RPG and board game reviews and discussion presented from a game-design perspective. We review and discuss modern role-playing games, classics, tabletop gaming, old school games, and everything in-between. We also randomly fall in and out of different games, so what we are playing and covering from week-to-week will change.
SBRPG is gaming with a focus on storytelling, simplicity, player-created content, sandboxing, and modding.
Today, we look at the phone-book-sized solo play system!
Someone who buys this could be instantly put off by solo play of any sort. This book is bigger than most of the games it supports in page count (613 pages). Compared to Mythic and other solo-play systems, this is not rules-light.
But it is.
The book is divided into sections that each cover a topic, and most of the pages are filled with charts for each option. The random-dungeon generation section is only 43 pages long, and it covers five different game systems, giving you CRs, damages, and DCs for:
Pathfinder 1e
5E
Pathfinder 2E
OSR Games
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Using this for games like Castles & Crusades, GURPS, Mutant Crawl Classics, or your favorite would be simple. Just understand the difference between a hard, moderate, and easy check in your game, and you can easily translate the tables. This isn't limited to any genre, so you could create anything from sci-fi, and modern, to fantasy adventures with the system.
This is easily the most complete and comprehensive random dungeon system out there and can create an amazing variety of rooms, traps, encounters, and treasures. The rooms are more generic, so it is up to you to make one a 20x20 and another a 40x40 with a corner removed, so there is room for a little artistic freedom. The system is concerned with the master grid and what is in each 'cell' instead of trying to draw a pretty map. That is your job.
If you ignore the rest of the book, this solid random dungeon creation system can provide hours of fun. This is honestly how I approach this book, and at this point, this is all I am using it for. There are plenty of other chapters here, including:
Quick Start (with the random dungeon generator)
How to Solo Play
Play Techniques and Variants
PC Roles
Solo Quests
Balance and Rules Adjustments
Rewards and Penalties
Generators and Tools
Encounter Tables
...Appendixes
The Solo Quests chapter is enormous, with over 150 pages of quest templates and charts for creating the 'flowchart style' adventures common to other games. A great system is hidden here for 'generic and specific clues' that can be used as counters to fill quest objectives. If you need 3 clues to find where the bandits ran off to with the princess, there are systems to generate and place those clues in the environments you explore - and even on the enemies you defeat. Some clues you can collect, and you won't know what quest they are for, and they have a chance to become relevant later when you pick up a new quest. It is really a smart and innovative syste.
This is the sort of book where you aren't supposed to use it all, but it has it all in case you need it.
I am taking this one part at a time, starting with the most valuable pieces and ignoring the rest until I read and discover them. The quick start rules are excellent and are probably where 90% of the book's buyers should start - and leave the rest of the book for later. My reviews will probably come in as I discover new parts of this book, but that is okay since I doubt anyone would (or should) use every table on every page of this book.
Supporting so many games is a plus, and it doesn't use much space to get the job done. You won't find conversions between systems here, but guidelines to get you started. The hardest part about using this book is creating a way to deal with how much you have at your fingertips.
This is recommended if you lean more towards 'random generation' and less 'off the cuff' style of solo play.
I may be an old-school fan where anything goes, but this book has a place.
This is a free download over at Monte Cook Games, and it goes through many topics that may upset people at a gaming table. I heard some criticism of this book along the lines of, "This is not needed," or "Sit at my table, and you consent to anything!"
I wish I had this checklist at a few of my games in the past, it would have set the tone for the game, and we would have avoided many problems. You can laugh at "needing a book like this" all day, but after you know all the trouble this game agreement saves you from - you will know.
In short, this is an informal agreement the group makes of what everyone expects at the table. Everyone fills them out, and it can be anonymous, and the GM goes through them and sets the game's parameters. This can also be used for world design and what players can expect from the world's history and events.
The book also has advice on resolving problems and includes a few good suggestions on apologizing and checking in later with both sides of a disagreement to ensure the "later feelings" are all right.
I also look at a book like this as an enabler. If you plan to play a "Friday the 13th" style game, and everyone accepts what happens in those movies, this pre-game checklist is good. This sort of understanding can enable handling a lot of sensitive topics that you are not 100% sure everyone at the table may be comfortable with. You never know if Bob from Accounting is a horror movie fan, and this sort of discussion is good to have just an ice-breaker. This applies to sex as well and includes the smart "fade to black" way of handling things many games recommend, and this technique can also be applied to too-violent scenes.
The killer raises the axe, and...
Fade to black.
It works, and in some games, this is a far more potent and effective tool for horror than rolling 1d6 damage plus STR mod and realizing the blow wasn't that deadly.
I do not see this as a "tool for wussies" but as a good starting point to set expectations and also "clear the way" for allowing even more sensitive topics at a table that most games would sweep under the carpet because, by default, most all games are made for a younger audience. Having a tool to "open the door" to mature topics for a group of mature players is a good thing, and it can expand your game more than the typical "sanitized out of the book" settings and adventures we get these days.
This is a good thing for more reasons than avoiding hurt feelings, but that is where this book starts, and you can take it so far from there and have a better game that fits your group's expectations as a result.
This is a cool product. You get this giant continent-sized map of a fantasy realm, complete with GM maps that see everything and player maps that see just towns and major features. What do you do with it?
The map is cut into 10-mile hexes at the lowest level, and that is still a huge area of land. For reference, here is about a 10-mile by 10-mile area from Google maps:
So each hex could contain a major town, a number of small villages, and some pretty cool areas of interest hidden here and there. Each hex is huge and could contain a lot of adventures by itself. A major metropolitan city in the US would take up a few hexes, for example, Las Vegas would be 2 wide and 3 tall.
Do you get a gazetteer, history, peoples, a timeline, location descriptions, and political factions? No! And that is a wonderful thing. The kingdoms and cities are all color-coded and divided up by borders, you get locations of castles and forts, towns, and plenty of small un-named villages - but nothing else! You get to make it all up yourself. How cool is that? This kingdom with all the dark gray castles and towns? Obviously the evil kingdom, right? Whatever you want.
And the GM maps give you plenty of secret locations done in the same way - fill them out and create adventures for them, put a mega-dungeon here or there, and just use them as you need them. The entire world is a blank slate all mapped out for you to begin thinking about what this place is or that place is and coming up with the details yourself.
There are no giant histories to read, no novels to fit in here or there, no politics to read about, no toes to step on for other people's ideas of what a place is, and no right or wrong. Better yet, come up with your own imaginary Forgotten Realms-style novels and fill the world full of GMNPCs that solve every problem in every location! And then kill them all and start there. Good stuff.
Take one kingdom and destroy every city, fill it full of bandits and humanoid tribes at war with each other, and call it the Lost Lands. Make a kingdom run by demons. Or dragons. Create a "we are not dying off" elven homeland and make them a strong world power. Make a kingdom of pirates on the islands. A dark elf homeland shrouded in perpetual shadows. A vampire kingdom. A goblin kingdom of tinkerers. There is plenty of room to do whatever you want.
And you can start in the smallest corner of the world, just one of those 10-mile hexes, and not worry about anything outside of it. You can leave the rest, say, yeah it is out there, and fill it in later. You don't need to know everything to start, just leave it all blank and when an idea hits you, find a place to put it and run with that.
An excellent campaign resource for those of us who love to look at maps, but don't have the time to make them and fill them out. This is really a cool playset and blank slate to create your own world from, and complete with secret places and lots of hidden spots and mysteries to last you years of gaming.
If your eyes are not what they used to be, and you find the printable Palladium Fantasy character sheets that you can download pretty much well unusable, this is a great product. You are going to spend a little time learning how this works, but it is a lot less time than you would spend working up your own sheet (or struggling with the official ones). The printouts are way more readable than what I can fill in on those sheets that force you to write 6-point type in pencil.
The only downside is now I want one for the other Palladium games (Ninjas and Superspies, Dead Reign, Heroes Unlimited, etc) besides Palladium Fantasy and Rifts. There is a little room for custom skills and classes in here so you can customize this sheet for specific characters.
It gives you three printable sheets for the character sheet (double-sided), magic (double), and combat (single). The sheet auto-calculates everything, so you don't need to do much math, and you need to follow along with the OCC selections and skill picks with the books - the sheet does not do everything. This is more like a worksheet that holds your hand and does all the math; while the choices and the character design steps you need to do yourself.
