Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal's a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I *love* the Corps!
-Man about to die horribly
Masked Reviews: Stay Frosty
Gonna be honest here, I'm reviewing this one to review the next thing. But the game I want to review is an expansion of this one, and references back to this one repeatedly, so here we are.
Stay Frosty is a OSR love letter to Aliens and Starship Troopers. Created by two person team Casey Garske and Matt Nelson, it places the characters in the shoes of hapless marines in a bug war. The game uses a roll over stat system, so having a low stat is a good thing, as well as a loose class system.
Art wise... this game is rough. Honestly, it's the weakest part of the book, and unlike say, Mothership, the book's art doesn't coalesce into a style, but just feels like the scribblings in the margin's of a teenager's journal. Buyer beware.
Character creation is split into four stats: Brains, Brawn, Dexterity, Willpower. Roll 3d6 in order, you want low rolls, reroll and keep one. The classes are all fairly simplistic, giving advantage to one task or another, but having a stat requirement, other then the Infantry who have no requirements and get the eminently practical reroll 1s. Rank gives a second ability, whether that's extra health or granting advantage to allies.
This games weapons use a similar system to the Black Hack and Cthulhu Hack, namely supply for weapons being represented by rolling a die, and reducing that die's sides if you roll low. It's a simple way of showing how resources are draining without tracking every bullet, which would be counterproductive in a game that is aiming for the tone of those 80s milscifi films. Bullets don't matter until the character runs out right when a xeno jumps onto them.
Mechanically speaking, there's nothing here that will blow anyone's mind. If you've played an OSR game, you've played this game. It cut out charisma and constitution because this game is not really gonna be about negotiation and character's ability to take a hit has been folded into brawn. The big difference this game has to it's competition (like... I dunno, Stars Without Number. There can't be that many OSR Scifi games) is Tension. Tension ramps up under certain circumstances over the course of the mission (although I would add more then what the game gives), and gives the party bonuses (advantage on saves, ability to used ranged weapons in hand to hand without penalty) until eventually the house of cards explodes, representing the characters losing their professionalism. It's... a genuinely unique and cool mechanic, and easily to steal for other OSR games.
After the Critical Hit/Crit Fail tables (both well written enough to generate the kind of scenes from this game's source material), we get a short bestiary and an Appendix N. The End.
This book is short and sweet, and would make for a great one shot game. It knows what it wants to be, a send up to 80s action scifi movies, and writes it's gameplay as a way of accomplishing that. If it weren't for the author voice being very informal, and how bad the art is, I'd give it a solid 4. But only I am allowed to speak directly to my audience on how fucking boring it is to cover edge rules, when the author of the game manual does it it's gauche.
3/5 "Game Over Man, Game Over"s
Oh, and did I mention the whole reason I wrote this for the expansion? I did?
Well that's a copyright violation waiting to happen. Still, may as well continue.
I wish that Slipgate Chokepoint wasn't a supplement to Stay Frosty, not because Stay Frosty is bad but because the book constantly refers back to the first book pretty much requiring you to own both books in order to run this one. And Stay Frosty is rougher then this book. Still, just a fly in ointment.
Written by Andrew Walter and Paul Cronin, Slipgate Chokepoint puts you in the shoes of Rangers, interdimensional warriors fighting monsters from the Doomed Dimensions. This is... well it's a Quake game in RPG form. The weapon line up is straight out of Quake 1, as is the monster bestiary. Stay Frosty wasn't exactly Dark Heresy, but this game is definitely Deathwatch in comparison.
Let's Rock.
Character creation is different from SF. Rangers are on average tougher then SF PCs, and while you lose the ability to play a psychic, the Traits are consistently more powerful. Armor has been simplified to Green, Red, and Yellow. Ammunition still uses the die size mechanic, but ammo now works in a very 90s FPS manner, with the dice size increasing whenever a Ranger picks up that ammo type. The only way to heal (outside of between mission R&R) is via Medkits, which take up a significant amount of inventory space and will be damaged if the Ranger takes damage, so it's better to use them instantly. I actually... kind of... love the justifications for making the players act like 90s FPS protagonists, running around the field picking up ammunition and medkits mid firefight. This game might require a battle grid.
Weaponry
"At this particular moment in time, I don't believe I have a healthier or more deeply felt respect for any object in the universe than this here shotgun..."
As I said earlier, the weapon line up is straight out of Quake. One modification I thought of instantly while looking at this line up is adding one more gun to the lineup, the big one, but that is neither here no there.
Guns hit hard in this game. Really hard. You will very rarely use the melee weapons available because the shotgun every character can start with does 3d6 at close range. Let alone the Super Shotgun.
Powerups
"Who's a man and a half? I'm a man in the half! Bezerker packin' man and a half"
This is actually literally pulled directly from Quake with no change. Moving on.
Combat
"Dig the prowess, the capacity for violence. I'm the man. I'm superbad!"
So, why was I so excited for this game? What possibly could make me gush about a hack of an OSR hack, especially one like Stay Frosty which is very rough?
Because this is the shit.
All rangers have a theoretically infinite amount of actions they can take in a turn. The game has a push your luck mechanic, where every time you perform an action, the character rolls an extra d20, taking the lowest result. So do one action in a turn, roll d20. 2, roll 2d20, keep lowest. 3, roll 3d20, keep lowest. And so on and so forth until eventually probability forces you to fail a roll. Of course, that's where the Gibbing mechanic comes in. If you Gib an enemy (that is to say, reduce them to chunky salsa by overkilling them), you get a free extra attack with advantage instead of a penalty. The result is to replicate the chains of badass that you can see watching a player who knows what they are doing running through old school shooters.
Goddamn great game design.
Also, a little bit of DCC influence here, as Rangers have access to a Stunt Die, starting at D3, which function identically to a Fighter's Deed Die in DCC. Want to do something cool? Roll d20+stunt die. You only get to use it once per turn, so you might blow it early or might want to save it after a gib chain has already begun to keep it going. Either way, it's cool.
Finally, there are the telefrag rules. If a Ranger attempts to Telefrag, you get a Willpower Save at 2 Disadvantage. Succeed, you kill anything. Fail, you end up instantly dead, your body in one galaxy with your ass in another. A true Death Or Glory attack.
Hostiles
"You are Huge! That means you have Huge Guts!"
The bestiary is taken straight out of Quake 1, just like the guns and powerups. The fact the monsters aren't even given new names makes me a little weary, but whatever, it's not like iD is doing anything with Quake 1's lineup of monsters. There is also a very varied monster generator for building your own horrific monstrosity from the Doomed Dimensions. I like this a lot, although I might supplement it with something like the monster generators from Silent Legions or other eldritch horror adjacent books. Not that the generators aren't good, I just would like more of them.
Mission Generation
"As I stride knee deep through the dead, all is clear. I know what must be done. My cause is just, my will is strong... and my gun is very big"
I'll be honest, playing this for a long campaign is pretty doomed to fail. It's very much a oneshot or short campaign game. That being said, the game has a mission generator to help come up with ideas. Decent enough.
The game also comes with one pre-written module, The Flayed Domain, which gives the players the task of retrieving the brain matter of three scientist, find an eldritch rune, and gib the Deathlord. Just another day with the Rangers.
The resultant point crawl consists of a half dozen small encounters through a non-euclidean hellscape, before smashing a big boss. While the scale isn't quite on point with the video games, it'll feel correct because combat is just as fast and frenetic given how play works.
In Conclusion
I made this comparison before, but it needs to be said. Slipgate Chokepoint is the Deathwatch of OSR games. It is a brutal game about shooting the eldritch creatures beyond the veil of reality in the face with big fucking guns, without sacrificing the low amount of rolls needed to keep combat fun and interesting. It's a blast, and I really wish that it didn't rely on Stay Frosty so much.
This game isn't for everyone. It is not a smart game, one that requires the tactical thinking of some OSR games or the avoiding of combat of others. Mechanics for character interaction have been left out in favor of being a badass. But goddamn are you going to have a good time spouting macho cliches as you bunnyhop while introducing monster face to your shotgun.
4/5 Grunge Songs. Would be 5/5 if so much of it wasn't dependent on a weaker product to play.
Kane's Gauntlet is a low level adventure bundled with the Castles & Crusades classic style box set. This is a short, paperback adventure involving an isolated tavern, a haunted castle, and a bandit raid. So let's begin.
First things first, I hate the formatting. Single column writing PLUS small print sentences describing location make this hard to parse. Bullet points are better for actually running at the table.
The tavern is pretty standard fair. Two floors plus a stable, a menagerie of colorful personalities, loot to rob if your PCs are the type to steal from their hosts. The prologue mentions a corpse being laid out on one of the tables in the common room, but the room description doesn't mention this.
Barrelhall is the main meat of the adventure, in the style of Hommlet's moathouse. Once again, the formatting strikes as I ask myself a simple question in the first room's description: Is the Portcullis Open or Closed? The formatting continues to be poor throughout, at one point forgetting to title a section which also describes four corpses as "humans dwarves", which I cannot decide was "humans & dwarves" or if the writer couldn't pick.
Criticism criticism criticism. Let's put a positive. This adventure thus far is NOT a hack-and-slash. The only threatening encounter thusfar has been if players were dumb enough to jump into a moat. Thus far, it's actually a bit more of a detective adventure, with the players being given an empty fortress where a tragedy happened and clues to figure out what happened the night of it's violent end.
Second floor is similar to the first, although there might be an encounter here. I don't know, it's unclear. There is mention of an gibbering mouther, but for the life of me I cannot find where it is, just a previous victim's corpse. Oh, there is is, on the fourth floor, which is leaves after seeing the party from it's perch. Yeah, don't put that info near the end. Pursuers need to be noted early, and in bold, maybe with a mechanic for them. And this book has two pursuers in this fort, and both of them are described nowhere near the beginning of the dungeon.
After completing the round at Barrelhall, the characters find out they were followed. Pulling this thread reveals an upcoming bandit raid on the tavern. The adventure ends with either the party fleeing into the woods, a battle with bandits at the tavern, or fleeing back to Barrelhall with the taverngoers in tow. I do appreciate they give the option to move where the final fight happens if you're clever.
In Conclusion:
Kane's Gauntlet is a mixed bag. The adventure itself has a number of useability flaws, even if the premise itself is solid. The fort is a nice little murder mystery, with a cursed magical item that is signposted as cursed. It's just... a little unoriginal and suffers from awful formatting. I could spend the effort to fix the formatting, but honestly this book doesn't do enough for that to be worth the effort. Maybe you could use the tavern as a base for other adventures, but as I said earlier, it's pretty standard.
2/5. Would be 3 if it weren't for the bad formatting and typos. This is a professional product, it needs to be held to that standard.
A while back, there was some controversy involving Jetpack7, a prominent publisher of 5e gamebooks, making a product that harkened back to Oriental Adventures called Dugatai, the Mystic East. This isn't to shame Jetpack7, they saw a hole in the market, made a go for it, and promptly cancelled it when they realized they fucked up.
At the same time, a group of Fillipino creators were hard at work on their own 5e supplement. While Dugatai had a generic "Mystic Asia" theme, this supplement would be by the people whose culture was being adapted, and with the intent of bringing that culture to game tables everywhere.
MASKED REVIEWS:THE ISLE OF SINA UNA
The Isle of Sina Una is a 5e gazetteer for a setting reflecting the precolonial Phillipines. Published by Deck of Many.com, Sina Una was made possible by IndieGoGo (I backed it, by the by).
CHAPTER ONE: Let Me Tell You A Story
First things first. Sina Una gives us a nice little playground to play with. Seven islands, each with 1-4 cities and towns. A wonderful bit of world building in this section is the list of ingredients and dishes. That's a bit of flavor that you don't often see in these types of books, especially since characters often will be sitting down in front of a meal to discuss their next move.
We are given a history of the isles, a history that is a broad-strokes telling of the Tagalog creation story. It's a pretty story, and also has been written in such a way that it also provides a couple of plot hooks for high level PCs. Then common names, and then a nice little overview of the spiritual beliefs that are most common in the Isles. I really like the distinction made between the Undead and Ancestor Spirits. They are actual different classifications of being, with Ancestor Spirits even available as PCs (more on that later).
Finally, there is an extended section on Death and the Afterlife. What's interesting is that it explicitly points out the cultural taboos against spells like Revivify. Spits in the face of the gods.
The chapter finishes with our look at the pantheon. Once again, my cursory googles mostly agree with these, this section could almost be a part of Deities and Demigods.
CHAPTER TWO: Look Around You
This section is the main gazetteer, giving an overview of the islands and towns. People, places, festivals, spirits. All are covered. I'm not gonna touch on this subject too hard because it's kinda... most of the book. Each of the islands get covered, but no stats are here despite a wide variety of characters. Very good world building
CHAPTER THREE: Characters
We have finally reached mechanical, player facing content. Sina Una doesn't invent any new races, but it DOES heavily modify the existing set, either by adding new subraces or by giving modifications.
Right off the bat, Half-Orcs are replaced with Balat-Kayo. Balat-Kayo retain Relentless Endurance.. but that's about all that's similar. They have innate spellcasting and different Stat Boosts, namely Charisma and either Strength or Dex. I feel they'd make a good charisma caster, especially a bard or paladin.
Dragonborn get a new subrace, the Umalagad. Remember how I said ancestor spirits were playable? This is them, reborn into new divine bodies after swimming up the Black River back to the land of the living. They lack a breath weapon, but also gain innate spellcasting. Excellent choice for a cleric.
Volcano Dwarves are extremely tanky, thanks to their ability to cover themselves in molten lava, giving themselves a small amount of temp hitpoints and dealing damage when melee'd while covered.
Balette Elves are akin to Eladrin, or perhaps Dryads. They join the list in innate spellcasting, with entangle and barkskin.
Half elves are unchanged.
Gold Gnomes are obscenely powerful, mechanically speaking, thanks to their Gilded Gifts feature, which allows you to enhance one bit of equipment for the adventuring day. Gilding an armor grants temp hp, which is nice; Gilding a set of tools lets them use their charisma bonus instead of whatever other bonus they would use. However, Gilding a weapon means A) it counts as magical for purposes of damage, and B) the first hit you make with the weapon is automatically a crit. I suppose this isn't game breaking, most of the time one crit won't change the tide of battle, especially since it's your first hit with the weapon. Still, it feels powerful.
Mangrove Halflings are pretty standard. They can use Help as a bonus action, and have access to mending.
Carabao Tieflings are not fiendish in origin, but instead are spiritually linked to the Isle. They still have their fire power (reflavored as the positive aspects of flame), as well as being beefy as fuck. Their dime ability is to just decide not to roll damage on melee attacks, instead dealing max damage, a number of times equal to their STR mod. Just some beef to replace the Half-Orcs.
New Classes begin here.
Babaylan are mediums. They cast via a spiritual companion called an abayan, which reminds me of a solar in description. They are an INT caster, and seem to be an odd combo of Wizard, Sorcerer, and Cleric. I'd need to playtest them, but from the quick look at the subclasses... Call of Clairvoyance is a utility class, not a lot of offensive options. Call of Sacrifice is a healer and support, with abilities to allow allies to soak damage and boost their saving throws. Call of Wrath is a martial class, letting your abayan also take swings during your turn (for respectable damage). It's like having a stand.
Headhunters are a martial class that's also based around spirits, sliding into the same niche as Rangers and Paladins, only instead of casting they have a more direct connection to spirits and the dead.
New Subclasses
Barbarian: Path of the Black River. Bane of the undead. They can narrow a single undead's sight distance to thirty feet, and eventually become a psychopomp as they level up.
Bard: College of Siday. Support bard. Hands out protective bonuses as they level up.
