by W. Eric Martin

Tresham at SPIEL '05. Image: Richard Breese• Game designer Francis Tresham passed away on October 23, 2019, just as SPIEL '19 was about to open. I had mentioned his passing on air during our livestream, but not in this space, and I'm finally correcting that deficiency.

You can measure the influence of a designer in multiple ways, and Tresham's legacy might be best represented by his influence on other game designers, specifically his creation of two game genres — 18xx games and civilization games — through the publication of the stock-manipulation and rail-building game 1829 by his own Hartland Trefoil Ltd. in 1974 and Civilization (also by Hartland Trefoil) in 1980.


I wish that I could say more than that, but I've played 1830 once and Civilization never as they're not my style of games. Instead, I can only recognize how Tresham's work has inspired others, both those who have created games of their own in these genres and those who play these games with a passionate devotion, such as Edward Uhler of Heavy Cardboard, who interviewed Tresham in mid-2018:

Youtube Video
• On November 14, 2019, Kai Jensen noted on BGG that her husband Chad Jensen, designer of Dominant Species and the Combat Commander series of games, had passed away. Jensen had been diagnosed with cancer earlier in 2019, with BGG user Christopher Hill posting a warm tribute to the designer at the time.

• Baltic publisher Brain Games has entered a distribution agreement with Canadian publisher/distributor Luma Games, with Luma now having "exclusive English-language distribution" of its titles in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. On top of that, Luma Games will "manage Brain Games's French catalog for Canada's French language market".

In June 2019, Luma had picked up distribution rights for Italian publisher Horrible Games — which changed its name to Horrible Guild in October 2019 — in North America. Luma also recently announced that it will be demoing and selling Bruxelles 1897 at BGG.CON 2019 on behalf of Belgian publisher Geek Attitude Games, with that title moving into North American distribution in early 2020.

• German publisher Pegasus Spiele has signed a deal with Canadian distributor Lion Rampant Imports to give that latter company exclusive distribution of Pegasus titles in Canada. (In case you forgot or missed the news, Asmodee had signed a deal in August 2019 to purchase Lion Rampant Imports.)

• Along the same lines, in mid-October 2019 Pegasus signed a deal with Let's Play Games Distribution and VR Distribution to give these two companies exclusive distribution rights of its titles in Australia, and in early October 2019, Pegasus signed a deal with Spilbræt.dk for exclusive distribution of its titles in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Designer Uwe Rosenberg used to have fairly consistent partners for his work: AMIGO for Bohnanza titles, Lookout for big-box games, and Feuerland for even bigger games.

Yet Rosenberg has been creating so many games that he's been branching out to other publishers, publishers that launch their existence with his creations, such as Edition Spielwiese in 2016 with Cottage Garden (as well as his Nova Luna at SPIEL '19), Wyrmgold in 2019 with Robin of Locksley, and Canadian publisher Paper Plane Games in March 2020 with the 1-2 player game Fairy Trails.

In Fairy Trails, one player represents elves, the other gnomes, and you want to give your creatures completed homes first in order to win. One tile starts face up on the table, while each player has a hand of two tiles. On a turn, you place one tile adjacent to one or more tiles already in play, and the edge of each tile contains paths in pink (for elves) and yellow (gnomes), although often these paths terminate on tiles instead of continuing onward. When you close one of your paths, whether by creating a loop or by terminating all of the branches, you mark all of the home spaces along that path with one of your markers — and whoever places all of their markers first wins.


In the solo game, you place tiles one at a time (instead of having a hand), and you must place at least one house on the board each turn starting with the fourth tile in play, ideally giving everyone a home before the paths lead you astray.

• UK publisher Osprey Games has announced a few of its 2020 releases, with Undaunted: North Africa from Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson being a standalone sequel to 2019's Undaunted: Normandy. Here's an overview of this May 2020 two-player release:

The North African campaign has begun. Take control of the British Army's Long Range Desert Group and operate behind enemy lines or command the formidable Italian forces opposing them. In Undaunted: North Africa, players once again lead their sides through a varied series of missions. As casualties mount, wounded soldiers leave the players' decks, forcing them to adapt in the face of changing tactical circumstances. Use your cards to strengthen your forces, deploy vehicles to advance rapidly across the battlefield, and seize the initiative as you determine the outcome of the North African Theater.

• That title will be preceded in February 2020 by Letterpress from Robin David, a 1-6 player game that has this somewhat vague description:

Johannes Gutenberg has given us letterpress printing, but it's up to you to master it!

Compete with your rival wordsmiths in Letterpress to craft the most impressive words and win first pick of letters to add to your collection. Choose wisely, for you will find any you leave in the words of your opponents, and the player who uses their stored letters to greatest effect will spell victory.

• In November 2017, L4 Studios funded a Kickstarter for KAPOW!, a dice-building game of superhero (and supervillain) combat from Larry Bogucki, Douglas Hettrick, and Carl Van Ostrand that was fulfilled in early 2019 through publisher 2 Ton Porcupine.

At SPIEL '19, White Wizard Games announced that it had picked up the title and would be relaunching it as a White Wizard title in 2020, with the game universe being expanded with more characters through a partnership with 2 Ton Porcupine. In a press release announcing the deal, White Wizard's Rob Dougherty said, "KAPOW! is super fun, easy to learn, and also has great strategy and tons of replayability, so it is a natural fit for our portfolio of games."

We talked with Dougherty about the game and White Wizard's new involvement with it at SPIEL '19:

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Since BGG.CON 2019 is taking place on Nov. 20-24, I won't be trekking across the Pacific to attend the next Tokyo Game Market on Nov. 23-24, 2019. Even so, I can highlight a few titles that will be featured at TGM and that might show up in licensed versions or at retail outlets closer to you in the months to come.

• Let's start with Remember Our Trip, a puzzle-y, (sort of) town-building game from designers Saashi and Daryl Chow and publisher Saashi & Saashi. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Remember Our Trip is a board game in which players recreate a map of a city they visited together. After returning to your own country, you and the other players have gotten together to try to recall the map of either Kyoto or Singapore (depending on the game board you choose). You need to piece together the scenery of the map using fragments of your memories, with you earning bonus points if your memory matches that of the main board and other players.

In the game, each player has an individual image board, while everyone shares a common map board. Each of the twelve rounds of the game starts with the revelation of a "memory card", which shows one of six patterns that players can build on their image board with image tokens that they draft. Over multiple rounds, you'll compile image tokens next to one another, and if you have the right tokens in the right shape, you suddenly "remember" the building that matches the shape and image, placing that building on the shared common map and scoring points for it. You can additionally score points for completing buildings with image tokens that match buildings remembered by others, i.e., that they placed on the common board earlier. You've now remembered that building, too!

Each player also has objective cards and photo memory cards, and you can score points for satisfying them. If you can't fit all of your image fragments into play, you lose points for scattered thoughts. For more difficult play, you can use the 7x6 area on the Kyoto or Singapore game board instead of the regular 7x7 area.

• Oink Games seemingly releases a new title at each TGM, and for this show it has a new design from founder Jun Sasaki, a 2-4 player titled Fafnir that falls into the bucket of "games in which you trade things to collect things that you might trade again in the future". Some details:

The chicken "Fafnir" lays two new gems each day, and all the players want to acquire these gems on the off chance that they'll be more valuable than the gems they already hold. Whoever throws away the most gems in a round acquires these two newest gems — but you can't throw away the colors of the gems that Fafnir just laid! No chicken will be impressed by you shaming the gems that you're also trying to acquire!

Once a certain number of stones have been discarded in Fafnir, the round ends, and everyone scores for the gems that they've collected. Gold is worth 1 point each no matter how many have been collected, so go for gold if you want to play it safe. As for the five colors of gems, whichever one appears most frequently is worth 3 points each, while the secondmost frequent color gem is worth 2 points each, and all other gems are worth -1 point each.

I've undoubtedly missed details in my summary of the gameplay, but as with most Japanese game announcements, I do the best I can and figure we can always edit descriptions later once the title is available. Actually, that same statement holds true for most everything I add to the database ahead of it being released, so never mind...


• To round out this round-up of titles from established JP designers, let's cover two upcoming games from Hisashi Hayashi of OKAZU Brand, starting with Goat 'n' Goat, a card game for 2-5 players with rules that I've roughly translated as follows:

Three mountains stand tall in front of the goats, who must try to combine their efforts to climb these daunting mountains together. Can you lead the goats to the highest parts of the mountains?

In Goat 'n' Goat, a.k.a. やぎ山, you want to combine your goats to conquer the tallest mountains possible, but goats only like to line up in certain ways. The game includes goat cards in three colors, with numbers ranging from 1-5 and with more low numbers than high; the game also includes mountain cards in three colors, with the values ranging from 3-9.

Players start with 3-5 cards in hand, and six cards are laid face up on the table. On a turn, you play one or more cards from your hand that all have the same number, whether of one color or more. If you don't have cards of this color or all the cards of this color are equal to or less than the number played, then you add these new cards to the stacks in front of you, with each color going into its own stack; if the number played is lower than the top card in a color stack, then you place all previously played cards of this color in front of you face down as penalty points, then start a new stack of this color with the cards just played.

You then choose as many cards from the row of six as the value of the card(s) just played. The quantity of cards played doesn't matter — only the digit on those cards! Whether you play a single 1 or five 1s, you draw only one card. If you now have more than eight cards in hand, you must discard down to eight cards, keeping all discarded cards as penalty points.

On a turn, after playing cards, you can choose to discard cards of a color to collect a mountain card in the same color that has a lower value. Thus, to collect the 3 blue mountain, you must discard four or more blue goat cards that you've collected in front of you.

Once you've gone through the deck twice (with 3-5 players) or once (with two players), the game ends. You tally all mountain points you've collected, then lose 1 point for each penalty card in front of you. Whoever has the highest score wins!

• The other Hayashi title from OKAZU Brand is the party game Distance from Here, which is for 2-8 players and which appears to have only Japanese rules despite the location cards also having English text. Here's what I know about the game right now:

In the game Distance from Here, you rank six location cards in order of what you think is nearest to you! However, the actual correct answer is irrelevant! What the players think is closest is most important, and this is what will actually earn you points!