The nice part about these sheets is you can save on the cloud and have your characters wherever you go. Make a fresh copy of the sheet for each character!
Also, you can save a dollar buying from the Palladium store since DTRPG takes a cut.
Very highly recommended. Also, it requires Microsoft Excel.
Castles and Crusades started in 2004, back in the D&D 3.0 days. This is one of the first OSR games, though the mechanics are a more modernized system called the Siege Engine (similar to the D&D 3.x DC system, but this basically fixes DCs at 12 or 18, and gives the referee leeway on additional difficulty and which DRMs apply), and it retains the traditional AC combat system. It dispenses with the OSR saving throws, and the 3.x fort/ref/will saves, and uses ability-based saves instead. D&D 5 borrowed the concept of ability-based saves, so if you are coming from 5E you will recognize that right away.
It is funny how D&D 4 borrowed a lot from Iron Heroes and went in a different direction, and then the designers at Wizards course-corrected and made a game more like this. You can't and shouldn't really say "stole from" since that is a negative and encourages flaming and system wars, which are lame. All games are cool. Lots of games share mechanics. We don't flame Sorry because Monopoly also uses dice for movement. It is what it is. D&D 5 does things in a cool and different way. C&C did some things earlier.
The game sticks close to the AD&D core. It is kept very rules-light with lots of optional extras in the Castle Keepers Guide, including higher-level play and heroic characters. The classes are mechanically different, some play more OSR, while others play more modernized. All rolls are still handled by the game's core mechanics, so there are no "1-2 on a d6 skill rolls" or large percentage tables of thief abilities.
It features some legendary designers and is named after the legendary Castles and Crusades Society, the gaming society founded by Gary Gygax. The game definitely has pedigree and also some serious design credentials behind it.
What is This?
It is a unique and cool game that sits on the crossroads between OSR and D&D5. It can be played as a compromise game between OSR and 5E players, and everyone will find something they like. The game is deadly, but there is no "death at zero hp." The game has that AD&D old-school feel without all the complexity. There is no THAC0 or support for alternate AC systems, or compatibility notations such as AC 5 [14]. This is a roll-high system with unified mechanics.
This is not D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder 1e. The fiddly and complicated feat and interrupt-based mechanics, complex character builds, and weight of the system have been completely torn out. Though to be fair, if you want feats, they are reworked and presented as an optional advantage system in the referee's book. So now the game plays more like Pathfinder, and those players can come in and feel at home.
There is a little Tunnels and Trolls in here with those ability based skill rolls and saves. In T&T you make a 2nd level STR save, and in C&C you make a STR check at a DC of 12/18 with your ability score mod, optional level mod if your class helps, and a difficulty set by the referee. Every score matters and can be checked, saved against, or used in the game. The ability scores and classes replace skills, though there is an optional background skill system in the referee's book. This core-concept I love.
The art is gorgeous. The printing is great quality. The core books are full color pieces of art.
This game feels like the coolest thing to come out of the D&D 3.0 era, it cut its own path, stayed true to itself and fans, and has been doing its own thing ever since.
B/X Compatibility?
This isn't B/X, but you can play B/X with it. A lot of B/X material is very compatible. If you had a module designed for another system, such as Barrowmaze, simply keep 90% of the content the same but use C&C monster statistics - or convert on the fly if need be. You can do the same with AD&D modules, or even 5E adventures if you want to.
If B/X is like the Linux/Unix of the OSR world, C&C is sort of like the Wine emulation layer that lets you play Windows games on Linux (if Wine existed in a perfect world, but to be fair it is getting really good). If there is something in another system you really like (D&D 5, Pathfinder 1/2, B/X, T&T, AD&D) you will find something similar here either as a core rule or option.
I have not seen a game that hits the middle-ground so solidly with a unified mechanic such as this one.
Old School Flavor
The game keeps the classic alignment system, and maintains the law-chaos and good-evil paradigms. It feels like a natural evolution of AD&D to me into the modern day, more so than D&D 3.5 or Labyrinth Lord (which feels like a B/X AD&D emulator). If you do not care for OSR mechanics but want the OSR feel and flavor, this works very well.
Also I feel like I could run an evil campaign like we used to do from time to time in AD&D and not have the game tell us we are playing it the wrong way. Those typically ended in Shakespearian tragedy as evil was finally punished, and the evil PCs fell one by one as the forces of good rallied (or bigger evil betrayed them). That is also cool. Those were fun games, sort of a puritanical lesson in "crime does not pay" like a gangster movie. You gotta have that tragic ending for an evil game because it is so satisfying and classic Hollywood.
If you want demons and devils, they are done very nicely in a separate book called "Tome of the Unclean." This keeps them out of the main game for people who don't want them, and devotes and entire book to them so they are done right. Again, this checks one of my boxes and does it in a very cool and flavor-filled sourcebook that adds to the fun.
...vs. Basic Fantasy?
The game is actually similar in spirit to Basic Fantasy. It is a rework and reengineering of AD&D to be more along that rule-light framework, where Basic Fantasy rewords B/X. If you play Basic Fantasy you will probably feel right at home once you realize the Siege Engine replaces the "leveled saves" of that game and a lot stays the same. Very highly compatible in terms of feeling and design.
...vs. Dungeon Crawl Classics?
Okay, this I feel is a Street Fighter moment. And this one is going to be a good fight where I root for both sides. The truth is they don't have to fight and these two games are both winners on my shelf and table.
The games are similar in that they take an OSR base and take it in a new direction without care for numerical compatibility and one-for-one rules replacement. Where DCC has more of a gonzo Heavy Metal feeling of wild and deadly fantasy, C&C has that classic AD&D feeling. I could see myself playing both at the same time and both qualify as top-shelf games currently.
DCC unifies the DC mechanic around a floating DC and variable dice sizes based on difficulty. Since there are two variables to manage (DC and die size) creating task difficulty can be a little difficult since both sides float. DCC also uses fort/ref/will saves.
C&C fixes the DC at two values, puts a little yes/no variability into the allowed bonus in regards to class, adds the ability score modifier, and floats only one side - the challenge level (which raises the target number). One side floats so this is a faster and easier system to adjudicate. Also there are no additional recorded saves.
DCC allows for rolls that you can put a lot of "English" on with rules like spellburn, so wildly high rolls can happen even at low levels. C&C follows the more traditional feeling and balance to classes.
Where DCC replaced my complete Pathfinder 1e collection, I can see C&C becoming my OSR game of choice. It would replace many of my B/X games because it hits the same AD&D feeling while unifying the mechanics. Since I am not tied to the B/X mechanics, if a game hits the feeling with a simpler system and unified mechanics, I am there.
Both are incredible games and they share that "common starting point, but different direction" feeling. Honestly I love games that do this since I have enough B/X games as it is, and at this point I am looking for new and different things. Where C&C has the traditional feeling, DCC has that anything goes feeling. Both are very cool.
...vs. B/X?
If you care more about B/X compatibility, there are too many games out there to choose from. Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and many others. If you absolutely need B/X mechanics, play a B/X set of rules.
It is funny, I see a lot of people playing the original print on demand AD&D and B/X games that are officially released and foregoing the more modern alternatives. I love the old games, I own them and grew up with them, but at this point I want to support the indie creators who are innovating and reinventing the genre.
Also, with my current collection of B/X I have everything I need. The only thing I am looking forward to is the forthcoming Old School Essentials demons book they promised.
Also, most all of my B/X adventures and sourcebooks are usable with C&C, so I don't really lose anything and I can keep buying and investing in the indies that make non-rules B/X adventures and settings.
So really, the feelings of both B/X and C&C are the same, they just get there in different ways.
The In the Middle Everything Replacement
D&D 4's Nerrath? The original gray-box Forgotten Realms? Mystara? Your own world? Classic Greyhawk? Pathfinder's Golarion? I can see playing all of them in C&C with a few tweaks here and there. The game feels like what came before but modernizes and streamlines the mechanics.
They even have their own setting of Aihrde with looks like a fun and deep world to explore.
I rarely find games I instantly fall in love with and feel they are a classic, and this one has slipped under my radar for far too long. I ask myself, why did I dismiss this for so long? Maybe it was because I thought once I had B/X I had it all, or that newer games such as Pathfinder 2 were better because of the new and shiny factor. I simply didn't "need" a game that did things a different way than what I was used to, and I feared it would end up in a box.