Cleric: Volcano Domain. A nice mixture of offense and healing.
Druid: Circle of Tides. A Druid-as-Rogue, with the ability to spend Wildshapes for skill boosts like Tremorsense. Interesting, but I feel that Wild Shape is such a rare resource at low levels that it's a bit of a compromise.
Fighter: Kawal. A tank style fighter like the Samurai, with an emphasis on taking hits and later turning that damage back on enemies.
Monk: Way of Kaluluwa. It's not quite a Stand type character, but it's definitely Stand analogous. The spirit gets it's own movement, but shares the PC's Action and Bonus Action.
Paladin: Oath of Blood. Another Tank character, this one more focused on punishing enemies for hurting your friends.
Ranger: Mangangayaw Conclave. Ranger with a Rogue's movement options. These Rangers are mobile and would make a good melee ranger type because of how their movement increases when targeted.
Rogue: Graverobber. Warlock fusion like the Arcane Trickster is a wizard fusion. Because they're cantrip based, their options in combat could make them a very effective ranged combatant, shooting, using Cunning Action, and then using eldritch blast.
Sorcerer: Diwata Bloodline. Gains access to Druid spellcasting too, as well as a way to make all touch spells ranged.
Warlock: Mooneater Patron. A martial Warlock, later able to consume the soul of a nearby dead foe to give themselves Barbarian-esque resistance. Perfect Bladelock material
Wizard: Mentala. Gains a minor buff to AC (adding their INT bonus) and the ability to curse enemies.
Next, there are a handful of appropriate backgrounds for characters in this setting, as well as some feats that mostly are setting specific, although one could be useful anywhere.
Equipment is unusually large for a setting book, due to exactly how large the difference is between what is available to an adventurer in a Psuedo-European setting versus a pre-colonial Phillipines. Iron and paper are missing, those are rare. Salt is the primary tool of combating evil, traditional fiends being replaced with Aswangs. Weapons like the Rapier are flat out gone, they never existed in this place, although there is a one-handed spear called a Songil which has the Finesse property. 5e kind of took a half step towards generic weapons and this shows how much of a half-step it was by stripping out the setting exclusive weapons and putting their own to replace them. It's good.
The Section on Boats and Sailing is also, naturally, extensive. There's some rules for boat construction, others for weather on the sea, how quick things move.
Magical Items and Artifacts deal in... well Magical Items and Artifacts. Most of the Magical Items are pretty useful, although some like the Aswang Egg seem more useful in the hands of an enemy then a PC thanks to the consequences of using them. Artifacts are basically like Excalibur, godly weapons for high level adventurers.
I'm not going to make a big deal about the new spell list, I'm not much of a theory crafter and the handful of new spells are thematically appropriate but I can't tell you how powerful the list is. After my current campaign was upended by a 2nd level ranger spell from WITCH+CRAFT, I realized that one can never know what players will do with new toys. The usual annotation is that having more spells makes Clerics and Druids more powerful then other classes because of their flexibility in choosing the tools on a long rest.
CHAPTER FOUR: Monsters
While there is an abundance of Fey and elemental creatures, the primary focus is on the Aswang. Aswang more or less replace Fiends in the setting, but they also have a kind of Lycanthrope feeling because they pose as regular people during the day before revealing their true, monstrous form at night. The wide range of them, unified only by their ability to blend in with normal people and their cannibalistic desires, make them about the most threatening monsters I've seen in a book like this. D&D monsters are generally obvious things. Dangerous monsters are bigger, scarier, more teeth, magic. But the Aswangs are subtler. They attack your community, hide among them, a trusted elder, a hard worker. And, the range of CR ratings mean they can be threats throughout play. They are very much the stars of this monster manual section.
There are also sections for Giants, which are a mix of benevolent and evil, and Merfolk, both of which are also well written and illustrated, but I'm slightly less compelled by them because the Aswang section was so good. Not to say their bad, I suppose I just like it better when the monster comes home.
APPENDICES
Appendix A talks about the real life behind the game book, what was altered from history for being table unfriendly, such as slavery or the exploitation of women, as well as things which would make play at the table hard, such as redefining black magic from any offensive magic to specifically necromancy as a way to allow the spellcasters to actually be able to be used.
Appendix B is a Glossary of phrases, useful with the Tagalog language. Appendix C is a pronunciation guide.
CONCLUSION
Isle of Sina Una is an excellent setting book, beautifully illustrated, well written, and filled with useful tools for a GM. If it does have a flaw, it is that it's setting could be hard to integrate into Standard Fantasy Setting, because it's not made for that. It's made for being played in, with the people who are from here.
This isn't a review of a system, but rather a thought on what it is I'm reviewing. This won't be applicable to everything, but I do believe I review OSR stuff often enough to be able to make some general statements.
Basics
OSR games are more similar then different. There are a couple of branching paths this way and that, a couple mutants that have grown into something different.
Original, Simple, and Ready-To-Hack. To borrow the phrase from Throne of Salt. OSR games can therefore be mutilated into working with one another. In essence, the picking of an OSR game is mostly down to what template you want to start with.
Don't get into the weeds. I could venture into the depths of changes, armor class, the little bits of genre like the difference between New Weird and Lovecraftian horror.
Therefore, what categorization I do use should be more about picking a framework to start with.
Categories
Source Edition - What edition of D&D is this borrowing from? OSR was a play on "TSR" after all, meaning the editions written by that company before it was bought by Wizards. The aforementioned mutants also will probably get their own section, since they can often borrow from story games or other RPGs.
Skill System - this is the only weeds I'm going to get into. Basically, do characters have discrete skills like Climb, or is it a everybody things.
Danger Level - A measure of how dangerous the rules as written are, based on how much health they get and how hard enemies hit and whether or not PCs have a grace period afterhitting 0 hp before biting the farm.
Pitch - How does the game describe itself, how does it twist off of the platonic elf game
Can You Run Hommlet? Okay, maybe not just Hommlet. But this is the taste test on how easy it is to convert an old module to the system, since one of the main reasons to play OSR is 30 years of adventures to draw from.
Might screw around with the ratings, but that's the basics.
Urban Fantasy, that wild mash up of noir aesthetic and Bram Stoker strokers. Verdant ground for RPGs, which is why D&D's biggest competitors keep coming back to it. Whether it be the classic Vampire the Masquerade line or PbTA games like Monster of the Week or Urban Shadows, something about rainslicked streets of a modern city being lined with dark creatures hiding from society while preying on those foolish or desperate enough to stay out after dark is compelling ground for roleplayers.
So let's talk about it
MASKED REVIEWS: DARK STREETS& DARKER SECRETS
Old Skull Publishing has been a nice little independent publishing house for the past couple years now. One man writing crew Diogo Nogúeira has been developing his own little rules lite system with a string of games that use it, like a Brazillian Kevin Crawford. DS&DS is the third and most recent game in that line, after "Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells" as well as "Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells". Support this man, he's a real gem of the community.
So, if you read my Esoteric Enterprises review, this will be covering a lot of similar ground, thematically. Both games were born out of a love for World of Darkness, and wear that love on their sleeve even as they reject the complexity of that system. When it comes to systems, DS&DS goes even further, cutting down to what a player absolutely needs. Four primary stats: Physique, Agility, Intellect, and Willpower. Four derived Stats: Vitality, Sanity, Luck, Money. A FATE-esque Concept, that gives you advantage on relevant rolls. An Archetype, basically your class, which gives a handful of abilities. And that is it. Characters are simple.
Gameplay takes place in the Dark City, a Gotham-esque hellhole brought to life by the beautiful black and white artwork within, that seems one part 80s action machismo and one part House of Secrets comics. After picking your character concept, you gotta pick the archetypes. Character archetypes fall into the standard Tough (hit things), Nimble (steal or snipe things), Smart (translate the ancient text and cast the rituals), and Gifted (take the powers of darkness and use them against evil). After that, pick a complication, basically a plot hook for the GM to build off of, and you are set.
The core rolling mechanic of DS&DS is interesting. The system is using a d20 and rolling between the relevant attribute and the difficulty (generally between 1 to 5). Roll too high, it's beyond your character's physical abilities, roll too low, and the GM gets to choose between denying you or yes and-ing nasty repercussions your way. There's a push mechanic for if a roll is important enough that you're willing to bet your life on something succeeding. Pretty standard stuff, but this book isn't rewriting the wheel so much as it's compressing it. There's a luck mechanic too that's got an almost PbtA function of allowing players to attempt to will in the contrived coincidences of the source material: the explosive barrels near the cultists, the window perfect for the escape, et cetera, as well as a durability mechanic that works like the Black Hack's flashlights.
I'm gonna skip combat here, there is nothing here that needs pointed out.
Sorcery and Psionics is interesting, and the title kind of gives away why. The Gifted, the sole combat caster of the playable classes, have an additional choice to make at character creation: are the origins of their power magical in nature or psychic? There's not a super large mechanical difference, but it does give different backlash tables, a concept borrowed pretty directly from DCC's spellburn. Power comes from blood, using it pulls from your vitality. A nice little balancing trick. There's a list of 60 powers here that have a pretty flat power curve, so a PC can roll for them or go for them, your call. After that, there's a list of holy and cosmic artifacts that the players might like.
Here we go with the fun bit
Running the Game aka Table Heaven. When I made the Crawford comparison, this is the reason why. There are tables for a GM to set up their world here in all sorts of places. A lot of the early ones are tone tables, signs of corruption, inequity, evil. From there, adventure tables, which reminds me a lot of the Augmented Reality holistic city generator (in a little less detail). The d66 tables give a nice lineup of scenarios, although supplementing this with other books tables might be fun. The breadth of potential enemies makes itself clear here. You can run a World of Darkness hunters game, a Mandy-esque battle against elder god cults, or even a Terminator game with evil AI and robots from the future. The tables help curate your idea for what your Dark City should be. There's also a nice little NPC generator here too for Johns, victims, minor antagonists, et cetera.
Monsters in the Shadows is a bestiary chapter, but what's nice is every monster class has a little table with relevant motivations. Love to see it, it's useful when a GM needs to start improvising. Enemies damage is based around their HD, but each has a little twist that makes them unique, like how Cultist Initiates have a number of powers equal to their HD, making them kinda like evil versions of the Gifted archetype. It's a Monster Mash of creatures, and that is followed up by the Monster Laboratory, which has further tables for rolling up spooks and spirits (and aliems). Monster Lab rounds off with a d100 powers table. Not all of these powers are made equal, I'm sure the character who rolls up Slowly Dying is going to want to strangle the one who got Disintegrator Rays. Such is life.
Optional Rules has... optional rules. Drunken Luck (get drunk for a chance at extra luck), Daring Points (Basically like force points in EotE), Solo Rules (for when you only have two people), Combining Archetypes... It's pretty simple.
Appendix I is the Appendix N of this book. Honestly, the list is kinda short, and it lists Buffy three times (once for the movie, once for the show, and once for the comic book). But hey, I'd probably end up filling the list with nonsense to padding it. At least their honest on what inspired them?
After that is a nice little section on how to write a scenario.
In Conclusion
Dark Streets & Darker Secrets is just a joy to read through. A well written, well illustrated low budget RPG made by someone who knows how to make a toolkit. The system underneath is easy to modify, the pulpy nonsense is front and center.
5/5 Tech Noir Shoot Outs
(As a sidenote: Esoteric Enterprises and Silent Legions might also be useful piles of tables. Even if the games aren't fully compatible with one another, the tools are still useful for one another. EE's massive list of evil tomes and Silent Legion's cult generator in specific would be very useful)
"The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It's the mortar holding an army together."
-Croaker, The Black Company
MASKED REVIEWS: BAND OF BLADES
There are a lot of fantasy games out there. Games about heroism and going into dark places and kicking evil's ass.
There are a lot of dark fantasy games out there. Games about being an unlikely band of hero adjacent individuals expected to die tired as their lifeblood mixes with chaos and corruption.
But I can't think of many games whose hook is "You lost. The Dark Lord won. Get home or die." And my god is that one hell of a hook.
Band of Blades is a Forged in the Dark game published by Evil Hat productions. It follows the last remnant of the Legion, a coalition of the free peoples who marched their armies to the land of the Cinder King with the aid of the Chosen to end the threat to the world.
They Lost.
Now, what's left of the Legion must make their way to Skydagger Keep, the only place they might be able to make a stand against a literal endless army of the dead.
Tonewise, the pitch reminds me of Shadow of the Demon Lord. The game makes no bones that the characters might not survive because they are regular people in the darkest of circumstances. So let's get a reading.
The first new mechanic this game introduces is a separation of characters. Your game time is split between playing as the Commanders and the Squads. The Commanders plan out the missions, give out bonuses, and the Squads go out and get killed.
This game runs off Forged in the Dark, so it's a D6 Dicepool system with stress mechanics and base management. This game adds in a WFRP-esque corruption mechanic for when your soldiers get bad touched by the servants of the Cinder King. Just something to keep in mind.
There is a big ol pile of mechanics here Imma skip. FitD games are hard to explain but easy to actually play.
Squads are made up of five regulars (either soldier or rookie) plus two specialists picked from a list of five: Heavy, Medic, Officer, Scout, and Sniper. Players also pick one of four heritages. The heritages are all human-adjacent, don't expect dwarves or elves, and give a minor benefit, which is good because in larger groups the majority of the people will be playing as regulars. Interesting to note, the game provides several squads, players won't be playing as one elite group but several slightly less elite groups.
Next up, the Commanders. This game requires at least three players to fill the three command roles of Commander (who picks what missions to do and what route to take in between missions, Marshall (Picks which of the existing squads will be going on the mission, and which specialists will be attached), Quartermaster (distribute special equipment); there are two optional roles for bigger parties: Lorekeeper (gets to tell lores), Spymaster (anticipate what the forces of the Cinder King are going to do). The Commanders take a little bookkeeping off the GM, while also giving the players the feeling of sitting in a war tent looking at tiny figures on a big map.
We next get a little info on the Chosen and the Broken. These are each side's heavy hitters, and work as campaign modifiers. One Chosen might be particularly antsy about Blight, and slay members of her own side that show Corruption, but give the team access to better healing from combat. One Broken might have the ability to reduce your supplies. Even though you won't be playing as the Chosen, and fighting directly against the Broken almost guarantees you're going to lose that squad, they give enough bonuses/negatives to make things interesting.
Blah blah blah, Mission phase. Blah blah blah, Campaign phase. Blah blah blah, How to Play. Bo~ooring
Mission generator. Neat.
Blah blah, gming tips.
Ah. Locations. So I mentioned routes a little earlier. Have you ever played the roguelite FTL? Where you have to move west across the screen with an enemy fleet on your tail? The Location map is like that, giving you nodes starting from Karlsburg and ending at Skydagger Keep... if you can make it there. The book gives a brief description of each town, with a sample list of missions. The Skydagger Keep section also gives a point system for end of campaign scorekeeping, presumably to go along with some future book. As it stands, there's enough here for a relatively long campaign that will be utterly nailbiting.
IN CONCLUSION
I know I skipped a lot here, but thats mostly because like a lot of FitD games, a lot of the rules are here for one character each. Still, this is classic dark fantasy. A story of fighting against the odds in desperation.
I think that the only flaw in this game is I really wonder about how replayable it is. It's obviously meant to be replayed, the multiple routes and multiple Chosen/Broken remind me of games like World of Horror, where the plot doesn't really change but players (or GMs in this case) have options, or like Curse of Strahd or Waterdeep Dragonheist. But I can't see running multiple campaigns with this system, although I could be wrong.
Still, it's pretty cool, and will be a fun campaign when you pick it up.
