Time for another entry in my occasional series covering RPG supplements I want to comment on but don’t fancy doing a fully-developed article on individually. This time around, I’ve got some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay releases that recently slipped out in hard copy, and the RuneQuest supplement Chaosium has been building towards releasing since they put out their new edition of the game.
Lands of RuneQuest: Dragon Pass (RuneQuest)
As the title implies, this is the first entry in the new Lands of RuneQuest series. Just as the Cults of RuneQuest sequence offers the full-detail breakdown of each of the various pantheons of the setting, these Lands of RuneQuest books are gazetteers offering a deep dive on various regions of Glorantha I’m not sure how many of these we are going to get – by contrast, Cults of RuneQuest has a fairly well-established plan set out for it – but it does make a certain sense of think of the two series as linked, because after all the original groundbreaking Cults of Prax supplement was a travelogue as much as it was an overview of the local sects.
Dragon Pass being the first region to get the Lands of RuneQuest is something of a no-brainer; you get beginner-friendly descriptions of it in the current core rules and the Starter Set, the adventures bundled with the referee screen and in The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau are all set there, and with the release of the Lightbringers, Earth Goddesses, and Lunar Way volumes of Cults of RuneQuest the major sects of the region have been covered, so it’s by far the best-supported locale when it comes to officially released material by Chaosium themselves. (The Jonstown Compendium scheme for putting out fan-developed supplements has done a fine job of widening the scope of this edition, but only people quite deep into it can really be expected to dip into there that much.)
A little while back I reviewed Heroic Worlds, a Herculean endeavour from Lawrence Schick which emerged in 1991. Rather than being put out by one section of the RPG industry or another, this came out from a mainstream publisher (Prometheus Books) and was a heroic attempt to provide a complete index of every product that had emerged in the English-language RPG field since the foundation of the hobby in 1974. Though time has passed it by – in particular, it had the bad luck to emerge just before Vampire: the Masquerade came out, so the most significant RPG of 1991 isn’t represented in there – it remains an interesting snapshot of the field at that point in time, as well as an interesting guide to a range of games, some of which have fallen into otherwise total obscurity.
There must have been something in the water at the turn of the decade, because it wasn’t even the only book of its general type to have come out around that time. Rick Swan’s The Complete Guide To Role-Playing Games came out through St. Martin’s Press in 1990 and likewise attempts to offer a snapshot of the state of the medium at the time, but with a sufficiently different methodology to make it an interesting alternative perspective.
Rather than providing a scholarly catalogue with brief abstracts of different products, trying to take in every single item published in the field like Heroic Worlds did, The Complete Guide presents itself more informally, as a buyer’s guide to help beginners and experts alike navigate the field. The idea is that newcomers to the hobby can consult the book to figure out what’s hot and what’s not, and then once they settle on a game they’d like to try they can use the book to figure out what they need to get and what’s recommended out of the support line. Meanwhile, experienced gamers can use the book to stumble across games which are a bit more obscure and niche and learn something of their concepts and game mechanics to judge whether it’s worth taking a punt on that oddity on the discount shelf at the back of the game shop.
The game writeups themselves are pretty decent reviews in a nicely readable style – making this something of a forerunner to Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, though Horvath allowed himself to be more selective about what he included in that whereas Swan is trying to be all-encompassing, because if a game is shit and unmemorable he actually needs to say it’s shit and unmemorable here, otherwise the book is failing at its declared aim of providing a buyer’s guide.
That said, the book isn’t actually 100% complete in terms of RPGs covered – there’s no mention of World Action and Adventure, an absolute oddity that only Lawrence Schick and Stu Horvath seem to have noticed the existence of. Still, it’s more than complete enough for the purposes it’s outlining – it covers the major games in the field of the era and a range of obscurities, including a bunch of games I have absolutely never heard of before I looked at this. Swan does at least provide his rule of thumb for inclusion: if, as of spring 1990, he could find a game at a hobby shop or a convention dealer’s booth, it made the cut, if he couldn’t then it didn’t. That’s reasonable enough – it means that the book is a bit skewed towards the US market, but that’s the market it was largely being sold in, and beginners don’t need a guide to material they’re deeply unlikely to encounter on a casual browse of shop shelves in the first place.
