review: Weird West

By: Unknown on 09:23

So, hey, this is pretty cool.  Weird West is a tiny little RPG with just enough rules to bootstrap a one-off game or mini-campaign filled with spookiness and cowboys.  There's no setting fluff or sample adventure here, but scenario ideas are easy to come by.  Just take your favorite Western movie or TV show and add a vampire or witch doctor or somesuch.  Or rewrite an old X-Files episode for the year 188x. Personally, I'd probably steal from one of the mid-eighties Incredible Hulk issues penned by Bill Mantlo.  As I recall many of those are Western drifter-type stories but instead of the Man With No Name in Texizona, they're the Jade Giant in some weirdo dimension.

Anyway, one dollar American will buy you the one page PDF, which you then print out and origami-ize into an eight page booklet, PocketMod style.  The result is a rulebook you can literally store in your wallet.  I think it's super-great that Stuart Robertson picked this format, especially for a non-D&D game.  The PocketMod D&D variants I've seen make it clear to me that 8 micropages are insufficient for a useful range of full blown Gygaxian building blocks like spells and magic items and monsters. But anyone with a fondness for a non-D&D genre of RPGs and a desire to write a short and sweet ruleset should check out Weird West. Stuart does a great job of working in the format.  The main text is readable, the headers are in a cool font that works when scaled down, the layout is clean and efficient.  I'd love it if 20 people read Weird West and were inspired to do their own PocketMod niche game.

I've only got two very minor nitpicks with this game.  One of the things you do during chargen is pick a "path": Adventurer, Gifted, Fighter or Magician.  Adventurer, Fighter and Magician are easy to wrap my head around.  Gifted works as a sort of half-Fighter/half-Magician hybrid, which is a-okay.  But the term "Gifted" itself just doesn't say anything useful to me.  I wish it had a better name.  The other thing is that the lists (weapons, sample dice tests, what happens when you run out of hitpoints) are ordered weirdly.  Instead of finding what I need immediately, my search is slowed and I start thinking about what the heck is wonky with this table rather than what I wanted to look up.

Still, for one page/8 tiny pages Weird West gets the job done admirably. Previously, if someone said to me "Hey, let's play a game with gunslingers and zombies" I would have reached for Savage Worlds, but now I think Weird West would do the trick.

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your cowboy game needs this

By: Unknown on 06:48

If you run a wilden west game or something like Victorian-era Cthulhu, then you totally need to get a copy of Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information 1889. Not only is this baby one of the best oddball reference books I have ever seen, but it provides an interesting perspective on the aspirations of the middle class in late 19th century America. Want to flesh out a dude from back East? Here's a great place to start.

There's so much haphazardly crammed into these 148 pages, it's pretty much the Dungeon Masters Guide for magnificently mustachioed white anglo-saxon protestants. (Speaking of W.A.S.P. and cowboys, 'Blackie Lawless' would be a fabulous name for a bandito.)

Stuff you can easily swipe for your game:


Sample business letters (p26-27) - for capturing the proper tone when providing a lead to the PCs via correspondence

Detecting counterfeit money (p32-36) - usage obvious

How to be handsome (p39-41) - dubious cosmetic advice to inflict on lady-type NPCs

How to make artificial gold (p43) - also how to tell the stuff is fake

Business law (p43-44) - i.e. ways to trick the PCs

Durability of a horse (p46) - practical numbers for hauling cargo

Certain Cure for Drunkeness (p47) - iron sulfate, magnesium, peppermint and nutmeg.  Who knew?

Twenty Choice Dinner Menus (p49-50) - Invite the PCs to a fancy dinner party, roll 1d20

Value of Old American Coins (p51) - Treasure!

And the list goes on and on.  There are lots of home remedies and recipes to puzzle over, some obviously incomplete  (e.g. how long do you bake this cake?).  I've made the pickled eggs several times, much to the chagrin of most of the folks I've foisted them upon.  The "Themes for Debate" section gives a good sense of the concerns and goings-on of the day.  The title of the last section is "Twenty Thousand Things Worth Knowing", which takes up all of 18 and a half pages.

