• Critique Navidad: OddFolk

    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.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: The Knight Errant

    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!

    The Knight Errant is a 4 page micro-module for Into the Odd by Isaac Is Afraid, with art by Citaaticat. It won the popular choice in the Appendix N Jam, for which I was one of the judges. In it you discover the last member of a knightly order, frozen for eternity — the only lifeform on a dead planet. Will you save him?

    First up, for effectively a 4 -page module (the entire first page is a cover) this is absolutely gorgeous. It’s styled as a pulp fiction cover, as you can see from the cover art above, and the interior is also damaged, but readable. A simple royal blue palate features on the interior as well, used for some highlighting and as an inverted background for stat blocks. It’s absolutely packed with text, but not in an illegible way, due to its’ judicious use of tables and bullets, as well as how highlighting is explained within the text. While sticking to the page count, you couldn’t be better than this; although it does squeeze 8 or 9 pages of text into 4. As a judge on this project, I quickly realised, however, that our criteria heavily favoured visually distinct and well-produce pieces of work over more amateurish productions, which I’m not sure I’d be happy with in future choices of criteria — does The Knight Errant hold up in other ways?

    I’m glad to say it does. As I said earlier, it doesn’t really sacrifice on word count. I think in a full-sized module of the same theme, we’d likely have a few more words, but not too many. They’d just be given more room to breathe. There are 7 rooms here, along with 2 stat blocks, a random adventure table, and adventure background. These rooms, unlike what you’d expect, are quite detailed, and the descriptions are solid, although after the terse stylings of The Iron Coral. There are a bunch of interactive elements: A laser-shrine that can be used against your enemies, glass on the floor that causes noise, clues about secret entrances if you observe enemies, multiple entrances, and lore drops. Often in small modules, there are forsaken easter eggs — here, each clue folds back in, such as the oath in room 5 that opens the secret door in room 4. It’s solid design. If I were to change anything, I think that there’s a decent chance that a certain type of party will charge through some of these encounters, and miss altogether that there’s a moral dilemma at the end of this: I’d simply have the squire in room 5 be a little more obvious in his simple sentences, to avoid this, as the moral dilemma is a compelling one.

    The random encounter table is important to such a short module, and I’m not sure it’s well thought through. The four encounters included are all solid, and I like them a lot. By the book, you have a 1-in-6 chance of having a random encounter in every new room, when you loiter, or when you make noise, plus a 1-in-6 chance of a clue of said encounter. Let’s estimate that there would be 15 rolls in this dungeon — generous I think — and we’re getting 2, maybe 3 of the written encounters, of which there’s a significantly higher chance of a vision or a meteor falling from the sky than there are of the plot-advancing ghouls or the corrupting voice, given those latter 2 only occur roughly 1-in-36 times. Given the slim chances, I’d rework this table if I had more space: I’d add suggestions for each for the clues, and I’d adjust the probabilities so the rarer are more likely to occur. In small modules, you really want each of your random encounters to punch above its’ weight, because you’re not spending much time in the space.

    What does it choose to omit? Well, it has no hooks, it has no rumours, relying instead on a tight frame of the player’s arrival on an alien planet. This is a good choice, given the constraints, although any dungeon will be more interesting with the addition of a few hooks that contain juicy worms: You could have a player who worships the Horror From Beyond, of course, one who pursues archeological knowledge, and one that wants to cage and examine one of the ghouls, off the top of my head, all of which would change the player’s approach to the dungeon. Similarly, given the constraints, the choice to have only 2 stat blocks is smart, and I think 1-2 monster types per 7 rooms is pretty reasonable. I do think that the behaviour of the titular Knight Errant needs to be better telegraphed, however. Finally, one thing that is left untold is the goals or intents of the Horror From Beyond, and given the fact that this is likely a one-shot given its’ unique sci-fantasy setting, and the fact that there’s a decent chance of the Horror From Beyond being freed, I’d love a short section that covers what happens in the wider galaxy when it is freed. The module has room for it: Both the about section and the background section could be trimmed.

    Overall, the popular vote isn’t wrong: The Knight Errant is excellent, with a unique, pulpy theme, decent, if terse, writing, and compelling spaces. It does very well with the space it uses. I think it would benefit from expansion, though, in some specific places, and it would benefit from being not quite so dense in terms of layout. Could you run this without any preparation, though, if you needed a one-shot? Yes, you could, and you’d likely have a ball, although I’d do some fudging, beefing up the one NPC, doing a little foreshadowing, and changing the random encounter table to have equal chances across the die. If that’s what you’re after in a short module, The Knight Errant is worth picking up while it’s still free.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: Time To Drop

    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!