With only two players, Distance from Here is played as a co-operative game instead of as a competitive one.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Restoration Games has unveiled the next title in the Unmatched game series it's been releasing in co-operation with Mondo Games — Unmatched: Cobble & Fog, with this being a two- or four-player game from designers Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, Justin D. Jacobson, and Chris Leder due out in Q2 2020. As for what's inside the box:

Unmatched: Cobble & Fog features four new characters for the Unmatched system. Invisible Man uses fog to dart around the board and strike without warning. Sherlock, with the trusty Watson by his side, schemes and calculates to ensure victory. Dracula and the sisters slowly drain you of your power. Jekyll & Hyde uses the former's cunning and the latter's brute strength to win the day.

Any character in Unmatched can be pitted against any other, so now you can finally have that Bruce Lee v. Dracula face-off for which you've always longed.

• Speaking of Chris Leder, he's a developer at U.S. publisher Calliope Games, which has just announced a crowdfunding project for a new edition of Station Master from Chris Baylis. (KS link) This card game was first released in 2004 from Mayfair Games — five years before the founding of Calliope Games! — and here's an overview of how it plays out:

With the rising of a new dawn, another busy day at the station begins. Harried passengers hustle about, looking for their trains. Behind the scenes, the engineers and workers rush to connect carriages to engines. It would all be a fine mess if there wasn't someone to oversee everything, if there was no station master! Can you be that station master? Can you balance the needs of your passengers with the carriages you have available?

In Station Master, you have to compete with opponents to direct passengers to the proper trains while choosing the best place to assign your carriages. There are many unexpected things that can happen at the station, so be prepared for anything!

Station Master is a quick and highly interactive 2-6 player card game within which players attempt to influence the value of departing trains by assigning passengers and carriages in an effort to get the trains to depart on time and accumulate the most points.

• With Azul: Summer Pavilion hitting retail markets now, Canadian publisher Next Move Games has teased its next release in Michael Kiesling's Azul game family — Azul: Crystal Mosaic.

This item is not a standalone game, but rather an expansion for the Azul base game, with the package including four plastic overlays (to keep your tiles from migrating across the board when playing in an airplane or or on the back of a camel) as well as four double-sided game boards that provide new challenges for gameplay.

• Alderac Entertainment Group, publisher of the long-lived card game Smash Up, has announced a partnership with The OP to bring "officially licensed factions" to Smash Up starting in 2020.

What those factions will be is a mystery for now, with AEG stating that "More will be revealed come AEG's 2020 March Smashness and future events." The OP has published a large number of games based on licensed IPs — Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, Munchkin Marvel, Talisman: Kingdom Hearts, and Bob's Burgers: Belcher Family Food Fight to name a few at random — so feel free to make lots of smashing speculations between now and March 2020.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Game publisher Days of Wonder is working together with mega-giant online retailer Amazon to get more people playing Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe.

How? By introducing Alexa skills that will both teach these games to new players and serve as an opponent for players both old and new. These skills are now available in English and French for those in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. An excerpt from the press release announcing this development:

After saying, "Alexa, launch Ticket to Ride" or "Alexa, launch Ticket to Ride: Europe," players are taken on a guided journey from setup to the end of the game for either game. No matter the player's experience level, the skills offer new ways to play and learn. For those new to the game, they offer full rules walkthroughs during play sessions. Veteran players can skip the walkthroughs and use other helpful tools that are part of the experience. The skills customize themselves to the number of players and track their remaining trains, the longest route, points, and more. They also act as an additional player for groups looking for an extra person or anyone who wants to get in a solo game against the skill itself. While each player takes their turn, the skills provide thematic background music and sound effects to immerse everyone in the world of Ticket to Ride.

"Ticket to Ride is a fast-paced, immersive board game experience that is now being elevated by voice," said Joe Balzarini, Director, Alexa Skills. "We're thrilled to be working with Days of Wonder to bring these skills to life and provide customers with an immersive, interactive voice gaming experience."

"Working with Amazon to bring the Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe Skills to Alexa-enabled devices has been exciting. We believe this is a great way for players to discover these classic games for the first time or in an amazing new way," said Adrien Martinot, Head of Days of Wonder.

Days of Wonder is eager for players to experience the free Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe skills for themselves. Additional languages and territories will be supported soon to ensure players around the world can learn and play Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe like never before.

I attended a press event during SPIEL '19 where this Alexa skill was demonstrated by Amazon employees, and while it's not something I'll use (since I already know the rules to these games and prefer playing against people rather than AIs), I can imagine this skill being extremely useful for the vast audience of potential players out there.

Nashville-to-Atlanta is still unclaimed?! Newbs!
As easy as Ticket to Ride is to learn, I recognize that it's easy only because I have a familiarity with games; I know the language of games and have a lot of background upon which to draw when learning new ones. If you asked me a question about, say, cars or anything related to the technical requirements of BGG, I'd stare at you for a while, then likely say, "I'm not sure what you want me to do." (Scott Alden can verify this from de-bugging sessions we've had.) I've encountered plenty of folks who have this reaction to learning a new game because they're not familiar with the game language, and they would benefit from having a teacher hold their hand from start to finish. Alexa can be that teacher.

In the demo session, the presenters started from ground zero: opening the box and laying out the pieces. This process could be tedious for some, but you can say "skip" and jump to whatever's next.

If you don't have Alexa join you as an opponent, you can still use it as a rules monitor and score tracker. You draw cards like normal, but when you claim a route, you say something like "Green player claims New Orleans to Houston", and Alexa will note this internally. If someone else tries to claim the route (because you were refilling the snack bowl and forgot to put your trains on the proper spaces), Alexa will stop that player from doing so, just as it will keep someone from claiming a double-route in a two- or three-player game. At game's end, you read off the tickets you completed and failed, and Alexa will tally the scores for all players.

With Alexa as an opponent, you start the game by drawing three tickets from the deck and reading them off to Alexa, with those tickets now being hers. (Do you refer to Alexa as "her"? I've never used one before.) You then remove them from the game so that no one else will claim them. Alexa has her own train card deck, so when she draws cards, nothing changes with the actual cards available for drafting by humans, whether for good or bad. When Alexa claims a route, she announces this and you must place trains on that route so that no one else will go there. It's an interesting take on an AI given that the drawn train cards are private and the tickets are public, which is the opposite of the online version of Ticket to Ride.

Why is Amazon doing this? To make more money, of course, but more specifically, at the press event an Amazon rep said that one of the most frequent error messages they get for Alexa is from people asking Alexa how to play such-and-such a game, with this being a skill previously unavailable on Alexa. Days of Wonder has sold millions of copies of games in the Ticket to Ride series, and I'm sure the customer service department receives plenty of questions about how to play. Amazon knows how many copies of the game it's sold and who has purchased them, and now it can send these buyers a message about this new skill — and if those buyers now play a game that's previously been hidden in a closet, some percentage of them will buy more games in the series, similar to how the introduction of the Ticket to Ride app years ago led to more sales of the physical game.

The biggest hurdle that exists to getting more people playing board games is the need for them to learn rules prior to playing. A video game allows you to start, then hit buttons and move around at random until you figure things out; board games don't allow players that same luxury. As for where this goes in the future, who knows? The rules-teaching app Dized has been in the works for years, and I don't know whether it's gained traction with publishers and players, but Amazon and Days of Wonder have a larger customer base upon which to launch a program like this. We'll see what comes in the years ahead.

[Disclosure: Amazon gave attendees of the press event an Alexa Echo so that they could test this skill themselves, something I've yet to do as this announcement came earlier than I had anticipated. Whoops. I'll post an overview video of this skill later, then pass the Echo on to someone else given that I won't use it otherwise. —WEM] Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• At BGG.CON 2019, Rio Grande Games will be selling new releases Butterfly, Queenz, and The Way of the Bear, while demoing upcoming titles Nevada City, Monster Baby Rescue, Underwater Cities: New Discoveries, and the just announced Musical Chairs from Kelly North Adams. Here's an overview of that latter title, which is due out at the end of February 2020:

Musical Chairs is a whimsical card game that simulates a game of musical chairs but with cards instead of music.

Each round, players start with a hand of eight cards to play. The starting player must play their lowest card to begin the round. Cards are played in ascending order until either no one has a legal move or everyone chooses to stop playing. In either case, the music now stops, and everyone has to take a seat.

After every played card, players moves their pawn around a circular board. Choosing where to stop is critical because the color of the chair you end up on determines which cards you score — both from your hand and from the cards already played. If two or more players end the round on the same chair, a "butt battle" must take place, with players having the option to play cards from their hands in order to claim the chair.

Players can also claim special cards and special power tokens during the game.

A butt battle, eh? Seems like a good way to grab the Instagram and TikTok audience to expand Rio Grande's potential player pool.

• Speaking of Butterfly, this late October 2019 release from Stephen Glenn has a simple set-up and straightforward gameplay. You first lay out tiles at random in a 6x6 to 9x9 grid, depending on the player count, then the player to the right of the starting player places a hedgehog token on one tile. On a turn, you can turn the hedgehog left or right or keep it looking forward, then you move it as far as you want to collect the tile on which it lands. If you pass over a butterfly net printed on the board (from which a tile was removed previously), you can choose to draw a tile from the bag and keep it.

Once a player can't move, the game ends, with players scoring points for butterflies (possibly doubled if they collected a doubler of the appropriate color), their highest-valued dragonfly, their lowest-valued lightning bug, their most recent grasshopper, their bee/honeycomb sets, and the squared value of their flowers, with points being lost for wasps. A player must capture a tile, if possible, so you might not get the chance to collect what you want...

• Queenz was a SPIEL '19 release from Bruno Cathala, Johannes Goupy, and Mandoo Games, and I posted both written and video overviews in August 2019. The Way of the Bear is the new name of 2018 release Wangdo from Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey, Sébastien Pauchon, and Mandoo Games, and we recorded a short overview of the game at SPIEL '18. Rio Grande's Ken Hill notes that some of the power cards in The Way of the Bear have been revised to better balance the game.

Both of these titles should be available through retailers by the end of November 2019, along with Uwe Rosenberg's Robin of Locksley (another SPIEL '19 release courtesy of Wyrmgold GmbH) and Friedemann Friese's Power Grid: Middle East/South Africa (ditto, but through 2F-Spiele).

