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Some mini-reviews of the OSR Bundle of Holding (Bonus collection)

I'm pretty excited about a lot of the supplements and adventures in one of the latest Bundles of Holding. It's the 'Old School Revival - Revived' bundle, designed to help you run D&D-esque adventures.

I've only had a chance to skim-read these adventures and game systems but I'm very impressed with what I've read. The God That Crawls
This adventure by James Raggi promises to flip the normal 'adventures enter a dungeon and explore deeper' dynamic. I suspect that run with a consideration for limited light sources and movement, it would be nightmarish fun. Maybe Torchbearer would be the meanest system to run it in, but I'm also tempted by something like Beyond The Wall--where the contrast between YA protagonists and shambling pursuing horror would be really striking.

I also really like lots of the seemly incidental material in the dungeon. This place is dangerous and rewarding, quite apart from the central threat.

(This is completely against the intention of both this module and the rules system ... but I'm curious how this would play using Dungeon World.) The Monolith from Beyond Time and Space
There's about seven brilliant ideas in this adventure by James Raggi. In fact, I'm going to count them: ... There are nine ideas I'd describe as brilliant (including a meaty and central hook of the adventure: a nasty version of body-snatching), and many other ideas that could be brilliant depending on your personal taste.

This adventure is both a location and a resource for creating unnerving incidents. It would play really well as part of an ongoing campaign but it's also incredibly mean. You'd need either to have a totally accurate and insightful read of your gaming group's preferences or a conversation where you asked them if they were interested in introducing a high-horror, high-doom quotient into your game.

One reviewer accurately described it as the nuclear option: once you introduce this module, you are changing or condemning at least one of the PCs. In some ways it reminds me of the high-doom elements of the Call of Cthulhu moduel, A Dream of Japan. Vornheim - The Complete City Kit
Note: The author of Vornheim,  Zak S, was kind enough to give me permission to use his elegant and quick technique for creating random floorplans in Soth.

Vornheim is an incredibly useful guide to creating a city that feels alive while doing not much work at all. In some places, it's dense: the first few pages of notes are the sort of thing you either get absorbed in and read cover to cover, or you dip into for inspiration. As the book goes on, it continually changes its presentation, giving you:

The book ends with this insight:

In a wilderness or dungeon, the party’s adventure during any given session is defined by where they are geographically–in a volcano, in the southwest corner of a maze, at the bottom of a pit, etc.

In a city, this is less important, movement is freer, easier and more certain than in a dungeon and distances are shorter than in a wilderness. In a city, the party’s adventure is defined by where they are in a chain of consequences.

What’s most important, after a session, is not figuring our where the PCs left off, but who they pissed off getting there. The next session’s adventure can often be built from the consequences of what the PCs did during the last session

I'd love to combine this with Blades in the Dark and see what sticks together. The Adventurer Conqueror King system (ACKS)
I've wanted to read this for ages. I've been told ACKs is amazing at helping the group create a completely logical fantasy economy that facilitates adventurers moving from nomadic looters to aristocratic managers of a stronghold or realm. The heart of this seems to be in Chapter 7: Campaigns and Chapter 10: Secrets, which (on a skim read) appears to be an incredibly useful resource for constructing a campaign setting, the regions inside it, the starting city, and dungeons.

ACKS also has two neat tables in its combat system: for moral and permanent wounds, and for what happens if someone tries to revive you with magic.

I have to admit, I'm a bit lost when it comes to trying to evaluate:

I think the character or uniqueness of each system will have to reveal themselves in play. I've played Into The Odd, which was fantastic at getting me into an old-school mindset. But figuring out the specifics of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, ACKS, Beyond The Wall, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords and Wizardry will take a lot more time than I have at the moment. Stonehell Dungeon
This is a mega-dungeon by Michael Curtis. Six levels of low to moderate dungeon-ecological-logic, which Curtis describes as perfect for a weekend gaming marathon. It's presented as a toolbox where the elements of the dungeon can be easily customised and modified by a GM.

It also takes a lot of inspiration from the One Page Dungeon competition about how to compress a dungeon down to its essentials.  In the case of Stonehell, each part of the dungeon in a two-page spread.