    Time To Drop is a 19 page roleplaying game by Marn S. In it you play a team of cons going on one last job to get out of the biz, but get caught in a time loop. It’s a collaborative game for 3 or more players, played to the tune of the album Nonagon Infinity.

    Time To Drop is separated into 6 phases, with an optional seventh phase. The first is creating your crew; this is done in two cycles around the table, the first describing names and your role and why you’re choosing to retire, and the second being to describe relationships between you — grudges, feelings about each other, and the like. The first cycle is well supported, with a list of 11 of each, the second less so; I’d appreciate a similar table of suggested relationships, especially given the very specific inspirations the game has. The second phase is about choosing the job; again, we have a random table to support this, as well as a few questions to expand upon that. Phase 3 is planning: 3 tarot cards indicate the 3 complications you can plan around, and then make your plan. This is all preparation.

    Phase 4 is the start of play: You begin with downtime, describing what your character does in the lead up to the heist; this is important, because this phase changes as you recognise you’re trapped in a time loop. Then you start the heist, phase 5. In this phase, you interact with cards on the board, rolling dice with mixed success, potentially clearing or adding new complications to the board. Complications are twisted on doubles, which changes things going forward, and you can of course convert characters to your side. You narrate other player’s complications, and they narrate yours. During the first heist, this is all written down, to provide a framework for the loop. The heist ends when the album finishes, or you fail completely (although there’s not a mechanism for death or being caught here, just the addition of new complications). Phase 6 doesn’t take place in the first playthrough — just play out an extended downtime to see your characters responses to the realisation they’re in a loop — but for every other loop, you review changes to the timeline here and update your notes. The loop ends when all complications are cleared.

    One interesting unstated choice in the gameplay here is that you can’t outwit the heist, you need to trial and error this through repeated loops. This is built into the rules —  “2d6 + your crew’s # of cleared Complications” — and makes sense given the collaborative nature on f the game, but it is easy to miss. You should roleplay this — you should be foiled a few ways before each success — but the roll here indicates how you’re foiled, not whether you are. Because the roll is the prompt here, it would benefit from this being stated outright.

    Small choices would improve the play here — the small lists in the text that cover the detail would be better called out either in expanded random tables or just in bullet points. This is a good example of where layout and information design overlap — the layout is excellent and clear, looks good, but this modification would make things more playable.

    Honestly, this game slaps; we don’t get enough time loop games. I could see this being a super fun weekly session after a dinner, given the brevity of a session. The concepts here are strong, and they work for any table that is confident with improvisation. It could be made more broadly playable with more support for those less willing to wing it based on a tarot card, or with a few additional tables. There’s a set of modules available to cover the tables half of that concern. Marn S has made a bunch of variations on this game — including relitigating a relationship, an action move, and a romcom. If this appeals to you, but you don’t care for heists, check out some of the alternatives. Overall, though, if you’re interested in short games or time loop game, and you’re happy to bring a little of your own imagination to the table, I’d check Time To Drop out.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: Oswor

    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!

    Oswor is a 36 page roleplaying game by Nikita Lapkov with interior art by Paul Red, Dean Spencer, and Rick Hershey, and cover art and logo by DC Stow. In it, you play members of a resistance movement, looking to overthrow the immortal emperor’s tyrannical rule.

    Oswor is inspired by Into the Odd, and follows that structure pretty closely; 3 stats, roll for your Ancestry and Guild, then you’re assigned a starter package based on your HP and highest ability score. The unique solarpunk flavour begins to sneak in here: the guilds include Lenses and Golems, the equipment includes solar refractor and shardlens, but also gladius and loud parrot. It’s giving Roman Empire meets solar-powered industrial revolution, which I think is what it wants to be giving. The neatest thing about the Ancestry & Guild table is that it implies that there is a ton of segregation: an Ursi cannot be a part of the School of Flesh, and Cani can only be part of the Armada. The three ancestries have been manipulated into little boxes by the emperor’s tyranny; in fact one of the ways you can be radicalised is that you want to live in a world where your job isn’t dictated by your ancestry. That radicalisation table is sloppier than the rest of the character creation tables: It feels like you could have a more specific radicalisation, because they tie into who you are, and I think it will be hard to riff on them, because at this point you don’t know the world. Like, playing a fox-person who always wanted to be a golem-builder, but is stuck in the army, gathering bits and pieces and making their own, until they are caught and are forced to join the resistance and die is a compelling hook for a character — but we can’t have that here, the characters don’t want the nuance. But in a resistance against tyranny, most people have a back story like that. Then, we have setting descriptions: This covers the guilds, class and ancestral conflicts, the emperor and his sons, and how the emperor is portrayed to different places, some big mysteries of the world. That kind of stuff.