Underwater Cities: New Discoveries and Monster Baby Rescue — both SPIEL '19 releases from Delicious Games — should have their Rio Grande Games versions on the U.S. market by the end of 2019. Joining them will be the RGG versions of Concordia: Balearica / Cyprus and Concordia: Balearica / Italia (two more SPIEL '19 releases), along with "a massive reprint of Concordia and Concordia Venus", according to Ken Hill. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Okay, stepping aside from my SPIEL '19 coverage (with lots of notes and pics still to process), let's check out a few 2020 releases that publishers have announced, such as the intriguing-sounding Inner Compass, a March 2020 release from Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen that AEG will demo at both BGG.CON 2019 and PAXU 2019. An overview of what's going on:

In Inner Compass, you play as one of four characters searching for meaning in their everyday lives. (Sound familiar?) Make the right life choices, experience the full spectrum of emotions, create meaningful memories, and — ultimately — find your own inner compass. The most enlightened player wins!

Inner Compass is a bold experiment in determining your personal inner compass. Will you focus on building up emotions to release them at certain times? Sometimes it can be healthy and productive, while at other times it can be destructive and inappropriate. As you move through the game, you'll learn how to communicate your emotions constructively and earn points towards winning.

• Another 2020 release being previewed at PAX Unplugged 2019 is Ettin, a 2-8 player card-drafting game from Kenneth C. Shannon, III and WizKids currently scheduled for release in May 2020. Here's an overview of the game:

From the mists of war, a pair of great nations rise together like a two-headed giant. They march across the land crushing their foes. As one, they combine their strengths, thwart their enemies, and achieve a triumphant destiny.

In Ettin, teams of two compete against each other in fierce skirmishes and fast global conflicts. Your alliance shares strategies, defenses, and resources as you face off against neighboring enemies. You can even expand to 16+ players with multiple copies of the game!

Each of the eight unique nations has a different focus and playing style, designed to be a formidable opponent or a reliable friend. Pairs of enemies and allies play at the same time, making even the most climactic global conflicts between eight players shockingly quick.

• Another upcoming WizKids release is Tournament at Avalon from designers Karen Boginski, Jody Boginski-Barbessi, and Kenneth C. Shannon, III, with this February 2020 release being a standalone sequel to 2017's Tournament at Camelot. An overview:

Tournament at Avalon takes players to the land where Excalibur was forged, building on the innovative mechanisms of Tournament at Camelot with new characters, cards, and mechanisms, allowing players to focus on informal diplomacy or alliances alongside the standard combat of the original game. It's a deep, challenging experience all on its own, with extra depth and complexity for players who own both games!

In the game, you play as a legendary character, battling opponents with weapon cards: arrows, swords, deception, sorcery, and even alchemy. The more you injure your opponents, the better you fare in the tournament. However, even the most injured characters can make a complete comeback with the grace of Godsend cards and the aid of their special companions. This trick-taking game ends when one opponent has been injured to the point of death. The player with the most health is then declared the tournament victor!

In Tournament at Avalon, you also have cards representing the legendary enchantress Morgan Le Fay and a new set of location panels that grant additional advantages to a player when they are the host of a tournament round. If you have Tournament at Camelot, you can mix and match your favorite cards, playing with either ruleset or combining the two games to play an epic "Chaos of Battle" tournament with seven or eight players!

• This final title would greatly benefit from an image or two to give you a better idea of how the game will play, but for now I'll have to leave you with only a written description of Dragnarok, a 2-4 player game coming from Kathleen Mercury and Kolossal Games:

Being a dragon is usually pretty awesome —wings, fire breath, a big pile o'gold to sleep on at night — until THEY showed up, that is, a "party" of adventurers who trespassed on your land, in your cavern, to steal YOUR gold. Why? What rights did they have to it? Why is it okay to trample all over yours? Good news, though, as you've found the village and castle keep they call home. You're fed up, and you're a dragon, so you're not reasonable. Time to get your gold back and to burn them and their village to the ground.

Dragnorak is a scenario-based, fantasy dexterity game in which players, acting as dragons, burn hero and villager meeples on a three-dimensional board. During their turn, a player may take a free movement action, then one of four different dexterity attack actions: Firebomb, Spit, Boulder Wheel, and Swoop. Most gold wins, of course, as befits dragons, and don't worry about missed shots because they build up your RAGE, which allows you to keep attacking until ideally there is nothing left.

Read more »

by Yves Tourigny

Cupcake Empire was designed by Al Leduc and Yves Tourigny. Al is currently visiting his mother in the Yukon, so I have been tasked with writing this diary. It was supposed to be a dialogue between Al and I, so I'll be writing both our parts.

Al: I'm very happy with the result and will henceforth let Yves write all my designer diaries, whether we co-designed the game or not! Great job!

i]Al's note: I didn't write that. Anybody can type "Al" and then a bunch of nonsense. That doesn't mean I wrote it. W. Eric Martin, can we please use a different color to indicate when it is really me?[/i

COLOR=#0066FF]W. Eric Martin's note: Sure! I'll even put it in italics. Just to be clear, however, Yves is writing this and wrote both the preceding notes, so this might get confusing.[/COLOR

i]Al's note: Got it![/i

COLOR=#00CC33]Editor's note: We will call Al "Alan" throughout because otherwise it looks like I'm, I mean, Yves is conversing with an artificial intelligence.[/COLOR

Yves: Cupcake Empire started off as something ridiculous, which, if my memory is accurate (and I believe it is) was called "Wizard Race".

Alan: Well, to be clear, it was about wizards racing...

Yves: Right, as opposed to a species of magical people.

Alan: ...but it wasn't called "Wizard Race" or "Wizard's Race". That's just what you called it. It didn't have a title.

Yves: I should probably keep this offline, but I do find it very annoying that your prototypes never have a title. I'll edit this out because I don't want to embarrass you.

Alan: (weeps uncontrollably)

i]Al's note: Please delete this.[/i

COLOR=#00CC33]Editor's note: I tried, but it wouldn't save properly! I'm very upset that we weren't able to take this out. Grrr.[/COLOR

Yves: "Wizard Race" was a game about wizards racing around a color-coded landscape, and it used your DICE POOL ENGINE mechanism (patent pending). A bunch of dice are rolled and sorted by value, then you use a value, and roll those dice, and sort the result, and so on.




Alan: I like dice.




COLOR=#FF0099]Yves's note: I should mention that Al had dice in his mouth the entire time we were talking.[/COLOR

Yves: We both do, buddy. So, "Wizard Race". Most of the dice were white, some of them were colored, and the colored ones allowed the player to go through the corresponding colored terrain spaces or to gain a bonus of some sort when the pool in which they were embedded was chosen. It was already an engine-building game, where adding dice of certain colors to your mix would guide your strategy into certain directions.




Alan: It worked, but it needed a bit of pizzazz — or so I was told. As soon as my back was turned, Yves took my game and redesigned it.

Yves: Yes. I did. I gave it a much more compelling theme and added some thematic flesh to the skeleton.

COLOR=#FF0099]Yves' note: This was in January 2016, according to file creation dates on my hard drive. You can tell we didn't work on that version for too long because there are only 45 files in the "Electric Fan Co." folder. There are 629 files in ten subfolders in the Cupcake Empire folder. That's a lot of iteration.[/COLOR

Alan: You made the new game about fans. Like, the portable ventilation devices.




Yves: Well, not every game has to be about wizards and space goblins. I think a game about the manufacture and sales of fans set in 1950s Canada is overdue.

Alan: I did like some of the additions you made to the gameplay, like tying each pool to a specific action and having the strength of each action increase when the number of dice in a pool was greater than certain thresholds.

Yves: It was an homage to Seth's Clyde Fans graphic novel!




Alan: I don't think anyone cares. That looks super depressing. Is that old man on the toilet?

Yves: Anyway, I'll have you notice that the "Fan Factory" player board looks remarkably like the Cupcake Empire one, so clearly I was on the right track. Specific actions are linked to each column, there's a break room, special actions, and a warehouse inventory track. There are some pretty major differences, though, if you look closely. The first is that the actions on the columns could be upgraded. That was replaced by the innovation tokens that could be added to any column. The next is that one of the columns gave you grey innovation cubes...




Alan: Grey innovation cubes. (puts on high-pitched whiny voice) Oh, I've been looking for a game about the exciting world of fan production and distribution, honey. Look, it even has grey cubes to represent my grey withered soul!

Yves: (puts on higher-pitcher whinier voice) Oh, look, why don't we get this game about generic space wizards racing across blank landscapes? I don't think I could handle something with as much gravitas as the fan game. This game with no theme about moving pointy-hatted people is much more to my liking!

i]Al's note: I've never put on a high-pitched voice in my life! Why are you arguing with yourself? I'm going to have to rewrite all of this. Is this libel? I think this might be libel.[/i

COLOR=#00CC33]Editor's note: It isn't libel.[/COLOR




Yves: Grey innovation cubes, which are clearly the equivalent of the "bright ideas" from the Cupcake version. There are also the machines.

Alan: Those were my idea.

Yves: Okay, buddy. There are also the machines, which permanently occupied a spot in the columns, allowing the actions further down the column to be reached with fewer dice. Those were Al's idea. We removed them because it turned out to be a bad idea.

Alan: It wasn't bad; it just wasn't right for what we were trying to accomplish. In fact, I think they could easily be incorporated into some sort of expansion to Cupcake Empire.

Yves: We did away with them and made the employee dice specialists in their own column instead, giving them the ability to jump to the next highest action space. Another important difference was the spatial dimension. It was a much more important factor, and I think your sales were tied to your position on the various boards. I honestly don't remember too much about that aspect, and I can't find any written rules or notebooks.




Yves: Anyway, I think Al was grumbling about the theme, so I tried to spice it up a bit with some color:




Alan: Those were nice, but the issue wasn't color. It was fans. It was always fans.

Yves: Well, judging from the email record, I emailed you these on Feb. 2, 2016. On Feb. 3, 2016, I emailed you the first Cupcake Empire stuff, so clearly I'm a responsive and flexible co-designer.

Alan: ...I'm not going to comment on that.

Yves: So, this is the first player board for Cupcake Empire, from early February 2016:




Yves: Several things jump out at me. First, the order of the columns is all wrong, at least in terms of the final version. Second, most of these actions were heavily modified, if not entirely changed, during development. Clearly this is still a "produce inventory, then convert into money" model of scoring. We still have "machines", and there is no dedicated space for improvements.

