edition is certainly an opportunity to improve on that, but it also poses a challenge for Modiphius in terms of the evolution of Star Trek in between the editions.
With the first edition coming out in 2017, it was largely focused on accommodating The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise eras of the franchise. (The Kelvinverse was alluded to but otherwise not delved too deeply into.) That was a tall order for sure, but now Paramount has put out Discovery, Strange New Worlds, Section 31, Prodigy, Lower Decks, and three unbelievablyshittyseasons of Picard. How do Modiphius accommodate all this without making their core rulebook impossibly bulky?
Well, part of this comes down to them being willing to go sparse at points when it comes to setting information. That doesn’t mean that the core rulebook doesn’t give you a perfectly good rundown of the setting and the major eras of play, or a timeline covering the events of all of these shows, but it doesn’t overly worry about giving you everything. There’s a basic understanding here that anyone who wants a deeper dive into the lore of a particular Star Trek show has Memory Alpha at their beck and call for that, so there’s a focus here on getting you the key information you need about the setting and a solid toolkit of gameable material, rather than trying to explain everything.
It also helps somewhat that they realise that some of these new shows are essentially providing new takes on the same general era, so they don’t need to reinvent the wheel to accommodate them; ultimately, the difference between The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Lower Decks isn’t about the equipment, ships, or character types available, it’s more of a style thing. Even though Picard dips its toe into the 25th Century, its setting is still very close to the 24th Century setting of those shows (it’s all comfortably within one dude’s lifetime, after all), so really the only radically new setting that Paramount have unleashed on us is the 32nd Century era of latter-season Discovery. This is explicitly tagged as an “eh, make it up as you go, canon’s still being established here” kind of setting.
The emphasis this time on judging what information is truly important for the purposes of getting something to the table and which is perhaps best regarded as an optional extra is a major boon to the layout improvements that have been implemented here. One of the most annoying bits about the original core rulebook was the way starship profiles often were spread over several pages, in part because of artwork stuck into the middle of a description and in part because of overly long mini-essays accompanying them on the history of the ship type in question; here, each ship profile is presented in a single-page format, giving you everything you need at a glance, and that’s an instant improvement.
Overall, the layout and arrangement has been tightened up considerably, Modiphius having using seven years’ worth of at-the-table experience to really tune up how information is presented. There’s still plenty of art, including some nice large pieces, but care is used about its deployment to make sure it doesn’t impact readability or overly break up information which should really flow continuously. There is some evidence of art being reused here and there – I recognised some bits from the first edition book – but the money saved by doing so has clearly been used to make sure that each and every piece of art looks good. The cover of this edition looks fantastic, for instance, whilst the cover of the first edition was rather ugly in comparison. The internal art is gorgeous, canon-accurate enough that I can’t imagine it’s generative AI slop, and also shows a diversity of styles; there’s even some cartoonier illustrations in the style of Lower Decks as a gesture to the game’s capacity to accommodate that show’s style.
In fact, it’s interesting how well Lower Decks concepts slot into the book here seamlessly; despite being a comedy show, many of the ideas from it are ripe for being played straight. For instance, the idea from Lower Decks of “second contact” missions is expanded on here and it’s clear that there is actually scope to run serious stories based on that concept rather than going for farce; likewise, the California-class starship is one of the ship types you get here and it’s not some sort of clown car option, it’s just as viable as any other starship frame in the book.
When it comes to character options, these have been expanded appreciably; a broader range of species are available in the book, and there’s also support for playing not just Starfleet officers but enlisted crew (like Miles O’Brien) as well as Federation diplomats and intelligence officers, and even civilians – all character types that have appeared in Trek before. Whilst I suspect the vast majority of Star Trek Adventures campaigns will focus on adventures on a Starfleet ship – because why would you do a Star Trek game if you didn’t want that? – having these options available is a nice touch. The range of starships available has been adjusted; some types which were in the first edition core are gone, some new ones are in their place, but I don’t think you’re missing anything which would be an absolute dealbreaker.
One major change that has occurred is that the system has been tweaked to take out “challenge dice” – D6s – which has knock-on effects for some aspects of the design. Other streamlining has occurred in respect of starships, retaining the idea of your starship as a character in its own right that’s helping you out whenever you’re using ship-based stuff but dialling back on the bookkeeping necessary. Meanwhile, the Momentum, Threat, and Determination economies remain in play and somewhat better explained.
It’s likely I’ll get to play some 2nd edition Star Trek Adventures soon, and I’ll be interested to see how it holds up, but the sheer clarity of layout and overall improvement of the new core makes me inclined to ditch my old copy of 1st edition; I can’t imagine wrestling with it, even with my little bookmark stickers and the like, when this is such a joy to navigate.