Seriously, this is one of my all-time favorite books.  It just oozes this lovely combination of audacity and quaintness.  You remember how at the end of the 1960 film version of The Time Machine they notice that the protagonist took three books with him when he left to re-educate the Eloi?  Barkham Burroughs' tome simply has to be one of the three.  The universe wouldn't make sense otherwise.

I adore my hardcopy, but you can check out an electronic version on Project Gutenberg.

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review: The Cursed Chateau

By: Unknown on 05:11

So yesterday I picked up a copy of The Cursed Chateau from my friendly local game store.  This puppy's a 48 page slightly-larger-than-digest sized adventure written by the man who is single-handedly ruining the old school scene, James Maliszewski.  Or did that title pass to Zak while I was at Gary Con?  No one keeps me in the loop about these things.

Anyway, The Cursed Chateau is your basic haunted house sort of affair, the kind pretty much just as home in Call of Cthulhu as D&D.  There's a couple levels of spooky Scooby-Doo mansion and an underground level filled with lurking Things Best Not Disturbed By Man.  It's a stock set-up that I adore, but since it's so cliche I figured I'd quickly flip through this book and throw it on top of my ever-growing pile of OSR type stuff.  Instead, I ended up reading the whole dang thing in one sitting.  I don't do that with many adventures.

What I like most about The Cursed Chateau is the fact that all the key undead have just enough background attached to them to make the haunted house theme work.  If a wraith shows up in the dungeon and it's just another turn undead roll followed by fight or flight, that's just another day's work.  Make that wraith into Rixende the Maid and give her an awesome Erol Otus illo (page 24) and suddenly you have the makings of a memorable encounter.  The devil's in the details and Jamie Mal supplies plenty of deviltry.

And you know I'm a complete sucker for the two page random haunting table.  Boo!

I've only got two minor gripes with this book.  First, the cover makes me a little nuts.  I knew this product existed and asked my local store owner to order me a copy.  Had I just walked into some random game joint and saw this on the shelf I never would have picked it up.  While I've gone on record as being against mimicking TSR's old trade dress, at least that's a clear signal that a book might be of interest to me.  The Cursed Chateau looks to me like it might be a White Wolf product.  I got nothing against the World of Darkness other than the fact that I have zero interest in playing any of those games.  Nothing on the cover tells me this book is for D&D.  Since I already own the book, I've already probably wasted more words on this nitpick than is worth it.  I just want other publishers to keep in mind that if you're going to put your book into distribution you need to make sure I can pick your product out of a police line-up.

Gripe number two is a slightly bigger deal.  As written, the Chateau has one of those "Oh no!  You're locked inside and can't escape!" gimmicks.  I don't mind that at all, but I've seen that sort of thing really push some players' buttons.  DMs who think they might have such folks at their table might want to consider dropping that whole angle or toning it down somehow (stuck inside until the next sunrise, perhaps).  There's freaking the players out and then there's freaking the players out, you dig?

Still, I'd probably use the adventure as is, I just wouldn't push the players too hard towards it.  My reaction to the entire set-up is a bit like how I see James Raggi's hardcore stuff: The Cursed Chateau might work best as the sort of thing you just drop into a wilderness hex.  Then throw out a couple of rumors in the middle of some other endeavors and let the players doom themselves at their own pace.

You should be able to get your own copy of The Cursed Chateau from your own local game store.  Or publisher Rogue Games will be happy to sell you a print or e-book copy.

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Two From Tejas

By: Unknown on 17:23

One of the weird side effects if operating this blog is that people occasionally send me stuff in the mail. Whatever they send is usually completely awesome, so I end up passing that info on to all you nice folks. Here's two items I've gotten recently, both originating out of the Lone Star State.