This game does not feel that way.
It is one I wished me and my brother would have checked out sooner, because this is what we would have chose to settle down on and play for our main campaign. I really can't tell you how good that feels. This would have been the one.
So I am planning with a tool called Articy Draft 3. It is a nice tool, sort of a set of index cards on steroids, and you are able to extend and subclass any object in the planning tool. Need an entity, which is basically a "noun" type thing in your game? You got it. Need to extend the entity base class as a main or supporting character? You can do that too, and even define custom properties for those base classes, such as a blank character sheet you can fill in for each character. You can extend the entity class to be an equipment item and give it weight, cost, damage, AC, and other values.
This is a first impressions review, so I may be missing a few things, so be warned. But I like first impressions reviews because they give the beginner an idea of what to expect when starting, and how easy the tool it to begin being somewhat productive with.
It also has a storyboard grid for laying out flow, with story parts, folding many cards into one, linking folded cards, and all sorts of other storyboarding tools and useful functions. You can lay out adventures, conversations, scenarios, or even a book in the flow grid and connect events with characters, places, items, and other concepts you come up with.
There is also a location tab that allows you to build maps, drop down characters, link those locations to the story flow, and take all of the noun items you build in your entity creation and all of the story flow parts to your own custom maps and locations. You can put down pawn-like markers for characters on maps to place your characters on a map the size of a room to a universe.
It is not a virtual tabletop, and it is not multi-player. This is a tool for teams or single designers to create structured experiences like games, modules, adventures, or stories. There is no die-roller, web client, or any other virtual tabletop functions. They have sort of a Powerpoint presentation mode for flows, but I have not figured it out yet. We are talking game design and planning today, not playing.
Easy to Get Lost
One point is that it is very easy to get lost in this tool, and I found myself fighting it as it started shaping my idea instead of my idea's structure and flow - the one in my head - being dominant. I threw out several versions of my plan as I found myself collecting junk again, making giant lists of everything, and ending up with junk drawers of hundreds of things, dozens of relationships, but no real plan.
I did a story, but the structure took over the story in several ways, and I found that the central core ideas in my story were sidelined to unimportant story branches. This is just as much on me as it is the tool, as not every idea translates well into a structured grid. It could be my idea is not baked enough and it needs several more revisions, and in my feeling getting to the point where you are writing things down and throwing them in the recycle-bin is a lot better than having them sit in your head and go nowhere.
There is a benefit to doing a lot of work and being forced to throw it out. Your idea gets refined with each iteration, more focused, and improves with each revision. You also start to quickly find the problems with your idea and begin to weed those out.
My advice? Do not get too invested in one project file to rule them all. Keep making them and throwing them out. Keep your project resources in a resource directory apart from your planning board and keep this as the giant sheet of newsprint on the table you can scribble all over, pull a fresh sheet onto your workspace, and tear off the old one to dispose of.
Adventure Design
This tool is a bit of overkill for designing a B/X adventure for a one-shot, as it is a professional level planning tool If I were writing a module to publish? Yes, I would use this tool as my first choice sine it organizes and collects ideas, stats, story parts, maps, and all the other bits that go into an adventure. One word of warning, what you design in this tool can be so complex getting it out may be an entirely different challenge.
You could design a B/X adventure so complex and intricate that describing it in traditional book form would take hundreds of pages, and I am still not sure many people could successfully take a complex, twisting narrative and present it in a traditional PDF adventure module. The idea may be clear in Articy and inside your head, but would readers ever get all of the ideas that you want to communicate?
You could have a battle in a B/X module where you face the vampire count, and if a player has a certain item, such as a stopwatch, the narrative could branch and turn into an incredible narrative. This would be clear to the designer in the program, but to the referee reading the module, or even the players playing through it, may not be obvious and the entire arc ignored as they hack and slash their way through.
A side note there too on audience expectations. Yes, that optional narrative arc is great for a story game, but in a more traditional hack-and-slash game that effort may be wasted as your audience came for one experience but the tool allowed you to design another. Don't get distracted by a tools cool capabilities and allow it to steer you off course, and be aware of what your audience came to see.
One could also create a story so complex and intricate that translating it into a game engine, such as a visual novel, RenPy, Inform, Twine, Unreal, Gamemaker, Godot, or other game or story engine would be darn well next to impossible. You could create it and lay it out, sure, but you could easily outstrip your ability to manage that much complexity, code, and engine expertise to get whatever you design out of there without a team of dozens and a couple million dollars to invest in a game company.
One of the best pieces of advice I can give when using this too is: be aware of the limitations of your target format and your own abilities. Also, be aware of your target audience and what they expect.
Export: Possibly an Issue
The tool has export functions for game engines and various formats, but for story and adventure design I have found, so far, that all my work is staying inside the tool and I am using it as a reference library. This was one reason I stayed away from learning this tool for so long, I was hesitant to adopting a proprietary tool that I could not export from easily in my planning and design work.
Part of me wishes you could export a visual novel or standalone story experience directly from the tool, as that would be ideal even for demos and rapid prototyping. Or even a PDF of the entire idea in book format. They may have an extension for that somewhere, or they may not, I do not know enough at this point as this is a first impressions review. They do have a variety of exporters, including Word and Excel spreadsheets along with JSON and XML, so it is possibly a matter of time or searching for the one that fits your needs. There is an API toolkit too, so further work in this areas is possible.
If you are writing a B/X style adventure for a PDF release, a visual novel, or a novel, yeah, I feel you will be doing all of the exporting and copying over the idea to the new format yourself. What you do gain is superior organization and refactoring abilities, so at least all of your ideas will be easier to pull out and describe. All of your relationships and links will also be easier to reference and organize.
You can get the raw data out in a variety of formats, but for my needs and use cases, I will be doing a lot of the work on format translation and presentation.
A Keeper!
This is a nice tool, and after using it a day it has already found a spot in my game design workflow. After a couple hours I was feeling somewhat productive, and it started revealing flaws in my ideas and designs. That is priceless, and if a tool has me throwing out work because it is garbage of my own design I find that highly useful and increases my productivity.
For highly imaginative types, you have no idea how valuable it is to have tools that collect the garbage in our heads, put it into bins, and allow us to see it as a whole and toss out whole parts at once is to our workflow. For some people the ability to collect, organize, and throw away garbage is more important than the ability to nicely organize things on index cards on a corkboard. The more you wreck, scribble on, destroy and rebuild your idea the better. Don't be shy, and do not be afraid to throw it all away and start fresh.
I need a tool that organizes chaos, lets me see the destruction as a whole, and hauls away the mental debris like a garbage truck and a street full of dumpsters - leaving me with the best parts.
This is the classic text adventure documentary "Get Lamp." It is worth watching, as the text adventure genre is entangled with the early days of role-playing and shared storytelling. The film goes through the history of text – based adventures and speaks with many of the pioneers of the genre.
Randomness as Puzzle
What strikes me about this documentary and text adventures in general is the complete removal of randomness from the game. You will see concepts such as mazes and puzzles discussed here, concepts similar to dungeon based adventures in role-playing games that use dice. In general, players and designers of these games hate mazes and love puzzles. My tastes also agree with this generally.
One could say that randomness, character design, character builds, and combat strategy is merely a puzzle to figure out based in statistics. That is what I find fascinating about watching a documentary such as this and seeing the designers talk about puzzles and how they love them, and then taking this fact role-playing games and how pen and paper gamers love character design and combat strategy within the rules. It seems to me that "doing well" within a pen and paper game with dice and character design is just a puzzle to figure out. How do I improve the odds?
How do we survive in this impossible situation? What gives me as a character the best chances of winning? What gives us as a party of characters the best chance of winning, based on synergies and strategy?
The puzzles in today's are all based around statistics and rules design, and players eventually figure them out and find "best builds" that give them the greatest chance of succeeding against challenges and enemies. Once this puzzle is figured out players tend to lose interest, and the factor that holds them in the game the most is story. I get this feeling the same is true with text based games.
Freedom
There is a freedom in both text based games and pen and paper games that does not exist in normal videogames. The designers of text based games tried to make as much as possible able to be examined and manipulated by the player. You could pick up a brick and look at it, and it may or may not have a use later on in the story. A lot of items could be manipulated like this, more so than in normal videogames.
