Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Today, I’m taking the day off to spend with my family, so I’ve asked my friend Sam Dunnewold of the Dice Exploder podcast, to step in to help me out by taking a look at Shiv, by Joshuacaleb Little. Here’s Sam’s take on Shiv!

Hello! This is Sam Dunnewold, host of Dice Exploder, filling in for your usual host. Before the review, I want to give it up for Idle Cartulary for this whole Critique Navidad series. It’s an incredible amount of work to do, it’s such a gift to the designers being reviewed (spoken as someone who was featured earlier this month), and it’s also great writing. Thus ends my review of Critique Navidad.

I’m here to review Shiv by megaflare0, a “high fantasy rules-lite tabletop roleplaying game about roving through a magic-filled world and solving problems for others.” Going into it I was expecting something OSR adjacent, and that’s what I got. Shiv, like many OSR games, feels like someone publishing their particular set of house rules. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

At just seven pages of mechanics, Shiv is the definition of rules light. They not long pages, either. The font is pretty big. Love to see a big font. So much of indie rpgs, and the OSR in particular, is obsessed with unreadably small fonts (this is how you can tell that Blades in the Dark is OSR), but Shiv is easily legible in its layout and its prose. I never felt confused by how anything worked. Though some of the information could come in a different order, like Skills before Traditions and Combat before Gear. Still, when the game is so small, those are easy bumps to navigate. God I love a small game.

The rules themselves feel… fine. Shiv lists Cairn and Into the Odd in its influences, and if you know those games, you won’t find a lot to be surprised by here. The scale of things have been moved around, you roll d8s for saving throws (or “skill tests” as they are here) instead of d20s, but it’s all familiar.

The most notable change here is in combat. Instead of the more common “just roll to hit” or “automatically hit and just roll damage” models, in Shiv we always hit and always deal a fixed amount of damage… unless the defender can roll to dodge. I imagine this makes combat feel more nimble – instead of the moment of uncertainty being how hard you can cut someone, it’s in how quick you are on your feet. Interesting! Not a big change, but I’m curious how pronounced the effect would be in play.

The equipment list and sample enemies follow suit: short, clear examples but without a lot of new innovation to be found from other OSR games. The specific items and enemies have a nice selection of special ability ideas, and it’s easy to see how to make up your own. Some of the creatures are fun: the Velocidodo, and a Mousse instead of your classic Pudding. We’re in classic whimsical fantasy adventure mode.

Given the guidance on how to create combat encounters and settlements, I assume Shiv does not expect you to use a module. That’s fine, but it means I’d really like to see prep rules. Thankfully Shiv has them! I LOVE to see prep rules. Like everything else they’re very brief, but the advice is all good and it’s probably enough to get you through a one shot. Not enough games give the GM actual tools to prep, and not enough games remind the GM that they can always ask the table for ideas.

Okay, having sorted through all those details, let’s step back a second. Shiv to me feels like it was designed from almost a defensive crouch. Like, let’s take its description of safety tools: “In any TTRPG it is very important to have open conversations before play about the expectations for the tone and the topics of the game. The guiding goal should be to make sure that playing the game is fun for you and everyone else at the table.” I agree with this! But it’s such broad advice as to be nearly useless to me. What kinds of conversations should I be expecting to have before this game? Do I need a section on safety tools at all given that Shiv seems targeted at people who are already familiar with this genre of play? I’d love more specificity to this instead of something that feels like lip service to the idea of safer play and the discourse around it.

Or take how Traditions are described: it’s barely one sentence before we get to something that feels like a reaction to discourse around use of the term race in D&D. Or the designer’s note at the beginning of the section on Enemies about how to design encounters: at least one enemy for each player character. Why does that need to be the case? Why do encounters need to be balanced? Again it feels like the designer reacting to imagined “best practices” or “how things should work” instead of taking their own swings or getting more specific. Shiv is at its best when it does get specific: give me more using Stone Lore to sense Velocidodos running across the veldt! I have skill checks at home.

Again, the game at least knows how to get in and get out. It may not have a lot new to say, but it doesn’t waste time dawdling either. I can’t emphasize enough how refreshing that is.

Overall, Shiv doesn’t feel like it has much new to offer me, a guy who’s played a bunch of fantasy adventure games. It’s also written so briefly that I’m not sure I’d recommend it for people just getting their feet wet with these games. So who is it for? I think if I’d played one or two elfgames and was looking to broaden my horizons, Shiv would be an interesting game to pick up. That’s a narrow audience, but maybe you’re in it.

Sam Dunnewold

Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.