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!

OddFolk is a modular TTRPG by Maxwell Lander. The core rules are 12 pages, and the modular part is about 20 pages of kits, which I’ll also look at in the review. OddFolk is intended to be a basic fantasy roleplaying game, for running OSR or system agnostic modules in.

OddFolk is a game designer’s game. The first 4 pages are, effectively, a discussion of Lander’s intent. This is an unusual approach, definitely, but in the context of a dungeon crawler, I don’t think it’s a bad one: Given how similar so many of these games are, and how so many of them are tiny variations and recombinations of each other, explaining your choices and reasoning seems a step forward. The basic gist is this: To achieve an action, you roll a d4, and choose the number of options you roll from a list of 4 options. Typically, the options include 1 that is a simple success, 2 that are complicated in some way, and 1 that is bad. You choose which one — this means you could choose a negative result if you felt it was the right choice for the narrative — but more interestingly, you will have to implement all 4 options if you roll a 4, which has a 1-in-4 chance of occurring. The other major aspect that’s unique about OddFolk is the kits: Basically, it comes with a bucketload of them, each with special actions. You can either choose a set of actions for everyone to use, for example, an OSR game, or you could let each player select 5-7 unique actions to reflect their character. There are of course, lots of small adjustments for various specific circumstances: gear and damage and critical hits and teamwork. Resources are only remarkable in their absence or abundance, which is neat, to me. That’s it. That’s the whole 12 page rulebook. In much the same way that Into the Odd is not exhaustive, but rather exemplary, most of what you see here is an example of what to do in your game, rather than an exhaustive list.

Most of the text is the kits: The official set of kits, entitled “Fantasy Basics”, and a set of kits by guest authors Aaron King, Christian Sorrell, and Kait Tremblay. Fantasy Basics starts out straightforward: Covering your basic actions in an adventure game, stuff like picking locks and sneaking and showing off, then magic, combat, and weirder shrooms like seance. Then Lander starts to show us what you can do when this framework stretches its legs: We have an action for taking an unknown substance, or for when you encounter a member of a long-lost civilisation. Then, it stretches further: Oh, so NPCs can simply be their own action? Oh, group actions use both d4s, and you choose from 2 lists for 1 action? The conceptual space for actions expands palpably within Lander’s own work. Then we get to the Special Guest Kits. These plainly aren’t basic fantasy: King brings science-fantasy, and devouring your enemies. Sorrell brings a kit to play out slasher horror, but also brings a set of crafting which brings you back to basic fantasy. More interestingly, Sorrell adds a bunch of Slasher-specific moves, suggesting a player-vs-player version of OddFolk. Tremblay brings actions themed around gardening, and modern day ghost-hunting. These expand the possibilities further, and also bring a bunch of interpretations to how broad and evocative these actions can be. We get from “The passageway opens.” in the 1st kit to “The lights blink out swiftly. What have you lost?” in the 14th kit. This is huge difference in possibility space.

The neat thing about the basic structure of the kits is that each action is basically the structure of an Apocalypse World move, but turned up to 10, and the structure is such that you could easily invent your own on the fly, or write simple love letters to your players between sessions without much ado. It’s a great little framework with a huge amount of flexibility. Reading the kits included calls for you to create your own moves, and calls for you to share them with the community.

The problem of course — and Lander identifies this — is that it can get pretty heavy coming up with 4 results 1 in every 4 rolls. That’s a lot. The official advice here is “Embrace the potential for messiness and bring in the whole group when you’re stumped on how to resolve an action.” which loops around to how I feel this is a game designer’s game, which digs itself an interesting hole. Because, while I can imagine how you could simultaneously “move in silence and shadow“, “leave a trace“, “leave a trail” and “someone notices you” (from Kit 1), it’s harder to comprehend a no-nonsense way of interpreting all four of “You are revealed to actually be a past victim – who wasn’t really dead.“, “You are not human but rather… something more.“, “You are not real… but the deaths were.” and “You were protecting an innocent, who now comes into view.” There’s a real degree here of my thinking people will start saying “don’t worry about that one, it doesn’t really fit the narrative”, a little more than I’d prefer. I want that randomness. I want to be forced to take a story somewhere unexpected, and I think the high chance of all four results occurring may end up causing more problems than its’ initial elegance suggests. And there’s a very real consideration that kept going through my mind as I read these compelling and excellent actions: Would these actions be better served by the discreet move structure of Apocalypse World than the cumulative action structure of OddFolk? I’m honestly not convinced that they would be; I do think OddFolk actions benefit from being more uninteresting, because of their cumulative nature. The creativity of the special guests doesn’t pay off here as much as say King’s work on universal moves.

So, OddFolk: It’s a framework the sets of actions that are kits. But it feels at its best when you’re playing it at its simplest: the basic fantasy version, because when you try to get fancy with actions they begin to fall apart. That additional flexibility, though, for creating custom actions, and the ease of creation of custom actions, make it a really fun take on basic fantasy, though, with a nice story game twist. If you’re looking for a game that leans into resource management and risk assessment while playing OSR modules, this ain’t it, and you’ve already got a bunch of good options. If you’re looking for something that brings narrative flair and the flexibility to add your own design signature to running those modules, it’s worth checking out OddFolk.

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