Imagine if D&D starred hillbilly anthropomorphic swine. That's Hawgbilly! in a nutshell. Stephen Colbert recently noted that the only people left in America you can make fun of are the hillbillies. Transforming the stereotypical Appalachian provincals into furries adds enough distance that you can hoot n' holler without guilt. Whether that's a good thing I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

The mechanics of Hawgbilly! are straightforward, but nothing to write home about. You assign some dice to the pools Brawn, Pep, Purty, Lit and Smarts. When you do things you roll your pool and the Damn Pinkerton (that's the GM) rolls 3d6 against you. Combat is slightly more complicated, as with most role playing games I care about. Character classes include the Ornry Scrapper, Witch, Moonshiner, Yokel and Goomer Doctor. A lot of the fun in this game comes from the cheesy spells, wonk magic items and goofball monsters, all written in faux hill-speak.

For 32 digest sized pages, Hawgbilly is a hoot. Any bigger and the running joke would get tiresome, but as it is I dig it a lot. If I ran this puppy I'd probably start out with a quest to get the moonshine still back from a cave full of creepy-crawlies. You can get Hawgbilly! from Noble Knight or direct from author Clem Hoofer.

Verdict: Recommended for anyone who wants to yell "Tarnation!" or something like that while seated at their game table.

If you had asked me a couple of days ago I probably would've told you the hobby doesn't need another zombie apocalypse survival horror RPG. But I was wrong. The Dead is an awesome addition to the field. The mechanics are a roll dice pools for successes sort of affair, which I normally don't dig. But the rest of the game is so good I don't care. The task system whereby players narrate their successes may annoy some GMs, but that rule is easily ignored and the rest of the game holds together. Other slightly hippy-dippy mechanics involves getting the players involved in fleshing out the campaign map ("Over here is the gun shop my crazy survivalist uncle owns.") and getting bonus dice by defining relationships among the players (My PC and Bob's PC are beer buddies, so we get extra dice when trying to save each other. That sort of thing.). The simple rules for being scared and going psycho are just enough mechanical oomph for the horrors of zombie apocalypse without trumping player volition.

All in all, I'd rank The Dead right up there with Zombi or Dead Meat as a great rules-light approach to zombie horror action. And the production values are top notch. Seriously, designer Kreg Mosier managed to do something that many much bigger companies have totally choked on: he put his text in front of various gray graphical elements and I can still read the rules! Also, it's neat to see someone using MagCloud for their print publishing. The Dead proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that MagCloud is a viable alternative to Lulu for print-on-demand gamebooks.

Verdict: Recommended for anybody interested in the zombie horror genre.

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The Dungeon Alphabet

By: Unknown on 06:01

At Wednesday night's game I was able to pick up my copy of Mike Curtis's The Dungeon Alphabet.


Let me run down the basic facts:

• A 26 point guide for pimping out your dungeons
• Kickass random die charts on damn near every page
• Chock full of awesome art by Otus, Roslof, Holloway, Mullen and others
• Only $9.99!
• In distribution, so you can get it from your local game store.

This book is very nearly perfect. I only have two nitpicks. 1) Not every page is numbered, to allow full bleed on the larger illos. 2) Too much white space on pages 40 and 43. A couple more chart entries could've been squeezed in there.

Even with those two gripes I still feel confident saying that every GM fond of random die charts and dungeon adventures should own The Dungeon Alphabet, no matter what system you use. Get in contact with your local store owner to order a copy. If you don't have a local store you can get it from Paizo, Amazon or straight from Goodman Games.

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five links, nano-review edition

By: Unknown on 17:05

Malevolent & Benign - You'd think I'd be really into a book full of shiny new 1st edition monsters, but this thing is just too wordy. Every time I go to read the fluff on one of these monsters I keep thinking Dave Hargrave of Arduin fame could've fit four times as many awesome critters in the same space. But if you like deep background info on your monsters, this may be right up your alley.

The Grinding Gear - Another absolute gem from Jim 'worst attitude in the OSR' Raggi. Like Death Frost Doom before it, this is a great item to drop onto your sandbox hexmap. Just leave it there, lurking menacingly, for some poor bastard PCs to stumble into. Things I wish I had thought of first: dead rats on the wandering monster charts. Like most of Raggi's best work, only get this one if you like material that demands that you DM outside your comfort zone.

