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!

Cryptid Keeper is a referee-less, trifold pamphlet roleplaying game where in you play zookeepers in a zoo for mystical creatures, by Joie Yong.

Your keeper has 3 stats (charisma, lore and body), as well as a favourite cryptid. You roll against a random challenge rating, for any challenges you face facing cryptids, patrons or other NPCs. There is also a simple procedure to generate a zoo, filling it with between 8 and 20 cryptids, and identifying the biome filling the habitat. The zoo is obviously magical, to allow for this.

The bulk of play itself is a generated by the event table, which contains 20 randomised events, of which you’ll experience 1-2 per day, depending on how many players you’re playing with. These randomised events or vague, but in a way that invites story-telling – for example, “A cryptid in Habitat 6 has found its way into Habitat 3” isn’t that interesting on the face of it, but with the relationships you’ve developed with the cryptids, your zoo design, and the randomness of the generation, you’ll liked get a unique situation out of it. Most of the prompts work really well like this – simple, but effective.

That’s the whole game, which is interesting. Most of the play here is implied, which is something I generally dislike. For example, it’s implied that the moment-to-moment gameplay will include cleaning and maintaining habitats, feeding, bathing and entertaining cryptids, and meeting with the vet and also wealthy donors, punctuated by the events. It’s clearly supposed to be a “week in the life” kind of game, played for a maximum of a few days. It’s clearly implied that you’re supposed to collaboratively draw a little map of your zoo and potentially also your cryptid guests, which just sounds like a pleasure to do to me. It probably helps that I recently read a book about a cryptid zoo, The Phoenix Keeper by SA Maclean, which gives me a very clear picture of what I’d want this to be.

This really makes me wonder about the role of genre or text familiarity as a form of scaffolding in games that we don’t talk about enough. Cryptid Keeper slaps, because it’s a very very specific homage to a niche genre. Could this be a very detailed genre-emulation storygame? Yeah, sure. Would that make it better? I don’t think it would be better for me, someone who reads this and thinks “Oooh I can play Phoenix Keeper”. I don’t think someone who has no magical zookeeper tropes in their head would benefit from those extra rules that would ensure a rigid adherence to the story beats, either. This is kind of the sweet spot for me. But I’ve played and read plenty of tiny games where it didn’t hit the sweet spot for me, perhaps because I didn’t have that familiarity. How much of the love, for example, for Brindlewood Bay, is borne from how many generations grew up on reruns of Murder She Wrote and Ms Marple, rather than the surplus of loving moves structured especially to replicate the story beats therein?

The other thing I enjoy and love about Cryptid Keeper, is that I while it’s clearly a game that would be a joyful night of play with a few friends, it is also designed explicitly to also be playable solo. And I think it would be a pleasure to play solo. I have trouble doing things for me, at times, so I’d feel the urge to record it as an audio journal, or journal it, which I wouldn’t feel the need to in a group, but for those who enjoy solo games, it’s honestly a great one, and, unlike most solo games I’ve come across, it doesn’t copy one of only a few systems designed for solo play.

I can’t imagine there’s a surplus of gamers out there looking for a cryptid zoo keeping game, but if that sounds like something adorable to you, either alone or with your friends, Cryptid Keeper is a no-brainer to me. It’s cute, it’s short, and would be a pleasure to play, and there aren’t many tiny games I feel like wouldn’t benefit from expansion.

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.

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!

When I get a submission for Critique Navidad, I put them all in a big folder, so I can access them on the various platforms I write on easily. This means I lose the context of who the author is, the page the game was purchased on, etc. When I first opened Mandog, my response was “What the absolute hell is this”. What Mandog turns out to be is a 16 page module, primarily an investigation, written for OD&D, but set in 2018, in a suburban neighbourhood, by Gromb, with art by Wilber H. Force.