    It is very Into the Odd that the entire ruleset is squeezed into a page and a half at the end of character creation. They’re fine, and they’re basically Into the Odd. Great. I’m more interested in the world than the rules, here, anyway. The big question, to me, is does the rules choice of Into the Odd make me want to make revolutionary decisions as my character? Both Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland really rely on economics to drive play; they’re dungeon crawlers. If I’m going to be playing revolutionaries, I’m not repeatedly entering a dungeon, I’m collecting intelligence, then going on missions to achieve specific objectives. The rightly identifies that there’s not much of a difference between a “dungeon full of traps with a power-hungry mage” in its’ center, and a “mission, to get through a defense system, to defeat a mad scientist”, but there is a significant difference between these two in the behaviours that occur outside of the dungeon. In this case, Oswor tries to sidestep this by having each mission be delivered by a different informant, so the characters never have any clue what the greater mission is. But it’s far, far more interesting to have the characters involved, in my opinion, and a game like this wants to be involved in that planning. I already read a game this month, Chain x Link, which satisfactorily manages to involve the players in both the broader planning and the specifics of revolution, and it was so satisfying. Instead, successful missions progress along the “unrest” table, and if you manage to progress 3 steps along the column, you can take a crack at the emperor. It seems too easy to defeat the emperor using this — only 3 missions, if they’re targeted — and it relies on the resistance being a disorganised mess to continue play, embodied in the Missions table, where you randomly generate a mission, meaning you’ll be doing random, unrelated stuff, with no throughline. I can’t imagine many players who’d be interested in exploring a world like this, or in a revolutionary game like this, with no clear throughlines from mission to mission. I get the impulse, because this game is actually going to be pretty easy to run, and I love that about a game: But that facility betrays the natural rhythm of a revolutionary game to me. If I were to run it, I’d need to build some pretty robust tools for intelligence, making plans, and building teams. That game would slap, and could still be based on Into the Odd framework — I just think it’s important for a game to support the kind of play it’s inviting.

    Oswor has a very interesting, developed solarpunk world that is really compelling, with tons of interesting decisions that make for a world that is ripe for exploration and igniting to revolution. It then fails to capitalise on this world, by falling too heavily back on Into the Odd’s framework and not developing it enough to make the game absolutely sing revolution. You might have the energy to develop the tools Oswor lacks, especially given how lightweight the rest of the rules are. And this world is so much better developed and compelling than the world of Chain x Link, the other revolutionary dungeon crawler I’ve reviewed recently, but Chain x Link’s ruleset is so much stronger for supporting the gameplay I want out of this kind of game. Your mileage may, however vary. Oswor’s world slaps, and if the details of a combustible world full of potential conflict, politicking, assassination and theft appeals to you, Oswor has so much more to offer than Chain x Link. If that’s what you’re after, and you’re willing to put in that extra effort, then Oswor might be for you.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: The Belle of the Bog

    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!

    Belle of the Bog is a 79 page module by Tom Lagier for Dragonbane, and OSR system I’m only passingly familiar with. In it, you are aboard a steamboat investigating its shady owner when you are lost in a fairy swamp. Will you return? Will you solve the mystery of the swamp, or the crime on the steamboat?

    First up I love this theme. It is bringing Maverick and that episode of Over the Garden Wall with the frogs; it’s a unique setting for an OSR jaunt and it’s one that’s instantly appealing to me. The decorations, illustrations and the back cover mock advertisement all really bring the theme home in a neat way. The layout is uncomplicated, and feels text-heavy, but that’s largely because there are few illustrations for such a long book. That said, the maps, while it’s hard to bring a lot of interest to limited spaces like a paddle-steamer, are absolutely gorgeous. The length isn’t inappropriate, and most relevant information is kept to the page or spread, which I like. There’s smart use of highlighting here, and plenty of page references, and section “headers” that sit consistently in the right page margin, for easy browsing. The information design has a few missteps, though, despite being otherwise excellent; the main one here is that important pieces of reference like the character index and the map really belong in the front or back cover of the book, and you’ll be using them a lot, given the structure of the game. I’d be printing these off to minimise the impact of this misstep.