X-plorers - I need another sci-fi RPG like I need a third bunghole, but I'll be darned if this doesn't look like a hoot. Remember how that old TSR chestnut Star Frontiers was basically Traveller for the Basic/Expert D&D kids? X-plorers is in the same conceptual territory, but I think it does a better job of it. If you like the mechanics of Swords & Wizardry look no further for your new favorite game about laser beams.

Adventure Games Publishing - The booklets that James Mishler has released recently are all sorts of awesome. I like Curses & More Curses and 100 Encounters & Treasures: Level 1. And Guide to the World of the Wilderlands is both a great campaign overview and a great format to rip off when writing an overview for your own setting. Monster Menaces Compendium 1-5 has the same wordiness of Malevolent & Benign above, but it also contains rules for the Chupacabra and the Rocktopus. It's hard to be dissatisfied with any book that brings that kind of radical-osity to the table.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls - One of the best things to come out of the old school hullabaloo. If dungeons are your bag, get a copy. Highest recommendation. 'Nuff said.

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so this is pretty awesome

By: Unknown on 04:48

Every once in a while the folks who publish games come out with something so suited to my idiosyncratic tastes that I can only assume they're making it specifically for me. Case in point: the new book Klingon Armada. Dan Kast takes his excellent Starmada spaceship minis rules and applies them to the alterna-Trek universe of Star Fleet Battles. To me that is so like peanut butter and chocolate that I never thought it would come to pass. Starmada is either the best or second best starship minis game I've ever encountered, Full Thrust being the other competitor for the top spot. The Starmada Compedium is one of my favorite game books ever. I own three copies, for frig's sake! Meanwhile, the Star Fleet Universe takes The Original Series and makes it bigger and more militant, so as to justify more and larger space battles. Kapow!

It's not a completely flawless book. I was hoping for a ship silhouette on the spaceship stat cards. And while the mini-campaign in the book is aces, an additional scenario or two (especially a training fight) would be nice. Stats for Tholian ships without web-shooters is just plain weird. And I don't understand why PDFs of the ship cards are six bucks at e23 rather than a free download. For six bucks I would expect to get the whole dang game, the hard copy is only seventeen. Still, as a launching point for seeking out new lifeforms and new civilizations and then blowing them straight to hell, this book totally works.

If you like SFB or the old FASA Trek ship game but want something sleeker and better suited to bigass fleet actions, I heartily suggest checking out Klingon Armada. Get it from your friendly local game store or buy one here. Or before you buy, check out this free download of the basic Starmada rules that Klingon Armada is built upon.

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Review: Obregon's Dishonor

By: Unknown on 14:50

Obregon's Dishonor is the first standalone adventure for Geoffrey McKinney's moral-panic-inducing Supplement V: Carcosa. (Other published supplementary material include an adventure in Fight On! #4 and the free downloadable, The Carcosan Grimoire). Cameron DuBeers, author of Obregon's Dishonor, sent me a complementary review copy. I had planned on buying a copy, but I like free stuff as much as the next guy so I took up his offer to swap a copy for a review here at the ol' Gameblog.

Anyway, Obregon's Dishonor is 36 pages of adventure for 6 to 8 characters levels 4 to 6. That's a level a number based upon Carcosa PCs, so if you want to use this adventure with regular elves and clerics and stuff you might want to aim a little lower.

At its heart the adventure uses the standard Dungeon & Nearby Town format, with a purple-skinned cyborg amazon serving as the Mysterious Stranger that sends the PCs off on their quest. My biggest beef with the module is the assumption that said lavender robobabe will accompany the party on the adventure. In the official novelization she'd clearly be the main character of the story. That leaves the referee stuck between the rock of overshadowing party autonomy and the hard place of playing an ass-kicking super-chick as a the bionic sexpot who lets the PCs do all the thinking and fighting.