Recently got my hands on Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Kobold Press's Underworld Players Guide for their Midgard campaign setting, and FATE Condensed.
This'll be a first, me striking while the iron is hot on a book that was actually written by WotC.
MASKED REVIEWS: TASHA'S CAULDRON OF EVERYTHING
In the history of D&D, generally speaking, each edition has been very keen on releasing player facing books that increase options, add new feats and equipment, all that stuff. Generally speaking, this is called Players Handbook 2 (or 3 or 4). Generally they add new classes.
5e has been somewhat different in this respect. Because WotC has only made one additional full new class in the Artificer, each player book has been more about adding subclasses. Tasha's is the second such book of it's type, the first being Xanathar's Guide. They differentiate themselves from Volo's Guide and Mordenkainen's by being all about Player Options instead of monsters.
So let's dig in.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is divided into four chapters: Player Options, Group Patrons, Magical Items, and DM Rules Options. Conveniently, this means both Players and DMs will be interested in picking this book up. As with all of the previous books past the release of the DMG, the titular Tasha gives occasional witty rejoinder in character. Tasha is a morally ambiguous magic user (hah, tautology) who studied under Baba Yaga and Zagig. She seems to have a poor opinion of Mordenkainen, which one can chalk up to Mordenkainen being a dick.
Moving on.
We begin Chapter One with Customizing Your Origin, a set of rules for messing around with Racial Bonuses. There have been a lot of 5e third party books talking about this recently, from Ancestry and Culture (and it's numerous expansions) to An Elf And An Orc Had A Baby. The reasoning behind this is decent enough, the weird eugenics angle that D&D has brought with it since ye olden times has every right to be called out, and disincentivizing playing anything other then stereotypes via ability score bonuses is bad and should feel bad. This is the most simple version of this system I've seen, but hey, what works works.
Subclass Review Time. Haven't had to do this since Aihrde. Tasha's little comments are comedy gold.
Artificer: Copied almost directly from the Eberron, with a new subclass
Armorer - Just the blacksmith stereotype made manifest. Armorer reminds me of the Totem Barbarian due to being even further customizable into the Guardian and Infiltrator, which split the Armorer's specialty between Punch Enemy and Beam Attack Enemy. Thumbs Up
Barbarian: Gets some replacements for their PHB abilities. Never played a Barbo so I can't tell you how necessary these are.
Path of the Beast - Werewolf Barbo! Got a decent amount of flexibility, especially with their sixth level ability which can be altered on a short rest. This seems like a pretty nice way of having a Werewolf PC. Thumbs Up
Path of Wild Magic - The draw here is the Wild Magic Surge table, just as it is with the Wild Mage Sorcerer. The table is much shorter, and as always I'd recommend the DM write a few of their own, but it definitely seems like fun. Thumbs Up
Bard: Widened the Bard's spell pool, gave healers the ability to spend a Bardic Inspiration to add to the amount that got healed. Respectable.
College of Creation - Buffs Bardic Inspiration. Can make normal equipment, and later bring that equipment to life. Eh.
College of Eloquence - an import from the Tharos book that I do not have. A social bard who can't roll below 10 on a Persuasion and Deception. Eh.
Cleric: Same as bard, more spells from the PHB allowed. Exchange a channel divinity for a spell slot. Replace Divine Strike or Potent Spellcasting with a damage bonus to your weapon attacks.
Order Domain - Be the LAW. A bunch of abilities designed to stop enemies in their tracks or mark enemies. Thumbs Up
Peace Domain - Calm people down. Link together allies, allow allies to intercept attacks. This is where the fun begins. Thumbs up.
Twilight Domain - Despite the name, seems more focused on buffing allies. Reminds me of the Circle of the Shepherd druid with it's Twilight Sanctuary Channel Divinity.
Druid: More Spells. Free Find Familiar.
Circle of Spores - Copy from the Magic the Gathering Book. Hope you like SPORES. Create areas of denial while becoming a horrific monster. Now I need to calm down after two campaigns that were hijacked by Zuggtmoy. Hoah.
Circle of Stars - Wild Shape gets a special mode. Nice versatility thanks to the three constellations that they can bring with them. I've talked about this kinda stuff before in previous books that have specialty druids.
Circle of Wildfire - Oh, so they're just admitting Druids are pyros eh? A nice mix of beastmaster style and area denial. That plus the pile of fire spells means you'll either love this or hate it because so many monsters are good vs fire.
Fighter: Our first martial class. New Fighting Styles are okay, although Interception and Unarmed Fighting are the only ones I'd use. New Maneuvers are better, the Battlemaster will benefit from most of these. There's even a section at the end which gives a number of suggestions on how the build a Battlemaster toward one archetype or another
Psi-Warrior - Feels like a supernatural take on the Battlemaster, with Psi-Die in place of Superiority Die.
Rune Knight - A warrior with the ability to enhance themselves and their equipment with Runes. Very customizable, but you'll want to know your build before hand because once you pick a rune you are stuck with it.
Monk: Get a nice little buff for monks that use weapons.
Way of Mercy - Healer Monk! They can still hurt people, of course, but the main thing is handing out heals with your fists.
Way of the Astral Self - Is this a Jojo Reference? Why are you booing me? Astral Self isn't actually Stand-like, being more of a mystic set of armor that gives you extra arms, more like Asura from Asura's Wrath.
Paladin: New Paladin exclusive Fighting Styles, access to more PHB spells, use Channel Divinity for more Spell Slots.
Oath of Glory - Import from Tharos. You have come to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum. True to it's Olympian flavor, it enhances the Paladin's physical abilities and buffs your allies when you kick ass.
Oath of the Watchers - Beat down outsiders. Seem to be the paladin equivalent of the Planeswalker ranger. If your DM likes throwing creatures from other dimensions at you, the Oath of the Watchers will be a go-to.
Ranger: A MASSIVE pile of alterations, a full two page spread. Replacements for existing abilities, more spells, more fighting styles. You can tell they've been footing complaints for a while. The section ends with some alterations and statblocks for a Beastmaster Ranger.
Fey Wanderer - A spell focused ranger and a good fit for the Druidic Warrior Fight Style that gives you cantrips. Their affinity to Misty Step is nice as well.
Swarmkeeper - BEES! Swarmkeepers have decent offense thanks to their BEES, but by the end have morphed into a defensive pick.
Rogue: They can give themselves advantage on an attack if they don't move. Good for a ranged Rogue, less good for a melee rogue.
Phantom - Extra edge. The Tokens of the Departed feature gives them a lot of versatility as an attacker or for story, but all in all it's okay.
Soul Knife - the second Psi class. They have the old "Teleport to your thrown weapon" trick.
Sorcerer: More spells, new Metamagic
Aberrant Mind - The third Psi class. The main hook seems to be how later on you don't need to speak or gesture to use spells, and later can see ALL. Would be fun for a Starjammer campaign.
Clockwork Soul - Domo Arigato Mr Roboto. Cancel out Advantage or Disadvantage. These are pretty good buff/debuffers
Warlock: More spells, more invocations, new pact.
The Fathomless - When your patron is a cthulhu, deep water edition. Very good for pirate adventures thanks to having a swim speed, has some decent defensive tools, including a panic button teleport at high levels.
The Genie - It's decent. The main thing is late game access to a nerfed Wish, most of the other elements are just the usual give more x type damage, resist x type damage style features.
Wizard: Huge pile of new spells. You can tell Tasha's a wizard because almost all the new spells the book introduces are Wizard spells first and maybe the other magic users can use them.
Bladesinger - After a sick burn from Tasha (seriously, all of her comments are gold but this one had me in hysterics), we get a frontline sword wizard. Not quite sure why you'd want to be a frontline wizard.
Order of Scribes - I hope you like Scrolls, because that is what this wizard subclass is all about.
All in all the new subclasses range from Great to Okay. Not really any bad ones that stand out. I feel that there is a room at pretty much any table for at least a few of these classes, and I'm hoping it's a promise for more... planespanning adventures.
The New Feats are... well I'm not the biggest fan of Crusher, Piercer, Slasher because their basically the same feat for each basic weapon choice that should have been combined into one feat because it leaves my Ranger who uses a Longsword AND a Longbow needing to choose which one to take. Skill Expert means expertise is now available to any PC, which is nice.
Chapter Two: Group Patrons is about... Group Patrons. No this isn't talking about Warlock Patrons, but rather Patrons in the sense of a powerful person or group who is paying you to kill things. This section takes up a lot of space, but mostly it seems to be a GM's jumping off point. Everything said is logical, of course the Ancient Dragon who is sending you out on missions can give you easy access to some magical equipment, of course an Aristo can bribe city guards to look the other way for you, but it's so logical that I can't think of a lot of GMs who won't have thought of this. I dunno, seems like there isn't enough mechanical benefit to have all this fluff. Luckily this chapter is short.
Chapter Three: Magical Miscellany has new (and reprinted) spells and magical artifacts.
The main thing I noticed in the new spells is the big list of Summon X spells. Maybe players complained that there weren't enough spells for bringing in meat shields.
The new magical items are a lot more promising, but most especially because of the magical tattoos. Most of the magical tattoos have some sort of magical effect brought up on command, although the Legendary Tattoos naturally have the best effects. There's also some demonology related items and tomes available, makes sense considering Tasha's backstory. Good additions all around, moving on.
Chapter Four: Dungeon Master's Tools starts with some basic DMing advice, Session Zero, that kind of stuff. It then moves on to the very good Sidekick rules I have borrowed in their UA form several times. Sidekicks are essentially simplified PCs, suitable for NPC companions who the DM wants to grow without managing everything a PC can do.
Next is Monster Parleying, with potential offerings for said monsters if the GM can't think of something suitable. It's a decent resource, but I would prefer to make my own tables if I'm dealing with some creature the group is going to be dealing with regularly.
Environmental Hazards are nice extensions of similar tables in the DMG, only for far stranger lands. D100 tables for haunted locales, far planes, and the like. Psychic Resonance and Magical Phenomena are for detailing powerful flareups of energy of either type.
Puzzles, the final section of the book, has a list of puzzles to drop into your game if you don't mind your party struggling over them for the rest of the session. Useful as long as the party hasn't looked back here.
IN CONCLUSION
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, like Xanathar's Guide before it, is an excellent player book, a way of refreshing your D&D experience with new subclasses and new items. It is and will continue to be pricey for what it is, but WotC gonna WotC. The theme of a lot of the new subclasses give me a lot of hope for some adventuring beyond the Realms, but even if that's not the case, they're all creative enough to give an enterprising DM ideas.
If you play 5e, this is a decent investment, although I think that it's gonna get way more use by people who make new characters all the time more then people who... don't do that. I'd say one copy per gaming group is all you need here if you aren't into the hypotheticals.
4/5: Great work WOTC, now learn how to write adventures again
As a sidenote, not to be a desperate youtuber, but please comment. What are your thoughts on Tasha's? What future content would you guys like?
This will be more of a quickie (or quiche if you're fancy)
I've talked about Kobold Press before, but for the recap, they're a third party publisher of D&D and Pathfinder sourcebooks and modules, set in their founder's homebrew world Midgard. Underworld Player's Guide is the second of their 5e player books, the first being Heroes of Midgard (which I do not own).
A note before I get started. Midgard's Underworld is not Faerun's underworld. Drow are present, but are not the top dog down below and also less spider freaks.
This book starts with organizations. The Order of the Ebon Star are renegade ghouls who are getting their Drizzt on. The Red Winter are cultists of the Goddess of Blood who hunt down Vampires.
Races
Darakhul are playable Ghouls. They have the most subraces.... because their subraces are just the other races. Logical.
Dark Trollkin are a subrace of Trollkin. As I don't have the Heroes of Midgard for the main stats, I can't comment on this other then to say Neat.
Derro, everyone's favorite crazed gnomes. Come in three varieties: Boring, Mutated, and Crazy.
Dhampyr, for getting your Alucard on. There are two varieties, the more suave one and the feral one.
Drow, who are different from PHB Dark Elf because they are their own race here. Their subraces are Delver, Fever-bit, and Purified; which essentially Blue Collar, Infected with Ghoul nonsense, and Buying the Hype.
Mushroomfolk, our first non-D race. The only thing that Darakhul fear, because they are the tasty treat. Mushroomfolk come in three varieties, one with acid spores, one with sleep spores, and one good at being unnoticed.
Satarre are EeEeViL Dragonborn (kinda). They want to bring around the end of all things, but that doesn't mean that they're bad. They can rot things.
Shades are GHO~oooOOSTS. It's actually not a bad take on the ghost archetype for PCs.
Class Options
Barbarian Path of the Ebon Star - Blind enemies and pick up Necrotic resistance, perfect for fighting ghouls
Bard College of Echoes - You are now the master of sound. Fuck with spellcasters and make your loud party member's sneaky.
Monk Way of the Sated Hunger - Exclusive to the hungry dead. Relax your hunger, and then give it to others.
Paladin Oath of Consumption - Also exclusive to the hungry dead. This is like... peak bad guy paladin. Necrotic energy, spooky aura, boosts to your bite.
Paladin Oath of the Plaguetouched - Cannot be ghouls. An excellent slayer of the undead, with a nice aura for battling the ghoul's paralyzing touch.
Ranger Imperial Hunter - Another hungry undead exclusive. They get an undead familiar and a bunch of stuff to do with it.
Rogue Herald of the Ebon Star - Magic knife trick. Turn invisible. Fun things.
Rogue Soulspy - The cleric to the Arcane Trickster's Wizard.
Sorcerer of Hungering - This is a selfish build that wants to get killing blows to get refunds on health and sorcery points
Sorcerer of Spores - Access to the Druid spell list and enhanced metamagic
Wizard of Gravebinding - Wizard designed for shutting the undead down. If you want to be mean, bring this subclass to Curse of Strahd
Wizard of White Necromancy - Basically the same as a Necromancer wizard, but with a more "Dark is Not Evil Vibe"
Backgrounds - All of these are highly specific to Midgard, although one could make more generic versions, like a regular old deserter instead of a Ghoul Deserter. It's backgrounds, nothing super important.
Spells - The spells are edgy. Most have to do with undeath, and if nothing else this book buffs up the number of necromancy spells available at earlier levels. Can't really speak about their balance though.
Underworld Beasts - Ranger companion fodder for being underground.
Conclusion
This is all killer no filler when it comes to sticking player options in front of players. With the exception of Dark Trollkin, this is eminently useable on it's own, and would be great for a horror or Underdark campaign. When it says Players Guide, it does mean Player's Guide, there is a remarkable lack of unique GM Tools here. Still, the art and writing is high quality, and while these definitely are all tied to Midgard to one extent or another they all seam fun to play as.
To respond to your previous post, really liking Tasha's for the various player options though I wish they had kept psionics as a separate magic system with an actual class. The chapter on Patrons was nice, if I hadn't already had something set up for a while now. As to future content to cover, I will always look forward to any new setting set, or systems with unique stuff that I can steal and port over to 5e.
There must be some kinda way outta here
said the Joker to the Thief
MASKED REVIEWS: GRADIENT DESCENT
Oh MOTHERSHIP. Lo-fi Horror Beats To Run Away From Monsters From. One part Call of Cthulhu, One part Alien. And now I have my hands on the newest module.
Spoilers Below
Gradient Descent puts the players in the shoes of Divers into the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility, aka The Deep. The Deep is a massive dungeon manipulated by an insane AI and filled to the brim with virtual ghosts, but the real terror is the existential dread that asks the question are the players who they think they are? Are they real, or machine themselves?