Taken individually, the different reviews are pretty good – they won’t be news to anyone especially familiar with the games in question, but if you tackle an entry for a game you’ve never touched you’ll likely learn a bunch, which is exactly the level this should have been pitched at and means it remains useful as a reference to get an overview of games which have since become obscure. Taken in aggregate, there’s some interesting trends…
At the time of writing the most visited article on this blog, by a rather startling margin, is my piece running down the various mainline editions of Traveller, and explaining why I wasn’t going to bother with the second edition of Mongoose Traveller. And strictly speaking, I’ve held to my guns in some respect, even though I’ve just acquired a fresh new copy of the core rulebook for that edition. See, the main reason I decided to ignore the new version was that the new core book wasn’t going to include a basic version of the starship creation system – if you wanted to fully upgrade you’d need to either use off-the-shelf starships or use the full-fat creation system in High Guard. It bugged me because this meant that functionality which was in the core rulebook for the first edition of Mongoose Traveller was now not on offer – and as far as I’m concerned, if a new edition of a game doesn’t include stuff in its which the previous version provided right out of the gate, then absent any major mitigating circumstances it’s a downgrade.
My opinion on that hasn’t changed, especially since the second edition of Mongoose Traveller is very close to the first edition – it’s a tidy-up of the presentation and tightening of some loose bits here and there primarily, rather than a revolutionary change – and the less an RPG undergoes a radical redesign between editions, the less excuse there is for trimming key functionality. However, the Mongoose Traveller second edition core rulebook has undergone a thorough refresh – you can tell because it says “Update 2022” on big letters on the front cover – and that has settled my major objection on this front, adding back in a basic ship creation system.
Time for another instalment in my occasional series about books on real-life subject matter which can be potentially handy for games set in the real world (whether in the modern day or in history). This time we’re looking at vintage memes, a book that’s more about being the Emperor of Rome than it is about any one specific Roman Emperor, and centuries-old fan fiction.
Weird Medieval Guys by Olivia M. Swarthout
This began as a Twitter account, span off a substack and a podcast, and has eventually produced an actual book. In all of its forms, Weird Medieval Guys sees Swarthout highlighting marginalia, illustrations, and other weird little snippets from medieval documents, sometimes for sheer merriment and sometimes offering fun insights into the creators’ mindset. You are not going to get deep, highly-detailed accounts here, but you do get a sense of what these people considered to be amusing or cute, with illustrations ranging from pure whimsy to social commentary to spiritual allegory. Use it for inspiration, to get into the mindset, or perhaps as an idea for clues – what concealed message could a scribe with a covert mission hide in such marginalia?
CY_BORG is a cyberpunk hack of Mörk Borg, designed by Christian Sahlen with art and graphic design by Johan Nohr. Since Nohr does all the visual stuff on official Mörk Borg products, this means that in terms of look and feel it feels like part of the same family as its parent game – this is a take on cyberpunk which in terms of musical influences dials back the smooth synthpop and cranks up the harsh industrial to 11. Sahlen also proves to have a similar knack to Mörk Borg writer Pelle Nilsson when it comes to writing instantly evocative text: the back cover blurb here simply reads “Nano-infested doomsday RPG about cybernetic misfits and punks raging against a relentless corporate hell”, and that’s exactly what you get.
That said, this isn’t simply a reskin of Mörk Borg, though there are some nods to that setting here and there and obviously it has a swathe of game mechanics in common, right down to rolling daily for a sign of the apocalypse. In this world, though, the portents of the end are not prophecies written in the scripture of the Twin Basilisks – they’re horrible new scandals hitting the 24 hour news cycle. And rather than walking around in a blasted wasteland trying to scrape together the means of survival, PCs are desperate people on the streets of what is predominantly a crowded city (though there’s a decidedly Stalker-esque dilapidated zone where some weird shit went down and the laws of physics have been suspended). Decaying kingdoms ruled over by monarchs on the verge of nervous collapse are out; ruthlessly effective megacorporations are in.