Layout in Mandog is basic and works for the most part. Nobody likes a monospaced font, but here it works. Highlighting is left to bolding and italics, which works well as keying is kept simple. The keying is arranged by address, so it’s hard for me to flick easily through the key, and section headers (or some other way of identifying things at a glance) would be helpful. That said, this is an investigation module; I’m not sure the player characters are going to be crawling through this space, and even more to the point, I wonder if location was the right choice to separate this by at all given it’s an investigation. I’ll come back to this point later. One particularly egregious issue with the layout is that Mandog is completely unsearchable; this made the smaller issues I had with information design far, far more significant. For example, it’s not clear what the “Black Moon” or “Black Moon Syndrome” is and I can’t look it up; I don’t know who Bill “Brainiac” Quimee is and I can’t find them without scanning 20 pages of text. It renders this completely impossible to run on the fly, and difficult to run without printing it off and marking it up. There are page references in some places, but many things I need to reference don’t have page references — any of the random encounters for example. I don’t really see any good reason for a digital file to be unsearchable. The art is mostly limited to maps, but they all look scrawled out by someone taking their best guess, which honestly slaps and suits the subject matter perfectly; when it isn’t, it’s impressionistic charcoal and crayon stuff like the cover above that also slaps. Great choices.

The basic gist of this investigation is that there’s a monster on the loose, and each night, it kills another victim, becoming stronger. The cops are useless, and so the responsibility of investigation falls to the player characters. The player characters take 2 investigation rounds per day and 2 per night, and might encounter specific characters or monsters. at a rate of 1 in every 6 rounds or so. There’s no invitation or suggestion of why the investigation falls to the player characters. I have no idea why the player characters might be here, whether they’re internal to the community or external, and without that, it’s pretty hard to intuit where to start here. In order to kick off the investigation, as a referee I’d have to do a fair bit of work developing the hooks, or else I’d have to do some collaborative worldbuilding with the table. The latter might work pretty well, but it’s definitely not supported in any way, so I’d still have to do a fair bit of work to make sure the worldbuilding doesn’t contradict the test. I’d far prefer if there was support for one of these options.

Mandog’s writing is urgent to a fault. It’s good, though, and the terse and evocative word choices often work here where they don’t work as well in fantasy settings, because most readers have deeper hooks into what an imaginary town would look like than a musty cave. “A small crack in the basement floor opens to a chittering world of filth, a world that armies of pest exterminators fought and lost. The realtor considers a fire insurance policy.” is a pretty typical example: There’s humour, terseness, and more, packed into only a few words. It’s genuinely great. But, it’s filled with forbidden easter eggs, things like “Bobby does not know May prepares his body for possession after her death.” which just aren’t discoverable or interactable, even though they’re a hell of a vibe. In fact, that same home is a good example of the recurring problem with these locations: There’s no reason, really, to get to know these people, and similarly, there’s no mechanism beyond breaking into random homes to identify who’s been killed by Mandog; and there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme nor reason to Mandog’s killings, so there’s no way to anticipate them and stand in Mandog’s way. There are 15 locations before someone suspects anyone of anything. There are only 2 characters with any suspicions at all that might point you to Mandog’s lair. You find out some clue regarding what the Black Moon is on page 11; it’s in the single longest and sloppiest piece of readaloud text in the book, and would better have been directed at the referee non-diagetically, or parceled out somehow.

Now, there’s the question of whether choosing a system other than 0D&D would have made these issues less meaningful. I think, in some ways, it would. Liminal Horror, for example, would be a good choice for this module, and it comes bit a bunch of presuppositions that would help breeze past some of the hiccups with initiating play. But, it wouldn’t eliminate enough of them, and I don’t think the built in rules would be better than 0D&D for many of the included rules. The issues here are primarily level-design, and not resolved by picking a different system.

Overall, Mandog is a conundrum. This is a gorgeously realised and written suburb infected with evil and plagued with a demon in a relatively unique setting; this should be a super-compelling module. But it’s almost completely unplayable; there’s nowhere to start, there are few clues to find out what’s going on; it’s difficult to navigate to a fault. This is not a playground, and that’s a mistake for a module, because nothing works together. There’s very little level design here. I would never run this, because the preparation just to get started is way more than I can justify when there are so many other modules out there; I’d need to mark everything up, develop hooks, and figure out what the characters know so that the investigation will lead somewhere. It’s too much for me. That said, if an investigation set in an alternate demon-haunted 80’s American suburb is your jam, or you’re a sucker for stellar evocative writing, I’d jump on Mandog without hesitation, so long as you have a lot of confidence to fumble through the gaps, or would enjoy building on what’s here in your spare time.