Alan: You can see a lot of the final version in there, however. The break room and morale track are already in their final form, and so is the once-per-turn special action, even if the actions will change. Those characters stuck around until the end of the prototype era, except for that hand. The size of the columns and the distribution of action spaces stayed consistent, except for the boss lady column.

Yves: I think people were expecting more snark from you, just then.

Alan: Oh, uh, you spend too much time making elaborately illustrated prototypes, and it makes me look bad.

Yves: Right. The geographical component was still a stumbling block. They changed the most, and the most frequently, during development.




Yves: That's February 4. Gross.




Yves: That's literally two days later, February 6. This is clearly inspired by the Raymond Biesinger map of Ottawa I have on my wall. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if I picked it up on February 5.




Alan: (silently mouths the national anthem, weeps, and hugs a beaver)

Yves: It is a powerful piece of design, which I shamelessly copied for my prototype. It has a nice Seth feel to it. Look at Seth's scale model "Dominion City", in comparison:




Alan: This has nothing to do with Cupcake Empire.

Yves: Well, the reader may be interested in what inspires the designers, and this is a thing that inspired me. If you hadn't crushed my dream of making the "Electric Fan Co." game, perhaps I wouldn't have to bore you with culture! If it helps, imagine that the foundations of the city are built on a mass grave of space goblins or whatever you like.

i]Al's note: This is what I deal with every day.[/i

Yves: A month later we had these bigger tiles.




Alan: Are you just going to upload your entire drive? That would be quicker. *slurp*

COLOR=#00CC33]Editor's note: Al was drooling uncontrollably because of the dice in his mouth and frequently had to pause and slurp up the saliva cascading from his mouth.[/COLOR

i]Al's note: This isn't as funny as you probably think it is, you know. It's actually pretty unprofessional.[/i

Yves: Finally, in April 2016, we start to see the city tiles turn into something like their final form.




Yves: We've got the sales values in red on the bakery and counter spaces, and the three colors — start, green, brown — but we still have a spatial arrangement. The next breakthrough came in August 2016.




Alan: Oh, that's essentially the final version, with the customers. It's so weird to think of the game without the little customer meeples.

Yves: Yeah, this is more or less the final version, with a few differences. The customers further away from the bottom have money bonuses associated with them in the final version, and there is a variable number of counter spaces for different player counts.

Yves: We can chart the changes in the player boards also, but first the improvement tiles.




Yves: These were the earliest Cupcake Empire ones. Strangely, they were tied to specific columns (which explains the colors), and there are large ones which give you extra VP (represented by $). There are still those damned machines.

Alan: Those machines were a good idea. *sulks*




Yves: The next version of improvement tiles and player boards made some important changes. First, the improvements are column-independent. Next, they are all placed in the columns, and they are all activated when dice reach the level at which they are placed. We're still working on the "produce, then sell" model.




Alan: Oh, snap! That's it!

i]Al's note: I have never said "oh, snap" in my entire life, gosh dang it.[/i

Yves: Yes, this is April/May 2016 when we did a big redesign. The columns are in the correct order, and the actions are...well, the actions. The correct ones: Baking, Icing, Sales, Marketing, and Managing. There are spots for the improvement tiles, which are now circular. There are customers! Strangely, the customers are not tied to specific positions on the board; you just claim them from a central supply.

Alan: Wait, what's that book in column 1?

Yves: Never mind, that's what.

Alan: Oh, those were the recipe book tiles that gave you bonuses. That didn't last too long. Whose idea were those? Let me see...

i]Al's note: They were Yves' idea.[/i

Yves: More importantly, there are two major new elements (both probably my idea) that are central to the final version of the game: recipes and production/sales tracks. You assemble cupcake bottoms and tops to form cupcake recipes (which can be used to attract customers with matching preference), which increases your production value (top track). Your bakeries, counters, and customers increase your sales value (bottom track). At the end of each turn, you score VP equal to the lowest track.

Alan: That is a much better way of doing things. Didn't you steal that idea from Knizia?

Yves: I don't think so. I mean, I think a few games of his use similar ideas, but I don't think he does it exactly in this way.

Alan: With cupcakes, you mean?

Yves: That's right. Knizia does not have a cupcake game.

i]Yves' note: Look up whether Knizia has a cupcake game...[/i




Yves: The new improvement tiles are essentially the same as the final version of the game, with the $2 changed to $3, and the customer given a range of 2. This is from April 2016.

Alan: Look at those cute little books. Oh, and machines!

Yves: Moving on. The next big step was in July when the customers were placed on the city tiles we saw earlier and when the bonus cards were added. These are in the final version in essentially this form. Even the values are identical. The only difference is that the final version uses tiles, and there are five in each of the four sets, instead of three.




Alan: There wasn't much left to change after that, just the endless process of small adjustments that game design seems to consist of. Overall, it was fairly painless for Cupcake Empire.

Yves: We played it a lot. Thankfully, the length of the game was consistently in the under-60 minute range. We tried different targets for the game-end trigger — 60, 70, 80 points — and we experimented with giving the bonus card points during the game or after the game. Oh, I guess I haven't shown the score track. For a long time we used a square one.




Yves: Then in 2017 we switched to a track going around the outside of the terrain since the game was more of a ra...since, uh, to save table space.

Alan: More of a what? What were you going to say?

Yves: A race. An ECONOMIC race in which you build your dice engine and try to outsell your competitors. It's very cutthroat and not at all wizardy. Incidentally, I should mention that the cupcake theme was inspired by the cutthroat vegan bakery business in Ottawa. Run and staffed by women, mainly, which is why I went for the skewed gender distribution in my prototype. Ludonova didn't stray far from our original concept and art direction.




Alan: They do make great vegan cupcakes in Ottawa, but you're trying to distract from the point that we came full circle, going from a race game all the way back to a race game. Checkmate.

Yves: That's not how Chess works, first of all, but also, I'm really hoping that some of the bakeries will see this free publicity and send us some free cupcakes.

i]Al's note: I know that isn't how Chess works, and I would also like some free cupcakes, so please email us with offers for free cupcakes.[/i

Yves: In conclusion, we worked on this game like we do on most games. You had an interesting idea with no flavor to it, I redesigned it more to my liking, then we eventually hammered out something that pleased both of us. It's like you baked a bland little cupcake and I added a bunch of colorful icing to it!

Alan: Can we make this analogy a little less insulting?

Yves: You know, this is already much better than my original analogy in which your cupcake was made of sawdust and dog hair.

Alan: ...well, let's not forget to mention all the times you sulked for hours because I wanted to make changes that turned out brilliantly.

Yves: Fine, let's not forget to mention all the times you, uh, made... When... Um. Oh, when you failed to appreciate how much better the prototype looked than what you would have brought to the table, and how it not only made playing the game much more enjoyable for us, but it attracted a lot of prospective players who might have been turned off by a generic wizard footrace.




Alan: Or fans!?!

Yves: ...

Alan: I think we're done.

Yves: Yeah.

i]Al's note: This is just about the worst designer diary I've ever read. On the other hand, I didn't have to write any of it, and it seems to have taken you 4-5 hours. Thankfully, no one reads these.[/i

•••

Addendum by the actual Al Leduc

The plan was for us to write the designer diary together, so I got started by starting at the beginning. My delightful co-designer had other plans — other plans and an entirely unreasonable deadline that would have been totally reasonable if he'd told me more than a day before and had not tactically chosen it to be enacted while I was out of town helping my poor dear mother move from her home of thirty years to a little apartment.

So below is as far as I got before the rug was pulled out from under me!

Many thanks to the amazingly understanding and sympathetic Eric Martin for listening to my pleads and tacking this on without Yves' knowledge.

It all started with a dream of treachery

I'd been struggling with a dice-drafting idea for a while (which I called "dice pool drafting" as players took all the dice of a certain value, not just one at a time; Yukon Airways uses this method). I awoke from a dream in which I was playtesting my good friend Yves' new game about trading in the Mediterranean when I suddenly realized with a flash of rage that the sneaky little stinker had stolen my idea! Even worse, he'd improved on it by giving each player their own set of dice, thus mitigating a number of the issues I'd been running into. I promptly started working on a new game, while silently fuming at Yves' treachery.

It's got great potential

Players used their different colors of dice to traverse different types of terrain, while ending their turn on good spots to acquire bonuses. The players were wizards so that I could handwave the weird ways they could move. It worked well enough, and as games do, it improved over several iterations. The key elements were a central board that allowed the players some interaction, a race-style score track, the idea that rolling 6s was something special for all players, and most importantly, that each player had their own player boards, dice, and improvements.

November 2015: Even the earliest player board featured only five columns

More treachery!

One otherwise perfectly fine day I got a text from Yves: "we need to talk about your game. I have an idea you'll love. Starbucks at 7:00. You're buying"

The long and short of it was that he'd completely reworked the game to be about door-to-door salesmen selling electric fans in the 1950s. More significantly, each column of dice had a specific function, like making fans, advertising, or selling to a neighborhood on the game board's map. I liked the mechanical rethinking so much that I asked him to help me co-design it, which basically meant he got to do 85% of the rest of the work.

The double-cross

So I show up for playtesting like the innocent lamb that I am, and bam! Yves throws down a game about making cupcakes that used 70% of the mechanisms from the fan game. "Fans are boring, and cupcakes are amazing," he says. "Heck, yeah", I reply, like it wasn't the most obvious thing he's ever said. It's not that I'm a huge cupcake fan, but fans are just so dull. Fan salesmen were still better than wizards racing around a lake as themes go, so who am I to criticize? I'm not really that fussy about theme as long as the mechanisms are solid and work with it, but it matters to Yves, so I let him do whatever he wants... It's better than hearing him complain about it week after week.

Okay, now it's starting to smell really good

We'd run into a few snags with the fan theme, but the general idea of running a small business was solid. The dice were your workers, and colored dice were specialists. The dice from each column on the player board represented a certain business activity, with more dice being a stronger action. When you take an action, all the workers (dice) there pull together to get the job done, then they go off to work on other tasks. (That is, the dice are rolled and go to the task that matches the number rolled.)