Of course in pen and paper gaming the interaction is only limited by the imagination of the referee. Text based games were still limited, but they had the freedom to do a lot more than a typical game that you would find on a video game console.What I find with text based games is that they approach the interaction ability of pen and paper games, at least the well-designed ones do. If a designer puts a lot of thought and work into a text based game you could have thousands of objects and interactions, with everything being able to be manipulated and examined by the player. It is almost an order of magnitude higher in the level of interaction between a player and the objects in the world than a videogame on a console.
The Fall and Rise
And the documentary chronicles their fall from grace, and limited rebirth. I get why people don't like text adventure games, they are fiddly bits of figure out the parser and type commands in while beating your head against a wall exercises of frustration - at first. Once you learn the rules of the road they apply to most text adventure games, how to examine, how to move, how to look, how to get, how to drop items, how to open up containers - all the basics. We get into implementation problems where the designer didn't account for everything, and the obvious to a player becomes an impossibility because the designer has not accounted for the interaction.
My Experience
When I first encountered these games I shied away, mostly out of fear I would mess something up or "not get it." I had this almost instinctual reaction of "not for me can't figure out" and walked away. Or that the text-adventure game would "punish me for being stupid." You know the feeling, like a designer would walk an inexperienced player through obvious choices and then make them look like a fool for taking what was the obvious route to someone who didn't know better. You have died. Next time try smarter!
These days, I love exploring and reading, so my patience has adapted my tastes more for text adventures than when I was younger and wanted to be wow'ed by great graphics and tight controls. I do admit liking a certain style of game, one that doesn't punish you for mistakes, can be solved with enough careful effort, understands you may have difficulty with the concepts and puzzles, and gradually expands and changes based on where you are in the narrative. I don't want to map and get lost in a maze (unless that is the point and we know going in). I want to have unexpected results to my actions, and my clever manipulations to be rewarded.
Comparisons
And I fire up games like Grand Theft Auto or other open-world games and they feel empty. Despite the promise of an expansive, unlimited world, once you know how things work they do not seem to change. The pedestrians and people that inhabit the world are all the same. Nobody lives and works there, they just spawn in. People obey a very limited script. There isn't much you can do with the objects in the world except collide with them. Few items are interactive, but they typically have a very limited set of interaction associated with them.
Open world games probably highlight the most why the promise of "true interaction" has failed in the world of video games - one you know the envelope of how the world reacts, that is all you can do and expect from the world. I typically lose interest shortly after this moment and then wait for another open world game to see what they add to the formula.
The Future?
I see hope though. There are already interactive fiction games on the Amazon Echo and Alexa platforms, where the text-to-speech and speech-recognition functions narrate the world for you in speech and audio. I would love to see an Inform interpreter for Zork-style games on the Echo platform where you could just sit and explore through spoken commands to the device, and have it listen and take the place of the flashing command prompt. Perhaps this is the future the documentary was searching for, an experience beyond the command prompt and purely in the mind.
Maybe that interface layer has finally been broken and we just can't see it yet. Maybe we are entering another golden age of the text adventure. Perhaps this is a new path, unexplored, and we have not yet stepped into this deep and foreboding cavern - just through what we hear - and interacting with just what we say. While I still like reading, this offers another way forward and perhaps a new realm of adventures to explore.
Let's do a deeper dive on each of the B/X Essentials books, starting the the B/X Essentials Core Rules book. This is a 34-page saddle-stitched 6" x 9" book, so it isn't all that big but it is dense and packed full of the core rules needed to play most any B/X game. This is halfway between a published game and a scholarly reference, and if you are comparing differences between B/X games this is a handy book to have since it gives you a starting point to work from.
As time goes on I feel that 'API reference' is important because there really aren't any rules on what is the final ruling on a rule or aspect of a B/X rules set - nor really, should there be. This is helpful since it attempts to lay out a rule and its implementation in a published source, and then attempts to work through discrepancies and differences. I feel it would be kind of silly to say 'this is the official source' when it would be better to say 'this is a well-researched source and other games differ by X and Y' on a rule or aspect of B/X games.
It is all a little soft on rulings and definitions since B/X itself is an emulation of a style of rules and era of play and really, there can't be an official source at all - but there can be well researched and useful ones.
I say most any because there is always going to be special rules needed to cover rules specific to situations that will come up in certain games, for example there aren't rules for shotguns, grenade-like weapons, or automatic fire in this book. This is just the basics for fantasy-style games, and I feel, that is as it should be - because this is where it all begins.
Ability Scores
We start with a short forward, and then two pages of rules for ability scores. We do not get how to create a character, just how the ability scores work and a page of tables describing what the ability scores at different ranges and what those do. The mentions of things like hit points or other concepts are kept to a minimum, as this just focuses on ability scores and their uses.
Why put in character classes when they could be different in every game you play? I like this approach since you don't have to ignore anything or rip out parts of the game you aren't using, if I am playing a Roman gladiator type game, my classes will be gladiator, soldier, politician, bandit, or whatever else I want my game to be focused on.
This eliminates waste and repetition, and it also sets a good base down for any game you want to create with these rules. I hate building a game on top of another, and then having the base game sitting there offering options to players that I don't want them even thinking about, using, or aware of - please stay focused on the game as it was crafted. Here? Just ability scores and no classes, and just how these scores interact with the rest of the rules.
Basic. Simple. Clean. I like it.
Sequence of Play
After that, we get a page laying out the three sequences of play in a B/X game: dungeon turns, encounters, and wilderness days. I like this emphasis on structure from the first pages, since I feel it helps codify the game as a structured play experience instead of something more narrative and soft. There should be this Dungeon the Board Game vibe to older-school games in my feelings, and at least that is how I like playing them. When you play soft, you invite a lot of fudge and player disagreements...
"It hasn't been that long, my light spell should still be up."
"Another torch, oh come on!"
"We aren't making that much noise."
"We brought enough food didn't we, who wouldn't?"
I hate assuming and I hate gimmes. If the party is doomed because someone forgot to buy a flint and tinderbox, so be it. Laugh off your lack of shopping skills and let this stand as a hilarious moment of party ineptitude. The dungeon and wilderness sections remind the referee to pay close attention to these things, such as rest, light sources, rations, and spell durations which are critical concepts to track in B/X style games - especially when resource usage is combined with a tight control of time.
B/X games often have a tight focus on resources, and that is for a good reason. Preparedness keeps you alive, and you try and go camping without food, shelter, warmth, or water - it sucks. Also, your gear is what allows you to pull off all sorts of cool stunts and tricks when it comes time for the referee to determine is a silly plan works.
I like this slightly more strict tracking of time and resources, and to me, that is a part of the 'play' of an old-school game - thinking ahead, planning, and preparing. It also trains players to be careful and write everything down - but that sort of stuff matters in old school games and is a part of the fun. If someone bought a mirror (and it isn't broken), then they get to use it for all sorts of cool more-than-a-medusa tricks, such as peering around a corner, signaling others from a distance, grooming, looking behind a chest or shelf without getting too close, reflecting a shaft of light to somewhere dark, or all sorts of other cool uses creative players would have for such an item.
I feel if you "let them have a mirror because they would have one" because you want to reduce bookkeeping and you are throwing away an important part of the game. Gear (and carrying capacity) matters, so make it your life.
Adventuring Rules
Next up is a long section of adventuring rules, and while I know they are all technically 'adventure rules' I would have liked to see these split up into subsections such as travel, survival, and other topics. That is the game designer in me speaking though, not the reference-minded referee. The section is actually an A to Z sorted on every adventuring rule from air travel to water travel, and I can see why in a more reference-minded work it was done this way. This is a reference book, and it you are looking for healing rules you can find it quickly in the H section - which now that I think about it feels right for a book feeling more like a reference work.
I think that is one of the more important points to consider when using B/X Essentials as a set of for-play rules, the books are more designed as reference works, so things may not be organized in the way you expect, but once you know you are playing out of a A to Z fantasy RPG reference encyclopedia, things makes sense and I can actually find things faster. For new players (or players expecting a traditional 1234... teaching style game) though this may trip them up, so it is worth noting.
That said, I like the gritty and survival-minded adventuring rules presented here. Way back in the days when I used to read Dragon magazine as a kid I always thought the letters saying 'wilderness encounters ruin the adventure' were sort of silly, as I thought wilderness encounters getting to the dungeon were just as much as a part of the game as wandering monsters. Yes, you could die or get completely lost on the way to the adventure, but that was a part of the danger of living in the world.