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.

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!

Carved in Stone, subtitled “A Storyteller’s Guide to the Picts”, is a 160 page setting guide, by Brian Tyrell and Lizy Simonsen, with research by Dr Heather Christie. This is a massive book, with a huge number of other contributors, particularly illustrators. This is, effectively a historical sourcebook, in the guise of a setting guide to a fantasy game, from the perspective of a 7th century Pict (who are, for what its worth, the people who lived in Scotland in the 7th century). Or, perhaps, it’s a setting guide to a fantasy game, in the guise of a historical sourcebook? I’m not really certain — although if the concept of either compel you, or you’re a historian yourself perhaps you should skip the review.

I’m going to choose to breeze over part 1; this is the evidence, and an exploration of what academic choices and work went into this massive book. The mere existence of such a massive collaboration between academia and the roleplaying hobby in the form of such a well-illustrated and well-evidenced book, is absolutely phenomenal, and this section talk about that. But that’s not something I need to recap in detail, and so I’ll move on to the first section: Landscapes.

In Landscapes, we start to talk about the actual locations in Scotland. I like the highlighting choices here. Effectively we have a bolded sentence, the summary of the paragraph that comes next, so you have the short and long description of a feature. This is the first half of a spread; on the second, there are 3 detailed encounters, and 8 less detailed encounters. These are gorgeous, and evocative: “A goatherd finds the remains of a fire by the mountain trail, along with a few iron tools and bits of cloth. While gathering the scattered items, they pray for the soul who left them.”, for example. They conjure questions about the world, and the characters, lots for a referee to improvise and work from. Weather is expressed as an illustrated cycle, again, with both a more technical description and a poetic one. This is solid, if perhaps overly detailed, incorporation of the unique Scottish geography into gameable form.

Next up is Kingdoms. This is a combination of factions and the map and key, with “regions” being by specific people. It follows the same format as Landscapes, to excellent effect. It’s also often funny (at least to those a little familiar with the subject matter): “York. An up-and-coming town that bishops and merchants are keen to support. Perhaps in a decade it might be worth a visit.” Languages are covered, and are shown through colour and symbolism on the maps. I adore how bilingualism is expected, but that examples are given of what that would look like in everyday life. Trade and value is covered, but also the rules of negotiation and trust are discussed, as our power, responsibility, and the specifics of royalty.

Next up is Perspectives, which covers time, traditions, storytelling, celebrations and the like. Less concrete cultural considerations. These abandon the easy-to-run structure of the earlier chapters, mainly because the topics are a little more difficult to define. Most importantly to most referees, this covers magic, which covers spirits and the rules around them, how Christians think these are demons, how sorcerers weave magic into quartz stones and brew potions, Magi and their more powerful magic, as well as the role Christianity has in magic and in politics, including miracles, magic and saints. This implies a lot of potential magical complexity, that isn’t explored in depth here.

The final and longest section is Lives. This is the real stuff of the world, which you’ll be preparing yourself: Travel includes pros and cons of different methods of travel, random landmarks you might encounter while travelling, people you might meet. Then there are settlement generators. Then 7 detailed locations, to show what things could look like for the various types of settlements. Then lots more things that I honestly feel belonged in perspectives: Skills, food, medicine, fashion and art, more time on the symbol stones mentioned earlier, equipment and entertainment.

The appendices are a mixed bag; I think the text itself is meandering enough that many of these things could’ve been incorporated in their relevant sections. There’s more on law, medicine, trade and magic here that simply should have been in the main text. But there are also useful things that definitely belong in the appendices: Lists of names, for example. I get the overall feeling the appendix is a bunch of detail that they didn’t want to bog down the reader with, but thought were interesting enough to be “further reading”, and it ends up being just a little clumsy.

The layout is stellar; the art is vibrant and interesting. I’ve often opined the fact that there are too few roleplaying game books designed like children’s history books: This is that book. While it could be more navigable from an information design perspective — this is a curse that I suspect comes from the desire to communicate academic as well as game design information — I think the layout is just stellar; this is by far the most readable roleplaying game gazette I’ve ever read. It’s gorgeous. You could leave it on your coffee table.