Megadungeon is a word that gets thrown around in conjunction with this module, and I think I should explain it. The Deep isn't the biggest megadungeon I've seen, but it is very big, split over several decks. The main key to such a place is that players must have an extremely large playspace that is still contained, while also having options to negotiate or avoid danger because they are going to be cut off from easy exits. It must be a place that can be delved into again and again. The Deep passes this test. It has multiple entrances, a good random encounter system, factions that could all use a few greedy dupes to make a move against their rivals, and a justification for new characters to show up if someone goes crazy.
Before I go further, I just want to complement the art style here. The rendering of humanoid characters are horrific, terrifying uncanny valley forms, perfectly getting people into the mood for this game. It's genuinely nightmarish, reminding me of System Shock 2 by way of creepypasta.
What this module does extremely well is how it's designed to be played. The way the decks divide up reminds me of System Shock 1 and 2, with each layer having it's own dangers, but at the same time it stays on theme. The Deep is all about androids and infiltrators, and all of it's horrors are based around this. The cleverest spook, though, doesn't come from some rusting killer robot, it comes from the Bends.
The Bends is a system that is meant to replicate THAT Moment in a scifi story. You know, like when Ash in Alien had his head knocked off. Or when the Final Five from nuBSG all realized they were Cylons the whole time. Or where Cobb from Inception is spinning the top to make sure he's in reality. Any amount of time in the Deep starts affecting the PCs as they begin to wonder if they are an infiltrator. MONARCH has brain scanners all around the facility, and how much do your characters really know about the outside world? It's a nice and thematic way of adding another bit of dread to your delves for treasure.
The Monster section is a very nice addition. Because MOTHERSHIP is still in Beta as it were, the modules are the only source of Monsters. Each of the non-unique new monsters here have nice little tables for making each encounter unique. This combined with GM advice to make sure that every encounter can end peaceably means that encounters can swing a lot of ways.
Antagonists wise, MONARCH fits well into the Rogue AI archetype. They're glitchy and panicky, but also smarter then the PCs and willing to turn their interior into more of a death trap if you piss them off. Minor antagonist The Minotaur is also fun, if only because it's very willing to help you out... for a price.
Look, I'm struggling to explain this without reproducing the book. The module just feels like a classic Space Isolation Horror story. Even working in a group you're always going to feel alone, because you can't trust the people around you, and might not even be able to trust yourself. This is good shit.
4/5 This ain't a module for a Beginner GM, but if you know what you're doing you can have a very effective scare.
Another day, another compilation of Warlock Zines to read through
MASKED REVIEWS: WARLOCK GRIMOIRE II
Like my previous Warlock Grimoire review, this is a compilation of Kobold Press articles taken from issues 10-19 of their patreon only zine Warlock.
Let's delve in, shall we.
Chapter One: Lore and Story Part I: The Burnished Grove
A nice little extraplanar clockwork forest with multiple areas but no map, some monsters, and a druid circle for being a robot druid. Nice! Part II: The Eleven Hells
Midgard uses an alternate array of Hells and Demon Lords, but the concepts themselves will be familiar. There are Eleven of them instead of Nine. This section references heavily Kobold's monster manuals. Decent, most likely going to be mined for ideas in a more traditional 9 Hells scenario.
Chapter Two: Adventure and Dungeoneering Part I: The Town Of Smoke
A "Town in the Mist", shifting locations to wherever is convenient to the DM, that has a big old Gate to the Hells if you're looking for a way to get there that doesn't involve things your worst player wants to do. There's some flavor here, but I do think it suffers a little of important NPC syndrome, the most glaring being the Captain, a human fighter of indeterminate level who will show back up the next day if killed by the players. Big thing here is the list of Guides, and their various gates into the Eleven Hells. I like this. Good shit. Part II: The Doom in the Pillars
A fallen city in the desert. A serpent waiting in an ancient tree. An excellent swords and sandal adventure in the waiting. The flavor here is very Raiders, with the players having to deal with a corrupted red dragon, some new monsters, and of course the corruptor himself. Neat little sandbox. Part III: Grandmother's House
Out in the woods of Old Margreve, Baba Yaga's hut awaits.
...
Fuck that noise. Old lady keeps a fence of skulls. I have no desire to end up like that kid from John Wick. Between the visitors she might have to the fact her hut is fucking terrifying, Baba Yaga seems like an extreme danger zone. There are some nice magical items in this section, including a divination tea, as well as some new spells, including one that makes people's eyes explode (temporarily). Part IV: The Darkest Vaults of the Great Maze
The Great Maze is an infinite extraplanar dungeon dimension. That being said, this is a list of potential corner pieces, although I feel they could use... I dunno maps for DM's use. A demon lord's conscience, sealed away in a living maze that constantly grows and changes. A heretical cathedral to Hecate, teaching xenophobic teachings to the minotaur slaves who constantly expand it. A book of mazes which is itself a maze. And of course, the First Labyrinth itself. Decent adventure seeds all, but I wish there was more. Part V: Treasure Vaults of Midgard
More adventure seeds, this one having a bunch of places to store legendary artifacts, piles of money, or other things that adventurers might want. Very good flavor here, from a wandering vault to the arsenal made by the frost giants for Ragnarok.
CHAPTER THREE: MONSTERS Part I: Boss Monsters
This section is filled with statblocks. Catscratches are a cruel player punch. Vexxeh is a pretty standard fiend. Gulper Behemoth is a nasty deepsea anglerfish. The Pumpkin King is a halloween spooky fae lord. Clockwork Archon is an Angelus Ex Machina. Death Barque are Ghoul Imperium unliving ships, with a statline like a dragon. Pustulent Shamblers are diseased slimes. Et cetera, et cetera. Part II: Abominations of the Blood Kingdoms
This sections all on weird gothic horror monsters found in Midgard's Blood Kingdoms. They might also be useful for Ravenloft or Krevborna games. Also, a new magic sword.
CHAPTER FOUR: NPCS Part I: The Band of the Twice Damned
A band of vampire mercenaries aligned with the Blood Kingdom. Here to kick PCs asses individually or all together as they level up. A+ response team for sub-10 adventures. Part II: Wotan's Warriors
Dwarven response team for the far north. Could be allies or enemies depending on the player's own feelings toward the Northland Dwarves. Part III: Thaern
An ambiguously aligned spy with an agenda. Part IV: Zoranya Vell
Punch Sorceress Part V: Yana Harr
Wandering sage with an evil tome. Part VI: Galvanix
Spellcasting paper drake
Gonna stop there, the point is there are a bunch of NPCs, easily inserted into your game.
CHAPTER FIVE: MAGIC
A pile of new spells and magical items. A druid circle created by goblins living in the magical equivalent of an exclusion zone. Atlantis the Lost Empire style skimmers. Clockwork pets. Some staves with spells on them. More spells. Plague that turns you into an automaton.
CHAPTER SIX: PLAYERS
This is just backgrounds, subraces, and equipment. Nothing really stands out as groundbreaking, but if you want to add even more types of halflings, bully. Seriously, four subchapters on halflings. Why?
IN CONCLUSION
It's another Warlock Grimoire. Like the Dragon Magazines of old, it's about having writers flesh out their main setting, while also trying out experimental ideas.
Just wanted to put a little update for what I got in the pipeline
I acquired the Kobold Press Midgard Heroes Handbook, previously referenced in my review of the Underworld Player's Guide from the same company. My flip through showed it to be of similar quality as their other products.
Looking through other people's reviews of old D&D content led me to Swordthrust, a AD&D third party adventure written in the mid-80s. I picked up a physical copy. It'll be interesting to see AD&D content in the era before the OGL documents.
Monsters & Treasures of Airhde, which I backed via Kickstarter, was supposed to have it's PDF out in January. Obviously, due to COVID, that didn't happen. When the PDF does arrive, expect a quick review. This would be follow up to my review of their players guide. Which also leads us to...
Best Monster Manuals - Look at me, working out a listicle. I have trouble saying anything unique about individual monster manuals for 5e, because all of them pretty much are stat block lists and art. So instead, I'm going to go through my dedicated Monster Manuals, including ones already reviewed here, to help the people reading figure out which ones match their needs.
Other books sitting in my backlog waiting for me to start typing include Stibbles Codex of Companions (5e Monster Manual), Stonehell Dungeon Book I (OSR Dungeon), and Ultraviolet Grasslands (OSR Sourcebook).
I'd like to say that I appreciate my small but enthusiastic followers here. I'd like to once again ask if there are any books or adventures you would like me to cover?
Back at it again with the Kobold Press sourcebooks. Sue me, they have a lot of them.
Midgard Heroes Handbook is a third party 5e supplement published by Kobold Press. It was written by Dan Dillon, Richard Green, and Chris Harris. Cover art is by Aaron Miller, with extensive interior art by Helge Balzer, Gabriel Cassata, Kremena Chipilova, Josh Hass, Russell Jones, Jason Juta, Guido Kuip, Marcel Mercado, Florian Stitz, Bryan Syme, Egil Thompson, Damon Westenhofer, and Michael Witmann. It was published 2018.
This book is mostly a sourcebook for new races, classes, backgrounds, and spells, although it also has some function as a Gazetteer for the Midgard campaign setting, albeit extremely lightly. Enough to give players ideas about the setting to make their character, not enough to really run in Midgard. Like the Underworld Guide, this is a book for players.
Races
The gang's all here people. Elves, Dwarves, Half-elves (kinda), Halflings, Gnomes, and Humans. Oh, and also Bearfolk, Centaurs, Dhampire, "Gearforged" (this was written before Eberron's release), Gnoll, Kobolds, Minotaur, Ratfolk, Shadowfey, and Trollkin.
Oh my.
Okay, so Bearfolk, Centaurs, Gnoll, Minotaur, and Trollkin are all some variation of the Big Guy archetype. Good Strength, subrace Con bonus. Gearforged are able to pick their ability score increase, making them versatile like the variant human. Dhampires, like their Underdark Guide counterparts, are charisma based. Kobolds are kobolds, you know how they work.
Shadowfey are the setting's Drow equivalent, but instead of them being from underground they're from another dimension. Skillwise, they're halfway between Drow and Shadar-kai. They are a neat Drow replacement, all the deadly decadent court stuff plus dimensional shit. Thumbs up
Martial and Roguish Characters
First of the big list of subclasses.
Barbarian: Path of the Ancestors - Not as fun as Ancestral Guardian. Basically just a tanky bog standard barbarian
Bard: College of Entropy - DIVINATION/WILD MAGE BARD
Bard: Greenleaf College - Druid Bard
Fighter: Clanking Mercenary - pretend to be a robot to make you fight harder
Fighter: Edjet - Dragonborn formation fighter. Gets a sweep attack.
Fighter: Ghost Knight - Ride your ghost horse into town.
Fighter: Griffon Knight - Ride a Griffon into town. Don't lose it because those are expensive to replace.
Fighter: Shieldbearer - BECOME SUNDOWNER
Fighter: Sword-dancer - No armor, just kill. It's like wearing nothing at ALLLLLLL
Paladin: Oath of Radiance - Paladin Classic. Destroy the Undead FOR GREAT JUSTICE
Paladin: Oath of Thunder - Solaire Paladin. Wield the power of Lightning.
Ranger: Vampire Slayer - Van Helsing kit. Kinda vanilla ranger
Ranger: Zobecker Scout - Urban scout. Knows where to find the good good drugs and can build alchemical devices
Rogue: Duelist - Like a battlemaster rogue
Rogue: Fixer - An urban rogue great for social encounters and linking up with crime bosses
Rogue: Whisper - SPOOKY ROGUE. Disappear into another dimension
After this, there are some variant weapon rules, giving battlemaster style maneuvers to each specific weapon. These all seem pretty fun, although they add a layer of complexity to player actions.
Divine Characters
Second big list of subclasses, built for the holy clerics and druids
Clerics
Apocalypse Domain - DOOM
Beer Domain - Keep spirits high by helping allies
Cat Domain - Become a catboi/catgirl: darkvision, claws, the whole shebang
Clockwork Domain - You are master of all machines
Darkness Domain - DARKNESS
Dragon Domain - a spell list that looks like the Draconic Sorcerer's
Hunger Domain - Devour your enemies
Hunting Domain - Make Rangers pointless
Justice Domain - tastes like pork because it's a fucking Cop
Labyrinth Domain - Into the Maze you gooooo
Moon Domain - Glow in the dark
Mountain Domain - Deal with extreme conditions
Ocean Domain - Swim swim free, and eventually become an innsmouther
Travel Domain - Can cure exhaustion and ALSO make Rangers worthless
Void Domain - Smart cleric. Drives opponents mad
Druids
Circle of Stones - Do stereotypical druid stuff with your spirit animal
The book then brings up Rune Magic, but then says it's in a later chapter. So moving on.
Arcane Characters
Sorcerers
Mazeborn - Melee sorcerer. Mutate into a minotaur as you deal more damage
Shadow - DARKNESS
Warlock
Genie Lord - A warlock that gets wish. Run.
The Great Machine - Gain clockwork precision with your spells
Light Eater - DARKNESS
Wizard
Angelic Scribe - Create auras with the power of angels
Clockwork - Turn yourself into a golem
Doom Croaker - shout about Ragnarok
Dragon Masks - Trick the universe into thinking you are a dragon
Elementalist - Become the Fireball wizard
Elven High Magic - Ritual casting speciality
Entropy - WILD MAGIC WIZARD!
Geomancy - Use the power of Leylines... which is explained later
Illumination - Alternate Divination Wizard
Necrophagy - Necromancy on steroids
Ring Warden - Craft magical items and pose as a team
Feats and Backgrounds
Most of the feats are for accessing or boosting the new magic types if you didn't pick their subclass.
The backgrounds are stereotypes for Midgard hubs, like the Bemmean Scholar being a student at one of their wizard colleges, or the Blood Sister being a worshipper of the Red Goddess. They are very specific to Midgard, and you would pretty much only use these if your character is from Midgard.
Spellcasting Rules
These explain how the new spell types work. Ley Lines are random boosts to spells with the chance of blowing up in your face. Ring Magic has no unique mechanics, but a neat little bit of backstory. Rune Magic is similar to ritual magic, but based off the collected runes.
Spells
It's a list of new spells. Most is devoted to the new magic types, although if you don't care they also have their classification of evocation
Appendix: Creatures, Magic Items and Other Miscellany
The clean up chapter. This has stat blocks for new familiars, mounts, and summons like the Ring Servant construct; items to add to your campaign such as Alchemist's Smoke. It also has rules for Frostbite and Snow Blindness.
And with that we reach the end.
In Conclusion
This is a good pull. Not the best, you can tell that they were still figuring out how to write subclasses at this point. But the spark is there, and the real love is in the races and spells.
Still, the new magic systems might have trouble integrating in a regular D&D game, the martial classes are frequently vanilla, the tendency for designers to make a Darkness subclass is here in full force for almost everyone, and Fighters, Clerics, and Wizards got the lion's share of the effort.
I have no idea why I'm reviewing this. Third party D&D supplements from the 80s are rare, and this one can only be gotten legitimate via buying old copies. Mine has some sort of water stain on the bottom of the seam.
Still, maybe the reason I'm doing this IS to get a look at what third party publishers were doing the same year Dragonlance first hit the market.
So let's be about it.
MASKED REVIEWS: SWORDTHRUST (3rd Party AD&D Adventure)
Swordthrust was published in 1984 by Mayfair Games Inc as part of their Role Aids line. It was written by Sam Shirley and Dan Greenberg, with cover art by the legendary Boris Vallejo. The adventure is for 5th level PCs.
The book is 40 pages consisting of an adventure into a mountainside dungeon. The hook is kinda weak, the party coming across a courier who asks them to complete her task before dying, unless the party cleric intervenes. From there, you show up in the town of Ferraburg, where the courier's employer tasks you with a retrieval job inside a dungeon atop a nearby mountain. The read aloud says the title of the module, as the wizard expects heavy resistance and wants you to move in and out of the dungeon.