Something that might put off some folk is how sexed up this purple lady is. The text makes sure to let you know how hot she and that she'll flash some cleavage during negotiations with the party. Later she'll sleep with one or more willing members of the party. Finally, her last scene in the story involves her clever scheme to defeat a Cthulhoid menace by taking off all her clothes and giving the shambling thing a massive woody. And I could see some folks not digging on the fact that the author takes the time to point out the dark purple coloration of her nipples and labia. Personally I find all that ridiculously ignorable and much less of a problem than the fact that there is this bigass plot that this NPC is such a key factor in.

One other slightly annoying thing is that the entrance to the dungeon is in room 22. Am I the only one who expects the first room of the dungeon to be labeled Room 1? Anyway, the dungeon itself seems pretty serviceable. It's a one level affair that seems a little heavy on 'holy crap! that's a lot of bad guys!', but I can totally work with it. There's one room that if mishandled by the players can kill them all and utterly wreck the dungeon. I like that a lot. It shows the designer isn't afraid to let the situation spin wildly out of control.

I also have one organizational issue. Before the dungeon is a great description of the Nearby Town, its history and the important players in local politics. This is good stuff. But it should be right next to the key to the town map that appears in the back of the book. Instead, the dungeon sits between these two sections.

The last four paragraphs might give you the impression that there's a lot to bitch about in this module, but I actually really like a lot of what's going on here. The dungeon looks like a fun romp and the town has more going on than most such backwater adventuring bases. I would totally run this module either as a one-shot or part of a larger Carcosa campaign. And I'd consider running the town and dungeon in another setting, though I'd probably chuck the plotline. If you choose to follow the plot, there's a neat little dilemma at the end and the possibility of a mass combat. Also, it's totally cool to see someone else's take on a corner of the weird world of Carcosa. Finally, the dungeon was built by beer-swilling atheist monks. How cool is that?

So despite a few oddities and flaws, I recommend Obregon's Dishonor to folks running Carcosa or people willing to do some work to make a fun little adventure fit into their home campaign. The print version is sold out, but you can buy the PDF from Brave Halfling Publishing.

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Mini-review: Points of Light II

By: Unknown on 18:25

Last week my copy of Points of Light II: The Sunrise Sea arrived at my friendly local game store. The first volume of Points of Light stands out as one of the great game books to come out in '08. Which really says something given that '08 was a banner year for neat-o gaming stuff. Rob Conley improves on the basic sandbox formula so excellently employed in the first volume.

Once again, the game mechanics are treated with a light touch. For benefit of 4e players the monsters are described as things like "4d12 giant crayfish (level 4 skirmisher)". I don't know what mechanically distinguishes a skirmisher from a controller or a brute, but it's no harder to ignore than similar oddness in old crap I use all the time, like the Arduin Grimoires. If you can't figure out on your own that Level 4 Skirmisher probably 4 Hit Dice then you should probably steer clear of third party materials in general.

In addition to PoL II have just plain more material (64 pages worth, up from 48 in the original), I'm really digging on the diifferent settings. The first one works as a fantasy version of the colonization of the New World, while another has a great potential for chopping through lost jungles with machetes, and a third is a bunch of islands begging for maritime adventure in the vein of Sinbad or Odysseus. And holy crap! The final setting is a giant ass volcano full of evil. It's almost like Conley wrote that one just for me.

So I give Points of Light II a heart recommendation. Not only is the material excellent but it looks just as easy to drop into a campaign as the original volume. I plan on using at least two of the PoL II sandboxes in my own home campaign.

You can get your copy of Points of Light II: The Sunrise Sea from your local game retailer or at the Goodman Games online store.