In addition, whilst Mörk Borg has this dark, doomy, depressive air over it, CY_BORG feels like an incitement to riot, a samizdat transmission over the Net urging you to rise up and rage against the excesses of the powerful. In most RPGs, Rule Zero is something like “Change up the rules however you like” or “Don’t be a dick to your fellow participants on an OOC level”. Here, there’s an explicitly stated Rule Zero, and a statement that you’re encouraged to break every rule in the book except that one; Rule Zero for CY_BORG is “Player characters cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corps, the cops, or the capitalist system. They might find themselves reluctantly forced to do missions for them or their minions. But make no mistake – they are the enemy.”
In other words, this is a deliberate bid to crank the “punk” dial in cyberpunk back up to where it was in the genre’s seminal works, where Philip K. Dick or Ridley Scott or William Gibson were offering a dystopian view of the world as a capitalist quagmire where the very definition of life and basis of reality is commodified. (In CY_BORG, the apocalyptic final revelation which comes up when you run out of omens of apocalypse is the discovery of objective proof that the world is a simulation – and it’s going to be reset in 12 hours.)
With nanotech afflictions and cyberdeck apps in the place of spells, optional classes crafted to the cyberpunk dystopia, and just enough of a sense of a witchy underground to allow for the incorporation of elements from Mörk Borg as and when you wish, CY_BORG is simultaneously dripping with a distinctly different flavour and lightly-sketched setting from Mörk Borg whilst at the same time being strikingly compatible both in terms of system and theme. Lean harder into Mörk Borg if you want things to be darker and more depressive; lean harder into CY_BORG when you want flashes of uncomfortably bright neon lighting and red-hot rage.
It’s time for another entry in my occasional series where I compile a clutch of brief supplement reviews. This time around, we’re going to continue our journey through the Cults of RuneQuest series and look at a series of different ways publishers have also compiled shorter texts into larger wholes.
Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way (RuneQuest)
The Lunar Empire is one of the major cultures of RuneQuest – and, in many campaigns, will tend to be the lead antagonists. This is in part because the major cultural conflict in Dragon Pass – one of the first areas of Glorantha to be detailed, going back even before the original release of RuneQuest to the old White Bear and Red Moon boardgame, which was the product that Greg Stafford originally founded Chaosium to publish and was the first glimpse of Glorantha the public ever saw.
That boardgame, in fact, was all about the conflict in the Hero Wars between the forces of the Lunar Empire and their Sartarite foes under Argrath. and in effect that basic story has resonated throughout RuneQuest ever since. The latest edition has followed the lead of the first two in presenting Dragon Pass as the first area of Glorantha it introduces you to, both in its core materials and the Starter Set, and the fact that there’s this easily-understood conflict there between tribal barbarian groups resisting an encroaching empire probably contributes to this.
The Lunar Empire is so called because it ultimately serves the Red Goddess, who dwells on the Red Moon that hovers stationary in the sky above the centre of the Empire; the Red Emperor himself is part of the pantheon led by the Red Goddess. Back in the mythic era, before the Great Compromise of Time was made, there used to be a Lunar deity, but she did not survive the wars of the gods and so for its first few ages of conventional time Glorantha had no Moon to speak of. Then the Seven Mothers – Heroquesters who have now achieved apotheosis – enabled the ascent of the Red Goddess, returning the Lunar concept to creation. Yet by doing so, they necessarily dabbled in Chaos, the medium through which thing which missed out on inclusion in Creation can creep their way in…
Chaosium’s licensing of its Basic Roleplaying-powered RPGs, as has been chronicled by Shannon Appelcline, has allowed BRPand its predecessors and derivatives to have an outsized impact on both the RPG industry and the global hobby. For instance, Call of Cthulhu is very big in Japan, to the point where back in the bad old days of the mid-to-late 2000s when Chaosium was circling the drain a little the Japanese royalties helped keep the lights on. Games Workshop put out their own lavishly-produced hardcover editions of RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer in the UK, games which not only shaped the distinctive outlook of the British roleplaying scene but also became major influences on the early days of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in when it comes to system, setting, and scenarios.