    Ok, so we open with a spread showing the history that lead to the events of the module. Then, we have a few hooks that tie them into specific characters or aspects of the module; each of them has the seed of a juicy worm, but they don’t quite take the extra step to expand on them. I’d give the player’s a payment or additional reason to pursue “Sloppy” Joe Benton’s ruby, rather than simply wanting a gem, for example. Then we have details on how to end the adventure; these I really like, as they all tie into places, items and characters in the module itself. I love having solutions buried in different parts of the module, but only if you pursue certain plot threads.

    Then we have the Belle itself; we cover the big twist first; it’s really meaty and I can see both the potential glimpses through the illusion being really intriguing, and the final revelation being incredibly satisfying. The mechanics of the engine are very important to some potential outcomes of the story, and they’re covered here; they cover a whole page, but honestly they are a lot simpler than you’d expect from the amount of description they receive. There are 12 characters that we get an index to; sensibly, given the nature of the map, this is a module that relies on interesting characters. I honestly think the index descriptions could’ve been more consistently thorough, but it’s pretty good. We have a random gambler generator, and crew summary too. Random encounters use a ladder table so that rarer encounters become more likely the longer you’re on the boat, which is a smart mechanic. It also varies based on the damage level of the engine, which is a nice touch, because it gives the players control over which random encounters they meet — I’d be telling the players which table I was rolling on, just to let this influence their decision making. The characters and the random encounters here, in particular, are really neat and I appreciate that they’re connected, and also play a role in progressing the “narrative” and also in introducing the players to various plot threads, but in a randomised manner. Two playthroughs of this will turn out very differently due to this randomisation, in a decent way. The only thing I don’t like is the criteria: “spend a lot of time doing something, the tension is low, or they draw attention“.

    Then we get to the actual key. There is a lot going on here, 28 locations in total, most of them complex enough to cover a spread, although that does include the referred to earlier character descriptions. They’re pretty consistently clear and evocative, it’s easy to identify relevant information; they’re solid, interactable locations. Just excellent stuff. The character’s aren’t limited to their primary locations — that’s right there in their description — but have an appearance, goals, manners, likes and dislikes; often they have a little history as well in a separate box for the referee in case that helps them. Overall, the key really slaps. The bestiary and magical items are relegated to the back of the book, along with supplementary rules for gambling and fishing, as well as some pre-generated characters that fit the unique setting.

    There’s one major issue with this module, and that’s its’ proximity to the Scintillating Swamps and the importance of the fairy realm to the story. I’m not saying that it’s a requirement for a module to cover everything mentioned in its’ pages, but when there’s a strong possibility that the player characters will end up in either one or the other, the lack of some support for overflowing into those spaces is rather jarring for me. That said, this is the author’s first module — there’s a strong implication that these spaces might feature in future work, and I’d look forward to seeing that; given the uniqueness of this setting it would be hard to shoehorn this into an existing campaign. That said, you could run it as a one-shot, and there’s a suggestion for how to run this as a one-shot in the sidebar.

    Gosh, Belle of the Bog is a damned good module. I’m really impressed, given this is the author Tom Lagier’s first major effort. The unique setting is refreshing, it’s well organised, it’s interactive and full of fun and interesting characters, the visual design and especially the maps are excellent. You need to be prepared to improvise or create a fairy realm and a Scintilating Swamp, if you’re not going to place guardrails on the module, though, because any table of mine is going to find themselves lost in one or the other. But I’m pretty certain plenty of you saw “gambling river boat” and decided you were already going to check this out, and that additional work is barely a consideration. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out on Lagier’s future work.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: Hardcase

    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!

    Hardcase is a 28 page solo TTRPG by Thursday Garreau and art by Ida Ailes. In it, you struggle to get by on Basement Station, in a slice-of-life game in a rusty cyberpunk future.