You need to worry about supplies, mounts and making camp. You need to decide on a schedule of keeping watch. You need to worry about maps and navigation. You need to have a plan should things go wrong. You need to know how to be able to deal with all of the things you may encounter out there on the way to a dark and dangerous place.
You may need to hire retainers, a ship or two, a team of pack animals, buy a month's worth of supplies for 50 people, and a group of workers for this treasure-hunting expedition to the middle of nowhere. Never assume this is one of those '5 person party in a fantasy novel' sort of experiences, as you may need to put together a large expedition for money up front if you are hunting that 50,000 gold-piece haul you heard rumors and legends about on the Isle of Nowhere, especially if that treasure hoard is protected by a dragon.
But as a referee, you need to be fair. You don't need to treat every wandering monster encounter as an instant video-game ambush combat encounter. So you encounter a griffin, does it need to be instantly in your face, ready to fight? Could it be you see it flying by, heading back to its nest, hunting, or just sitting in a river cooling off? Is that group of orcs off in the distance marching towards a hamlet, camped on a hill that you spot nearby, engaged in a battle with a troll, or is the entire group of orcs dead after being blasted by dragon fire?
As a referee, did you use the reaction chart to determine what the reaction is if the encounter meets the party? Perhaps the orcs are just passing through and a bit wary, but willing to trade for supplies. You never know and you should never assume, there are evil and possibly orc-aligned humans in these fantasy worlds so there could be chances to interact with wilderness encounters a more narrow-minded referee would see as 'just monsters.'
Never assume an encounter means combat, and always have that high CHR character out front for parlay (look at the monster reaction chart and realize that even a +1 reaction modifier and a little care can disarm a lot of situations). And never get stuck in the rut of thinking like you are in a limited video-game or simplistic party-based fantasy adventure novel, there are a lot more ways to approach problems in classic B/X style games when you hire specialists, retainers, and use the resources and factions of the game world in creative ways.
Basic Combat Procedure
Two pages of combat rules. Nice. I have this rule that if a role-playing game's combat rules are longer than the rest of the other rules sections of the book the game is unnecessarily over-complicated and some sort of war-game pretending to be a pen-and-paper RPG. You know the feeling, these games with endlessly complicated combat rules, forty or fifty special conditions, page after page of rules covering special situations, and typically full of combat character build options (with 1 out of 10 options actually being worth taking).
Not here. Two pages and we are done and can move on.
I get this feeling pen-and-paper games always have this magnetic pull back towards their complicated war-gaming roots and we can never escape that. There are many, many times I don't really care about build options and combat complexity and I want it all aggregated away. Like, in story-based games. Or old-school games where the decisions of the player in the dungeon (in the moment) outweigh the decisions made during character design (before play). There are some games I feel where once you make a great set of character design choices you don't really need to play because the results are almost predetermined by your build, or the same abilities are used over and over (aka D&D 4) and what promised a lot of flexibility ends up being a script played over and over again.
There's an interesting two-handed weapon rule that states all characters using two-handed weapons go last during a turn, as if they had lost initiative. When you get to the Classes and Equipment book and realize that all missile weapons are listed as two-handed weapons this rule takes on a new realization - most traditional missile fire cannot win initiative and always goes last (except for one-handed missile weapons like slings or thrown weapons).
Though I miss the rules for grenade-like weapons and those oft-reprinted miss charts that used squares and a d8 for direction and some other roll for distance. Those rules may have came later but their omission is noted since I am so used to seeing them changed and over-explained down to war-gaming detail in almost every pen-and-paper game from the era.
If you use the "all weapons do a d6 damage" option it makes two-handed melee weapons pretty pointless as well, but since we like our funny dice shapes and huge damage rolls this strange side-effect isn't probably seen that much. But a part of me likes the "all weapons do a d6" option because, you know, a sword, an arrow, and a dagger do the same "movie damage" anyways in more cinematic settings and we don't need to go in that much detail. I like the option but I feel in practice would rarely use it.
What happens when all participants are using two handed weapons? Is that simultaneous initiative (as if everyone had lost) or does it go on the rolled order (but after all the one-handies)? My preference is the latter.
Other Combat Issues
More combat rules! I know, I was hoping for too much, but this is only two more extra pages for really special cases such as cover, attacking from behind, or unarmed attacks. Morale is also handled here, and I feel this is another part of old-school games that gets hand-waved away in more modern games. Old school fights typically end in a rout by the survivors, and this becomes the most dangerous part of the fight.
If the rout is on the players' side, it is running for their lives.
If the rout is on the monster's side, they need to be stopped before they trigger a second encounter - either by the monsters fleeing to another keyed room or attracting the attention of wandering monsters. Chances are, you are already owed a wandering monster roll just from the noise of the fight, so chances are something may be coming to investigate, add to that a group of screaming goblins running for their lives and you have just upped the odds for trouble.
I feel some pen-and-paper games fall into this video-game mentality, where each room must be handled as a separate battle-chess like encounter or the game's CR or balancing system breaks and the whole game falls into "not fun stop being unfair land" or something. Old-school dungeons are more organic than that. There is a chance if you allow one of the front cave's goblin sentries to get away he runs screaming into the common room full of 20 goblins and you have a real mess on your hands.
That is what fireballs are for.
Then again, noise like that is alerting the whole darn lair. The goblin chief's guards will probably block off the passage, hide the treasure, and ready shortbows. Spells will be prepared by the tribe's shaman. The dire wolves will be set loose in the lower halls. All hell breaks loose.
Good times.
Again, this is when you start pulling out cheats and using up your game-breaking, but one-use, spells. Sleep. Lightning bolt. Fireball. Start burning those expensive scrolls. Your spells aren't balanced for a single-room encounter because you are going to find yourself at times needing something with a bit more power than that. Some things are meant to be unbalanced because life isn't fair, and henceforth, neither should you.
Standard Combat Charts
The base game's fighter-mage-thief and racial classes sneak into the book in the next section in the combat and saving throw charts. I suppose there is no good way to aggregate this, though I could just rename and re-purpose the charts into "combat classes," "semi-combatants," and "non-combatants" if I wanted to re-use them for a new set of classes - and same thing for the saving throw charts.
Ont thing I have always been a fan of is re-purposing saving throws to include more types of hazards. In my games, paralysis saves make good fear saves. Breath weapon saves can serve as dodge rolls. Spell saves make good mental attack saves. Death saves? Of course, instant death, system shock, or any other sort of save or die mechanic. Wands? Wands are odd since you would expect those to fall under spells, but wands are easier to save against than spells and they fall between death and fear saves - so I typically make these a health (ward versus disease) save since dwarves, elves, clerics and fighters all excel at these. At 10th level a dwarf isn't going to get sick, save versus wands at a 3+ please.
Magic
Finally, magic. Not lists of magic items, but rules for memorizing spells, casting spells, spell effects, spell books, and magic items come into play here. We also get rules for magic item types, such as potions and rings, and how many of each can be worn or used during a turn. We also get magical research and then the book closes with the OGL and an index of tables.
There aren't any lists of magic items, which I like because again, the basic rule book isn't tying me to one setting and its list of magic items. Just the types that may or may not be in the world and how they are used is covered, and that is it.
It Is Easy to Get Excited About This...
That is my feeling about B/X Essentials, especially after reading the Core Rules. I haven't felt this way about a game since Traveller's little black books. I love multi-genre B/X style games that use the rules for an entirely new experience, such as Labyrinth Lord and all of its spin-off games such as Mutant Future and other games in that multi-verse.
But with B/X Essentials, I see the holy grail of a generic universal B/X based system right here in front of my eyes. A B/X style Traveller, where you start out a level 1 pilot with 1d6 pitiful hit points and explore the vast hex-grid galaxy star by star? Maybe your starting 10 meter long scout ship is a piece of junk with only 10 vehicle hit points, AC 9, and is armed with a single 1d4 damage light laser? That is possible here.
A spy game in the genre of Top Secret, or a gangster game like the classic Gangbusters? Those are possible too, like as if TSR never used a d100 system for those games and stuck to what everybody knew, loved, and worked. A Gamma World style game that didn't drastically change the starting hit point scale and instead had that familiar B/X style progression? All possible here.