I was only able to skim this but it looks totally fit for purpose to me.

Posted by Steve Hickey at 11:32 PM 

A review of the Bundle of Tentacles (the Bonus collection)

Here are some mini-reviews of games and adventures in the Bundle of Holding's latest offering of Cthulhu-related products. (I reviewed the Bundle's 'Starter Collection' yesterday.)

Money from this latest bundle goes towards the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which defends digital civil liberties.

Disclosure: my game Soth is in this bundle, so I'll financially benefit from sales.

In this post, I'll take a look at all the products in the Bundle's 'Bonus Collection':

Reading through these supplements and adventures I've seen examples of at least seven types of Call of Cthulhu adventure:
Between the Starter Collection and The Bonus Collection, there's more than enough material to create an anthologised Call of Cthulhu campaign.

You can find the Bundle of Holding here: https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Tentacles3

Here are some other things I noted about each of the supplements in the Starter Collection World War Cthulhu - The Darkest Hour World War Cthulhu - Europe Ablaze Tales Of The Crescent City A Dream of Japan

Posted by Steve Hickey at 5:05 PM 

A review of the Bundle of Tentacles (Starter Collection)

I wanted to share some first-impression mini-reviews of the Bundle of Holding's latest offering of Cthulhu-related products.

The Bundles of Holding collections raise money for charity and distribute profits to game designers. Money from this latest bundle goes towards the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which defends digital civil liberties.

In this post, I'll take a look at all the products in the Bundle's 'starter collection':

I'll look at the games in the bonus collection in another post, and then I'll choose one of the supplements to focus on in more detail.

In the meantime, here are some other things I noted about each of the supplements in the Starter Collection Cthulhu Live Island of Ignorance: The Third Cthulhu Companion Age of Cthulhu - The Long Reach of Evil Mythos Society Guide to New England

Posted by Steve Hickey at 4:02 PM 

Cartel: thoughts on prepping for the first session of a crime drama I ran Cartel last night, a game for telling crime soap operas in the spirit of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. It's set inside the world of Mexican drug cartels.

It was a really successful session -- successful enough that what I thought might be a one-shot is going to turn into at least a two session thing.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure this session hit the ground running. I combined Cartel's advice with my experiences running Monsterhearts at conventions and came up with this:

* clearly pitch the genre and set expectations for where the conflict will come from

* identify the fundamental conflicts for each playbook

* turn each player's selected playbook moves into a conflict or situation that needs to be dealt with

* enmesh the playbooks' NPCs into problematic situations

* turn the characters' histories with each other into active bits of the game's opening

By doing all of this, I created a list of bangs I could use if I needed to. I also created a list of bangs from the crime fiction I've been reading and watching (The Power of the Dog, Savages, Traffic).
Stuff like a drug shipment being observed by the DEA, a money mule taking off with cash you paid them in advance. That gave me a ready-made supply of bangs to introduce into the game if I needed them.

That took quite a lot of set-up time (maybe an hour?), but paid off brilliantly. When combined with the choices each player made about their characters and the series of botched beginning-of-session moves to set the scen, we had a lot of immediate trouble going on:

* Jolanda, the wife of the cartel boss, had a secret second family, which the DEA decided to use as blackmail to turn her into an informant. Pepa, a dirty cop and Jolanda's former lover, had to decide what to do with this information

* The two least-capable characters (Diego the street kid and Hector the meth cook) found themselves trapped in their underground meth lab as two enforcers from a rival cartel broke in to kill and rob them

In more detail, this is what I did:

When we sat down, I told the players that this is a crime soap opera, in the vein of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. You play the criminals and your lives will inherently be difficult, with competing demands from family, the cartel, and law enforcement.

As a soap opera, you should not play safe. Each playbook has sources of trouble embedded into it: you'll be expected to embrace that trouble.

Then I took a trick from how I like to run Monsterhearts at conventions. During character creation (especially when we're figuring out the histories between characters), I find the moments of crisis. Then I bring them up in play immediately. In Monsterhearts' supernatural romance, that's stuff like being seen watching a neighbour through a window or discovered over a dead body.

In Cartel, the histories are filled with situations like starting to deal with another criminal organisation, forming a plan to make some real money, and suspecting someone is undercover.