    The first thing that strikes me about Hardcase, is that unlike most solo games I see, it’s not modelled after an existing solo game. In this case, it’s modelled after a mixed-success system like Apocalypse World and you get some additional labels which give you bonuses. The main flavour subsystem here is stress; you can upgrade the result of a roll by taking stress (you choose the type of stress from a list), and it gives you a permanent debuff; but if you pay enough, or take enough drugs, you can untick the box. But stress doesn’t kill you, conditions do: if you take 3 conditions of any nature (related to stress or not) you die. The driver of gameplay is economics; you have to pay for rent, and food, and treatment if you get conditions. If you don’t earn enough money, you can take on debt, but when the bill comes due every 2 weeks, you might gain stress if you can’t pay, or maybe get a job that you have to do, else you’ll face more severe consequences. But gear and cybernetics, as well as subcontractors to help you out, all cost money. If you manage to earn enough money to put some away, you might retire; but there’s a decent chance when you try to retire, someone might try to steal your savings. This is a pretty pleasing loop, in terms of creating a direction in which to play. Enemies are basically the same as the Player Character, but may only act on a “miss” roll, and may have fewer than 3 conditions before they’re killed.

    We then have the setting: You work and live on Basement Station, a half-finished logistics hub hanging in orbit above the earth, at the zenith of a space elevator. This is sketched out in broad strokes: 6 locales, 6 characters, how to gamble, what’s in a vending machine, a dozen drugs, and psychic folk. And jobs: There are examples of work: How to run deliveries, random “distractions” that might occur along the way, how to run salvage operations, random “hazards” that might stop you from raiding abandoned ships, how to hunt bounties. There are examples of how to use the now text-based internet, and how to play the VR that many of the residents of Basement Station spend their spare time in. There’s a page on what’s going on out in space, and a few people who aren’t from Basement station, who you might meet. All of this adds up to a pretty compelling little world, with just enough concrete facts to spark your imagination. Half the book is packed with tables, descriptions, and lists to help you understand the ins and outs of Basement Station. It’s really good work.

    At this point, though, I’m most of the way through the game, and I don’t know how to play it solo. It feels like a nice little sci-fi game, but there’s nothing about it that screams solo. The game ends, with a page on how the author plays Hardcase. I kind of love that how to play the game is kind of an afterthought, here. It assumes you’re a smart cookie, choosing to read this game. The advice the author gives is pretty straightforward: 1. When you miss, the world reacts in a way that needs to be handled. 2. If you’re not sure what happens next, assume that it’s the worst possible thing. 3. The first thing on your character’s mind is usually “How do I get paid today?”. It’s a solid phrasing of common refereeing advice, and it’s also a case that every game can be a solo game if you want it to be.

    I come out of reading Hardcase with mixed feelings: Do I want to play referee and player in a solo game about a future corpo-fascist cyberpunk reality? I’m not sure that I do. My current reality is close enough to that, as I mentioned in my earlier review of Hypermall Unlimited Violence. But this is a pretty compelling little space station, if you do. It’s vibrant, interesting. It gives you just enough to springboard off, I suspect, for Basement Station to be interesting a background for your character’s rags-to-riches story. Your campaign of Hardcase might turn into a show about the many people who struggle to break out of poverty here, or might follow one character on their whole complex journey. It gets me excited. But, it is a solo game after the style of games like Ironsworn, where you’re playing 2 roles, that of player and that of referee, rather than it being one role. That’s a different kind of barrier for me, personally to overcome.

    It’s worth noting, though, that there’s an introductory tutorial for Hardcase, specifically for people struggling with how to start out, like me, with additional guardrails and supports, called Escape the A, and that there is a, expansion called Truthseeker that adds additional support for the world, and that people have released adventures for Hardcase that can support your play as well. Maybe my concerns are short-sighted, given all that additional support. I nevertheless think Hardcase would slap as a 2-player game. That would be my preferred format for playing Hardcase, I think. But does Hardcase work as a solo game for a bunch of people who are more interested in playing something with a more traditional TTRPG structure? Hell yes, this is absolutely solid, drives further story hard, and is set in a really compelling world.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: Shiv, featuring Sam Dunnewold

    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.

    From Shiv

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: The Field Agent Handbook

    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!

    The Field Agent Handbook is a set of 5 connected booklets, each a journal to take notes in. You take on the role of an undercover field agent from the Aetherial Corporation, viewing the world through a lens of suspicion. I’m not aware of another game like it, but you could describe it as an always-on solo RPG to play when you’re out and about. Look, honestly, if this feels like a jam to you, then just order a handbook now and get playing.