Making cupcake bottoms, icing tops, advertising, and enacting business improvements (i.e., engine-building) were the four obvious tasks, but we wanted five jobs. We knew we wanted something to take place on the map to represent sales areas and to give players a good way to interact with each other, but it took a long while to figure out a really satisfying way to do this.

Oh, for crying out loud!

So that's it. I've run out of time to set the story straight. Take what he says with a few grains of salt!!

Please reply with Team Al (TA) or send me a cupcake to show your support in these trying times. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

For a change of pace this week, I'm presenting a side of the convention experience that happens only after it's over: Getting all of those (potentially) great games home.

Okay, yes, you might be figuring out your luggage space while the con is underway, pushing your clothes aside to drop a box or two in the suitcase and compute what will likely still fit: "Hmm, one KOSMOS, a Hans im Glück, two Lookout 2p, a handful of AMIGOs, and a few other oddball items."

Then you discover something wonderful and suddenly you're contemplating how much can fit in your carry-on bag.

Should you find yourself in that situation, I offer some packing advice in this video, along with teasers for SPIEL '19 releases that might find their way into overview videos down the road:

Youtube Video Read more »

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Monstrum Encyclopedia is your premier resource for adversaries. This tome not only includes detailed lore on these creatures but also encounters specially tailored to showcase their abilities and tactics.

I will update this product regularly to add new creatures and their encounters.

As I add more content, I will also increase the price.

BE SURE TO COMMENT BELOW WITH THE ADVERSARY YOU WANT TO SEE NEXT

So get in early, because after you purchase, you will get all the updates at no additional cost!

This supplement includes:

• Four new adversaries
• Two encounters customized for an adversary
• Two traps
• A new magic item.

Price: $1.95 Read more »

Publisher: Doctor Merkury's Lab

This 15mm Cyberpunk Scifi City Terrain pack contains 3D print ready stl files to create signs for other Packs in the series.  These signs are made to fit the slots and tabs of the other buildings released and are double sided.  Also there is a silo model for creating crowd markers.

Price: $1.00 Read more »

Publisher: Drop Dead Studios

This spheres apocrypha is filled with new Alchemy talents and powers, particularly poisons. Expand your poison powers when working with ingested poisons, create poisons that penalize your target's ability scores, and transform your splash poisons into dangerous noxious breath!

Go beyond with Spheres Apocrypha!

Price: $0.99 Read more »

Publisher: Aeon Forge

This special bundle product contains the following titles.

	Eyes, Goggles, & Spectacles - Boundless Magic Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.75 Format: Watermarked PDF	Eyes, Goggles, & Spectacles - Boundless Magic Enhance your pathfinder game with 14 variant pieces of magic eyewear. Including eyes of forest sight, loremaster spectacles, and the mask of the void --- Boundless Magic Variant magic items, spells, and class options for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (First Edition). Learn more here: https://aeonforge.wixsite.com/home/boundlessmagic --- This PDF download is compatible with and intended for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (also compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition). ...
	Magic Rings - Boundless Magic Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.74 Format: Watermarked PDF	Magic Rings - Boundless Magic 14 variant magic rings like the ring of disruption, ring of the warden, and snapdragon ring. --- Boundless Magic Variant magic items, spells, and class options for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (First Edition). Learn more here: https://aeonforge.wixsite.com/home/boundlessmagic --- This PDF download is compatible with and intended for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (also compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition). ...
	Magic Staves II - Boundless Magic Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.75 Format: Watermarked PDF	Magic Staves II - Boundless Magic 17 more variant magic staves for use in your Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Including the frostfall staff, the staff of abomination, and the dragon’s gift. --- Boundless Magic Variant magic items, spells, and class options for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (First Edition). Learn more here: https://aeonforge.wixsite.com/home/boundlessmagic --- This PDF download is compatible with and intended for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (also compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition). ...
	Rods of Wonder - Boundless Magic Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.75 Format: Watermarked PDF	Rods of Wonder - Boundless Magic 7 variant magic rods and 1 massive, 100-entry, expanded effect table for the classic Rod of Wonder. --- Boundless Magic Variant magic items, spells, and class options for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (First Edition). Learn more here: https://aeonforge.wixsite.com/home/boundlessmagic --- This PDF download is compatible with and intended for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (also compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition). ...

Total value:	$3.96
Special bundle price:	$2.99
Savings of:	$0.97 (24%)

Price: $3.96 Read more »

Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment

Carthage Island lies five miles off the northern California coast. Only a handful of top-secret maps acknowledge its existence.  For those who visit its dark, primeval forests and shudder in the face of pure terror, it has another name—Carnage Island!

Carnage Island is a horror adventure for four to six heroes of Novice Rank. It’s an homage to the exploitation and grindhouse horror films of the mid-to-late ’70s. Players can create Savage Worlds characters from virtually any walk of life, and the GM can set the adventure anytime from the 1950s to the present day.

Escape from Carnage Island is a Savage Tale for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game system. A copy of Savage Worlds Adventure Edition is optimal.

Price: $3.99 Read more »

Publisher: Misfit Studios

This stock art piece from Earl Geier depicts a savage Dire Ape or some sort of extremely primitive ancestor of man.

The image is 4 x 6" in dimension.

This purchase includes a JPG and a TIFF version at 300 dpi, along with an EPS vector version.

All art files are bundled in a ZIP file.

Earl Geier Stock Art License Summary

All stock art is licensed for use in professional publications. Misfit Studios (or, in some cases, the third-party artist) retain ownership of the work, meaning you cannot resell the art in your own art packs or the like, and may be required to post an artist credit.

You must include the artist's copyright statement in all publications using the art under certain terms and conditions. You obtain a license to use the art, but do not own any rights to it beyond that.

Price: $5.99 Read more »

Publisher: Aeon Forge

Magic Grafts - Boundless Magic

Contained within are a selection of magic items. Prosthetic grafts designed to replace limbs and organs. Includes the arm of the artificer, the paragon’s eye, the wondrous helping hand, and 5 other magical grafts.

---

Boundless Magic

Variant magic items, spells, and class options for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (First Edition).

Learn more here: https://aeonforge.wixsite.com/home/boundlessmagic

---

This PDF download is compatible with and intended for use with The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (also compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition). 

Price: $0.99 Read more »

Publisher: Lost Dutchman Publishing

No one spoke as the ships cut through the southern passes of The Black Band as the familar jutting cliffs and glaciers of Stromgard eased away over the curve of Midgard, the hundred or so boats making their way into the open ocean like so many sharp-beaked birds in flight...

Created for The Wyrd of Stromgard setting but compatible with any Dungeon World setting, Against Expanses is an detailed, three act Adventure Front set during the late Viking Age and will have your PCs sailing across unknown waters to explore new and supposedly uninhabited lands. 

They'll have to rely on their wits and resourcefulness to survive, though there is no shortage of dangers in the form of epic sea monsters, hostile wildlife, and a hidden society of talented magic users.

This Campaign includes:

• Light historical context + setting information
• Narrative introduction
• 3 Distinct Acts that each contain:

- Danger

- Impulses

- Major Forces

- Impending Dooms

- Grim Portents

- Starter Hooks

- Narrative Hooks

- Special Moves

- Monsters

- Items

Price: $2.95 Read more »

Publisher: 23rd Century Productions, LLC

NOTE: This is a SCANNED COPY of a book originally printed in 1993.  A true digital to PDF copy is not available. 

"Blood will pour like rain from the heavens!"

The effect was instant and absolute. As if seeing a specter of death, the enter chamber of shouting, threat-filled voices fell fearfully silent. Markuss burned with anger, hot and out of control as thousands of distracted eyes once again anxiously fixed on him. He was losing the battle of emotion verses balance. It hurt too much, and the Prefect of Timar could not contain the contempt that welled inside him. 

These bickering children whose races he had coddled for thousands of years had not listen to his words of wisdom, never heeded his call for prudence. He could protect them no longer. And now... now they would be sentenced to a grizzly future, one of the High Priest could not bear to think about. Suddenly, the passion burst from within him and the energy controller slammed his fist on the glowing lectern, sending shards of brilliant light flashing in all directions! The effect was dazzling. It froze the entire audience. 

"Now heed tis!" he commanded, sweeping the room with an accusing finger. "I Markuss, Lord of Timar, Prefect to the High Counsel, and Keeper of the Gate of Time, hereby condemn you to suffer a future that will be both ghastly an seared with pain. I promise you this... yes, I promise you this. You will lament the folly of your sins. And you will pay for them with a currency of blood!" 

------------------------

"Condemned" is the Battlelord's guide to Who's Who in the galaxies. This book is all about the movers and the shakers, those leaders and personalities who will ultimately shape the future of this universe. It's a compendium of aliens and individuals that you, the warrior, may encounter during your adventures into this dangerous and uncertain future. Condemned is a must for the serious warrior who wants to know just who he is up against. Without it... well, you're Condemned! 

This product is for the 6th edition of the Battlelords of the Twenty-Third Century roleplaying game. Keep an eye out for the new 7th edition - also called the "Kickstarter Edition, which has streamlined and revised rules and is full color throughout the book.

This is a SCANNED COPY of a book originally printed in 1993.  A true digital to PDF copy is not available. 

 

Price: $5.00 Read more »

About a year and a half ago, I was in one of my local used book stores searching for ancient tomes. While perusing the shelves, I stumbled across a large collection of books by the same author: David Eddings. He hit it big in the 1980s and had quite a prolific career through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. During these decades, he was a staple for fantasy readers, and his books came highly recommended to me for this entire time.

However, somehow I’d missed the Eddings boat. I knew of his works and how highly people talked about them, but I never did delve into his lengthy catalog… until now. When I came across the solid row of David Eddings books on that shelf, I knew I had to have them. I picked up all of them before anyone else could snatch them from my grasp. A credit card transaction later, I had a paper bag packed with what I hoped would be wonderful fantasy tales.

I don’t regret the purchase. It took me a few months to finish up the current read, and then I dove headfirst into the Belgariad series. Five books later (and a year later), I came up for air from one of the greatest tales I’ve read in a very, very long time.

This spawned some ideas for me on the role playing front.