And then there’s Sweden, where a Chaosium licensor effectively created the Swedish-language RPG industry wholesale. Interestingly, the story here doesn’t begin with any of Chaosium’s seminal hits – instead, it begins with Worlds of Wonder, an interesting little experimental product which was more of a proof of concept than the heart of a major product line when Chaosium put out its original English-language version.
Worlds of Wonder was, in essence, the next step on from the original Basic Roleplaying pamphlet in the journey towards making BRP a true generic system, a process whose most recent iteration has been the ORC-powered hardcover rerelease of the big Basic Roleplaying design-your-own-game handbook. In the box you got the Basic Roleplaying pamphlet to cover the core system concepts and three little booklets applying those principles to different genres – Magic World for fantasy, Future World for science fiction, and Superworld for superheroes.
There was also a desultory amount of material – four pages and a map, essentially – describing the city of Wonder, which was a sort of cross-genre dimensional meeting spot to allow for travel between the settings, but that’s not the bit of this boxed set that was particularly influential; what made Worlds of Wonder interesting was that it was a very early pass at creating a truly generic RPG. Each of the genre booklets was only 20-ish pages long, so we aren’t talking about particularly deep or well-resourced explorations of any of these genres, but there was enough there to at least tinker and experiment with and get a taste for the genres involved.
Someone, in a quote I can’t presently find, once said that RPG rulebooks benefit from inspiring graphical design because they’re art objects intended to inspire their owners to create their own art in turn. If that’s so, few core rulebooks embody this as much as that of Mörk Borg. (It’s Swedish for “Dark Fort”, apparently.) It describes itself as a “doom metal album of game”, and that’s certainly an apt summation of the aesthetic – I was moved to blast Electric Wizard at high volume as I wrote this review. In a dark medieval fantasy world, the apocalypse foretold by the Twin Basilisks is unfolding rapidly. The known world is increasingly hemmed in – on three sides by the Endless Sea, to the West by the Bergen Chrypt, the tall mountain range the Twin Basilisks hail from. Player characters in Mörk Borg are desperate survivors in a world where time is running out, scrabbling in the darkness for the rudiments of survival. Maybe they will make a difference. Maybe there’s a way to turn back all this horror. Or maybe spitting defiance in the face of death as its jaws close on you is victory enough in itself.
Mörk Borg comes to us via Free League, specifically the Free League Workshop imprint – the banner not only for their community content programs for their own in-house games, but also their indie RPG distribution program, in which they take a carefully curated set of games and let them take advantage of Free League’s enviable distribution problem. The product itself is the creation of just two people (if you don’t count the public domain art credited to “Dead People” used here and there); Pelle Nilsson designed the game and wrote the text, and Johan Nohr did the graphic design and the original art.
And let’s be super clear about this: Nohr absolutely deserves half the credit here. In PDF or in hard copy, Mörk Borg looks the part. I’d describe the overall production value as “triple-A zinecore”; you’ve got this scrappy, underground aesthetic design which looks like something out of a zine (not a slam, Mothership does absolutely fine with a zine-based aesthetic and simple, unfussy production values), but Nohr exploits the production values he’s able to work with thanks to the Free League connection to the absolute hilt. There’s silvered pages on here so you can gaze into your reflection in an inverted crucifix, there’s startlingly vivid use of colour to break up the doomy monochrome expanse, in the hard copy there’s a hidden embossed message on the spine. (It’s “Psalm VII”, the relevance of which I’ll get to in a second.)
A while back I reviewed Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, the first of his in-depth books of RPG history. Though very good, the book’s got the drawback of having spent a fair bit of time out of print – I was only able to get it on Kindle back in 2013 and it’s not been reprinted in hard copy since. Now the MIT Press, who put out Peterson’s subsequent books The Elusive Shift and Game Wizards, has stepped up to the plate, committing to putting out a new second edition (dubbed Playing At the World 2E) in two volumes, the first volume of which has just come out.