My preference is for a more detailed and intertwined world; this isn’t that. But what it is, is a huge step up in detail in the best possible way, from most worlds designed to be mostly evocative and improvised upon. A recent example of the style is Empire of Hatred; but the detail here is far more supportive, and if you wish modules like that one were more detailed, this is an excellent choice.

Carved in Stone is strictly system agnostic, which may work for some people, and may not work for others. My own style, I could run this as easily as anything, with a little prep for stat blocks. That may not be as compatible with every referee’s style. Certainly, I think this would be extremely compatible with something like Wulwald which I reviewed last year and seems a no-brainer for the kind of world set here. The main clash with popular systems is the ambiguity with which Carved in Stone treats magic here. The big challenge, for me, is that there are loads of implied systems of complexity: Language, trade and negotiation, and reputation are examples. These are things that are often mechanised in OSR style games, but here are simply described. I think I’d need to develop my own systems for these, if I were to run Carved in Stone, which is a not insignificant commitment. But, if you have an abiding love for the subject matter, you might also consider that just a bit of fun. One massive, implied subsystem here is tale-telling, which gets a section with lots of detail, but that I really feel should be a significant mini-game — it feels a lot like boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast. Overall, I can understand the choice not to put this to a system, but I think it is far weaker for it. That said, I can see a world where the community crowd-sources a system to play this in, and if it gains popularity, I’m excited to see what the community does with all of these fascinating implied systems.

If you’re interested at all in the history of the British isles, Carved In Stone is probably one of the better books I’ve seen on said history. It’s also an excellent setting guide for an OSR style roleplaying game (or, I suppose, a traditional system like 5th edition), although the kind that leaves a lot of room for your own interpretation. If you love to take worlds and build your campaign around them, this is a hell of a world to build around. But there’s a lot of gaps by virtue of this being system-agnostic: A lot of important concepts here that you’ll need to figure out how to explore, a lot of things you’ll have to decide whether you consider important regardless of the import the book places on it. It’s a game that seems designed really well to take advantage of specific systems that you could adapt to its use: Wulfwald or Wolves Upon the Coast come to mind. It’s a book that you’ll want to study if you’re going to run it, but if you do, there’s so much power in the minutiae you’re going to be able to describe, and the writing is often gorgeous and assists you in communicating a lot of the strengths of the texts. This is a complex one, I think in terms of the tension between the academic or historical, and the game design or gameability, and every referee will fall in a different place. But if the concepts here are exciting to you, Carved in Stone will be a beautiful book to have on your coffee table, filled with great historical communication, even if you choose not to take the effort that is likely required to bring it to your 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.

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 Bonsai Diary is a 34 page journalling game by Gene Koo. In it you nurture and grow a Bonsai Tree, with pen and ink.

The mechanic is simple: You tract the previous page’s bonsai, and then add a line to make your tree grow. Each page, you’ll get a prompt, which will guide you to tell the story of yourself and your tree. Sometimes these prompts are a question, sometimes there are images to help direct what you draw, and sometimes they’re quotes. Sometimes they’re very specific, sometimes they’re ephemeral. I get the impression this is supposed to be a regular practice — you play a page every day for a month — but it doesn’t outright say that.

The layout is spacious — as it should be, as you’re supposed to be drawing all over the page — and conservative, but as it is played page by page as you progress, information design is straightforward here. It’s elegant, and lovely. You can buy a print edition; I had the print and play edition, which has clear instructions on how to reproduce it. I have a strong feeling that this game would benefit from being on higher quality, better bound paper. Like, it screams “I want to be on a textured, spiral-bound notebook”; that said, you could do that, if you wanted. There are instructions for creating your own diary, unique from this one, using a deck of playing cards, in the back. This would be, in my opinion, a project well worth the time.