I’ve been a player in a few games that were “based on the book by ” and we always seemed to have a blast living in those worlds. I’m not talking a direct translation of book-to-game (like The Dresden Files or similar games), but using a system to live out the events and times from a book. The key game I’m thinking about was run by a good friend of mine, Bill. He took a space opera game and setting and translated it into the Alternity RPG. We did our best to fight the Von Neumann machines that were eating our part of the galaxy. Along the way, we encountered key characters from the novel, came into contact with cultures and people that were taken whole-cloth from the book, and saw (and sometimes changed) events that occurred during the course of the original author’s story.

Even though we knew we were “living in a borrowed world,” we had a blast. I think there are some key take aways that I have from that lengthy space opera campaign that I could apply to emulating the events, people, places, and world of the Belgariad in a fantasy game I want to run.

Leverage the Setting as a Character

I think to capture the true feel of a novel or series, the setting needs to feel like a character. It needs to feel lived in and experienced and ready to take action in response to the PCs actions. If the GM can give the flavor of the setting (or the parts the PCs will interact with), then the level of immersion for the players will increase exponentially.

In the Belgariad books, there are numerous maps of the different areas the characters move through. I’m pretty sure I could find those maps all stitched together in one large map. Even if I couldn’t find such a thing, I can easily put the maps in the books to use. My approach would be to pick a nation (I’d probably start in Sendar), and drop the PCs there as a starting point. I’d make Sendar as real as I could by borrowing flavor and text from Eddings to set things up and give the area that realistic texture that it needs.

Bump into Key Characters

While in Sendar, I’d have the PCs travel through Faldor’s Farm (which is where the whole Belgariad series starts), but I wouldn’t make Garion or Aunt Pol or Durnik or any of the other Really Important People From The Book a focal point. Sure, they’d be there, but they’d be side characters to the main story.

To keep the spotlight off of these various main characters, I would amp up the focus on NPCs of my own creation that fit within the location. Of course, while at the inn at Faldor’s Farm, the PCs would see the scullery boy and his aunt with the white-striped, raven-black hair, but at this point the boy (Garion) is just a young lad who scrubs pots and makes messes. Likewise, Aunt Pol (aka; Polgara) is just the kitchen’s cook who has some mysterious past that no one is aware of.

By allowing the PCs to “bump into” the main characters of the story, the players who know the tale will get that Easter egg moment and that will increase their enjoyment. If a player hasn’t read the books yet, then if they do turn to the novels down the road, they’ll have their own sweet memories of how their character interacted, even if it was briefly, with Aunt Pol or Garion or Old Wolf or any number of other important characters from the stories.

Witness Important Events

With the Belgariad being five books long, there are plenty of awe-inspiring events that come to be, and many of them happen in front of other people. What would happen if the PCs are in a place to witness, perhaps alter, a key event in the book? Would this change the story? Probably. Does it matter that your story is different from Edding’s efforts? Not one bit. This is your turn to play in the author’s playground. You and your group are not committed to marching lockstep with the author’s words.

This next bit is a tad spoilery, but the books have been out for decades, so I don’t feel compelled to hold back. In the fourth book (Castle of Wizardry), Ce’Nedra dons armor and raises an army. At this point Ce’Nedra is betrothed to Garion, but is still very much a spoiled young woman of noble descent. She’s demanding and hard to be around, but something changes in her during the course of this book that makes her quite a bit more admirable. If the PCs are nearby Ce’Nedra when she and Polgara work together to raise the army, they could witness (or even be swept up in) the building of a massive army that follows Ce’Nedra’s every move.

Make It Your Own

I’m pretty sure I said this before when I talked about The Expanse and adopting the books and/or TV show to your own gaming table, but I feel it’s work expressing again. Make the world and characters your own. Put them to use at your gaming table and make them work for you. You’re not beholden to the tale Eddings has already put forth in the world.

Go out and tap a vein from an old story and see what gold you can mine from the mountain.

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Over the last two months, I’ve been looking at the game Thousand Year Old Vampire, by Tim Hutchings. It is a journaling game that you play by recording facts about your character, then rolling dice to answer prompts. These prompts may make you change some of those facts. You have a limited number of memories, and eventually, you have to fight to remember everything that you once were.

Camdon Wright, amazing fellow gnome and game designer extraordinaire, is the one that first asked if I would be interested in looking at this game, and as I’ve never played a journaling game like this before, I was very curious to see what would happen.

Holding Back the Years

As a refresher, my vampire was Jorgrimr, a Viking mercenary who helped secure Kiev around 1000 CE. Jorgrimr was turned into a vampire by a mysterious black wolf, fled Kiev, moved to Germany, and adopted the name Wolfhart.

While he violently clashed with a rival’s troops and fed on them, in his new life, Wolfhart met a girl named Kisaiya, and found a cure for her blood ailment by researching the Blood of Czernobog. He’s feeling pretty human for the first time in about 50 years.

This is going to get messy.

Content Warning

I don’t get too graphic in this chapter, but there is still a lot of violence, reference to severed body parts, and a general disdain for human compassion on the rise, so if that isn’t your thing, please continue accordingly.

Prompt #13

This prompt tells me that I fall asleep for 100 years, and must strike out any mortal characters on my character sheet.

Wolfhart begins to chronicle who he is and what he has accomplished. Foremost on his mind is his arrival in Kiev, his family, Kisaiya, and his invention of the elixir that cured her. He is tired from his work with the mortals, but almost feels human again.

When he awakens, Kisaiya and his work, even who he was, is like a dream that he can only remember when he reads his diary. When he finds out how long he has slept, he realizes Kisaiya, Anichka, Ranssi, even Konstantine are all long gone.

He wants to mourn, but he doesn’t know why.

Wolfhart creates a Diary, and moves a memory to that Diary. All his mortal Characters are gone.

Prompt #14

The prompt tells me that my Diary has been damaged, and I have to remove three nouns from the Diary.

Wolfhart spends another 100 years in a blur. Everything is like a dream. He feels nothing. He does the bare minimum to maintain what he has. He haunts Germany, and when he finally realizes how much time has passed, and what he must do to maintain his estate, he realizes he has neglected his Diary.

He cannot remember the girl he saved with the elixir. He cannot remember his father’s name. The ink is smudged in the diary. He does not even remember the city where he won his glory.

Why am I going through the motions of this long unlife?

Prompt #15 

This prompt tells me that generations have passed, and I wake up covered in dust. I lose a resource to determine how I escape.

The remnants of the house guard of Wolfhart’s estate, the children of his mercenary company, loot the estate that they once guarded. They set fire to the home under which Wolfhart was buried after an unfortunate rockslide trapped him in the caverns under the manor. After the fire burns away the passages, the rocks fall away, and he realizes that he has lost even more time to his carelessness. He must get control again. He must not let time keep sliding away like sand through his fingers.

He forgets everything about his old love. He knows she existed. Or maybe she was a dream. Has he ever known love?

Wolfhart strikes out his memory of Anichka and his earliest friends. Wolfhart strikes out “My Loyal Troops” as a resource.

Prompt #16

This prompt tells me that I gain a creative skill based on a lost memory due to timeless introspection.

Wolfhart is sure he loved at one point in time. He reads poetry and stories of doomed lovers. He learns to write his own stories, and shares those stories with others. He feels the shadow of something he once knew, and he is even less sure that he ever truly knew love. Can the written word cast such a spell on the mind?

Wolfhart gains the Writer of Love Stories skill.

Prompt #17

This prompt tells me to check a skill to avoid arrest, and if necessary, create a mortal character to take the blame for your crimes.

Gregor Langstrom is a “monster hunter,” using Karina Strausshammer’s inventions to fight the supernatural. He is getting closer to Wolfhart. Wolfhart does not want to feed on the people reading his books, but he can’t make himself care about the real people as much as he cares about the people he makes up in his stories.

The authorities close in on Wolfhart, so he manages to frame Langstrom as a crazed, obsessive zealot, killing people that were reading “perverse” books, and undermining society’s moral framework.

Prompt #18

The prompt tells me to bond with an ancient enemy Character, checking a skill to become friends, and sharing a resource with them to gain a shared resource from them. 

Wolfhart is increasingly annoyed with humans. They feel so ephemeral compared to the people he writes about. His stories speak of epic people that live life on purpose, not weak-willed folk that don’t appreciate beauty or the thrill of living. They might as well be dead.

Wolfhart decides to find his “origin,” to track down the Black Wolf. He uses his skill at ambushing others to trap the wolf, but he doesn’t kill it, as he once fantasized. Instead, he feeds it half the Heart of Czernobog, while eating the other half. He wants the Old Gods back in the world, and he wants to know if the Son can become the Father.

The Black Wolf feasts with him, and shares control of the Great Pack with Wolfhart.

Wolfhart checks the Ambush skill, and shares the Heart of Czernobog. He gains access to the Great Pack resource.

Prompt #19

 I don’t know that I will ever truly sleep again . . . I may only lie awake in the dark, in my mockery of a life, waiting to journal again. 

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This prompt tells me that I am physically trapped in a place from which I can never be rescued, and asks me to come up with what I think about for the first thousand years. It informs me that the game is over.

Wolfhart feels no kinship with the mortals any longer. It has been too long since he had a friend. Wolfhart has the pack now, and he rampages, destroying Strosshammer’s new society that is spreading across Europe. He will single-handedly turn back the clock and make mortals live by the sword and their wits again.

Then, the Black Wolf turns on Wolfhart. This is a Europe rife with possible worshippers. Wolfhart has served his purpose, and the Black Wolf drops him into the Void of Czernobog, a place of darkness between worlds. Because Wolfhart shared the feast of Czernobog’s Heart, he will always have a feeling of what the world is like, moving on without him. For a thousand years, Wolfhart hears the prayers of the faithful in the Black Wolf’s ears, but Wolfhart shares the hunger that he obsesses over, unable to feed.

The Black Wolf thinks about Wolfhart’s hunger, and he becomes a mad god, one that demands as much sacrifice of flesh as of will. In this way, at least, Wolfhart knows he continues to shape the world from the void. Or does he?

Is this all a dream? Is this Niffelheim? Did you die all those years ago, when the wolf bit you? You are so hungry. You are so cold. But you must be still affecting the world. Surely you wouldn’t lie in the cold, eternal winter, having lost your greatest battle, unmourned and unremembered.

Why?

Thoughts On An Unlife Well Lived 

I really enjoyed this process. Now that I have a taste of journaling games, I think that I may have been transformed. I may have to feed on more of them. I don’t know that I will ever truly sleep again . . . I may only lie awake in the dark, in my mockery of a life, waiting to journal again.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase. 