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Review: Delving Deeper - Gnome

By: Unknown on 03:52

John Adams of Brave Halfling Publishing was kind enough to send me a copy of his outfit's new PDF for Labyrinth Lord-playable gnomes. Delving Deeper - Gnomes is a three page PDF written by Luke Fleeman with the cover by Jason Braun. Since the first page is the neat cover by Mr. Braun and the last page is the Open Game License, we're only talking about one page of gameable content. Even at 75 cents for the download some people might find it hard to swallow paying for such a small dose of gaming material. Personally, I don't find cost per page analyses to be very useful. Either I need a page full of gnome stats or I don't and either this particular product helps my game or it doesn't. At under a buck the cost is so close to free I just don't consider it a relevant issue. But I got a comp copy, so what do I know?

The gnome as presented by Mr. Fleeman gives an operational framework that includes both of the mechanical aptitude of the tinker gnome archetype and the illusionist magic of the pre-Dragonlance era version. The mechanics are straightforward, relying on previously established LL/D&D norms. I like the class. It's simple enough to be used for NPCs and I would definitely try it as a player. In fact, I think I like this incarnation of the gnome more than any other version I've seen to date.

I do have three little issues with this product. First is the XP chart. Per Fleeman gnomes need 4,065 experience points to get to second level. That's the same as an Elf run under Labyrinth Lord. I just don't buy the implication that the two classes are equivalent in power. The Elf is better than the Gnome in in terms of hit points, spell ability, armor usage and attacks. My gut tells me these disadvantages are not offset by the gnomes mechanical ability, 90' infravision or better saves. The point is debatable, but the XP chart was a definite WTF? moment for me.

The second issue that may annoy some people is that the Delving Deeper version of the gnome doesn't interact with the gnome as presented in the Labyrinth Lord rulebook. Gnomes in LL are creatures of base 1d8 hit dice and leader types of up to 4HD ability. None of these NPC gnomes have any spell abilities, so it is impossible to stat up baseline LL gnomes with this class. I don't consider that a huge issue, but I wouldn't have minded a second page (or even half a page) with rules and XP chart for more fighterish gnomes like in the main rulebook.

Finally, that 90' infravision I mentioned before bugs me a little. In my games I try to take dungeoneering seriously and just handing out infravsion that's 150% better than standard to some pudknocker illusion jockies rubs me the wrong way. I doubt it would screw up things up, but I don't like messing with dungeon operations without clear signs that the implications have been thought through.

None of these issues is a dealbreaker for me. As I said, I like this class. I would have no problem using it in my campaign, though I would do so in the form of additional rules to supplement the pre-existing version of the gnome. So in my campaign world the Delving Deeper rules would describe a magic-using subset of the overall gnome population. I haven't decided yet whether to update my "How to Make a PC" handout to include gnomes or not, but the very fact that I'm considering doing so is a pretty positive sign.

You can get your own copy of Delving Deeper - Gnome and lots of other cool Brave Halfling Publishing products at their YourGamesNow page or at the Old School Renaissance.

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Zine Review: Iridia #51

By: Unknown on 06:03

So the day before yesterday I got this envelope in the mail from someone in Beverly Hills, California. “Other than the Clampetts and the gang at the Peach Pit, who the hell do I know in Beverly Hills?” was my immediate reaction. Inside the envelope I found a little booklet with a cover depicting a wounded sword-jockey and a buxom adventuress. Well that looks right up my alley! Turns out that Christian Walker, zine publisher and Gameblog reader, lives up in the Hills of Beverly. Christian very kindly sent me a complementary copy of his zine about RPGs and minis both old and new, as the tagline on the cover says. Thanks, man!

Issue #51 of Iridia contains 20 digest-sized pages of unpretentious gaming goodness divided amongst three articles. The first article is part of an ongoing series called Iron Rations, all about stuff drawn from an old Basic D&D campaign of Mr. Walker’s. This particular installment is a mini-dungeon, a long-abandoned dwarven waystation now serving as the lair of some minions of Chaos. The map is clean and all the room descriptions are straightforward. There’s a little more italicized fluff narrative than warrants an adventure this size and in a couple of places I can’t tell if the sconces on the walls are supposed to have lit torches in them or not. I don’t consider either issues a dealbreaker; the former is ignorable and the latter is easily handled by on the fly by any self-respecting referee. I like this little adventure site enough that I plan on dropping it pretty much as-is onto my sandbox hexmap.