(I really hope there's an 'undercover' playbook. If not, I suspect I'll want to write one!)

Anyway, turning the histories into active bits of the game's opening are a great creative support for those initial scenes where everyone's finding their feet and the fiction's still coming alive. There are also a few options that aren't so appropriate for openings, but holding onto them for later created explosive scenes.

* Diego is high on pain-killers after getting shot in the meth lab and from injuring himself racing to get a gas mask when Hector created a toxic gas out of some leaking chemical. That's the worst time for him to meet his cousin Jolanda who wants him out of the business. Slapping, bribery and public screaming ensued in a crowded cafe while cartel enforcers watched the whole thing.

Of course, some of the playbooks have beginning of session moves that destabilise things too. The boss finds out if they're in control of their territory or whether there's trouble brewing. In our session, we had the meth lab break down, the cop fail to find out that the police are moving in on the cartel, and the cartel boss lose control of his territory which triggered a robbery.

The playbooks also contain three other elements it'll be essential to draw on (and these are either directly stated or implied by the rules):

* The basic concept of the playbook: if you've chosen it, you'll want to deal with the conflicts inherent in it. A halcon may have to deal with someone short-counting them, a sicario will have to enforce the jefe's will.

* the moves each player selects: I've started listing those moves out, and finding ways to dramatise them into a conflict or situation that needs to be dealt with

* the NPCs: most of the playbooks have some great NPCs you can enmesh into problematic situations. Making a note of those and then either bringing them into the game or having them make conflict-generating off-screen actions will be essential.

We ended the game with three crises unfolding:

*The street kid with ambitions to move up the chain of command had just gotten together with his gang to snatch one of the military-trained enforcers from the rival cartel

*The hitman had followed the cook who's been kidnapped by enforcers from a rival cartel. He's about to shoot his way into a rescue.

* The cartel boss had just learned (from the dirty cop) that his wife was going to inform on him, just as she had seduced one of his enforcers to let her into the boss' office to search for information.

---   ---   ---

How would you prep for a game of Cartel or for a convention session of an Apocalypse World hack?
Posted by Steve Hickey at 9:18 AM Labels: gameprep


The Warren: First Impressions and preparing to play tonight

I've been interested in running The Warren (formerly Lapins and Lairs) for a couple of years. It's a game inspired by Watership Down and other 'intelligent rabbit' stories.

Hopefully I'll get to take it for a spin tonight. I've already had a quick read through it and it seemed well organised and logical. Now I'm going to dig a bit deeper. I'll post comments as I go, reflecting on the game.

I'll link, here, to any actual play write-ups or reviews that I do.

The Warren is being kickstarted right now.

Posted by Steve Hickey at 11:51 AM 


Psi*Run: Actual Play

We played Psi*Run last night (I was GMing).

You play ‘Runners’: amnesiacs with super-powers. The game begins with you escaping … and you’re being chased by a shadowy organisation (the ‘Chasers’). The game has a tension between whether the Chasers will capture you or whether you’ll answer enough questions about your past to be able to escape them.

The players all commented on Psi*Run’s brutal, brilliant resolution system. One player said it gave him the opportunity to fail in five different ways on the same roll. Another player said it was so good, it should be in many many more games: he saw it as a worker-placement mechanic.

I’m a huge fan of modern, urban chases, so in terms of Colour this game was pretty easy to GM. I applied a lot of setting details from my recent trip to Auckland: a crash on the beach near the Mission Bay clubbing district, nosy beach-living neighbours, a guard dog from the awesome B&B we stayed at (who was turned into a cuddly zombie by the misapplication of empathic projection powers).

Runners were separated from each other. One of them turned a few drinking teenagers into a kill-squad through switching his danger sense from passive to active mode.

What I learned as the GM

This is a game I feel like I should be able to GM well, but I need to apply a few techniques to in order to make it easy and fun for me.

Throughout it, though I felt like I needed to create more sources of GM antagonism in the story. Without constant tension, there are few reasons for the players to make dice rolls (which create jeopardy and advance the game). Some of the rolls I called for felt a bit arbitrary to me.