This has been an unorthodox journey of a review process, but if you enjoy wondering exactly what you would do in challenging situations, I think you are going to find a lot of worth-while material in Thousand Year Old Vampire.

I’ll be honest, I’m kind of worn out after that roller coaster spiral that my vampire went into at the end. It took a lot out of me to try to do the story justice, but I also really enjoyed the process.

Do you have any other journaling games you would recommend? What was your experience with them, and what kind of emotional charge did you have after completing them? We want to hear about your experiences below!

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Join Ang, Matt, and Senda for a discussion about how many players is a comfortable number. There may also be talk about actual furniture. Will these gnomes find the right-sized game to keep them out of the stew?

Welcome to The Indie Game Shelf! Each article in this series will highlight a different small press roleplaying game to showcase the wide variety of games available. Whether you’re new to the hobby and looking to see what’s out there or you’re a veteran gamer looking for something new, I hope The Indie Game Shelf always holds something fun for you to enjoy!

Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies

Dialect by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu (Thorny Games) is a GMless(-ish) roleplaying story game designed for 3 to 5 players to explore the story of a community’s rise and fall in a one-shot session. The story is told from the points of view of specific, persistent characters and uses the community’s own unique branch of language to tell the tale. The game is, if not wholly card-based, then at least card-driven, and it requires both the core game rules and a special deck of cards used throughout play.

There is a caveat attached previously to the term “GMless” because although the structure and mechanisms of the game do not distinguish between different player roles, the game does ask one player to act as “Facilitator” to clarify rules, maintain order during play, and adjudicate at the table if needed. The role is logistical, however—truly earning the moniker “Facilitator”—and does not confer special narrative authority.

The Story

Dialect is, as the text itself makes explicit, a game about language. More specifically, it examines the development of a unique regional language form (the titular “dialect”) and its eventual extinction. The textual content of the game’s story is of a particular community or segment of a larger society that has been separated from its parent culture, but the game also provides for examination of what is lost when a language dies. The specifics of the setting are not dictated by the game and are decided upon as the first steps of play of each session (with each session of Dialect designed to tell a self-contained story). Players do also each create and play their own characters in this setting to tell the community’s story.

The arc of a session of Dialect spans the birth and death of an isolated community. Over the course of this story, a unique language is created piece by piece by players adding words and phrases to the characters’ shared vocabulary that only they understand. Roleplaying scenes make use of these new words to explore characters’ relationships with the community and each other. The story arc is divided into “ages,” and the transitions between ages also explore the way in which the community itself changes over time. Finally, the endgame examines the end of the community, the death of its language, and the implications of both to the outside world.

The Game

The frameworks for the settings in Dialect are outlined in structured playsets called Backdrops. While each Backdrop provides some information about the setting a session of Dialect will take place in, much of what the Backdrop offers are questions to be answered during the game, so even two games of Dialect using the same Backdrop are likely to turn out very differently. Even so, four core Backdrops and a dozen more contributed Backdrops are available in the core rules. In addition, Backdrops adhere to an easy-to-follow structure, and there is an entire appendix in the rules to guide you to constructing your own, so there is no shortage of ways different sessions of Dialect can be played.

At the start of a session, the players collaboratively come up with three Aspects, two of which are guided by the Backdrop and one of which is completely open-ended. The Backdrop also provides a series of Community Questions which further guide the players in explaining more detailed characteristics of the completed setting, called an Isolation. It is in this Isolation that the story of a session of Dialect takes place.

Once the Isolation is created and named, each player then creates their own character for the story. Character creation involves choosing an Archetype card provided in the game deck. The Archetype provides brief prompts describing the character’s role in the community, how community members regard them, and the character’s relationships to various Aspects of the Isolation.

While the creation of the Isolation and the Characters form the setup of the session, the core loop of the game involves the creation of words and use of them in character conversations. The story told in a session of Dialect is divided into three Ages, and each Age is divided into Turns. In each Turn, a player Makes a Connection by relating a Language Card from their hand to one of the Isolation’s Aspects. The Language Card generally prompts by supplying an object, event, concept, or some other item for which the community will develop new language. Collaboratively, a new word is constructed to fulfill this linguistic need, and then a conversation is held between characters, again prompted by the Language Card. Some Language Cards may be special Action Cards that modify this usual mode of play. For example, special actions may include coming up with a nickname for someone, narrowing or expanding a word’s meaning, or even a player coming up with a new word on their own using special rules. Action Cards are, however, still followed by an in-character conversation using that turn’s new word. Throughout gameplay, words and information about the Isolation are recorded and arranged in a Language Tableau, a common area assembled from index cards that represents the culture of the Isolation and how it has evolved.

As the story progresses from Age to Age, the Backdrop provides information and questions for the players to answer about how the Isolation is changing. Each Backdrop includes two Pathways, each of which guides a different story about the community’s rise and fall. As play proceeds, one of these Pathways is followed through the Backdrop, and the story of the Isolation proceeds as the Backdrop prompts are answered by the players. Language Cards are also keyed to different Ages in the story, so as play continues, the selection of possible Language Cards also changes to reflect the Isolation’s approaching end. After the third and final Age, Legacy Cards have players choose a prompt on which to base an Epilogue they narrate about the Isolation’s impact on the world at large.

The Extra

I’m including a special additional section to this edition of The Indie Game Shelf to share a little more information about what this game book contains besides, well, a game. In support of the game itself, besides the aforementioned instructions for constructing a custom Backdrop, there is also a quite comprehensive guide to inventing completely new words from scratch without using an existing language as a base. There is also an entire chapter devoted to actions and exercises designed to foster sustaining languages in our own world, including other games you can play!

I personally find the book a delight. It features a crisp, striking layout and attractive and evocative full-page art pieces between sections. Rules explanations are supplemented with easy-to-follow play examples and illustrations, and it is clear that in addition to the game rules, the designers also put a lot of thought into the play culture and safety they think will result in the best experiences with this game.

Finally, playing the game adds a little something more than the usual exciting stories and fond memories that come from most roleplaying games. The act of constructing and sharing a whole new language creates not only a unique play experience with each session but also something special that continues to link players to each other long after the game session is over. Sharing a story with others is what roleplaying games are all about, but sharing a unique language with others is what makes this game truly stand out.

The Shelf

Dialect is available from Thorny Games in digital format as well as in both standard and deluxe physical form. Dialect is a terrific and unique game; so much so that I have difficulty listing similar titles to explore. The designers are trained linguists, and so for games along similar themes to Dialect, I heartily recommend checking out the rest of the Thorny Games catalog, which includes Sign, a parlor LARP in which players do not speak and invent a whole new form of sign language, and the upcoming Xenolanguage, a game of deciphering an alien language and how that experience changes how you see the world.

If you’ve got something on your shelf you want to recommend as well, let us know in the comments section below. Let’s fill our shelves together!

 

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Your world is basic as all hell.

Mine is too, don’t worry about it.

As a GM, I’ve been working on my own homebrew setting for several years. As GM veterans and aspirants, you all likely have one of your own or are at least thinking about the one you might make in the future. As creators and storytellers, it’s somewhat inevitable to imagine ‘what would a world I make look like?’ For some, they might spend their lifetime building upon a single world and constantly adding to its depth. For others, they might have made a new world for each and every campaign. But more often than not, these worlds are made in the confines of our laptops and notebooks, something we build in secrecy by our lonesome. While we may come out and talk about our world to our friends, I’ve seen many a GM recoil when suggestions concerning it come out. After spending so long nurturing it, it can feel like whiplash when others provide feedback. Many builders here continue to work on it, alone.

But a sword does not take shape until it is hammered by steel and whet by stone.

This is not to say your world sucks; it could be deep and expansive, with long histories and family lineages tracing back hundreds and thousands of years. It could have dozens of quirky npcs, races, and cultures. However, I posit that unless you’re developing it with the opinions and voices of many others, it’s a world that’s going to be entirely dyed by your preferences. A world written entirely by yourself is like painting with a single color: you can have a single red square on a white canvas be worth $15 mil at some art gallery, but it doesn’t change that it’s basic as all hell.

Our biases, interests, and preferences are hard to separate entirely from our work. If you happen to prefer swords or have consumed a large amount of media that features swords, you’re far more likely to have cool and magical swords as relics over any other weapon in your world. If you were heavily influenced by Lord of the Rings, you probably have an idea of elves and dwarves that’s hard to shake. If you happen to like Terry Pratchett, you’re far more likely to be interested in weird, or in other words gonzo, fantasy and—by extension—Old School Revival(OSR) systems.

We are already the product of many different sources of influence, that’s just how we are. However, despite all that, we’re still limited in that all that information goes through filter after filter of our preferences. We keep what we like, toss what we don’t, and can’t fully capture the nuances of all the content we absorb. We’re all a collection of those preferences and biases, so how can we imagine a nuanced world when the only point of view we have is our own?

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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The magic of others

There’s this system, Microscope, that works in one part tabletop, two parts world-building engine. Between a group of players, you begin by deciding how the world starts and ends, then take turns filling in the various ages and events in-between. When I played it, my friends and I created a world where a giant hole to hell opened up in New York’s Time Square, which then ended when everyone on Earth was a demon. Personally I had a timeline in my head where the demons rose up and fought an excruciatingly long war with the humans, and that we’d detail a large number of the battles that happened in-between.

On my turn, I progressed that story.

But then the humans turned magical girls happened.

And the demons were friendly.

And more holes opened up and the demons monetized an intercontinental wormhole subway which led to a nomadic and free-love otherwise unheard of.

I was constantly face to face with scenarios I never would have expected and had my ideas responded to through angles I never would have imagined. We eventually created a world that had magical girl armies building on the moon, demons slowly integrating with human society (and so each generation had more demon blood), and with one lone immortal Japanese ramen chef forced to cater to weeaboo magical girls for all eternity. He was literally the last full-human to ever exist.