Though some of the research here has been bolstered, the intention is that the two volumes will still offer the same basic narrative as the first edition, but the order in which the history gets covered has been changed. In the first edition, Peterson led off with a sweeping history of the historical precursors to wargaming and roleplaying, spanning the centuries from the invention of chess to the development of serious wargaming and roleplaying exercises by militaries and governments in the 19th and 20th Centuries (with stopovers like the Brontë siblings’ Glass Confederacy make-believe play, which bordered on a proto-LARP at points). It was only after this long narrative is set up that the book’s first edition turns to the particular confluence of those influences in the wargaming scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, circles where Arneson and Gygax learned their game design craft and from which Arneson recruited the players for that first world-changing session of the Blackmoor campaign, and from there chronicled the development and publication of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and its reception in wargaming and fandom spaces.
For this second edition, Peterson has chopped and changed a bit, perhaps realising that some readers would rather just read the bit where tabletop RPGs come into existence rather than the long exploration of the development of games that represent some simulated scenario or notional story, rather than games which deal with purely abstract play. Thus, all of the deep background stuff has been shunted into the forthcoming volume 2, and volume 1 – subtitled The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons – picks up the story in the wargaming clubs of the Midwest, and takes it on from there.
This is, perhaps, commercially savvy; those readers who want the full whack will obviously buy both volumes, but readers who don’t particularly care about the deep background and just want the story of how Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, and their early collaborators at TSR brought the game to the market can just get this first volume and be satisfied fresh out of the gate, without having to wade through a whole volume of material they’re not really here for.
On top of that, Peterson’s kind of turned his bibliography into a sneaky little dungeon crawl by doing it this way. If one starts with Playing At the World 2E, volume 1, as the main entrance hall, you can then progress into the bowels of volume 2 to learn of the deep past, or head into The Elusive Shift to do a deeper dive into the immediate fan response to Dungeons & Dragons and explore how the community developed a sense of what the RPG hobby was distinct from the way TSR and Gygax had perhaps been defining it, or you could sidestep into Game Wizards and follow the business history of TSR from the period covered here to the ejection of Gary and the rise of Lorraine Williams. Any of those reading orders will be similarly informative. And who knows, maybe soon enough Peterson will have another original book to add a new layer to this exploration…
As well as getting Free League’s latest products for The One Ring on their recent Kickstarter, I threw as an add-on the core rulebook for their RPG adaptation of Alien, having been favourably impressed by their Blade Runner game. As with that game, it’s based on their Year Zero system, so called because it was the driving force behind Mutant: Year Zero, but the game which I think it bears most comparison to is Mothership. Both games came out within a year of each other (Mothership‘s earliest materials emerged in 2018, Alien dropped in 2019), both of them are very much based on the same source material and are oriented towards similar science fiction/horror atmospheres, and each seems to have some similar tools to get the job done.
For instance, both games have a stress mechanic which tracks the effect of the escalating terror on player characters. Alien‘s version is an intriguing variation on the standard Year Zero resolution process. Once again, you’re rolling dice pools made up of your stats plus skills and whatnot, and so long as you get a single 6 on the dice you succeed at the task at hand and additional 6s allow you to buy “stunts” – little extra benefits resulting from that success. So far, so good.
The big twist in Alien is that stress is modelled as an additional dice pool. As your character gets increasingly stressed out, their pool of stress dice grows, and every time they take an action, those dice are added to the pool being rolled. This means that the more stress dice you have, the more likely you are both to succeed and to get additional 6s to spend on stunts, reflecting how characters in the Alien series often end up pulling off their most impressive feats when the chips are down and they’re truly desperate. There’s a sting in the tail, however: if you roll a 1 on any of your stress die, your character starts panicing. Whenever you panic, you must roll 1D6 and add your current stress level; if you get a 1-6, you just about keep it together, from 7 to 15+ you get progressively more extreme and unhelpful reactions to the situation.
In both Alien and Mothership, this models the way when people start panicing and going to pieces in this sort of scifi-horror story, they generally make the situation worse for themselves, sometimes in a way which has knock-on effects on everyone around them. (For instance, one of the results on the panic table in Alien has you screaming uncontrollably – anyone who hears you abruptly scream then must make a panic roll!) The big difference is that in Mothership you have to get fairly lucky to get that sort of adrenaline rush which makes you that bit sharper and more effective in the moment out of the stress and panic rules – in Alien, that’s constantly a factor due to the way stress dice add to your dice pool.
