This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More is a 60 page game by Tom McRedy about the climactic invasion of Normandy in 1944. Wrap your head around this: It’s a WWII hex-crawl based on Wolves Upon The Coast. Right now, having not yet read this book, my mind is reeling: What the hell am I getting myself in for? Let’s dive in and find out what an OSR WWII battle-simulator looks like.

As the title suggest, in this you play paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines. Your paratrooper is randomly generated, and are, as soldiers, largely similarly equipped. You can imagine in a WW2 game, a lot of attention is placed on equipment lists, but while they take up space, they are all unique and flavourful, and they are what will set you apart in the absence of classes and spells and what not. The rules are simple, OSR-style rules, roll under your stat, using a number of 6-sided dice equal to the difficulty. Rules for save are always the same, on a 20-sided dice, over a certain number. You want to avoid these, as they’re difficult. It’s hard to hit someone with an attack, as you have to roll greater than 20 on a 20-sided dice, meaning this game is all about stacking modifiers. While gunfire rules are a little more complicated to reflect automatic fire, that complexity is reflected in clever rules about jamming, ricochet and overpenetration. Overall, while this 20 page rulebook is dense, the rules are exactly what you need to run a WW2 game, and no more. This is intended to be a gritty, messy crawl, with fragile people dropping into fearful situations with no recourse.

The rest of the game is the 40-page referee’s guide. The surprise for me is how dense this game is: You’re playing on a timeline, that goes from 3am to midnight. There are 9 major objectives scattered across the map, 3 settlements, and 4 exits all detailed. There are 11 targets of opportunity: Things that you can achieve that will help your side out, but aren’t primary targets. Just loads of encounters and things to do. You hit the ground in a random place, you could lose your stuff in the air or injure yourself in the landing, or get hit as you parachute to the ground. Then, you still have to find each other when you get there; once you’ve regrouped, you have to find a senior officer who’ll give you new orders. Until then, you’re seeking whatever the nearest objective to your drop site is, and trying to recover vital supply drops. At midnight, the invasion ends, and you compare the player’s achievements with the objectives they achieved, giving them a point score, which is bolstered by gaining decorations and medals, which occur for specific actions, as well as claiming trophies and the like.

The referee meanwhile is tracking what’s going on throughout the battlefield: Reinforcements are arriving and advancing to assist you, but you don’t know where they are or what they are. Aerial bombardment has no contact with you, but is proceeding to destroy strongpoints, following a certain route that the paratroopers do not appear to have knowledge of. The German counter-attacks are also occurring at specific times and in specific places, matching the timeline provided at the start, which details the allied movements primarily. To do this, the referee needs a working knowledge of the geography of Normandy, of the German presence there, stats, a random encounter table, reaction rolls, and hex fills.

The referee really leans into the FKR style of play, placing the majority of mechanics and rulings in the hands of the referee. I don’t disagree with this: It feels very appropriate for the topic. But the issue is, the players kind of already have to be super familiar with how to interact with this war-torn world to figure out how to win. An example is that, if you access a radio, you can call in naval fire support to destroy a target; you need to choose which ship is best for your aims, as well. This is all in the referee list, but I’m pretty certain my players, unless told this was a pretty sensible option for large objectives, would be looking for explosives to replicate what they see in modern action movies, by default. They wouldn’t even consider this option.

All I have to say about He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More is: Wow. I have so many thoughts. This is an absolutely unique work, drawing on a bunch of sources that I don’t think I’ve seen concretely in the OSR realm before. It draws tournament play concepts from the early hobby in a way that I’ve talked about in Dungeon Regular needed to make a comeback (although I wonder if in this case the inspiration is actually war games). It takes the sprawling grand campaign structure of Wolves Upon the Coast, and rather than try to replicate its’ scale, it gives it strict borders and time-constraints. This is a really, really impressive piece of work. I have read the author’s Shot & Splinters, and I planned to review it some time ago, but in my esteem it needs more of the grandeur of Wolves Upon the Coast to work. This however, embraces the constrained nature of its’ subject matter, and revels in it.