In the early days of RuneQuest, the old guard at Chaosium made the game a major success, a serious challenger to Dungeons & Dragons, and arguably the most groundbreaking and sophisticated RPG of the 1970s. More recently, the new regime at Chaosium – primarily made up of members of Moon Design Publications, brought in by Glorantha creator and Chaosium founder Greg Stafford to right the ship after a series of major blunders nearly destroyed the company – have proved to be reliable custodians of the game, producing a new edition which enjoys the most lavish production values and extensive support that RuneQuest has ever enjoyed.
In between. however, RuneQuest‘s history has been somewhat patchier. I’ve gone on the record here as not liking Mongoose’s custodianship of the line in the mid-2000s; their first edition seemed a little slapdash, suffering from the lax production values that has been Mongoose’s trademark for most of their existence (though I was recently pleased to note that their latest versions of Paranoia and Traveller have found them cleaning up their game on that front), and their second edition was legendarily botched, with the two lead designers leaving to found the Design Mechanism and given the blessing of Greg Stafford to produce a 6th Edition of the game – a variant later retitled Mythras – which was essentially a “director’s cut” of the second Mongoose edition without the hatchet job it suffered in the edit.
Before the Mongoose era, however, RuneQuest endured another misstep – Chaosium’s decision to get into a business arrangement with Avalon Hill. Let’s rewind to the early-to-mid-1980s: RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer are all big hits, but Chaosium isn’t a huge business (and never really has been) and doesn’t really have the means to do all the production and distribution logistics on all three game lines. Lead figures like Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin want to spend more time doing game design and less time doing business management. As a result, the business decides to indulge an experiment to see if they could pivot to being a design house, so they could do all the fun part of designing game materials and other companies could handle the nitty-gritty of actually printing, distributing, and marketing the stuff.
Although Chaosium have provided at least some support for the popular 1890s-based Cthulhu By Gaslight setting for Call of Cthulhu during the game’s 7th Edition era thanks to the Cthulhu Through the Ages supplement, which provides 7th Edition guidance for creating Investigators in a number of eras (and thus provides all you need to use existing Gaslight products with 7th Edition), until recently they hadn’t gotten around to fully updating the old Cthulhu By Gaslight supplement for the new version of the game. Originally put out in a couple of editions in the 1980s (a 1986 boxed set, and then a 1988 revision of the box contents into a softcover book), its most recent tune-up was back in 2012, a mere couple of years before the release of 7th Edition, and so perhaps it was deemed prudent not to render that redundant immediately lest it seem like a cash grab.
However, it’s been over a decade since that came out, so it’s hardly exploitative of Chaosium to put out a new version of the supplement – but rather than just take the old text, multiply all the core attributes by five, and move on (which is really all you need to do to convert a supplement from the 1st to 6th Editions of the game to 7th Edition), Chaosium have gone in for a root and branch revision and expansion that’s even more extensive than the job Kevin Ross did back in 2012 of expanding on William Barton’s original supplement.
This is sensible. The downside of writing an RPG supplement that’s about a real historical period is that on the one hand, you have the advantage of a mass of real-world material to base your research off, but you also have the downside that here in the Internet age a fairly sizable proportion of your audience has access to the same material. If you’re going to sell someone a supplement detailing a historical period, you’re going to need to something a bit more substantial than what they could get by skim-reading a few of the meatier Wikipedia articles on the subject; in effect, your audience is paying you to do the research legwork for them and present the material in a way which is of particular use for the purpose of playing in and running games set in the era.
This is particularly the case with the Cthulhu By Gaslight Investigators’ Guide – because the 7th Edition expansion of Gaslight is so major that it’s been split into two books. We’re promised that in due course a Cthulhu By Gaslight Keepers’ Guide will emerge giving NPC stats, Mythos threats, and other Keeper-facing rules and information; for obvious reasons, this is going to be where most of the outright fictional material is going to land. In contrast, the Investigators’ Guide is a player-facing book, providing a deep dive on the Victorian setting without spoilering any of the Keeper’s secrets – which in effect means that most of the real-world history researched for the supplement is going to end up here, because that history provides the pool of common general knowledge available to the characters in the setting, describes the zeitgeist they exist in, and gives details on the class and cultural context they hail from.
In fact, the Investigators’ Guide is rather cunningly developed so that it can serve as either a supplement or as a core rulebook depending on your preferences and what makes sense for your gaming table – rather than requiring Gaslight players who want a rulebook but don’t want any of the referee-facing stuff to get the 7th Edition Investigator Handbook, as you might for a game set in the 1920s (which the Handbook has a fairly extensive chapter on) or the modern day (which, since you reside there, you don’t need an introduction to), such a player can just get this book and have everything they need, because not only does this include the Gaslight-specific rules for creating an investigator, but it also has an appendix reproducing the basic Call of Cthulhu rules.
This, perhaps, might be a by-product of the development of the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, since the condensed rules here are much like the brief version of the rules there – doing the exercise of seeing just how much you can strip down the rules and still give someone the details they need to fully participate in a game session seems to have helped Chaosium realise that they could put this out with a significant shift in the balance of setting material to rules stuff; whereas the Investigator Handbook has the full-fat rules explanations for players (and so may still be of some help to participants in Gaslight campaigns – if you already own it you didn’t waste your money) and about 40-odd pages of 1920s setting discussion, this book goes all-out on providing deep dives into the era.