    So, what does a handbook contain? Well, to simplify it maximally, each of them has you searching for signs in everyday life of very strange things: You start with “suspicious activity” in 1924, but by 1928 you’re on the look for “kinds of giants”. All of the handbooks contain these basic signals you’re searching for in the inside cover of the book, for easy access. Once you know what to look like, you learn how to use your tools (typically a pendulum and another 1-2 items) to ascertain the likelihood it’s an actual case of giant (or whatever you’re looking for, perhaps sky-whale). We then have a few pages describing the phenomenon you’re looking for, and learning a little about it (animals, clouds, plants, geography) and the rest of the book is filled with space for your recordings.

    The layout here is perfect, and feels like one of the cheap, mail-order zines that I ordered in the 80s; if anything it feels too modern for its intended time period. But it’s legible and easy to navigate, and leaves plenty of room for you to take notes, including an index that you fill out yourself. The art style is also very work manual, which means I can’t really praise it too highly, but it’s a perfect choice for these books.

    So, I can’t really talk too much about these handbooks without spoiling things, but I think they’re absolutely genius. This is the analogue equivalent of a game like Pokémon Go; the closest TTRPG to this is the classic Collectible Trading Moon Game You pick a handbook — I’d recommend with no further research into which you get — and then until you complete it, every time you go out you’re forced to focus on one aspect of your environment. It’s meditative, and beautiful, but with a dose of humour and storytelling that I enjoy tremendously. It’s akin to the Bonsai Diaries, but you’re engaging with your actual environment and reinterpreting it, not creating your own pot sized world.

    Anyway, The Field Agents Handbook is great. If you’re looking for something to do instead of be on your phone (as I am right now, while sitting a forest surrounded by birdsong), it brings a way to connect with what’s actually around you in a creative but deeply observant way. It’s a healthy, imaginative, solo exercise, with precisely the level of engagement with the imaginary world and your role as a secret agent in it as you wish. If any of this appeals to you, check it out now.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: The Cycle

    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!

    The Cycle is a 13 page module for Mothership by Luke Frostik. In it you are trapped in a monotonous dehumanising routine, when suddenly you’re given the opportunity to escape from your interstellar prison, run by a crazed AI. It’s intended as a one-shot module.

    The layout here is simple, easy to read, well signaled, and has a lovely cohesive colour and art style. I’d love some page numbers or in-text highlighting for clearer in-game use, however. It’s a good example of how small choices can cause issues even in a small text though; the text is super light, which on the thistle-pink background gets challenging to read in large blocks. These large blocks don’t really happen until the second half of the book. You can get away with these misses in a short module like this one. The art by Eli Bensusan is honestly lovely. Great work.

    You get one key NPC, the protagonist Dante, and a prisoner generator if you need more. Play takes place during a series of time-loops, which while aren’t technically time-loops, effectively they are. Between cycles, you can have a dream some of which will affect you in different ways. The module expects the session to be over by the third cycle, which is just enough to get a sense for what’s going on; I hope that the players won’t figure this out and try taking advantage of the cycle, though. The likelihood is that they’ll break free of it, and explore the rest of the space station, then realise they’re not going to be rehabilitated, and what their fate will be if they don’t escape. I really like the AI table, which basically automates the responses it makes. This is pretty neat, and makes it feel like AI, and not some god-like being.

    I do wish that this module relied a little more on read-aloud text, instead of relying on my translating the description in-text of what I’m supposed to communicate into my own words. It’s just another, unnecessary step. I love to see beautiful writing in modules, especially to read it aloud. Instead, this module tells, rather than shows. I like the locations, though, and plenty of these encounters are interesting. This feels a little bigger than a one-shot, however, by sheer number of rooms; that said, you may just breeze through them, because there aren’t too many random encounters, more a series of scenes you may or may not stumble into.

    Overall, I like the Cycle. I’ts a lovely little module, and I love the idea that on the first few play-throughs, you’re living a monotonous and boring life being re-integrated, before the truth starts to come out and you begin to break free. However, I don’t think the module itself scaffolds’ that play well — if someone told me that I was going to be playing a bored corporate drone in Mothership, I’d be confused, which undermines the implied course of play. And the ease of play is limited by the fact that that implied structure of play isn’t really assisted along for the referee by the text itself. I could see this story being told in a different format, incredibly well, and it’s compelling enough a concept that it has my mind jumping to how I could either fix the module or write something inspired by it. And, the truth is, that’s enough that for your table, with your amazing improvisation skills or your enjoyment of prep as an excuse to escape downstairs to the study, the Cycle might be an excellent one-shot for the right table.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

  • Critique Navidad: HyperMall Unlimited Violence

    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!