Ferraburg is given a quick Gazeteer, with three factions and a handful of landmarks. Honestly, I love how terse this is. It makes it flexible.
The adventure itself is... good? Like, it's very MYTHIC D&D. You're assaulted by a man claiming to be a king from antiquity who demands magic items as a toll or he'll sic his wolves on the party. The dungeon itself has a war between the Skeksis and Uru (excuse me, the Durge and Fantsies). The Durge have made minions of the usual suspects, so the play includes the goblin smashing you crave on top of the weird shit. And that's just the warm up.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
The dungeon is not a dungeon. In fact, the mountain is not a mountain. It's a sleeping Ice Titan. Ferraburg's industry has been unknowingly mining the Ice Titan's body. The King is the Ice Titan's memory of some ancient barbarian king from 1,000 years ago. The Durge and Fantsies are incarnations of the Ice Titan's millennia long contemplation of the nature of Good and Evil, and how many of each are still alive if the players discover how to awaken it determines how it decides. The armor pieces isn't just the breastplate, it's a full set that gets more powerful with each piece you find but gives you a desire to sacrifice your life to awaken the Titan.
This is a good module, what the fuck.
Like yes, there's nothing here that's mechanically complex, and the Dark Crystal references are noticeable. But my god, this was 1984 and the payoff is so creative and great. I love this.
WHO'S READY TO DISCUSS WHAT NOT TO DO IN A MONSTER BOOK?!?
MASKED REVIEWS:BEASTS OF FLESH & STEEL
Beasts of Flesh & Steel is a monster book by Monte Cook Games, creators of the Numenera/Cypher rpgs. It was designed by Bruce R Cordell and Sean K. Reynolds, with the man himself Monte Cook as creative director. The goal of it is to add monsters from Numenera to 5e. Let it never be said that Cook can't recognize an opportunity to get his brand out there.
I bought this book on discount via Miniature Market, along with a copy of the Creature Codex pocket edition and a $3 beholder miniature. Thank you Spring Sale.
Reviewing a monster book always puts me in a particular kind of spot, because a good monster book has qualities that are one of those "Know It When You See It". I'll hold up Ultimate Bestiary: Revenge of the Horde as the best Third Party Monster Manual I've read, at least for the purposes of examining what makes a good monster manual. The reason I bring that up is because this book breaks a lot of the rules.
BoF&S begins by telling you it's a monster book "filled with weird and bizarre creatures to help introduce Science Fantasy monsters into your campaign". So far, so good. And then we immediately run into trouble, as the book references back to the first monster book for bringing creatures from Numenera to 5e that Monte Cook Games released: Arcana of the Ancients.
This is going to be the sticking point for the review, as the biggest sin. Even though right here at the start it tells you that you do not need Arcana of the Ancients to use this book, that's a filthy lie. In fact right before it says that, it has a sidebar that gives a symbol whenever a monster statblock references Arcana of the Ancients.
The first monster of the book, the Argozt uses this symbol because the biomechanical teleporting cat can be broken down into Cyphers, something that is only found in AotA (or the main Numenera book). I know what cyphers are, they're like D&D wands, limited use magic tools, but this book don't deign to explain them.
I will contrast with Revenge of the Horde. That book also introduced unique limited use items that are carried solely by it's monsters... but all those were in the book itself. It didn't require me to own Remarkable Shops to know what they were. If a part of your monster's statblock requires referencing a second book, and especially when that book is something that you insist they don't need, then you made a mistake.
One other thing, this one positive. Like Compendium of Forgotten Secrets, this book has two talking heads commenting in universe about the creatures: Elmande, an elven scholar; and Faim Trubeard, a dwarven soldier. Both of them come from conventional fantasy land, so all these beasts are weird and frightening to them. A nice touch.
Strike two against this book is when we come to Basic Automaton. One would presume that the reason a person would buy a book called Beasts of Flesh & Steel would be for the robots. Shame this book is missing robot types 1-5, which I would assume are useful for lesser parties, because they are in Arcana of the Ancients. This book instead has robot type 6 and 7, both of which are boss monsters. Type 6 is a CR9 spider tank, Type 7 is a CR18 Howl's Moving Castle with guns.
Both of these are cool ideas. But the book takes time to point out that there are five other types of robots that are in the book it told you that you didn't need while this book has the boss monsters. I should note that there are other machines and especially cyborgs in this book.
And this keeps happening, this isn't a one off thing. A few pages later, the Chance Moth Swarm's table of random shit that can happen has the 00 result on a d100 roll cause the party to be pursued by... a giant mecha from Arcana of the Ancients. Which to twist the knife has it's pilot statted out later in the book.
Writers. Do not be afraid to reprint monsters, it's better then pissing off your readers because they need something they don't have.
There's not much else to say about this one. The monsters are imaginative, although none have that "Oh Hoh I Recognize That" factor that fantasy books have. There are a lot of tentacle monster here. What's missing here, that's missing with a lot of monster books, is a sense of how to pair off anything in here. This is especially problematic for this book because you don't have that real life mythology informing you on it. You're just gonna have to see what sticks.
The book itself is fine. I'm bumping it down to a two out of five for lying to me about needing another book, but if you have the other book and don't mind flipping between the two it's a solid 3. But I think the more valuable lesson here is what makes a good monster manual by seeing where this book failed.
So let's talk about that.
What Makes a Good Monster Manual, according to Masked
Thou Shall Make The Monster Book Useable On It's Own. D&D already requires the DM to manage their own notes, plus rules from the PHB plus whatever other books you bring to the mix. Adding one more book is manageable, adding two books that have to be used together is just obnoxious.
Thou Shall Have Monsters That Are Thematic And Interesting. Tentacle monsters are great, everybody loves them. But the sheer amount of them that are basically just animals makes them a lot less appealing. The stand outs are generally people with wants and needs more complex then survival. Things like the decanted, synthetic humanoids who will decapitate PCs and steal their head to take back to their home city and install them in their own robot body. That's a goddamn plot hook that any DM could use.
Thou Shall Give the DM Tools for Mixing And Matching. This is me just giving a big endorsement to Ultimate Bestiary. But one of the things that made that book for me, and I really felt the absence of here, was that because UB made wide swathes of variations on a single monster type, it could afford to put encounter tables that would allow monsters to specialize during combat. And looking through the other monster books I have, a lot of them do this to a lesser extent, creating variations on certain DM favorite monsters to fill out the ranks of an encounter. Hell, BoF&S pissed me off when it said that five of the seven automatons were in a different book because that meant using just this book I could only run the artillery pieces and not the die in droves mecha mooks that would be the no brainer to surround them with.
I wear on my sleeve a general contempt for bad game design in modern RPGs. So much potential for interesting stories has to be fought for amongst railroady nonsense and pre-written box text. I'm of the opinion that, while it's possible to run a cinematic campaign, the best way I can think to do so is give GMs the tools to write campaigns so that the story matches the characters the players have brought in.
With that said, welcome to the master class in game design. Daddy Crawford is here to take your hand and show you how it's done.
MASKED REVIEWS: WORLDS WITHOUT NUMBER Buddy, you ain't seen anything yet
Worlds Without Number is the latest in Kevin Crawford's line of game systems which run on a merger of Basic Expert D&D and Traveller, which started with 2010's Stars Without Number, and includes Wolves of God, Spears of the Dawn, Silent Legions, and Godbound. Mechanically speaking, all these games are more similar then different (barring Godbound due to it's obscene power level), changing the set dressing but working about the same: D20 for combat rolls and saves, 2d6 for skill rolls, classes consisting of "Fighter, Wizard/Psychic, Skillmonkey, Gish", and leveling that goes to 10.
So why am I singing this book's praises? Let's find out.
Worlds Without Number begins with a meditation on the Sword & Sorcery genre as it introduces it's default setting: the Latter Earth. The book describes it as "a now savage and primitive world built on the graves of the past". Technology is unreliable, monsters and mutants wander, the Law are tyrants, despots, and the forgotten left over aristocracy of a dead empire.
Basically the perfect adventuring world.
From there, the book breaks down the Character sheet, using a two page spread precisely labeling what each section of the character sheet does and is for. The next few pages explain the skills. After that we begin character creation in earnest.
You start with selecting your background, either via a d20 roll or just picking. Each background can be quickly selected or picked from a larger list, giving three skills, or randomly rolled with a chance for an extra skill or a stat boost.
Next, your class. As previously noted, the classes are Expert (a skill monkey that can auto succeed one non-combat skill check once per scene), Mage (who pick a tradition to follow in order to get their spell list), Warrior (can auto succeed one combat skill check OR force an enemy to fail one), and Adventurer (a class that merges two of the prior classes together, including Mage/Mage if a character wants multiple arcane traditions, at the cost of losing some potency due to their lack of specialization). The system combined with how skills and foci (essentially this game's take on feats) work mean your character is highly customizable. Pretty much any fantasy archetype you can think of can fit in here.
The Foci section gives verbs for playing an animal trainer, a conan-esque warrior who can hit multiple enemies with a single swing, a doctor, et cetera et cetera. Mages start with one foci, Warriors and Experts two.
Finally, equipment packages allow for characters to start like that, very useful if someone has to reroll a character, which happens in OSR games more then in 5e.
The next chapter is all about equipment and hirelings. This game uses the silver standard, a fairly common change OSR games use to prevent the problem modern D&D has: having two thirds of the in game currency be pointless.
We then come to The Rules of The Game. A thing I just noticed is that the heading has the sub-chapter labeled. Nice. Carrying over from previous Crawford works, the combat moves are formalized like in 5e: every action is defined as a Main Action (which 5e would define as an Action), a Move action, an On Turn Action (things that don't take up a lot of time like dropping to the ground or drawing a weapon, and which are at GM descretion how many the player has), and Instant Actions (which can be applied at any time during the turn order, and includes making Snap Attacks and curling up in a ball for the round to increase your AC). The only other major change, brought over from SWN, is Shock Damage. Essentially, more powerful melee weapons like the longsword deal damage even on a miss if the foe isn't wearing heavy enough armor while also acting as the minimum damage that weapon can deal, with a shield being able to absorb one instance of shock damage per combat round. This greatly increases the danger of melee weapons. especially against mages, since they are unlikely to be wearing heavy armor.
WWN is a OSR game, but it's slightly more merciful to characters at 0 hp then some games, although not as much as 5e. An important character at 0 HP is Mortally Wounded. Their allies have six rounds to stabilize them before they croak. If that happens through non-magical means, they wake up 10 minutes later with 1 HP and a condition which means if they get dropped again before getting real medical attention they die. Magical healing bypasses this, but gives the target Strain, a resource that mages also use to push their spells. Hit max strain, healing doesn't work on you anymore until you sleep off the strain.
The game then thoroughly explains exploration. Wilderness exploration, sea exploration, ruins exploration. Explaining what an Exploration Turn is, a ten minute block of time. These are common procedures in old school games, but have been largely missing from D&D since 3e as the game changed to a more cinematic style.
After explaining level ups, the game gives tools for players modifying their equipment. This is a system D&D hasn't yet adopted yet from video games, a temporarily buffing gear with whatever is salvaged from the ruins of the far more advanced civilizations.
The book throws out a System Cheat Sheet, and then we move on to Arcane Traditions.
Not gonna lie, Mages are extremely powerful in this game. A first level magic spell instantly kills a 1 HD enemy. Another grants invisibility. The trade off is that a max level spellcaster can only cast 6 spells in a day. I think Crawford knew that turning back the clock on the amount of spells available to Mages, no cantrips, meant he was gonna have to weight those spells to be worth it. Also, Mages have Arts, abilities that function similar to Godbound Words in that you commit effort for the day to use them.
The Arcane Tradition available are as follows
High Mage, the generic mage class. Uses the knowledge of the ancients to manipulate reality. Their arts seem to be metamagic equivalents, with things like casting silently or preventing allies from being harmed by your nuke spells.
Elementalists, Water Earth Fire Air mage. They have access to the High Mage spells (but not arts), as well as a few of their own. Their arts mostly tow the line of things you've seen on Avatar the Last Airbender
Healers. These can only be taken as a partial mage class, either Dual Mage or Adventurer. Healers don't know any spells, but they have the Healing Touch art, and can develop further arts to increase it's potency.
Necromancers, they love the dead. Like Elementalists, they can access High Mage spells along with their own pool. Their arts focus on controlling the dead or stealing life from the dying.
Vowed, fist wizards. Like the Healer, they are a partial mage class, acting as the martial artist equivalent. They get an array of arts which can be used to make them into monks or ninja or whatever floats your boat.
The book then gets into Workings, persistent magical effects which range from keeping a room clean to raising a city into the sky. The range given for this sort of thing is quite impressive, most of this stuff would be handwaved as NPC magic but here you have formulas for calculating whether your wizard had the power to grant a broom and bucket animation while he wasn't present.
Creating Magical items is similarly useful, although even the simplest items take time. And with that, we end rules and move into setting.
WWN's setting, Gyre, is a riff on the Dying Earth setting like AS&SH's Hyperborea or Numenera's Ninth World. It also borrows from Pathfinder's Golarion in that different countries have different genres baked into them. Dungeon Crawling can be done anywhere of course, but the difference is whether you'll be doing it in a city constantly under construction by automatons or in a pioneer town mountainside or a Mordor-esque hellscape.
The backstory tells of the Outsiders coming and enslaving humanity, humanity throwing off it's chains only to re-enslave itself under the Voth Empire, a fascist magocracy which inevitably fell from within. From there, the lands were conquered by the immortal Reaping King, who has been slowly disengaging from life beyond his throne even as his city constantly expands under his servitor's toils. The nation shattered into city states, which is pretty much where we are now.
Each settlement is given a write up, with government and common names for the peoples there. Fitting with Sword & Sorcery flavor, the Tolkein staples are completely absent (Note: found them later in the book as backgrounds). It's just people here, flawed as ever. And of course the Outsiders. Once they lived as gods, ruling over the conquered humanity. Then something happened and they left, quickly, and leaving many behind. The ones that survived the reprisals by pissed off humans have hidden away in their bunkers, stewing in their rage of being stuck on this miserable blue dot. The three that the book brings up are the Jikegida, parasitic four armed bipeds that believe humans are P-Zombies and thus only good as breeding hosts; Polops, lobstermen who enjoy cannibalizing sapients; and Tuhulots, an entire race of the G-man from Half Life. The book also explains the oft-mentioned Arratu, which are zones of xenoformed Earth.
"So hey, if this whole game takes place on Later Earth, why is it called Worlds Without Number, Masked?" Good question. That would be because of the Iterums. Iterums are alternate timelines, used as a doylist reason for why lore might be different between tables, but can also be used as a way of building impossible dungeons or bringing in modules that wouldn't fit in the main setting.
The thing that makes Kevin Crawford a DM's game designer is that he always makes sure to put the tools of creation in the hands of the player. The next 150 pages are dedicated to helping a GM design their adventures. Don't want to use the Gyre? Here's tools for making a fantasy map. Here's a table for determining what the average citizen looks like. Their values, what their government is. What their history is. What their religion is. Who will you be stabbing? Where will you be delving? Who's gonna pay you to do that? It is layered, and thorough, while being simple enough that the most basic version could be used if a PC presses you for an answer you don't have. The tables all have a sword and sorcery tone to them, but they are all useful.