Anyone, some potential sources of antagonism include:

I also felt that ‘Advance the Chasers’ needed to be a GM move: if there's a pause in the game and the players turn to the GM expecting them to say something, advance the chasers by one location. (And the same for if the characters don't move at all: there’s a paragraph about this in the game, but it’s not specific.)

Another thing I’d do differently next time: each Runner has questions they need to answer about themselves. I should've drawn on those questions when they were read out for the first time, writing them down as potential situations to throw the Runners into.

A few rules questions

(Psi*Run is available here. It’s Game 28 in my Play 51 Games in 2015 challenge.)
Posted by Steve Hickey at 1:03 PM 


Undying: a hyper-focused vampire RPG about power (review)

Undying by Paul Riddle is a diceless RPG about vampires. It's on Kickstarter at the moment, with a couple of days to go.

Undying is about vampires as predators

It's natural to compare Undying to White Wolf's Vampire or Urban Shadows. However, Undying is a simpler game, focused on two aspects: preying on humans and the way predators fight each other for dominance.

Here are some exercepts from the rules that establish what it's about:

"You are a predator: a vampire who stalks human prey in the night, feasting on their blood. ... Predators are misanthropic, but not solitary. They are a pack of wolves.

"[In this pack of predators], the most cunning and ruthless is the alpha. All predators envy that power and prestige. Each hopes to one night rule the pack. Thus, from the greatest predator to the least, all are embroiled in a ceaseless conflict of intrigue and bloodshed.

"Game play revolves around brief periods of intense conflict, where old rivalries and new slights spark an inferno, and long stretches of intrigue, where intricate plots are set in motion. ... During the course of one or two sessions, the PCs experience tumultuous events initiated by a galvanizing crisis. The story unfolds hour-by-hour, night-by-night until the conflict resolves with a new status quo."

Undying's simplicity also comes from the way there are only a few 'dials' to keep track of: humanity, blood, debts (to other vampires), and status (relative to other vampires). Coupled with a fast moving conflict resolution system to deal with violence and with interfering in another vampire's plan, Undying looks like it will play quickly and create nasty conflicts of interest between the characters. Predators are not inherently sympathetic characters

I initially thought this game would be perfectly tailored to my tastes. I like the idea of vampire conflicts (both political and physical), and the relationships between vampires over decades and centuries.

This game deals with that time-frame: it divides the action into 'nightly play' where a conflict is resolved, and 'downtime play', where years can pass in a few minutes of real-time, vampires execute a long-term plot or strategy, and a new crisis is created. That new crisis becomes the basis for another round of nightly play.

It's a well-executed structure for a game.

However, I had a really unsettling reaction to the character creation section. The game's playbooks (character classes) are things like the Devil, the Nightmare, the Puppet-Master,

Reading them, I recoiled and went "I don't like most of these archetypes". As in, when I'm reading/watching fiction involving these sorts of characters, I think of them as the 'enemy'. After reflecting on what I liked about the Vampire games I played in the 90s, I realised I liked seeing new vampires caught between their old human society and the new and alien vampire society. Tested loyalties, tough choices, terrible mistakes in ettiquette and alliances.

So, Undying is nailing its vision of play: these characters in this situation aren't wish-fulfilling gothic superheroes. They are predators ... and they prey on humans and on each other.

The closest match in fiction I can think of to what a game of Undying looks like is the vampire plot in the first Blade movie. You focus on the soap opera of the entitled and ambitious vampires, screwing with each other for dominance.

The GM prep advice seems perfect for engineering these sorts of situations.﻿ Undying is really about power

Thinking more about why I was alienated, I realised characters in Undying still have 'humanity' (which varies between 0 to 3). So, despite each playbook's theme, you're able to be human inside that

And each playbook showcases one way of handling power.

That opened my eyes. The game is about power, and now I can see other playbooks in that space that I'd love to have in a game of Undying.

I've written more about my thoughts on Undying here. It's a brilliantly-crafted game. I can only imagine the amount of playtesting that's gone on in order to focus on its core so successfully. I'm looking forward to playing it.
Posted by Steve Hickey at 9:52 AM Steve Hickey

Editor of Monster of the Week. Showrunner: lovebites. Writer/Director: hopeless. Governance consultant.
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