    HyperMall Unlimited Violence is a 248 page game by JD Clement, with art by Bryton J Swan and additional art by a bunch of other artists. It’s a cyberpunk game, that appears loosely inspired by Troika! In it, you and your fellow contractors go on missions against the corporations that run the world.

    This is maximalist layout. Every page is heavily collaged, it’s rare to have text running vertically down the page. It’s messy. It’s a vibe. It’s most reminiscent in its maximialism of Mork Borg, but I personally find it a little harder to read than Mork Borg, largely because it’s intentionally less cohesive. These choices often are reflected in a less easy to navigate book — in a short book like Mork Borg, it works well, but in an almost 250 page book, where you need to find your way around, a little more consistency in terms of page numbering colours, or section headers, etc. would really go a long way.

    So, what does this massive book contain? Well, the rules take up the first 5 or so pages, and then we have 75 pages of backgrounds. We then have some player-facing rules — skills, psionics, mutations, resurrection and gear — for about 50 pages. Then, we have a short 15 pages on how to run the game, and finally, a few pages on the world of the Hypermall, and then a mission generator and a section on enemies, along with a list of 36 enemies. That’s a lot, and the nature of Critique Navidad means I don’t have a lot of capacity to dig into this in a lot of detail; what I’ll do, is cherry pick some examples.

    The rules are more or less Troika!, with a few small changes (a dice pool, mixed successes, a few types of combat, no chip-based initiative). It incorporates a bunch of tech from the Apocalypse World through Blades in the Dark lineage into a Troika! framework, effectively. It’s a neat jam, but it explicitly says the system doesn’t matter: on, and the game agrees with me: “This is all the boring s**t nobody cares about. Let’s get to the part about the killing.”. This is a vibes game, through and through. If you like Troika! Backgrounds, you’re going to like these backgrounds, as they’re similarly flavourful and communicate a lot about the world of the Hypermall. There’s normal cyberpunk here, and also weirder stuff like the carcinized believer, a human who’s religion has transformed them into a crustacean hybrid of some kind. What’s interesting to me about the world of Hypermall is that it’s not always clear what level of reality these backgrounds are actually existing in. In combination with the intro, and especially the end of book setting information, you get an impressionistic idea of what this world is like, if you read enough of the book, or else you’re going to make it up in concert with your players. The referee advice section adds referee moves into the framework — really a necessity if you’re going to add partial success. “Let’s get to the part about the killing.” is the pinch point here. We get advice around making the violence fun in the referee section, but it weirdly doesn’t do enough to show us how to make the violence fun. This is a game that expects you to be steeped in violence as a genre, rather than something that supports you in being hyper violent. Compared to say Vengeance California or Crank It Up, two other hyper violent games, it doesn’t really tell you how to be violent. It relies on the referee for that support.

    But, this world is not my jam at all. The writing is very cyberpunk and gross in a bunch of ways. It’s darkly funny. But, the hostility of the writing and the hostility in the world, in combination with the — aesthetically appropriate — challenging and bold layout — is that I really struggle to read it, and I’d struggle even more to run it or play in it. For me, I exist in a cyberpunk hellscape already, and this parodic one is a little too close to real life for me to want to spend time here. If you’re not sure whether this is for you, the title of the holiday module that’s been released is likely to tell you whether you’ll enjoy the writing and the world.

    HyperMall Unlimited Violence is an interesting beast, though. The big caveat is that you might bounce off the layout and art style, but you can see examples of that right there on the store page: Trust me when I tell you it is all like that. If you have played Troika! but you thought it needed some storygame influence to fulfil it’s promises, this is probably a mechanical direction you’ll appreciate, and is worth looking at for that purpose. If you’re looking to play in a parodically dark cyberpunk future, and the mainstream ones are a little too clean for you, then this one might appeal to you. There are a lot of people who are going to absolutely eat up this hyper-stylised, maximalist, Troika/Storygame hybrid, extreme parody of our impending cyberpunk future. Sadly, HyperMall Unlimited Violence is not for me.

    Idle Cartulary

    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.

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