Creatures of the Far Age starts with the standard blurb in OSR circles that this game is largely compatible with classic D&D and other OSR games. The game uses a system of tables for turning its fairly small roster of warriors, wizards, and monsters into horrible monstrosities, as well as asks what the motivations for such a creature is. Especially brilliant is the set of tables for determining what the reaction to a failed morale roll is, divided into creature categories. Of course the civilian would either freeze up, curl into a ball, or hide behind the biggest beef on their side.
The book at this point does introduce an orc equivalent, called Anakim, who are human templates effected by some outsider genetic engineering.
The book gives a brief write up on playing as "demi-humans", the usual fantasy suspects. You can sub one of these in as your default foci, although their presence isn't significant and can be safely ignored if that is what you wish. These exist mostly because if an elf or dwarf doesn't show up in your elf game, the ghost of Gary Gygax will step out of your mirror and beat you to death with a copy of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1e Players Handbook.
After wrapping up monsters, the book moves on to the Kevin Crawford special: the Faction system. Building on a system of tags, the Faction Turn is used to simulate the moves between anything as small as rival criminal operations to as large as nations. Later on, once the players have carved out their own little stronghold it can represent their action in the room with the map in it from their inevitable cool keep.
From here, we move into what I believe is paid edition only content, starting with six Gyre specific classes which alter how things are played. The Invoker uses a spell point system, trading access to arts for more spells per day if you have a good enough int score. The Skinshifter is a partial mage that has the ability to change into animals, where their arts allow them to give those animals new abilities. The Duelist is another partial mage, similar to the Vowed only replacing kung fu tropes with pirate tropes. The Beastmaster is yet another partial mage, designed around buffing animals you befriended (or alternately binding one forever friend). The Blood Priest is a alternate cleric, focused on buffing instead of healing with it's arts. Thought Nobles are partial mages who are psychics.
Like with SWN, WWN acknowledges that characters in this game are very fragile. A starting warrior with max HP can be one shot by a peasant with a longsword. It also acknowledges that sometimes people want to play badasses right out the gate. For that, we have Heroic Classes. These are the basic classes up to eleven. Heroic Experts start with one of their skills at Level-4. Heroic Fighters never miss opponents equal to them and can ignore a Mortal Wound. Heroic Mages get access to multiple specialities. Heroic Adventures get to pick one full class and one partial or three partials. All of them get access to the Fray Die, a Crawford staple which shows the heroes cutting through foes weaker then them, rolling a die determined by their class and just dealing damage.
Next is the other massive power boost, the Legate. Legates have bonded with the Legacy, Gyre's magic stream, and thus have superhuman powers. A character might become a Legate upon reaching 10th level, or via some story ability, or if the GM wills it the party could start as a group of them. Basically, Legates have access to Writs, extremely powerful abilities that run on Effort like the mage's Arts. For those of you who've played Godbound, yes, these are basically Words. And yes, they are exactly as broken as that sounds. The book even cautions that once you introduce Writs, challenges that would stump your decidedly mortal PCs, even Heroic ones, would probably be laughed off by them.
The next chapter extends out Iterums. While the main book gave a spiel about Iterums being alternate timelines, this gives GMs potential hooks for Iterums. Are they Hells? Heavens? Domains of Squid Things From Beyond the Stars?
The remaining tables are adventure and NPC tables, fleshing out the plot hook tables earlier in the book.
In Conclusion
If there is one thing you can call any Sine Nomine product, it's comprehensive, and Worlds Without Number is no different. This goes up on the list with the Rules Cyclopedia and OSE Rules Tome of complete books where if you were only permitted one RPG book on your shelf this one could let you play a D&D experience with nothing else on hand. Not only that, but Kevin Crawford's signature polish means that the book is more usable then anything WotC has put out. All information is set up by the two page spread rule, also followed by OSE and Five Torches Deep, meaning you will never need to flip back and forth if you are having difficulty understanding a rule. Characters are simple to make, but are given surprising depth via the interplay between Background and Foci. I cannot rave enough about how much Kevin Crawford's book is a near perfect version of the concept "B/X D&D + Skills".
The only potential negative this system does have is if you're one of the people that doesn't like Skills, which is valid. There is something to be said that skill systems lower the potential competence of PCs because it governs what they are and are not good at more thoroughly then a DM. Worlds Without Number is more complex then OSE or even LotFP, with formal rules for Encumbrance, Healing, Action Economy, and Crafting that are more based on character builds then "this makes sense". If these are negatives to you, then WWN still has value as an adventure generator and setting book. Still, I cannot fault its execution if the premise of a D&D game with skills is alienating.
So 5/5 Tables for Generating the World. Honestly, pick up the Free Version even if you don't intend on spending money on the Deluxe version. It's in the running for best way to ease players from 5e to OSR games.
I wanna be,
the very best
Like no one ever was
To catch them is my real test
to train them is my cause
MASKED REVIEWS:STIBBLES CODEX OF COMPANIONS (5e)
Pets. What player doesn't love pets? Is there any group that doesn't collect a big ol' pile of them? If you say no, then next time you run a tabletop game put a baby version of pretty much any beast/monster and watch what happens. I. Fucking. Dare you.
Stibbles Codex of Companions was a kickstarter project spearheaded by Logan Reese, aka Runesmith. It was published by Ghostfire Gaming (who produced Grim Hollow, which was reviewed previously.) Full Disclosure, I backed this on kickstarter.
This isn't going to be a deep review, as the majority of the book is monster book. A good monster book, because everything here has something in common: being cute and likely to be picked up by PCs. A vast majority are smol versions of classic D&D monsters, like a shotglass sized gelatinous cube that can be stuck to plate mail to clean it. The other half tend to be references to video game companions, like the Balderdash construct, which bears no resemblance at all to Borderlands mascot Claptrap, or the mustachio'd mushroom folk. All of them are pets of some stripe, cats and dogs and enchanted hats and pygmy owlbears.
In short, it's good.
Chapters 2 and 3 begin with mechanics, specifically bond mechanics. They're simple, requiring animal handling rolls. As your companions bond strength goes up, it gains traits which allow it to do more and more on it's own. Certain bond levels also grant Bond Boons, which are like feats. Some are familiar skills, like a renamed Evasion or Reckless Attack. Others are more esoteric, like the elemental exclusive Elemental Expansion that allows it to summon more elementals as back up.
Chapter 4 has personalities, an optional rule that gives minor modifications to the creature statblock, like how Chatty gives a bonus to charisma but a negative to Stealth Checks, along with a taunt ability. There is a d20 table if the GM wants to roll for personality.
Chapter 5 is dueling rules, which might sound very familiar for anyone whose got monsters in their pocket. Also, brief descriptions of companion league battles, and how to build league arenas.
Chapter 6 is ability score training for companions.
Chapter 7 is incubating eggs.
Chapter 8 is new spells, feats, and magic items. The Feats are mostly related to handling animals. The spells are a little more varied, but have more then monster boosters or gathering. Magical items are all focused on taming, capturing, or utilizing companions, from a pack for carrying them to a device which lauches a orb that causes your companion to pursue who it attacks.
With that, we conclude.
In Conclusion
This book is the definition of Good Monster Manual, in that it has a theme and by god it sticks to it. If you are the sort of DM who likes giving pets, this is an excellent resource. The new bond mechanics are eminently useable for a Ranger's animal companion or a magic users familiar. This isn't an essential supplement, a must buy for every table, but it is solid rules paired with excellent presentation.
NOTE: I would like to preface this by saying that while this book was not written by Sandy Petersen, his name is on the cover and he influenced it's production. This reviewer despises Sandy Petersen's bigotry against trans people. I acquired this book as a birthday gift by a friend who was unaware of those circumstances.
Now, on with the review.
MASKED REVIEWS: PLANET APOCALYPSE
PLANET APOCALYPSE is a 5e supplement which borrows themes, monsters, and ideas from Petersen Game's PLANET APOCALYPSE boardgame, which I do not know and have never played. It's primary campaign lens is a demonic invasion of whatever your setting is. It pitches itself in it's introduction as a book for burning your setting down.
Let's see if it does that, shall we?
The first thing the book does is give a pair of primers. The first is on the nature of the Demons, their ranks and the Doom Gates which bring them here. The second is what exactly the DM should do to pull the rug out from players: killing leadership so players have to make decisions, have old enemies decide they'd rather throw in with the devil they know, that sort of thing. It's good advice, reminiscent of scenes from media where the lead asks who's in charge only to be told "You are, sir".
Next is some advice on campaign length. The book recommends 16-24 sessions, complete with a breakdown of how many sessions each portion of the story should take. This implies a cinematic campaign, similar to the advice of Shadow of the Demon Lord. It makes sense. Familiarity breeds Contempt, especially with Horror.
This section is pretty much a framework, spelling out how the campaign should go in enough detail that a GM who knows what they are doing can work it out, but not so tight that it can't be retrofit on an existing campaign. I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it doesn't leave a lot of room for player fuck ups with it's tight timeline, but it's better then some. I fucking love that it out and out says that the demon's have taken over a dungeon complex the party cleared out before the demon invasion, out and out telling you to reuse a place the players have already visited. That's cool. The other thing that is very noticeable is the names of some of the demons may sound familiar to anyone whose played a certain property that Petersen worked on in the early nineties.
Next session is character options. Here's the breakdown
Barbarian Path of the Trophy Hunter - They can take a trophy from an enemy that gives them one of three bonuses at the start. By the end, they are using the corpses of extra planar beings as armor. It's very much a class that requires your allies to be okay with their buddy walking around covered in skulls.
Fighter Branded Archetype - Basically the equivalent of the Eldritch Knight for Warlocks. They get cantrips from the Warlock spell list, which is nice. Nothing else worth noting but a powerful capstone which makes you a voodoo doll on a specific enemy you smacked, although that does mean you have at least one round of only one attack.
Monk Way of the Wastelands - Odd hodgepodge of abilities. Use ranged martial weapons, spend a ki point to cancel disadvantage, still be able to attack when you're knocked to 0 hp, and heal allies hp and exhaustion for 3 ki points. That capstone is ludicrously powerful, even for the ki cost.
Rogue Scrapper Archetype - Basically a Rogue Alchemist. They focus on creating disposable combat items like Alchemist's Fire or Caltrops. Later on they can make potions.
Sorcerer Blood of the Lost Origins - a relative of whichever poor sap the Archlord is wearing as a human suit. They can choose to either pick spells from another spell list, become a better melee fighter, or be smarter. This is either a versatile caster choice or a worse bladelock, your choice.
The Feat list is pretty edgy. Apocalypse Mutations are some the feats, others give you tiefling racial abilities, others are designed to make you very nasty versus fiends. I somehow conned my GM for the 40k/Spelljammer game I'm in to let me have Banishing Strike and I'm wondering when the next inevitable next demon fight happens if he'll regret that.
Spells are the same. A couple have optional components harvested from fiends from this book which make them stronger. It's a neat concept, but most of the spells are existing spells but blood.
Magic Items are a mixture of harvested monster parts with a beneficial effect and holy artefacts. Also Skeletoys, which is hysterical name for some of the more dangerous and evil items that the battle leaders of the invasion will have.
The book has three adventures: Among the Damned,To Slay Leviathan, and The Gate of Bone. The first two are adventures for beginning the apocalypse, the last as an example of the final battle.
Among the Damned assumes you're level 6ish, and starts you in a tavern in a town that's about to get fucked and ends with you escorting the town's survivors away from the Doom Gate. It's pretty boring, with stock locations getting overrun by demons.
To Slay Leviathan is you navigating a mountain sized Kaiju's back in an attempt to slay the thing, battling your way through fiendish churches and outposts built on top of it as you do. This is the most imaginative of the sections, with good time pressure as Leviathan moves to flatten another city as the party presses forward.
The Gate of Bone is a finale to Planet Apocalypse, after you've slain the general of hell and need to close the gate like it's the end of Pacific Rim. It's a return to the location from Among the Damned, now twisted into a demonic form with a big hell portal at it's center. The group has to push into hell and close the gate from the other side, all the while dealing with their Max HP being sapped. It's a nasty set of fights to cap off a campaign with a cruel twist where a character must stay on the other side of the hell portal to close it.
A World Torn Asunder goes into the basic mechanics of the invasion. It's basically a more detailed version of the beginning section. The demonic invasion also nerfs spells that look at the future, contact creatures from other planes, and allow planar travel. No Commune, no non-fiend summoning spells, no Magnificent Mansion. Make sure to tell players this if you're using this rule.
Curses, Diseases, Hazards and Traps, and Poisons all are effects on the PCs
Fiendish Legions gives modifications to the invading army. Each Legion gives a different big bad, modifies the various mooks in different ways, and gives different mortal monsters that will ally with them. This is not a mechanical section (that's next), but gives organization charts.
Monsters is a pretty standard monster manual. The demonic legions are described to be more similar to zombies then thinking creatures. They can't regain hitpoints but they also don't stop to rest at all. It's a demonic bestiary, so it's very icky. It then goes into Templates for existing D&D monsters to be corrupted, with examples. This is smart, it prevents the bloat of redoing a bunch of stock monsters.
And I spoke too soon. The rest of this book is more monster manual. Once again, icky monsters. Mutated flesh beasts with too many limbs and too many eyes. Some look like creatures from The Sleep of Reason, others looks like rejects from Dead Space or Dark Souls. This continues into the Fiend Lords, which includes some very familiar faces such as Cthon and the Spider Mastermind. All of these fights have several hundred hitpoints, legendary actions, resistances, "shadow actions" (which are basically lair actions). They will be absolute slogs to fight, so prep for that if you use them.
In Conclusion.
Planet Apocalypse is a unique campaign book because it expects to be used by parties who have finished the standard 1-5 campaign like the ones WOTC puts out in their Beginner Boxes. It wants you to take familiar locations and rip them to pieces. The campaign framework is very nice because it gives the DM more instruction on pacing then most 5e adventures. It's not perfect, the classes are oddly balanced and only one of the adventures was particularly good. If you don't mind funding Sandy Petersen, it's more solid then his company's 5e/Pathfinder Adventure Paths. The quality puts it around a 4/5, but once again, I'm not super comfortable giving Petersen money and Shadow of the Demon Lord is right there doing a lot of the same things.
Hey guys. I have been picking up books, but nothing really jumped out at me as reviewable. So I decided to look through my back catalog to get back on track.
So here we are, with something a little different.
MASKED REVIEWS:ALYTH'S BLUEPRINTS FOR HOME & BUSINESS
Alyth's Blueprints for Home & Business is a swing at the ephemeral D&D simulation: the homebase. As far back as the origins of D&D, the thought was that eventually players would become lords of the lands that they once battled through. Many rules have been written on the construction and maintaining of secure keeps and enormous towers over the years.
Of course, this is 5e. Players aren't building just keeps and towers, they're building smaller places like shops or homesteads. So here we are, as we take another swing at the whole dang thing.
The big difference, in my quick glance through, is that this book focuses on the profitability of the location. A tavern in the city is going to cost more to make then that same tavern in the middle of the woods, but is more likely to make bank. Obviously, the tavern in the woods is only going to get occasional clientele and the one in the city is going to be always full. Other books I've read on the subject have kind of treated building property as the end, rather then as another revenue stream.
CHAPTER 1: is an overview, going over the steps that the other chapters will cover, with the example building being the Elfsong Tavern, a fan favorite location in Faerun found in Baldur's Gate.
CHAPTER 2: This covers locations to place your building. Specifically, how close to civilization are you? What is the region like? These sorts of questions effect how much it costs to staff your building, and how hard it is to build. It's fairly comprehensive, but lacking in... imagination. It states, for example, that locations built underwater MUST be made of stone, and it's patrons MUST be able to breath underwater. Neither of those is necessarily true: bathysphere connected glass domes is a genre norm for undersea locations, from Sealab to Star Wars to Bioshock.