The second article is a well-detailed write-up of an alchemist shop done for D&D 3.5. The neat thing is that I could probably get a lot of use out of this article as well. I’m amused by the slightly perverse idea of putting an alchemist capable of making tindertwigs and thunderstones into a Labyrinth Lord game. Sure, the two lurching statblocks are mostly wasted space for my purposes, but the adventure hooks, good descriptions and detailed floorplan more than make up for the mechanical rubbish. One excellent bit is that Christian tells us where the alchemist goes to empty the ol’ chamberpot. For all the ancient sewer dungeons appearing in fantasy gaming, you rarely get details like that. I’ve long argued that D&D needs more poop in it. Finally, someone who agrees!

The last section of the zine is an introductory adventure for Twilight: 2000. How many of those do you see nowadays? It’s probably been 20 years since I played T2000 and odds are pretty good I’ll never play it again, but I still like what I see here. There’s a couple quick firefights with Soviets, at least one solid role-playing opportunity, stats for a commie armored car, and a couple sound ideas for future adventures. It would probably take me all of ten minutes to change this thing into an Encounter Critical scenario involving a land war between the Ape Sultans and the Steel Warlords or something like that. The AK’s become tommy guns, the armored car turns into a Damnation Van with a protonic spearlaunch turret, the PCs’ humvee transforms into a diabolic ’57 Chevy powered by the crooning spirits of damned lounge singers, etc.

Finally I’m really impressed with the production values. Sure, this is a little saddle-stapled black-and-white amateur affair, but the layout is sound and the artwork better than I’ve seen in some commercial outings. And no typos or grammatical errors leapt out at me as I read. The closest thing to a miscommunication that I found was an NPC in the Twilight 2000 scenario that’s labeled Dr. So-and-so in one sentence, then Lt. So-and-so in the next. The character in question is a both a lieutenant in the army and a medical doctor, but I still had to flip back to previous page to make sure I was following the plot correctly. The only major problem with the physical book itself was that the covers got scruffed up in transit, rubbing a far amount of ink off the cover art.

Even with a scratchy cover, Iridia #51 is well worth the two buck cover price. (And it sure as heck is worth the zero dollars I paid for it!) But there’s not really any need to take my word for it. The official Iridia website has a bunch of stuff you can check out for free, with a PayPal donation button if you like what you see. If issue #51 is representative of the whole, then there ought to be lots of useful stuff over there with very little in the way of padding.

Thanks again for this great little zine, Christian!

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Curse you, Red Baron!

By: Unknown on 22:01

or Jeff's Review of In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades

I don't really do historical straight historical games. The closest I can come is action movie style adventures where the explosions occur in an earlier time period. When I want to do that I usually look to the Wild West or the Roaring Twenties for bullet-riddled faux history. But ever since my buddy Dave got a copy of Dawn Patrol back in the day I've also had a little thing for World War One flying aces. Since Dawn Patrol not much has come out in the way of roleplaying games about WWI pilots. Clash Bowley of Flying Mice Games fills that void with In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades.

Aces in Spades uses a version of Bowley's "StarCluster" house system, which I believe is named after the first game it appeared in. The basic mechanics strike me as very meat-and-potatoes, but I don't consider that a bad thing at all. You build PCs by buying stats and skills. Skills are assigned percentage of success based upon the level of the skill and the rating of a governing stat. To do things you roll percentage dice. Since most of this is old hat, I'm not going to restate the entire system. Instead I'll focus here on the cool stuff and the few nitpicks I have with the game.