The possibilities are endless because the starting point is so clean and well-presented. Like a painting that leaves a lot of white space to let your imagination fill in the details, this book leaves out the genre-specific content and invites you to fill in the blanks with your own creations.
A Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers style campy space romp? A horror-style Cthulhu game? A cavemen and dinosaurs game? A Wild West style gunslinger game? Post-apocalyptic survival? Pirates? Zombies? Ninjas? Commandos? Space opera? 1970's detectives?
A vast new world of B/X gaming starts here and that has me excited about all the cool and wonderful things people can build from a basic and expandable basic set of rules like this.
Ever find a product that just rekindles your love of old school gaming? This is it, The book was a bit on the expensive side but for a high-quality 261-page book with great old-school art on almost every page? A cover by the immortal D&DG legend Erol Otus? A PDF you can keep on your phone or tablet and read through and feel the inspiration come back when you pick a page and flip through its deviously-crafted pages? And did I mention it has a promo cartoon?
It's campy. It's deadly. It's thoroughly old-school. It's crazy with flashes of black humor and the madness of its creator and I love it. I have only just began to dive into the pages of this one and I already feel the excitement. This one so masterfully captures what old-school gaming is all about in both flavor and style, and most importantly - the combination of rules and play. Let me lead you down into the darkness of this one and explain a little, if only you would gather around before you hastily dash off into the night...
What This Is
At its core, Barrowmaze Complete is a combination product covering Barrowmaze I and II, so you do not need the II book to have everything - it is all here. This is essentially an old-school mega-dungeon, but without all the mega-dungeon problems. The layout of the mega-dungeon are the tombs and catacombs under a huge area of ground, the burial mounds of an ancient civilization lying underneath a foggy moor. There are hundreds of mounds to break into and explore, all for the loot this civilization buried with its ancestors, so you can be sure the grave robbers and other ne'er-do-wells are lurking about busting into these forbidden places, getting themselves killed, or killing the others who loot the tombs and head back to town with sacks of loot over their shoulders.
And the marsh itself is deadly and dangerous, especially at night, and it is far enough away from town that you have to conserve daylight to be able to excavate the ruins of these tombs and get out before the night falls and the certain doom of twilight descends upon your party.
What I love about this is it marries lore and a real understanding of grave-robbing mechanics to an old-school experience. You need to physically dig up these places. Many are hidden. You need to bust through mortared-up walls with sledgehammers to get at the good stuff - and all that work makes a lot of noise. Any noise invites wandering monster checks. This sort of risk versus reward feeling extends through the overland plus the expansive underground, the more noise you make, the less chance you have of getting out of there alive.
And then there is the question of time. You may have a great run in the underground spaces only to find out you miscalculated and it's night outside. Torches matter. Light matters. Nightvision matters. Being able to find traps matters. Supplies matter. Resource management is critical to survival. All the low-level "manage or die" stuff that makes old-school gaming so fun matters and this adventure was built to support smart play through realizing you can't rest out here, you need to get in and get out, and there is no way to come out ahead without willfully walking into a place that will most likely get your character killed. This is the perfect tour-de-force of old school sensibilities and gaming and a hallmark example of an adventure written to bring out the best of why we love this genre of gaming.
Old School Death Metal Dungeoning
One thought I kept having was this adventure was like finding an old death-metal record by some band that no longer exists. And when you put the vinyl record on the turntable you are both terrified by the noises coming out of your stereo speakers but amazed by the genius of what this band was able to do with both what they had and the time this was made in.
One of the things I love is the unholy marriage between old-school mechanics and story. This place is infested by the undead, so you would think bringing a cleric or paladin along would activate easy mode, right? Well, it turns out an artifact, the holy grail of evil itself, is lying underneath the boggy fens and foggy moors of this place and it makes turning dead harder - sort of a home-field advantage for the undead team should you choose to venture forth in their domain. It is a small special rule, but this adds so much flavor to the place my heart sings along with the chorus of evil-dungeon master glee.
The excavation rules, the numerous bricked up walls and sealed off tombs, the ever-present "make a noise and we all die" sort of feeling where the noise of one encounter's combat could trigger the roll for another just gives this place an atmosphere leagues better than many of the "places of the dead" adventures I have ever read. The tombs force you to break through walls to explore and find the good stuff, and in doing so you could possibly seal your fate by the noise you make.
And there are optional insanity rules tool that turn this wonderfully crafted gem of player apprehension and terror into a Call of Cthulhu masterpiece where the halfling rogue you depend on for that backstab damage goes insane at just the wrong moment and runs away, only to fall into a bottomless pit to be gone forever, no save allowed. And in that moment you realize your party is doomed because you ventured too far in this time, the halfling was carrying all of your oil for the lanterns, and you won't have enough light to make it out of here without stumbling into more monsters or other traps.
It is like the beginning mission in the movie Aliens where the squad of space soldiers gets in way over their head and all hell breaks loose. Only here, this is old-school unforgiving rules like some insane rage-quit game and you laugh at the incredible stupidity of it the gory demise of the characters around the table and realize what you got into was all you and your group's fault.
Puritanical Sensibilities on the Tabletop
You know that feeling? Your greed put your characters here and they all paid for it.
There is that puritanical "you shall be judged for your sins" sort of feeling that runs through old-school games like the sermons of the 1980's equated tabletop-gaming with evil worship, and I love the morality play here. While gaming is not evil worship, this adventure paints a rather harsh and unforgiving lesson that greed knows no good end that actually meshes quite well with those fundamentalist teachings of yesteryear. To pursue greed is to pursue evil itself, as your character makes a selfish decision to save their own skin and run while leaving your friends behind as a terrifying horde of skeletons busts out of a sealed up wall and engulfs them all. Playing old-school games really gets you 'close to the metal' of morality and sacrifice, and it brings out that "what would you do" moral choices (good or bad) that I assume those preachers did not want young parishioners to make for themselves.
Moral choices. What would you do? Is gold and power worth a part of your soul?
It was funny because back in the day we bought our first copy of Dungeons and Dragons from a religious Christian bookstore. They likely sold it as a sort of a game that taught morals, good versus evil, and the hippie-like holy-rollers that ran the store were cool and probably used it as a teaching game to kids on how to make the right choices in life.
Do you kill a helpless goblin? Do you steal? Do you do what is right, or something that benefits only you? Do you abandon your friends in a time of need? I love that sort of feeling in B/X games, like the game allows you to make good and bad choices and you live with the results of your choices.
And the game doesn't tell you what choice to make.
You bring that to the table. Your faith and beliefs. Part of your character or not. And you live with the outcome. You can choose to live by your beliefs, or not, and see what happens in a safe environment of make believe.
I love those choices, because to see the faces of people that you thought you knew when push comes to shove and they shove the elf covered by green slime into the nearest pit of fire because they have no way of fighting the green slime once it devours the elf and then comes for them is priceless. And then the player who was playing the elf and the look on that person's face? Yes, priceless. Dude, I thought you were my friend! And you don't get those moments if the character design system creates characters too painful to lose, too enshrined as heroic icons, and a rules system that promises fairness and balanced play.
If I ran a Pathfinder game this way? I would get players who would never play with me again because some feel there is some unwritten contract of challenge level written into the rules they would point to and say I wasn't DM-ing the game right. I have seen this happen, and I see this "GM as DVD player" sort of design decision written into almost every modern pen-and-paper game that puts balanced story-based play ahead of a more harsh sandbox and brutal survival style of play that I love. To each their own, and if you have fun with a game please keep doing so - but hard player choices are what I love seeing in old-school games.
At what cost power? At what cost fame and fortune? How do you deal with limited resources, an ever-present dangerous world, and a ticking clock of death? I don't feel today's video-game inspired "story type games" get it, where layers of character protection, hours of iconic hero character-generation, and some assumed hidden contract of GM fairness can even tell a story like this. The new games really can't, and I feel old-school shines when you want this sort of experience. It is why some people love to read horror novels, and some people can't and won't.
To me, old-school gaming is the fantasy equivalent of Call of Cthulhu, but you don't need artificial insanity and horror rules for characters to give the game its sense of terror. If you run the game right, the players are the ones in terror and going insane with every door they open or wall they have to bust through. No game, besides Paranoia, comes close.