CHAPTER 3: This gets to brass tacks on how much it's gonna cost you to build this location. Everything is covered: materials, how high you can build, how certain spells interact with construction costs, how quick you can build. The book uses a multiplier system for cost. Once again, the book expects fairly normal materials for a fantasy setting, no crystal or bone in the building, or even things like steel or paper for cross genre works. Happily, it does give AC and damage threshold for the place, so if characters need to defend their homebase the DM can make them deal with damaged walls.
CHAPTER 4: Gets into the interior decorating. The rating system is Basic/Fine/Opulent. At each level, the costs go up but it gives the building a benefit. A basic Barroom increases the building's Profitability score by 1, but an Oppulent Barroom also increases the resteraunt's Renown score. That sort of thing. These costs are on top of the costs for building the room.
CHAPTER 5: Hiring deals with the various types of professionals that will be dealing with day to day business while the party is off saving the world. This section cross references the Monster Manual, telling which statblocks are needed. Notably, it does not require any rolls from them for day to day operations. That's been folded into the Payday mechanic.
My only thing that stands out is how far out Monthly Wage balloons once staff reach "Skilled". As an example, a waiter goes from making 6gp to 60gp per month once a year rolls over. I wish there were more levels to this to have more then one years difference between some shlub that walked off the street to buss drinks and Alfred fucking Pennyworth, Legendary Butler. I understand that this distinction comes straight from the PHB (where a skilled Hireling costs 2GP per day/60 gp per month), but it stands out. A skilled hireling is expected to read ancient runes or dodge a hobgoblin's crossbow bolt, it delineated jobs that required proficiencies not how long they worked.
CHAPTER 6: This chapter gets into the actual stats of the establishment: Profitability, Security, and Renown. These scores act like ability scores for the building, and are determined by factors from all the previous chapters. With these three scores, the players can work out their profits, find out how the business handles dealing with thugs, or any other simple interactions with the fantasy world. It's simplistic, but that's on purpose because only lunatics play D&D to do significant amounts of math.
Appendix A: Filled with example buildings, with the statblocks for the buildings, and then sample statblocks for employees.
The book ends with a printable sheet in the style of D&D's character sheets for whatever location you're building.
IN CONCLUSION:
I will give this book this, it's very useable. There are a lot of books out there that just kinda throw stuff out there. This has everything PC might need for the building of their own business in D&D, and gives GMs tools for throwing a curveball at players once things get started.
It's a little expensive at $15 for the PDF, as is common with DM's Guild projects. WotC takes a cut, as does DriveThru, so the sellers have to set the cost higher to break even. Still, if you don't care about that, it's a good resource.
Jailbroken mil-grade neurochip that no longer lets corpos beam ads directly into my frontal cortex: Check
Nanoweave black trenchcoat with artfully tailored shotgun pocket: Check
Second hand spinal reflex booster: Check
Chainsaw Leg: Check
Sunglasses at Night: Check
Masked Reviews: Cities Without Number
Oh, we're back baby.
Cities Without Number is the latest from Kevin Crawford's rule sets + toolkits for the discerning GM, this time set in your own take on The Sprawl, Night City, New Atlanta, or whatever else you call your city of sin and chrome. Cyberpunk as a genre has been enjoying a renaissance in the TTRPG space with the releases of Cyberpunk RED, Shadowrun Fifth Edition, CY_B0RG and KILL SAMPLE PROCESS, Hardwire Island, and several others over the past couple years. Meanwhile, as our own world becomes closer to the worlds imagined by Gibson, Pondsmith, and Stephenson, there has been a resurgence of Tech Noir films and shows that pull at classic Cyberpunk themes such as Altered Carbon, Westworld, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, and Severance.
Point is, it's a good time to be a chrome head. So what can Sine Nomine bring to the table? Let's find out.
"Wake the fuck up, Samurai. We have a city to Burn."
For those of you who are unfamiliar with previous Sine Nomine RPGs, here's the basics. The games use a version of the D20 system found in D&D, with the standard six stats and three saves. Meanwhile, it's skill system is borrowed from Traveller, rolling 2d6+Skill+Stat versus a DC determined by the GM. Life is cheap, and neither player nor NPC is immune to some bad rolls.
However, Cities changes up the formula from Stars and Worlds. While the previous two games had a Class system which broke down into combat specialists, skill specialists, and magic/psychic characters, Cities instead leans more towards Sine Nomine's Exalted inspired Godbound and gives the player character a pick of two Edges that they can mix and match as they see fit. These edges include the abilities classes had in other Crawford games, such as turning missed attacks into hits, as well as ones that help a new player begin with their cyberpunk fantasy, such as gaining an extra main action dedicated to hacking or starting the game heavily borg-ed out. Pick your Edges carefully, you only have two and only get one more at 5th level.
From there, character gen is familiar for veterans: a pick of Foci, which give PCs improvements to their skills or combat abilities. Starting gear packages, or the option of starting with $500 to pick for yourself.
Combat is Sine Nomine games is the same as it's ever been: D&D style D20+Skill vs armor class, with certain weapons dealing Shock damage even on a miss if the enemy isn't sufficiently armored. Player characters can perform Snap Attacks if they wish to go before an enemy that has the drop on them at a penalty. And that's before we get into Trauma die, rolled alongside damage which if it exceeds the target's Trauma Target will multiply damage dealt by the weapon's Trauma Rating. All of this combined with the average NPC having between 1-6 health, and PCs being equally weak at the start, makes combat short and bloody. Have a plan to draw first or have a plan to talk your way out of trouble, fair fights on the chrome streets lead to quick deaths.
Healing is equally punishing. If a character (as in, a player or named NPC) is knocked to 0 HP, then you have 6 rounds to get them stable or they die. Stabilized characters get the Frail condition, and if they drop to 0 again while they have that condition they die. If a Frail character isn't given bedrest, they have a further chance of dropping dead in the next week, all the while losing out on natural healing. Have a medic in your party, it will save your life. Meanwhile, a character who takes a Traumatic Hit and is brought to 0 HP gains a major injury that will require a prosthetic (if it doesn't kill them instantly).
The result of these two systems interacting is that characters who don't start chromed up will get chromed up pretty quickly if they aren't careful in a firefight.
Gear wise, Cities Without Number has no surprises. There is an array of armors, with a handy Subtle/Obvious table so that players know whether their fashion choice is making the statement "call security". The weapon table is also near-identical to Stars Without Number, minus SWN's exotic and laser weapons.
Of course, SWN's Cyberware section is a lot smaller. CWN's Cyberware is only limited by your character's wallet and how much System Strain a character can bear. That means it's generally wise to have a high CON if you're going to add more then a few bits of Cyberware, or else make your character unable to be healed in combat. Of course, going full body is also an option, but Full Body Cyborgs have their own issues, especially on an Operator's budget.
My favorites of the various Cyberware include the Eyeware Flechette Launcher (shoot an opponent with an explosive dart that shoots out of your eye), Iron Hand Aegis (letting you catch bullets once per scene), Body Blades (always was a sucker for Adam Jensen's arm swords), and Zombie Wires (keeps a character moving at 0 hp). The full line up is tight enough that a GM with ideas could expand it, but has enough depth to recreate the protagonists and antagonists of various cyberpunk works.
From here, we move to the Cyberdeck system, for the inevitable hacking specialist of the group. I don't think that CWN solves the decker problem in Cyberpunk games (that the party's hacker will be off doing their own adventure while the rest of the team is cutting through gangers and suits), but the severe limits the default setting of CWN has on wifi means that the hacker won't be sitting in the van while doing their hacking, they need to jack in on site. Which means wearing a vest and carrying a gun on top of the laptop and VR crown, at the very least.
Hacking is based on Subjects and Verbs, with Verbs acting like spells and the Hacker's Deck acting like a spell book with a limited amount of space. While in Cyberspace, the Hacker will have to deal with Demons (virtual constructs) and Watchdogs (other Hackers hired to secure whatever system you are in, who are infinitely more dangerous because they can call IRL security while counter hacking you)
Basically all of security (and only security, don't expect to get lucky with a backdoor into the building's fire alarm) is going to be hooked up to a Network, which essentially is going to be a node based dungeon that your hacker will be able to guide their program through which is on top of the actual layout of the location the Operators are moving through. Trying to get in through wifi instead of plugging directly into a port gives pretty hard hitting debuffs, but a Hacker will generally only be dealing with one or at most two Demons at a time, so there are tradeoffs. All in all, Hacking is functional, but as I said earlier, still runs into the decker problem despite attempts to lessen the issue by cutting down how much you can do without a direct connection.
"Somehow, the notion of unalienable liberty got lost. It's really become a question of what liberties will the state assign to individuals, or rather, what liberties we will have the strength to cling to."
Crawford's biggest contribution to TTRPGs has always been the depth of his sandbox creation tools, and Cities Without Number is no exception. It starts at the top, with what the outside world is like and who owns everything, and then makes it way down to your city, then your district. Each step has a number of tables designed to give the area character and history, which can easily be fleshed out by the GM. The focus is a lot narrower than SWN or WWN, because in Cyberpunk stories the City has to be as much of a character as the protagonists, a representation of everything that went wrong, that could have been.
Beyond that, there are the standard generators for Corporations, Gangs, and NPCs, as well as advice on creating and running missions. The book emphasizes avoiding wasted prep by making sure that you're only creating new as far as the next mission, and folding whatever prep the group doesn't make use of into future missions. It especially gives advice on "Intrusion Missions", the kind of heists, kidnappings, rescues or raids that make up the most dramatic cyberpunk stories.
From there, discussion moves to Heat, aka how much response your merry band of psychos is going to get from the corps and the cops. It does not take a lot for your heat to rise into "fake your death and move to a new country" levels, so making sure your team behaves as professionals rather then murderhobos is emphasized. No one wants to work with the group that merits calling CyberSWAT on sight.
"War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nano-machines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities"
Onward to the enemy bestiary, which like most of these games is more general, with the intent for GMs to customize the more general stat lines with the needs of the game. It's divided into Beasts & Guard Animals, Corp Guards & Law Enforcement, Gangers & Criminals, and Hackers & Pilots. Each of these have about a dozen stat blocks that range from 1 HD mook to Adam Smasher level threat.
A note I appreciate is the emphasis on Reaction rolls and Morale. The game straight out says that no corporate rent-a-cop or lowdown gangster is going to put their paycheck over their own life. The example of play has the security guard, realizing he is outnumbered, shutting the door and running while calling for backup rather than stay and become a corpse. Even veteran combat teams will retreat if it's in their best interest, albeit in a more orderly manner. Self-preservation is how most people operate.
The bestiary wraps pretty quickly with notes on adding cyberware, including advice to ignore System Strain calculations when working out NPC cyber.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
As with WWN, for GMs that want a more fully fleshed out world to drop their players in instantly rather than building one from scratch, CWN provides New Chicago, 2075 aka The City. Set in a post balkanized Great Lakes Compact, The City is a dystopian nightmare, rewriting the past as it spirals forever into a future of mindless consumers and infinite growth until the end of the world. I especially laughed at the descriptions of elections in The City, as attempts to actually vote are now considered election interference, potentially disenfranchising the millions whose politics are modelled by AI.
To put a long story short, while The City isn't particularly original as a cyberpunk dystopia, riffing off of The Sprawl, Night City, and a half dozen other post-Blade Runner works, with some modern satire thrown in for familiarity and flavor. With six districts to venture through, of varying affluence and all filled with mission seeds, The City is a respectable starting point for a campaign of Tech Noir conspiracy and violence.
"How does it feel? Do you remember? The first time, you said it was like you were outside yourself. Like time itself had bent its knee, waiting for you to decide. You moved my chair without touching it. It gave me chills. The possibilities."
With the Deluxe edition of the game, there are a few extra goodies. Some are additional tables for GM usage, some are different campaign frameworks, all are thoroughly optional.
We kick off with a basic table for variations on cyberware based on the company that made it. They gain a perk and a negative that might help or hurt.
Variant Humanity gives a number of genetically modified humans that just so happen to line up with the races from Shadowrun. Funny that. Like in Stars and Worlds, Player Races within Cities are Foci that must be chosen at character generation, and generally give a skill plus some sort of bonus and fault.
Cyber Alienation is the addition of a negative to becoming a cyborg, similar to Cyberpsychosis from CP Red or Essence loss in Shadowrun. With this campaign trigger active, whenever a player picks up a new piece of cyberware they must also choose a syndrome to go with it. If they fail to keep their syndromes in check, then they make a mental roll to not go into a psychotic state. I never liked these types of mechanics, they imply prosthetics make you a psychopath, so I'm glad they're optional.
Cheap Cyber gives guidance on lowering costs of Cyberware for a world that has more casual cyberware, like Ghost in the Shell.
Magic and spellcasting is an extra, and works pretty identically to how it did in the deluxe edition of SWN, except it now functions as an Edge. Prepare spells at the beginning of the day, commit effort to use them, the spell list is very D&D. Summoning, meanwhile, gives you access to a spirit that has an array of abilities determined by the player at time of summoning from a list, who then assists that character until the summon is finished. Finally, the Graced edge allows the user to harness magic through their body, and can do kung-fu magic like 8 foot vertical leaps or punch people's heads off. All three magic classes are either unable or severely penalized for having cyberware.
"You have heard me, tell this story / many times before you sleep. / No matter how dark this City gets, / Even now, there's hope for man."
With that, my coverage of Cities Without Number ends. As a fan of the meeting place between anti-corporate angst, science fiction dystopia, and some good old fashion rage against the machine, I really can't get enough of what this game has to offer. Is it original? Hell no, very little cyberpunk is anymore, as reality has caught up to it's bleakest predictions. However, Cities Without Number does have an edge over the biggest names in the genre, namely that it's a rock solid system that any player with the slightest familiarity with ttrpgs can pick up and play, with all the tools a GM will need to keep your runners deep in debt and shady connections.
5/5 Rusty Metal Skullguns.
PS I'll try to get back into a writing groove. Maybe check out some of the other games I mentioned in this review.
Dungeons & Dragons. Traveller. Cyberpunk. Certain games just never die. Born of 80s excess and a nihilistic sense that corporations would one day become governments unto themselves, Cyberpunk the tabletop game was meant as a love letter to Cyberpunk the genre. One-part Hardwired, one-part Bubblegum Crisis, one-part Streets of Fire, Cyberpunk sought to create a comic book style world with larger-than-life heroes and villains doing back alley battles under the gaze of the megacorps. Night City, a sort of cyber infused Gotham, where every vice could be sated for the right price and everyone was stepping on someone's neck, was the perfect distillation of all of the themes that had come before.
Cyberpunk RED is the fourth edition of the game, released in 2020 for extra irony, set in the far distant future of 2045, at least by default. The book is just as much about catching up with what's happened since the end of CP2020's metaplot as it is about playing as a chromed out badass, which in turn leads into the 2077 plotline new fans to the franchise may be more familiar with thanks to the adventures of V and David Martinez.
Aesthetically speaking, Cyberpunk Red uses a pleasing black and white with red highlights for its text, with grey box text side panels for GM asides. There is full color art throughout the book, both snippets of relevant cyberpunk art and in-universe advertising for food, books, television programs, and gear. The art is in a realistic style that contrasts with the fantastical cyberpunk elements and help ground the world.
I should also note that this book repeats itself a lot. At first, I was annoyed by this, but I appreciate that it's for the ease of use at the table. No one likes flipping through a book to find the rules on injuries, as an example, so placing them in the combat section as well as the healing section makes sense.