This may be necessary. For one thing, the 1920s are increasingly in the rear view mirror, but they still feel more modern than the 1890s, and some players – especially those who haven’t studied 19th Century history previously all that much – may have less of a sense of what the era was like in general. For another, the assumed centre of gravity for Gaslight campaigns is London, due to the literary inspirations of the setting, and assuming everyone knows what Victorian-era British culture was like is a stretch. Thus the book provides an overview of British cultural values at the time and a deep dive on London, a close look at the rest of the UK, and sufficient details on the rest of the world to be getting on with. It also notes that the Down Darker Trails supplement can cross over with Gaslight, since after all the Old West is just an ocean liner voyage and a railway trip away.
When I reviewed the previous edition of the supplement, I noted that it didn’t go too deeply into some of the social inequities of the era, and tended to assume PC groups would be primarily middle-to-upper class. This version of the supplement realises that audiences these days won’t go for that, and so both provides guidance on how working class characters could contribute to investigations and provides a deeper look at the inequalities of the period – some groups will simply gloss over that, of course, but it’s better to have the information and not want it but to want it and not have it.
That isn’t to say it’s all dry sociological stuff. The section on Victorian occultism, in particular, gives a sense of the interpersonal drama and larger than life characters that existed at the time, and makes allusions to a system for astral projection detailed in the Keepers’ Guide – making me wonder whether they’re going to dip into the system for exploration of the astral plane (as imagined by occultists of the age) detailed in Pagan Publishing’s old, long out of print The Golden Dawn supplement or whether they’ve cooked up an all-new take on the concept.
On the whole, the sheer quantity and quality of the material in the Cthulhu By Gaslight Investigators’ Guide more than justifies the split into multiple books. After all, the core Keeper Rulebook for 7th Edition already gives you a toolkit of Mythos monsters and magic you can throw at your players, so if you want to start a campaign of the new Gaslight now you can have at it straight away with just the Investigators’ Guide with no need to wait for the Keepers’ Guide to come out, and then get the latter book once it’s out to get more Gaslight-specific material. (There’s also a range of useful third-party supplements for the era like Hudson & Brand.)
On top of that, the fact that all the Mythos-oriented, Keeper-facing stuff has been saved for the Keepers’ Guide means that the Investigators’ Guide is actually potentially useful for more than just Cthulhu By Gaslight. It’s kind of a backdoor generic rulebook for any Basic Roleplaying campaign that takes a detail-oriented approach to the Victorian era, and could also be a useful resource for exploring the era in any other RPG system. Lots of games have touched on the period, but few have managed it to the level of detail and clarity offered here.
Extremely online billionaire and corrupt barnacle on the hull of the American ship of state Elon Musk recently stirred up some controversy by hinting he might buy out Hasbro. This may or may not be serious – he talks about buying lots of things he doesn’t end up touching, he only went through on the Twitter deal because he put himself in a position where legally it would have been awkward to back out, and he Tweets a lot of shit, like we’re talking the amount and style of Tweets other mortals might Tweet if they were hopelessly addicted to social media and cocaine.
Because Elon Musk is a philosophical zombie, a simple stimulus-response mechanism that does not actually experience qualia like the rest of us, he didn’t actually think about this Tweet. That would require him to experience thought the way conscious, self-aware beings do. Instead, he Tweeted as a knee-jerk reaction to some other reactionary dipshit getting all fussy about Wizards of the Coast acknowledging that some of the Dungeons & Dragons material which Gary “nits make lice” Gygax worked on might have been a bit dismissive of women’s rights or a mite culturally insensitive. The specific source was – let me check my notes here – a big hardback book of nearly 600 pages lovingly reprinting masses and masses of Dungeons & Dragons material that Gygax worked on, warts and all, because conservatives always cry about someone being censored and their words suppressed even when that person’s words are being republished in an archive-quality format.
The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons is curated by Jon Peterson, author of influential gaming history books like Playing At the World, The Elusive Shift, and Game Wizards. Alongside those efforts, done independently of Wizards of the Coast, Peterson has also been brought into do the odd nice coffee table D&D history book for Wizards; generally, these have been lighter, less detail-oriented, less in-depth, and more introductory in tone than his scholarly texts, as you might expect from an official history put out by a corporation aimed at a mass audience.
The Making of OD&D, however, is a whole other matter. As I said before, it’s massive – and most of the words in it aren’t by Peterson himself. Instead, it’s a guided tour through a range of primary documents from D&D history and prehistory, spanning 1970 to 1977. Not only do you get a facsimile reproduction of the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set – in the version from before the cease and desist letter forced them to yank hobbits and ents and balrogs and replace them with halflings and treants and balors – but you also get full reproductions of the first three supplements, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry.
Refereeing and Reflection 