But there are problems, and these are problems that come with the subject matter, but also which I think are eminently solvable. The two major problems are firstly, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the players would naturally choose a lot of the options given to them, even though to an expert in historical warfare they’d be intuitive. The first thought is providing them with a “moves” list, but I think that’s a blunt force solution: Rather I think this needs to come with a printed briefing handout, talking through what the paratroopers actually know when they drop, talking about the resources at their disposal and the resources they need to find when they’re in the field. Without something like this, I think anyone not well-versed in WWII history will bounce off this very hard, even if they were interested in playing it. The second problem is the sheer load placed on the referee here. I see this problem in Wolves Upon the Coast as well, and there it’s largely in response to Gearing’s seeming allergy to considering information design and layout in the construction of a complex system. Same goes here. There are two separate timelines in two separate places; put them together for me, the referee. Don’t make me do it myself. Suggest a way to track troop movements on the map, don’t just leave it to people on Discord to sort out. The keying is left up to chance for a reason: This is a game that’s intended to be replayed, I suspect, for high scores. But it doesn’t make it easy to play off the book, because information design and layout is not high on the author’s priority list: It’s hard to find the hex fill you’re after, or the random encounter details you need, or the stat block that’s relevant to the place in question. If my players stumble upon the village of Chef du Pont in D7, I have to go to the town maps document before I discover there’s no town maps, then I search the document for what consists a company of landsers and a landser mortar squad, before finding that landser isn’t defined and having to google it to find it means german soldier, then scrolling to page 23 because it’s not linked to find what a company is which is a lot of things listed in paragraph, with no link to stat blocks, and with reference to the previously defined platoon, which is also listed in paragraph, and I have to refer to. The mortar squad I assume refers to the light mortar squad and not the mortar platoon, and then I go back to infantry profiles on page 22 to find their stats. So I’m talking in this case, 10 people in a squad, times 3 plus 1 for a platoon, and a horse drawn wagon, times 3 plus 1 for a company, plus a machine gun squad, and a headquarters with another 11 people. And I don’t know that they’re going to arrive at Chef du Pont, necessarily. So I’m going to have to do all that math on the fly, and run the game. There’s a better way to lay this all out, so that I can actually run this game. There’s a visual design solution to all of this, involving laying these lists out in a visual grid so I can tick them off as I go, for example. But I don’t want to do that myself, because I’m here to play the game. It’s not the player’s job to design a game for the designer.

There’s also layout solutions. This is effectively a word documented exported as a PDF, and it has the readability of one. But with section headings, and sidebars, and references, this becomes a whole different ballgame, and something you could literally pick up and play in a long evening. I could see a revised version of this, given to an inventive visual designer interested in information design as well as layout, that would see regular play at plenty of tables, because it fits this unique, non-campaign, but still learning from session to session, semi-competitive slot that almost nothing else in the modern hobby fits in. It’s really unique, roguelike OSR gameplay. But it needs a developmental edit, a proof edit for clarity by someone who doesn’t speak WW2 jargon, and a solid visual and information design revision to achieve that level of ease.

If someone thought it worth polishing and spending money on, He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More could be the kind of game that inspires many, many other constrained, tournament-style games for a new generation. I’d love to see it do that, or I’d love to see someone take this and run with the concepts to apply them to something else, to make slick, tournament-style old-school games with a modern twist. But right now, it simply makes a promise that it can’t quite fulfil. That promise is super exciting to me, and I’m honestly crushed to see so much potential wasted to the cult of minimalism in TTRPGs.

That all said, if you’re into WW2 enough to want to run He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More (which I am), and you have the time (which I don’t), and you’re willing to solve those design issues yourself, it’s probably only as much work as it would take to run any WOTC adventure book, to be honest, so disregard everything that I just said except for the solutions. This is a damned remarkable game, under all of these problems, and it would be sad if people otherwise interested thought it wasn’t. I love to see these unique games, and He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More certainly stands out of the crowd.

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