If at the end you can all laugh and say you had a good time, like walking out of a theater playing an intensely scary horror movie, the experience was all worth it and you all had fun. Maybe you stood with your friends. Maybe you stabbed them in the back. The game gave you that freedom, and since your characters were a bit more disposable and easy to create you could laugh about it and not feel three hours of character design time and backstory authoring were wasted.
That is why I play old-school games and B/X.
Devious Dungeon Design
I admit, I saw the words mega-dungeon and my stomach did a complete one-eighty. But this isn't your typical mega-dungeon, this is more a cross between B1 Keep on the Borderlands and the S1 Tomb of Horrors. It is a huge area with many small mounds and mini-dungeons that you can map and explore over an entire campaign. The secret is, without giving too much away, the mega-dungeon lies underneath this place and you could break into it at any time. There are entrances everywhere. You may not even know you are, in fact, since there are many smaller tombs (completely mapped) that can fool you into thinking "this is it."
There could be a mound you dig up that provides and unwitting entrance into a connected part of this evil place. You could find an entrance inside one of the mini-dungeons. A pit descending straight down into the earth could link to a part of this place. You could explore a part of the mega dungeon and think it was an unconnected mini-dungeon without even finding the secret door leading deeper in. You could stumble upon a collapsed entrance that with you magic and powers now never be able to dig through, but later at a higher level...
The ability to go in and out, map, explore, and get back to town without having to traverse through seventy previous conquered levels is the great strength to this dungeon. The farther you go overland towards the source of evil, the tougher the wandering monsters get, so the risk/reward and danger of taking the overland route is still very high - even for higher-level characters.
Also, there is a system in the appendices for creating random tombs of any size, large or small, deadly or empty, so the possibility of expansion is very high. A referee could drop his own version of the Tomb of Horrors right into this place as an add-on dungeon and players would never know better. A level underneath the Barrowmaze perhaps more deadly? A deep catacomb with insta-death traps right and left? A giant additional complex with its own story, yet connected to the overall theme? This is all possible, and the adventure as a framework for further sandbox-style fun is very high, which increases my love for this adventure even more.
Oh, and there are rules for restocking cleared rooms with new traps, monsters, and encounters over time. This is less a "burn through it" module than it is a complete campaign sandbox with a near-infinite level of re-use. Who knows, maybe the characters lost on a previous expedition show up as guest zombies and undead fiends on future runs. There is an organic level of re-use and a living dungeon feeling here that I love in a setting.
Campaign Support
We also get three towns and a campaign map with this adventure. Normally, this falls to the level of, "nice to have" but I feel there is something really important here. This is set in the fantasy campaign world of an area like Detroit is in our world. A run-down, hopeless, poor, broken down, forgotten place of end-of-the-Earth lost hopes and shattered dreams. The towns are infested by opportunists, grave-robbers, and thieves. The people that come to these fetid hovels are interested only in one thing - either stealing from graves of a lost civilization or getting rich off the fools who do so.
We have towns, maps, characters, portraits, and little backstories for all of them that tie them to this place. There are those you think you can trust, and those you shouldn't but have to. Watch your words, because that shop-keep you shared your plans with just may try to make a coin or two selling your plans out to the local bandits who prey on people like you and your merry band. You may stumble out into the fading light with that bag of 50 looted gold pieces and that bag full of potions into an ambush by eight good-old-boy local bandits with crossbows in their hands, greed in their eyes, and murder in their hearts.
There are factions lurking about, both connected to the town and also some of the denizens of the maze to worry about. There are secrets everybody holds. There are cults and cutthroats wandering the streets at night. There are hushed conversations happening when your merry band enters the tavern. Other parties of fools and grave-robbers wander about, doing the same exact thing you are doing. You may wander upon a camp excavating a tomb with workers led by happy-faced dwarfs and elves only to later go by this same camp and find them all dead or missing. Or worse, the entire lot of them turned into flesh-hungry ravenous zombies and they now wander the bog looking for living flesh upon which to feast.
If you subject the players to NPCs that seem perfectly normally busy, competent, and focused on one task and then end up as mincemeat for the unseen Blair Witch style evil that lurks out here you are doing a good job as a referee of this adventure. The farmer they buy cheap food from many times goes missing. The friendly group of nightwatchmen that guard the gate and always fight off the monsters chasing the party all end up dead one night. A shopkeeper who gives the party great prices and information suddenly refuses to deal with the party out of some fear. A mad traveling priest starts shouting at the players one night, saying they are going to get the town killed, and then he disappears without a trace.
Set up reliable NPCs and expectations early on, and then suddenly and slowly start taking them all away to instill a sense of terror and hopelessness in the players. This is not some static town you would find in a video-game to go restock supplies at and rest at the inn, the town and its people are an integral part of the horror and dread, and the actions players take have consequences. Raid the were-rat lair and get away? One night the were-rats show up and raid the town, NPCs are killed, and buildings are burned down (and stay down for the rest of the campaign).
What do you do?
Did you cause this with your actions?
There is enough room here for the referee to make their own factions, plots, and stories, and have them wander through the area. Some may interact with the players, some may not, or some may have what they did found later and the players wondering why or how did this happen?
Another group of "adventurers" may open up a tomb with something that shouldn't have been disturbed, getting themselves all killed and now a rot-mummy covered by deadly poisonous gas-spewing mushrooms wanders an area of the bog. You may not know what others did and wander into their stupidity. Others may trail you into the bog for nefarious reasons. They may get eaten alive, or survive long enough to turn on you when you wander out of a tomb battered and bruised. You may choose to be the bandits yourselves and enact some revenge upon them, only to incur the wraith of others.
Remember when I asked, "what would you do?" Yeah, that moral question comes up big time in the campaign aspect of this adventure when you deal with the town and the oft self-serving people that live here. Played right there is a whole lot of intrigue and backstabbing going on outside the dungeon, and that adds another layer of fun to this adventure and its surroundings.
Cons
This is expensive, even $30 for the PDF, but I chose for the book-plus PDF option and that is more than twice the price. There aren't many player maps, if those are important to you. This is really focused on the Labyrinth Lord system (and other B/X clones), so if you play other Pathfinder or D&D 5 type systems you will need to convert, and you may lose some of the danger and flavor.
You need to have players interested in old-school games, and because they can't read this adventure, they may not understand the excitement behind it (I admit the high cost here is a benefit because not many players would be willing to fork out this much to cheat). Again, you have to be good at communicating why they should play this over the more player-friendly and story-focused modern games, but you may be lucky and have a crowd of old-school fanatics ready and willing to be able to dive in and lose dozens of characters in an old-school romp.
To me, the creator of such a cool setting deserves to be rewarded, so I feel the cost is well worth it and contributes towards me supporting the hobby and those who create within it. I will get a lot more enjoyment out of this than a $70 AAA video-game, and I will have a physical book to read and enjoy for myself. If this inspires me I am happy to support it, and this does inspire me.
Other Stuff
There is an "illustration book" of S1-style pictures that can be printed and used as flavorful player handouts. There are also news spells and items in the book, plus an impressive collection of monsters - a 24-page mini-monster manual with pictures and statistics for each. You get pre-gen characters, plus a section covering rival adventuring parties. You also get a B/X and Labyrinth Lord 2-sided style character sheet that is absolutely to die for with beautiful art-filled borders and plenty of space to create your certainly doomed character with.
You get a complete random dungeon generator focused on creating these types of tombs, and a record and worksheet for each one you generate. The adventure encourages expansion with mini-dungeons of all sizes and levels, so the potential for supporting a wealth of unique user-generated content is very high. Make a low-level dungeon that stretches on for a dozen rooms. Make a mid-level deathtrap of secret rooms and deadly puzzles. Make a cultist headquarters. Make a bandit hideout overrun by were-rats. Make a high-level mini Tomb of Horrors style character killer dungeon with rewards and wealth worth chasing...but at what cost?
I Took a Chance on This...
...and I am happy I did. It rekindles my excitement for OSR games, and it gives me something that was written by fans for fans, and it shows an understanding of why we enjoy the games we do. No matter your flavor of OSR, be it B/X, Labyrinth Lord, or some other game, this one I feel is a keeper. This one is a keystone for me, something that makes me want to expand my OSR collection, buy books, and build a library of fun that I can enjoy and share with other players and fans.