Bonsai Diary is another game in this past year or two’s trend toward book play; Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, Triangle Agency, and most recently Spine, all have repositioned the book itself as the center (or at least a fulcrum among others) that the game spins around. This isn’t a new concept, but I think that designers are embracing it in newer and more interesting ways. It also plays with the oft-lauded destruction of a text — but in the opposite direction. You’re tracing your Bonsai from the previous page, so every page you have the opportunity to deface your page and your Bonsai, and you simply do not have to. There are pages that take advantage of the ephemerality of the tracing of your Bonsai, which is fascinating for the very same reason why other legacy games are fascinating in how they ask you to destroy things you previously wouldn’t have dreamed of replacing. It’s inventive and I love it.

Bonsai Diary is full-bent focused on providing a contemplative, mindful experience, but in a creative, surprising way. It’s really quite excellent. It’s also quite interesting. So many solo journalling games are instead full-bent on horror, or fear, or exploring your innermost feelings, and I enjoy this calmer, more measured pace. If you’re looking for some kind of meditative gaming practice, for a month, or for a day, I’d check out the Bonsai Diary.

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.

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!

A Real Boy is a 1-page collaborative storytelling game, where players take turns telling the story of an artificial being struggling to become human. It’s technically for any number of people, but I feel like it would work best with 3.

The basic gist is this: You agree on a few basic worldbuilding prompts, and (in a neat simple worldbuilding technique), describe how the world you’re playing in feels about certain things.

The you take turns rolling on the encounter table and framing scenes for the player to your right, who plays the creature. At any point, another player will ask for your reaction, checking one of the four feelings you used to build your world. If the feeling gets too much use, it evolves into a new feeling, and the world changes. After 9 encounters, you look at the world, and decide what happens to the creature.

The meat of the game are the encounters, and these are pithy and metaphorical, effectively tarot-like, such as “The Crow and the Owl. The science. Why are they a danger?” I like them, but as I mentioned earlier in this year’s Critique Navidad, I like some specificity in my design: This being a 1-page game doesn’t have the space for that, so it’s going to appeal mainly to players who run on creative fumes.

A Real Boy is a lovely little game, that would benefit from being a little less little. I suspect simply expanding it to the back of the page would be sufficient to expand on the back or front end of the prompts, to add some space for the marking down you’re supposed to do, and to clarify the processes a little. It’s all here, though, and for the right table A Real Boy would honestly be a great warm-up before a similarly themed game, or perhaps even a whole evening if you were very comfortable improvisers.

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.

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!

Chain x Link is a 64 page game by Ethan Yen, with art by Tony Tran and Andrew Beauman, with consultation by Spencer Campbell. In it, you are the leaders of revolutionary factions, that have been exiled to a dungeon deep beneath your civilisation. You work together to survive and escape, while plotting against each other to smuggle assets out of the dungeon to your factions above ground. Meanwhile, you also play your faction above ground, trying to seed their very own revolution.

Let’s talk visual design first, because it’s worth talking about but I suspect it’ll get lost if I leave it to the end. The layout, also by Andrew Beauman, is excellent. It’s full of visual aids and graphics, it has a lovely faded purple highlight palette. It’s clear and relatively easy to navigate; I think there are so many moving parts here, that choosing a larger page format would have enable concepts and procedures to be pinned more commonly to spreads, and that would have made it better again. Within the format chosen, though — looks to be A5 or half-letter — it works very well. The information design isn’t terrible, although it front-loads a lot of information. Later in the book, in Spadefront section, it starts walking the referee chronologically through what she needs to do to run that first session — I think the game as a whole would be better off to have been presented in that way, given that rules —are at least complex in their unfamiliarity.