A lot of this book's early chapters are lore. It starts with a novella retelling the story of the Cyberpunk 2020 module "Never Fade Away", where Johnny Silverhand's girlfriend Alt is kidnapped by Arasaka Corp in order to recreate Soulkiller, a program which creates a digital ghost out of its victim's consciousness. This may sound familiar to 2077 fans.
From there, the book moves on to a condensed timeline, with numerous call outs to a more comprehensive timeline later in the book. Cyberpunk isn't like Cities Without Number, it's a world with continuity and a writing team that still consults Mike Pondsmith, there are Names that you have to know. Arasaka, Militech, Johnny Silverhand, Morgan Blackhand. Adam Smasher. Mike Pondsmith has previously cited comic books as his inspiration for Cyberpunk, and it's clear that the game is closer to something like Marvel FASA, where the players might end up working alongside or against the heroes and villains of the setting as they try to make their name amongst them.
It's actually kind of impressive how much the book crams in the first 30 or so pages before getting to the game's actual dice rolling, all with wonderful cyberpunk art that really gives a sense of place to 2045 Night City.
Cyberpunk has ten Roles (essentially your class). Rockerboys, Solos, Netrunners, Techs, Medtechs, Medias, Execs, Lawmen, Fixers, and Nomads. In general, most parties need a Solo for the combat ability, a Netrunner for their hacking, and a Medtech to keep people alive. Nomads are useful to have because they are the party's wheels, Lawmen can be helpful as your backup combat character if you don't mind bringing a cop along to your criminal capers, Rockerboys and Medias are faces for the poor and unwashed masses, while Execs and Fixers are faces for their respective niche. Finally, Techs are important for chroming up, but in my opinion best left as an NPC.
To be honest, the Role list needs a trim with a razor. While the lineup functions, there is a lot of overlap (four separate face classes!) and some of the classes have mechanical utility, but I feel like they need a lore friendly makeover. Maybe the Exec could be renamed Mastermind or some other title which shows that mechanically they give teamwork bonuses to the crew without begging the question why a middle manager at a major corporation is holding a pistol next to the chromed out supersoldier and not directing things from a windowless office. Also why is your paramilitary crime squad able to have a cop and a reporter on it?
The book then gives an extensive lifepath system, with d10 dice rolling for appearance, cultural origins, motivations, you name it. It's extensive in a way that ensures that a character comes out the other end with a couple of scores to settle and a couple of scars on their soul, but not quite as deep as Traveller's. The game then throws a second set of life paths specific to your character's role. The two-page spreads make this section simple to navigate, but also increases an impression the role list gave that this game would almost be better played solo, as each lifepath gives at minimum three NPCs or organizations per character generated.
From here, we finally get to Stats. 10 stats, which can be generated in three separate ways that are influenced by your Role. On one hand, this means that unlike some RPGs your characters will always have decent stats for your role. On the other hand, it's a lot of space wasted on d10 stat tables.
This is also where Cyberpunk RED shows the age of its core systems. RED's skill system feels like a late 90s, early 00s skill system, with around 70 skills that vary from useful (first aid, demolition) to oddly specific (shoulder arms, a skill specifically for using rifles, shotguns, and other weapons that use a stock) to so specific as to be useless (Personal Grooming). Like the role system, this is where I'd consolidate skills down to a more manageable number for ease of play. Cities without Number had three combat skills total, Cyberpunk RED has five separate skills just for Ranged Combat. The more granular your specific skills are, the more that needs to be a checkmark with a specific bonus instead of Dice+Stat+Skill.
All in all, it's not my favorite arrangement of class and skills. As I said earlier, everything here could probably use another pass by the editor to consolidate roles and skills into simpler configurations.
Gear begins with a table for firearms, with the basic array of pistols, rifles, and shotguns that every game set in modern day or beyond has. The exotic weapons section is also surprisingly light, with only a single page of unique bits of gear, half of which are more powerful versions of the standard guns, or weapons like the Stun Gun which function as a standard gun with a different effect. While I assume that there are more weapons in further books, the default line up is generic.
Armor also takes up a single page and is similarly utilitarian. This is a little more excusable, I've never played a game with more than a handful of armor options, and the book gives you more than enough variety.
From there, the game gives an array of gear, which are pretty similar to CWN's gear: ear protection, science doodads, anti-smog mask. The sort of things a group in a dangerous job on the edge of legality would need. The game gives one better here, and also gives the price of clothing broken down by style and fit. I wish I could call the prices exaggerated, but they pretty much match the last time I went clothes shopping.
God that's depressing.
To wrap regular gear, I mostly see this section as workable but a missed opportunity. A game's equipment section is the most player facing way a rulebook can explore it own world without turning into mountains of text. Cyberpunk's gear list leaves a lot on the table.
Cyberware, the most important section for a cyberpunk game, what makes it different then post apocalypse or modern day. Since Johnny Mnemonic (the book version, not the film starring Keanu) introduced the razor girl Molly Millions, the fusion between man and machine into something violent and off-putting has been in the genre's DNA.
Cyberpunk kicks off with an explanation of its own limitation on Cyberware: Cyberpsychosis. I am not the biggest fan of the concept, but Cyberpunk has been sanding the edges off its original version for a while now. It's caused by the dehumanization of turning yourself into a gun that walks, the countless bugs and glitches of systems made by rival companies attempting to work together after being produced at the cheapest price and sold for premium, the general horrific existence of living in Night City, where life is cheap and living is expensive. Mechanically speaking, it's to prevent a character from becoming overpowered by borging up.
The cyberware on offer is obviously where a lot of the love went. From non-invasive cyberware like LED hair to turning your esophogus into a gun or your arms into blades, this section has it all. Most Cyberware is expensive, but within the same range as a tailored pair of pants or an assault rifle. And really, isn't getting a massive cyberdong worth that?
The game then asks you that question, with my favorite trick in these types of games. At character gen, you can have your character go into debt to somebody who doesn't mean you well in order to get enough cash for some serious hardware. The catch being, they own you now. Whether by taking a friend hostage, burying killware in your shiny chrome, or just a tracking device to send the repo men after you, they will get their EBs worth from you whether you like it or not.
Cyberware is a slam dunk, basically the opposite of what I said about the conventional gear. It really sells both the spiral of chroming up and how the society of Night City encourages you to turn yourself into a gun.
The book checks back in with Johnny, and the ill fated run at Arasaka Tower. Johnny's own death is far from final, of course, but it puts into perspective why taking on Adam Smasher is a bad idea.
From there, the game finally dives into the meat of player facing gameplay. The game talks about its skill system in depth: 1d10 + Stat + Skill, and then goes into depth about every skill, and then about each Role's special abilities and how they upgrade as the player levels up. This section is important, but largely redundant for the purpose of this review.
After skill rules comes combat rules. Once again, I'm reminded a lot of Pathfinder, in that combat is surprisingly complicated: For ranged weapons Attackers Reflex + Weapon Skill + 1d10 VS Defenders Dex + Evasion Skill + 1d10 (or a target number based on a table for NPCs that don't have the ability to dodge bullets). That's a lot of derived numbers to keep track of, and Melee combat uses a different formula for attackers. Both ranged and melee combat also have further modifiers, like Autofire for machine guns, or martial arts schools for melee.
After a quick review that being set on fire hurts you, the game then gets into its cover rules. Basically, if an enemy can see you, you don't have cover. If what you're hiding behind can't stop a bullet, you don't have cover. If you have cover, it eats the damage you would have taken until it runs out of HP. And yes, the game does have rules for using people as cover.
The game's injury mechanics are not quite as meaty as something like WFRP, but it takes into account how wounded a character is, whether they took a critical injury to a limb, and gives a Death Save when reduced to 0 hitpoints. I wish there were descriptions on the critical hit table rather than just mechanical jargon, but it's functional and I won't complain.
Vehicles are generally the domain of the Nomads, but have their own section devoted to what's available (split into land, sea, and air), instructions on skill checks for them, and how they function in combat. It works the same as other skills, and only slightly modifies combat.
Reputation is the last portion of the chapter, psychological combat. In a game that's this much about dealing with corporate pricks and jumped-up thugs, the ability to stare them down is just as important as the ability to quickdraw. A high reputation, depending on the character's deeds, can means the difference between mean words or bullets.
The game explains what happened to the internet. Short version, the Fourth Corporate war blew up a lot of infrastructure. The longer version is more complicated, but also fuck Rache Bartmoss in particular.
In my CWN review, I mentioned the Decker Problem, where the party's hacker is off in their own little world while the rest of the party shoots their way through an issue. RED tries to solve this by making the Net mostly AR and wireless, with the netrunner needing to be onsite and dealing with stuff in the real world as well as the virtual one. In practice, the netrunner is still doing their own thing, but it's at least an attempt.
This also acts as the GM's monster manual for the net, filled with demons made from Black ICE. Demons in turn control meat space security, and thus eliminating the demon ALSO takes out the auto turret that was pinning your buddies down.
From there, the book describes hacking like being on an elevator. You hit a button, door opens, there's a room that has stuff in it. Sometimes that stuff is a password, sometimes it's a virtual demonic tiger come to rip your face off, so you use your internet gun and summon your own tiger to get it first.
This adds up to a decent crack at the Decker Problem hampered by legacy code. The game wants to have netrunners acting as they did in previous editions and also wants them to not be hacking from the van.
The rules go over how health and death work once again, this time in more detail on how stabilization works and what each of the various skills that pertain to injury (Cybertech, First Aid, Paramedic, Surgery) apply to. It then pulls out Trauma Team.
Trauma Team is a unique idea for Cyberpunk. It's the future after all, and in a game which already has multiple characters who have lackeys, adding insurance in the form of heavily armed paramedics who are on call to rescue the PCs. Trauma Team aren't stupid and they aren't reckless, but if a PC is heavily injured they'll come when they're called with a doctor and a big gun to pull you out of hell.
From here, the book covers hospital stays, surgeries, drugs and addiction, and therapy to cope with all that. Skipping on.
Cyberpsychosis is more fully covered here as well. Once again not a fan.
Health management in general seems to assume that the player characters will have long stretches of time to rest up if someone gets laid out, while also needing to deal with the game's rocket tag combat. It's not unrealistic, but it does means GMs may need to encourage players to play smart lest the first combat of a mission sends somebody to the hospital.
Cyberpunk is a long running franchise which has jumped to the future several times. Its internal timeline diverged in the 1980s and has chugged along ever since, switching to the present day from 2013, 2020, and now 2045 with each edition change. I'm not an expert in Cyberpunk deep lore, but the broad strokes are one of world wars, plague, balkanization in the first world, 80s fears of all powerful Asia coming home to roost, and unlimited corporate power. The time of the RED, aka the present day, has seen that corporate power weakened but nowhere near destroyed, with 2077 and Edgerunners having the major players once again in charge of the world.
The book then leans into that long running fiction to give a series of corporations and faces within those corporations for the players to deal with or be stuck between. Some are familiar, some are new, all pose their own dangers to a crew of edgerunners.
The story then shifts to Night City itself, the real main character of Cyberpunk. Night City in 2045 is still rebuilding, having survived a nuke prematurely going off on the 120th floor of Arasaka Tower courtesy of Johnny Silverhand and company, and being a charnel pit for both sides of the Fourth Corporate War. Once again, we can see the intermediate stage Night City is in compared to its Golden era in 2020 and what it has become by 2077.
Night City's attention to detail is both a positive and a negative in my opinion. The good news is that a GM has all the resources they need, and the way one becomes a Night City Legend gets around the D&D problem of being filled with powerful people who could fix the problem the PCs are solving. But why would anyone who has the eddies be risking their neck, huh? The bad news is that it's very hard to surprise a well-read player, because every gang, fixer, suit, and company in town is named and labeled.
After the Night City gazetteer finishes, the book then goes into everyday life. What the law is, and how it's ignored in Night City. Where do people eat, what do they watch, how the economy works. It's one of those "useful*" things that feels like padding to me. The one thing that is important to emphasize is that the 80s Excess of the pre-war Night City means that while nothing new is getting made, there are a lot of tech and guns sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting for enterprising fixers to connect to the next generation of heavily armed edgerunners.
The GM advice for Cyberpunk RED is simple, but fits the genre. The game expects you to read what this book has to offer and drink from the well of its inspirations, and to keep on genre. This is a game where the only thing the players must hold onto is each other, make sure that the power of friendship matters and make it hurt when it wasn't enough.
From there, it gives both standard and non-standard advice. I like the idea of a Beat chart, with a GM trying to hit the story beats within a mission at every half hour mark, but I think it would take a GM experienced with this system to consistently pull it off. I think that the advice given is fragile to the chaotic element player characters add to the scenario. Not bad advice, just something to think about.
From here, the book talks about how skill improvements work. I like that the point distribution encourages players to play their role (ie, combat characters fight, social characters talk, et cetera), but I actually kind of wish it was based on Role rather than self-assigned playstyle, and triggered by specific things a player could notice and check off themselves.
The book then gives a handful of stat blocks for antagonists. They function nearly identical to PCs, but have simplified stats and no Roles (under normal circumstances). The book gives a rule of thumb on how many of each enemy type should be thrown at a party, which is nice to have, especially since it's much less esoteric than D&D's CR ("A good rule of thumb is to throw out 1 Lieutenant for every 2 Edgerunners in a crew"). Enemies in general hit hard, mooks start off as equals to a player character and move up from there.
The GM section ends with a handful of short adventures to kick off a campaign. All of them are preluded by a short news article designed to look like it came off a website. They function, especially for how short they are, which is enough for me.
The book ends with one last short story, following a handful of characters created by real life disability advocates. The fiction is one last chance to show the tone of Cyberpunk, the mixture between nihilism and hope.
So, what do I think about Cyberpunk RED? Aesthetically, I like it. I'm a fan of the lore of Night City. Mechanically… I'm on the fence.
As I've stated before several times, I'm not the biggest fan of crunchy TTRPGs. As a GM, the less variables I have to manage, the more time I'm able to put into writing the plot over working out how things will work mechanically. As a player, the longer combat takes to make it to my turn, the more likely I am to check out.
Cyberpunk RED is a game inches away from being slick, but with a lot of legacy code from Cyberpunk 2020 that adds unneeded complexity. It seems to be at war whether it's a game about style over substance like it claims or a game where player characters and NPCs are fragile blood bags that burst if you look at them funny. That's a contradiction within the genre it lives in, and I didn't give Cities Without Number any shit for how fragile its player characters are, so it's not right for me to ding RED for the same…
Maybe it's not something that can be answered.
Still, Cyberpunk RED is unmatched for it's attention to detail, deep and interesting setting, and the ease to onboard new players with the setting thanks to the numerous multimedia projects it's had in the past few years. If CWN isn't your thing, check this one out.
It starts with a novella retelling the story of the Cyberpunk 2020 module "Never Fade Away", where Johnny Silverhand's girlfriend Alt is kidnapped by Arasaka Corp in order to recreate Soulkiller, a program which creates a digital ghost out of its victim's consciousness.
Cyberpunk 2020's core book started with the same story, IIRC.
Actually a lot of this sounds basically the same as CP2020. The only bit that made me go "Oh, they changed that" was that there was no mention of rolling for hit locations and different health and armor values for different body parts (and your description of the armor rules as short implies that the game doesn't have different armor for a bunch of different body parts).
Which is a bit unfortunate, because while I do actually like crunchy RPGs, CP2020 was very much a product of its time and could use some streamlining and modernizing.
RED tries to solve this by making the Net mostly AR and wireless, with the netrunner needing to be onsite and dealing with stuff in the real world as well as the virtual one.
Shadowrun has Doc Wagon, which is basically the same, but I think CP2013 came out slightly sooner. The time frame is still close enough that I suspect that they both got inspiration from somewhere else, but I can't figure out what.