I want to talk about two of the stats you purchase at character generation, Luck and Class. I've seen lots of games with various Luck mechanics over the years, and I think I like this one the best. Your Luck is rated 0 to 3 and that number represents the number of times per game year that you get a lucky break. The players suggests the fortuitous event, but it is subject to GM approval. One example is that the pilot of a damaged plane can use Luck to find a clearing in a forest to land his plane. My players balked at the limited "per year" uses, but for a lengthy campaign I could see how you wouldn't want crazy lucky breaks ever freakin' session. Personally, I find it useful not to think of Luck as some form of 'dramatic editing', but rather as Mulligans or Extra Lives or something like that.

Class is a nifty stat because it gives PCs and NPCs alike an excuse to talk some trash, and who doesn't like a little smack talk in their RPGs? More importantly, buying yourself a high Class score gives you a leg up on the other PCs in the hunt for promotions. Which brings us to one of my favorite parts of Aces in Spades. The players all work together to fight enemy squadrons, but they're also in earnest competition with each other for kills, general recognition, medals, mention in dispatches, and promotions. I like games with that kind of dual competitive/cooperative nature. Truth be told, when I'm a player I tend to approach any campaign that way, but that's another post for another day. If you want to play this game but need a feel for how the competition could spice up your game, then I heartily recommend the George Peppard film The Blue Max. That movie rocks.

The skill list is a lot longer than I like in pretty much any game, but I like the implementation. Most skills come with but a line or two of description and the text encourages player/GM negotiation for when a skill applies and how it can be used. I like that idea a LOT better than the default assumption in game writing that a skill description needs to outline the exacting totality of its uses. My players were unhappy that the skill system gave their starting characters percentages in the 50% range with meager skill improvements on an annual basis.

As with most games featuring killing things and breaking stuff, combat skills get a little more attention. But those seem pretty straightforward, too. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the only tricky mechanics in the book are the air combat rules. Not surprising in a game about pilots, eh?

Before I get to air combat, I want to tell you about this cute little trick involving percentiles. Initiative is rolled with percentile dice. To-hits are made with percentile dice. Damage is rolled with percentile dice. And you can trade points between them. So I can decide to screw up my inish by -20 and maybe take thrity points off my to-hit roll. But if I hit, I get +50 to damage. Things that would be clunky combat maneuvers in other games (taking extra time to aim, doing an all-out haymaker punch, quickdrawing your pistol) are neatly addressed with simple shifting of bonus points on the three die rolls. I wish I had thought of that.

As I mentioned, plane-on-plane action is the hardest part of the game. Every plane has a control sheet for tracking fuel, maneuvering, and stuff like that. Fifteen planes of WWI are statted out this way. Stones, counters or dice are used to track fuel/energy, kind of like how Nobilis tracks godlike mojo. I can't tell you which was trickier: mentally tracking the movements of several planes to adjudicate who could shoot at whom with what modifiers, or trying to explain the various maneuvers to the players. I pretty sure I screwed both up. But I have no doubt that had I ran more than one session I would have eventually wrapped my head around dogfighting. The initial mental workload was a little harder than most games I play nowadays, but it wasn't a dealbreaker.

Overall, I really enjoyed giving In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades a try. The StarCluster system feels crunchy in the right places but uses a light touch where I like it, too. The book is full of lots of goodies I haven't mentioned, like random charts to determine the quality of your airfield or a table for dicing up plot points. And the list of things that earn you Notice (effectively xp or glory like Pendragon) suggest lots of nifty air adventures.

I'm not sure there are many competitors out there for this particular historical niche. My 1st edition Savage Worlds has some decent dogfight rules, but it lacks the support of stats for a bunch of different era-appropriate planes. Did All Flesh Must Be Eaten ever get a World War One supplement? I recall that being on the drawing board at one point. For a short flying aces campaign I might go with the Savage Worlds, but I'd sure as heck use Aces in Spades as a sourcebook for such an outing. For a longer campaign meant to play out a big chunk of WWI, I'd definitely go with this game. And I wouldn't turn my nose up at any other game powered the Starcluster system.

You can get a PDF version or print-on-demand hardcopy of In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades from Lulu. The electronic version is eleven bucks, while the paper book runs $23.58 plus shipping.

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