This plays into the fine distinction between the two systems. Alien is a few notches more cinematic than Mothership; the baseline core book presents “Space Truckers”, frontier colonists, and colonial marines as options for campaign framework, which suggests a range of tones from the more vulnerable, isolated, and claustrophobic approach of the original Alien to the sort of action-horror extravaganza that Aliens offered up. By comparison, Mothership goes for a narrower range, defaulting much harder to the Alien end of that Alien/Aliens spectrum.
There’s distinctions in gameplay assumptions too; Mothership advocates a fairly old-school scenario design approach, where you design a locale where some horrid shit is happening and dump the PCs in the middle of it and see what happens. Adventure design in Alien is a bit more accepting of a scripted experience. The core book describes two different modes of play; Campaign play is, as it implies, designed for longer-term play, and suggests basing most conflicts around facing down nefarious human and android foes (yes, androids are a PC option in this) and saving the xenomorphs for really big moments. Conversely, Cinematic play assumes a short, closed-ended playstyle (either one session or a very limited number of sessions) in which most PCs should be expected to die horribly at some point and where you probably will run into a xenomorph, because that’s kind of the big draw and if you’re only doing one story you’re going to want chests to burst and faces to get hugged.
Of course, when you’re adapting a franchise based around a very, very iconic monster, there are certain advantages when it comes to throwing together a bestiary: you don’t need to go broad and make up heaps and heaps of new stuff (though a very few original extraterrestrial nasties are provided to allow for a bit of variety), you just need to do a good job of describing the iconic things. By and large, the core book manages this nicely. We get the classic xenomorphs and facehuggers as established in Alien and Aliens, we get the Engineers from Prometheus and the “neomorph” alien varient from Alien: Covenant, all in enough detail to get something of a sensible ecosystem and range of customisation involved.
As far as the setting stuff goes, Free League make sensible calls on what to include and what to set aside. The game is set a few years after the events of Alien 3 (which, in-character, have been recorded by one of the prisoners in that movie and propagated in a book called Star Beast, which has inspired something of a cult). This means that Alien: Resurrection can be very sensibly ignored. Likewise, the timeline given here is flatly incompatible with the Alien vs. Predator movies, but on the other hand those already kind of cause massive issues for the original four movies’ timeline and were totally ignored by Prometheus and Covenant, so that’s reasonable enough.
In addition, in the process of fleshing out the wider universe Free League have dipped into the expanded universe here and there as well as riffing on ideas from unproduced movies – even the really weird ones like the wooden space station from one of the versions of Alien 3 which got shitcanned. This is arguably necessary – the Alien movies don’t foreground their worldbuilding a lot outside of the immediate situations the protagonists find themselves in, and piecing everything together requires looking beyond the movies. At the same time, it’d be very easy with this sort of thing to fall down a rabbithole where you end up with something which fits all of the continuity in theory but just doesn’t feel like Alien in practice. (Hello, Alien: Resurrection.)
Not only do Free League avoid that pitfall, but they also make sure this core book is absolutely dripping with atmosphere, which is kind of another link with Mothership. Sure, the two games approach this from different directions; Mothership has this scrappy, lo-fi, DIY zine aesthetic to it, whilst Alien is very slick. If tabletop RPGs were presented via projection systems rather than books, Mothership would be made for a grindhouse cinema where you can hear the gears on the projector go click-click-click in the quiet parts of the movie, whilst Alien is made for IMAX.
It’s good that we have both of these flavours, and arguably either extreme is preferable to something blandly in the middle, because both extremes inspire you to want to play this stuff. A while back, I saw someone say (and I cannot for the life of me remember where, so sorry if it was you) that tabletop RPG rulebooks are like art objects which, in and of themselves, are designed to inspire other people to create art. From that lens, both Mothership and Alien knock it out of the park, and perhaps most interestingly they manage to enunciate a sufficiently different take scifi-horror that I can see a purpose for both of them, even though they’re working in very very similar ballparks.
Refereeing and Reflection 