So, those rules. There’s a lot going on here. Your core loop consists of entering a new level, completing a faction trial for one of the factions, and completing a grave trial for that level. If you can complete the ascension rite, you can enter the level above, or if you’ve ascended far enough, escape. If your faction has completed all 3 of its’ goals, you get to have a revolution. As a Breaker (what characters are called here), you have skills and assets, and those assets can move between your “chain” (that’s your party), and your faction on the surface (by smuggling). The goal is to both escape (and hence you need loyalty to your chain) but also to start a revolution, where the other breakers in your chain all desire very different revolutions to you. You also have equipment and experiences, which operate similarly to assets and skills, but are earnt or bought. Very neat way to represent a revolutionary leader’s acumen. When you ascend a level (or in a scene on the surface), you play out a trial. The trial has an objective, an opposition, and stakes, and the referee determines the difficulty of the trial, which the breakers are trying to beat. You each make a contribution adding to the dice pool for your various equipment, experiences, assets etc., and roll them all. You pick one die as your contribution score — the next player will have to pick a higher score, so best to pick a low one, or the others won’t be able to contribute. But the final breaker gets to be the leader next time, which is a powerful advantage. One of my favourite small mechanics in this game is opportunity: You’re all leaders of powerful factions, which means you’re masterminds, you bide your time. So each of you have a d10 which is the opportunity die. The longer you wait to strike during a trial, choosing lower contribution scores, the greater the number you can choose to substitute your choice for when you do choose to seize the opportunity. If total contribution beats the difficulty, you succeed, and the new leader distributes any rewards. If you don’t succeed, you suffer consequences. Then the leader gets to enlist someone in opposition during the trial, to smuggle an asset to their faction. The same rules apply to faction trials as to grave trials, which I appreciate very much. I love the tension in these relatively simple, 1-pass rules, between gaining leadership and risking danger. I appreciate that there’s this core complexity to the game, lots of fiddly parts, but it’s re-used in different contexts and features a lot of internal tension. It’s great.

There are a few things I don’t think are clear. I got the impression you’d face a maximum of 2 trials per level, but the Ascension Rite has me second-guessing that impression. If I fail a trial, do I repeat it again and again, unchanged? That may get repetitive. I don’t quite understand whether contributions are simultaneous or turn-by-turn — I think simultaneous would make more sense, with the push-your-luck of contribution score. What does revolution, or reaching the surface, entail?

One of my favourite touches in Chain x Link is the additional resources; it relies heavily on the breaker, chain and factions sheets in the rules, so they aren’t really bonuses, but the trial sheet structures the trials visually for the referee, which I appreciate, and more importantly it comes with a folder of pregenerated breakers, factions and chain, so you can simply skip that entire section of the rulebook. The rules in Chain x Link are unique enough — at least to me — that it takes a fair bit to wrap my head around, so reducing that cognitive load from 60 pages to 30 is a hell of a scaffold to get me to running the game.

The end of the book is the entire lowest level of the Grave. This slaps! It’s full of characters, interactions, it’s an absolute powder keg! And I love that it provides an example of what you’re supposed to be designing as the referee for future levels of the dungeon. One way this diverges from inspirations like Blades in the Dark and Agon is that the referee is expected to design the levels of the Grave. It’s a weak criticism to say that I want more of this, but it’s good. The same goes for the worldbuilding as a whole; there’s a gesture to collaborative worldbuilding in the character creation section, but I really feel this needs more information, even if brief, on the surface, and the specific contexts of the faction and the world. Certainly, if the book were twice as long, with 10 times as much of the actual location content, it would make my job as a referee a hell of a lot easier — the referee already has a lot of improvisational load in terms of the surface, so reducing the preparation load would make this more likely to hit the table for me, simply by virtue of my being time poor between work and children.

I like Chain x Link a lot. The feeling I got out of Chain x Link after reading through the book, felt a lot like the feeling I got out of Blades in the Dark the first time I read it — there’s a lot of mechanical heft here, but it’s elegantly presented, and while it might take a lot to wrap your head around, it’s going to result in a really compelling game filled with really compelling stories. One of the inspirations listed is Spire, and I always felt like Spire would’ve been better as a Forged in the Dark game: No. This is the game Spire should’ve been. It’s clearly inspired by John Harper’s work, but it really pulls things together in a neat and compelling way. I’m disappointed it isn’t organised and explained a little more clearly — it needs space to breath and it needs to be in a bigger format to do so — and I’m disappointed it doesn’t come with more information about this compelling world and the levels of the Grave. It also feels cut to the bone to fit the page count, leaving some end-game crucial elements uncovered. But those aren’t dealbreakers for many people, and if I can find time to do all the prep, this is a game I’m definitely going to try to bring to the table next year, despite those misgivings. If you’ve always had the same feeling as me about revolutionary games that fell short like Spire and Brinkwood, I think you should bring Chain x Link to the table as well.

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