More on this, hopefully soon, but I have a lot of reading and enjoyment myself diving into this book and discovering the contents inside. Don't ever discount that part of enjoyment, some of us just enjoy reading adventures for fun and imagining all of the possible dangers and stories within.
To get to play this some day? A dream for me, and I hope I can share my enthusiasm with the lucky group I get to run through this. That is what I feel drives our hobby, that love and enthusiasm for the games that we play, be it OSR or the more modern games. If you love it, play it and share it. I like the horror-movie feeling of OSR games, but I also appreciate the more movie-like experiences of the story-based modern ones as well. I have played a lot of modern games though, and to each their own, but discovering old-school games and adventures like this that appeal to that dark and dangerous horror-movie game side of our hobby?
That I get really excited about. This looks to be a lot of fun for months and months, and I can't wait to begin diving into it. Even if I can't I know I am going to enjoy reading this one and imagining all the possibilities.
Revised narrative system that powers Fantasy Flight's Star Wars role-playing games? Check.
Expensive dice? Check.
Dice app on my phone that does a faster, cheaper, and better job than the dice? Check.
But I still like the physical dice.
Generic system with a name that sounds like something Hollywood would slap on a movie franchise? Check.
Do we need another narrative storytelling system? Well, Fantasy Flight's game system that powers the Star Wars line was one we liked, and we could see using it for more than just the venerable and slightly culturally over-saturated franchise that we love.
Then again, I am still a fan of the old Expanded Universe, a work of so many different artists and creators that throwing it all away feels like trashing a shared creation that I grew up with and that defined my ideas of the franchise more than today's interpretations of a place that defined so many dreams and set the stage for so many role-playing adventures. It can be said the EU was defined by role-players and I feel was a more inclusive place for speculative fiction creators and game players alike.
So the game system we like gets a revision and a clean break from the licensed world. Was this something we always wanted to see?
Dedicated Fantasy World? Check.
This feels like a good break and evolution for the strong underlying system, and my initial reservations about "what do I do with this" were washed away when I heard that a companion volume, a fantasy world book covering the worlds created in Fantasy Flight's fantasy board games was being published this year called Realms of Terrinoth (covering Descent, Legacy of Dragonholt, Runebound, and Runewars).
Okay, we have a dedicated fantasy world with an admittedly strong and pedigreed line-up of source materials and games that were just begging to be explored and used as a base for storytelling. For me, it always feels better for a generic system to have some sort of 'official' setting for the game as it gives my investment a fall-back position in case the generic appeal wears off. And this feels like a good one since we were a fan of the Descent system and all the miniatures and games we played over the years. Color us interested and excited by this one, and to us, this at least has the same appeal of playing in a Warcraft style universe or even Warmachine.
The only problem is that I don't have this book in my hands yet, so I can't start diving in and planning some adventures. I do have some of the Descent boardgames, so that is a start, but I want to see what they do with a full-sized, dedicated rules-plus-world book with the production quality level that we saw with the Star Wars line.
Strong Fan Support? Check.
The second, and very surprising thing that attracts us to this game is the amount of fan-support this is getting from the Fantasy Flight forums themselves. There is a fifty-page free PDF of talents for character creation, fan-created worldbooks, conversion guides, character sheets, and other resources. This is a really great sign of community support, and it raises my excitement level for using this system (which we already like and are used to after our Star Wars sessions).
The level of excitement and fan support really is a cool thing to see. I like this because it gives me confidence that there will be enough of a fan base to support this as a dedicated product line going forward, and I hope we will see a lot of nice, high-quality supplements released in the future.
Book Quality? Looks Good.
I have heard some complaints about the art-style in the Genesys book, that the art in some way seemed unfinished and it has this sketchy, sort of drafting-table industrial arts look. I actually like this style for the book, as the line-art plus unfinished nature of the art tells me "you finish the story." You color this in, you tell your adventures, you make it happen, and you craft your world. the book itself feels high-quality, at least equal to the Star Wars hardcovers we have in this line, and I just get that intangible feeling of crafts-work and attention to detail when flipping through this that I like.
Narrative Dice
And this seems like a revised game built on the lessons of the Star Wars line as well, with a lot simplified, streamlined, and cleaned up. Yes, this is a generic game, but it has this "do anything" feel like a "DIY movie game toolkit" that appeals to me for certain genres that doesn't seem like it needs a lot of work to get started.
Yes, the dice are relatively expensive. And yes, you likely need two sets if you are serious here. I can see that as a problem for some players as we played with groups in the past who can't afford to spend that much on dice for a weekly game. The 5-dollar app-store app for both Android and iOS works well, and better than physical dice in some cases (when a lot of dice are being rolled and the app auto-tallies and sorts the result), so that is an option. If I had to play this with strangers or semi-regular groups I would take an old tablet, install the app, and leave that on the table for players to use if they didn't have dice. And no playing games or surfing the web on it either!
Part of why we like the system lies with the dice and how we liked they had this "macro" element to them in regards to storytelling. As a player, you could lay out a big course of action, such as, "I go to the red light district and start asking around if anyone saw the strange man in town with the scar on his eye and red cape." You make a Streetwise roll, and the dice not only determine success, they also direct the game master if anything else - good or bad - happened. Not only that, the possible good or bad related events also have their magnitude of goodness or badness all determined on the same roll.
Do the bad guys show up and try and stop you? Do you get a lucky break and find someone who knows something? Do you find the bad guy himself and get the jump on him? Do you wander into an ambush? Do you find another piece of information relating to something else you are looking into? Are you hot on the trail or following a dead end? Do you attract attention from other bad guys in the area? Does a street thief try to pickpocket you? Do you have a chance to assist a fellow citizen in need from a snatched purse? Does nothing happen and you get no where?
One roll - that first Streetwise roll - determines all that. You have to be able to 'read' the dice, but this is a skill that we found we picked up quickly for all the fun this interpretation delivers. You also have to be able to accept atomic success, where you do not let repeated Streetwise rolls force the issue, as letting players try and try again reduces the impact of each narrative result and practically guarantees success with that sort of 'take a 20' thinking.
You get your roll, this happens, and if you fail try something else. A good referee should be able to keep things from dead-ending, but I feel you have to make macro rolls like this mean something, good or bad, and not let players buffalo their way through a situation by letting them roll and re-roll the same skill until they get the result they desire, all while trying to ignore or minimize negative consequences.
We felt the game works better if you really celebrate the results and make them mean something. The minute you roll the dice repeatedly to get the result you want while ignoring negative consequences or minimizing positive results the game loses its charm. It pays here to aggregate, keep tries to one per skill, and really describe the result as best you can without picking up the dice to 'try again' or 'roll the dice to interpret or clear up the first roll'.
Let the dice stand. Let that course of action matter. If you fail, try something else.
The dice also scale pretty well into the micro, turn-by-turn combat style of roll, although we feel there is still a little bit of a macro feel to combat where you are not going blow-by-blow but more action-scene by action-scene and determining the winners and losers of each scene rather than 'this blow penetrated my right flank, hitting my plate torso guard and puncturing my spleen' sort of combat result.
To be fair, I need to read the game to see if there are any further clarifications to what we found worked well when we were playing Star Wars with this system, as I am sure there are some suggestions and directions in the game that they found and shared in this revision of the rules. But really, when you ask yourself, 'why play this game?' the dice and the wide variety of narrative results they produce should be considered. It is a vastly different experience than a d20 system when done right, and it is a huge part of the appeal of this system for us, more so than a simpler narrative system such as FATE or other generic games.
Though FATE has some cool dice too, especially the metal ones we collected.
More Soon...
This looks like a fun game, and I am looking forward to diving in and reading this from cover to cover. I like the system, my players have bought into this with Star Wars, and the idea of using the same narrative dice system for other games and worlds with that same action-movie vibe really has me excited. I was surprised by this, and my expectations were this was another game I would read for fun and eventually shelve, but my mind now is racing with possibilities and all of the adventures we could have and stories we could tell with this one.
That keeps this one on my table and the cover calling us to crack it open and find a world to explore. When the dedicated fantasy world comes out this year, hopefully soon, that will be a whole new world to explore that we are sort-of familiar with but entirely unprepared for - and that is an exciting thing as well. Overall, I am impressed with this one and very pleasantly surprised by both the quality and possibilities of this, along with how well the fans of this game stepped up to support it. Nicely done, and a game I am looking forward to play.