If you’ve GM’d before, you’re likely used to this feeling. No, not the magical girls and such, but the feeling when something is going ‘off the rails’ in a manner that you’re honestly 100% okay with. When you realize you have no idea what’s going to happen and suddenly you need to improvise your butt off and, while it’s nerve-wracking, it’s exhilarating because you want to see where this it’s all going. Ultimately this is where I end up feeling the most alive in tabletops. When once I finally pull away from the moment I can’t help but laugh and wonder ‘wait, just how the heck did we get here?’ I’m okay with that in the end because, at that moment, I’m fully aware that I alone wouldn’t have been able to come up with the idea in a hundred years.

Alone, your world is unlikely to have that degree of complexity.

In another example, I’m currently playing a Fantasy AGE game where I’ve allowed the players to go all out with character creation. Fantasy AGE, in particular, has this race called the ‘half-blooded’ which allows characters to derive ancestry from literally EVERY monster in the bestiary. The game also has strong support for mixed-raced characters, allowing you to do things like half-human/half-dwarf. Combine that with half-blooded, however, and we’ve got wacky combinations like dwarf/gargoyle, gnome/carnivorous tree, or—through utilizing half-blooded/half-blooded—something like ooze/mothman.

I know. I had apprehensions too, but bear with me.

Obviously there was no bloody way I was going to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out all the reasons why this worked, or what the various cultures behind those mixes would be like. So from the very beginning, I went with one rule for my players:

“You all have the final say about your culture.”

Not even two sessions in and I suddenly get a wide variety of stories I couldn’t have dreamed of. The gnome/carnivorous tree goes on an entire creation myth about the world starting with a gnome and a tree, and therefore through a complicated family tree, all gnomes and trees and distantly related. We spent nearly an hour in a session brainstorming about dwarf/gargoyle culture and how they harden over time into diamond, so elderly gargoyles need to be protected by the younger ones from poachers, and how their burial grounds are effectively El Dorado’s but with statues of diamond made from grandma.

And here I am, the GM, just throwing bonus exp out left and right for their amazing roleplay and world-building. I’m honestly worried they’re going to level up too fast, but I can’t not reward them for all this.

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Where I’m going with this

Let me say this again: even if you make your world by yourself, it’ll be fine. Despite everything I’ve said here, you’ll likely create an interesting world that your players will enjoy. To be honest, the opening line was mostly out of shock factor.

But I wasn’t kidding with the rest of it. A world written alone might be a great reflection of your imagination, but I don’t believe it’ll truly be a world one could call complex. Our own world might currently be going through several crises but it’s beautifully complex and built over centuries of conflict and collaboration, where many minds made their mark upon it over and over. We still find pieces to this day that can completely and radically change how we see the past.

Meanwhile, for most worlds, it’s often just a single lost ancient civilization, tops.

I think there’s a lot more we can do for world-building that can drastically improve the quality of worlds we make and the games we run, but I’ll save that for another article.

~Di, signing out

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Death often defines the RPGs that we play, even when we don’t realize it. The style of gameplay of many games is determined by the frequency of character death, but even in games where that isn’t a consideration, the absence of character death is often a consideration in reinforcing the tone and themes of a game.

Instead of death being an aspect of the wider game, the game I’m reviewing today is entirely about death, and what comes after. Today, we’re looking at Afterlife—Wandering Souls, a game about finding out who you were in life, now that you are dead.

The Book of the Dead

This review is based on the PDF for the game, which is 153 pages long. This includes a two-page character sheet and a single page index at the back of the book. The book itself has clear headers and table entries, but saying that feels like I’m definitely underselling this book.

When I say this book has full-color art, I mean there are gorgeous borders on each page, as well as full-page chapter illustrations, and various half-page illustrations for various entries in the book. Vibrant flowers contrast with grey skulls and characters that encompass both extremes in appearance throughout the book.

Traveling the Dark

The book begins with an explanation of the setting of the game. The Tenebris is shadowy real that isn’t the afterlife that you should have reached. It’s kind of a strange world between worlds, where the player characters aren’t natives.

Player characters are Wanderers, trying to collect Resonance to unlock memories that lead to Death Marks, which appear on their skin once they have had a Break that allows them to reintegrate a memory. Enough Death Marks, and the character can find their way out of the Tenebris and into their intended afterlife.

If they gain too much Stagnation, they become Unrequited, characters that have lost their will to move out of the Tenebris and find their intended afterlife. Characters remember very little about their past lives, and are attempting to find out who they were, before moving Beyond. There is more on Mirages, Limbos, and the people native to the Tenebris later on in the book.

By this point in the book, I was already greatly intrigued at what this kind of surreal journey through the spaces between life and death would look like, and this is a great, evocative chapter to bait the hook.

Mechanics

Characters have a stat for Body, Mind, and Soul. They have Attributes linked to each of these core stats, that represent a specialization in applying that core stat.

In addition to attributes, characters have pools derived from adding a core stat to an attribute. One pool is Concept, and the other is Vitality. Concept can be spent to gain special results when that pool is relevant to what is being done, such as spending points to generate a success on your roll, or to add a success to an allies check. The Vitality pool represents how well you resist stress to the relevant area—for example, Health represents physical well-being, Hunger represents want (more on this later), and Will represents your ability to carry on.

Health and Will function as you might expect—zero out your pool and you may need to accept a consequence or you die (again, and permanently this time) or you start gaining Stagnation and eventually become an NPC that doesn’t have the motivation to find out who you are or your final afterlife any longer. You can save yourself from permanent death by giving up Will, and if you zero out Health or Will, you suffer a memory.

Hunger is interesting, because it can track you having your basic needs met, but you can also spend from this pool to buy things, representing you giving up your potential to sustain yourself to secure an item. This is what you do instead of tracking any kind of wealth. If you zero out your Hunger, you start taking Health damage until you aren’t quite so destitute anymore.

When characters fill up their Resonance track, they gain Death Marks, and Death Marks allow characters to pick up abilities like Tricks, which can lower the difficulty of certain tasks. Characters also have an Approach, which is a manifestation of the character’s self. This manifestation is either a Bow, a Shield, or a Sword, and each one gives benefits to checks in different situations. Characters can also have Talents, which are very much like Feats or Stunts from other games—a discreet ability that modifies the game rules in specific circumstances.

While Death Marks and Approaches are manifestations of who the Wanderers are, Wanderers can also obtain Curiosa, items that have a level from 1 to 3 that can increase damage or reduce difficulty when used in an appropriate circumstance.

Making checks involves rolling a pool of d6s derived from adding a Core Stat to an Attribute (with potential bonuses from other aspects of the character), and counting certain numbers as successes. The GM sets difficulties, and when the PCs fail, Things Get Worse, which means that the action in the scene escalates, or the PCs take damage to one of their Vitality pools. The GM never rolls dice.

Two things in particular jump out at me in this design. I am interested to see how the flow of Hunger works as both a substitute for tracking currency and for measuring the “needs” of a character. I’m an easy mark for anything that tracks wealth or resources in a new way. I also like that failure isn’t just failure, it is always escalation. I feel like this is a long term legacy of games derived from Apocalypse World, and a key component to game design that doesn’t involve the GM rolling dice or using the rules that work in a parallel manner to the player facing mechanics.

Playing Afterlife

This chapter details the assumed course of play in a game session. Characters are traveling across the Tenebris and interact with the inhabitants. They find Limbos, which are special “pocket dimensions” where they can gain Resonance. When they gain enough Resonance, they can suffer a Break, which allows them to unlock a Death Mark, which moves them closer to their Requiem, their final trip to their intended afterlife.

Characters can mark XP for each Things Get Worse result that comes up, and these can be used to advance attributes. XP can also be marked by answering questions at the end of a session. Death Marks and their associated abilities are only unlocked through interacting with Limbos and gaining Resonance.

In each Limbo, a character can claim something in that Limbo as a Fragment, a powerful link to a memory that immediately triggers a Break and creates a Death Mark for them. This can only happen once per Limbo, and the same character can’t claim a Fragment in a Limbo until everyone else in the group has done so.

I like the idea of characters being able to name their own fragments and have the agency to say when they will experience a Break and what about that memory helps them to remember who they are. It is a nice interaction between the surreal nature of the setting and player agency to allow this kind of declaration, and I like that the built-in mechanics address who can claim a fragment and when, to keep people from dominating a trip into a Limbo.

World, Mirages, and Limbos

The next three chapters detail the settings and give examples of existing people and places in the Tenebris. Mirages are established settlements in the Tenebris, usually populated by people that are native to the Tenebris itself, rather than wandering souls that are either looking to travel Beyond, or have given up that quest.

Limbos are strange pocket dimensions that hold Resonance that the Wanderers need to unlock their memories and gain Death Marks. Limbos tend to be even stranger and more thematic than the Mirage settlements in the Tenebris.

These chapters introduce some of the hazy mythology of the setting, including the giant serpents that live under the sands of the Tenebris and that were present at the dawn of creation.

There are native people of the Tenebris, such as:

• The Kiin (human appearing, but born to this world)
• The Nagiin (serpentine natives of the Tenebris that see themselves as heirs of the giant serpents)
• Venefolk (multi-armed near humans with a talent for Magick)
• Usurii (small, spiritual bearfolk)
• Ungkiin (hooved humanoids subdivided between satyrs and centaurs)

There are also the other Wanderers as well as the Unrequited

The Wanderers have philosophical factions based on their view of the true nature of the afterlife Beyond, and there are factions of Unrequited as well. Individual Mirages have political aspirations that might reach across the Tenebris and hinder or harm the efforts of PC Wanderers on their journeys.

Example Mirages include a city built on the back of a giant dinosaur, the towering city of Babel with its 77 circles, a city built on the edge of a chasm, and what appears to be a crashed starship. There are frozen wastes, cities built inside of an enormous skeleton (with districts in the various body parts), a city composed of reflections, and a mirage based on M.C. Escher architecture.

Example Limbos include a region that exists in the flame of an enormous candle, an ever-expanding version of Atlantis, an ever dark jungle, and a giant garden. Other examples are a living steampunk land, a maze of broken glass, a giant void, and a world based on truths established by ancient science and alchemy. Because the Limbos are both highly conceptual and the area where the heart of adventuring is assumed to be taking place, the entries have a section for what themes the Limbo has, as well as various plot hooks listed at the end of the Limbo’s entry.

I don’t always enjoy surrealist fantasy. I may be no fun, as I can’t always enjoy a world that aggressively doesn’t make sense for the sake of reveling in the chaos. That said, there is something very charming and engaging about the Tenebris and its details. Something about the framing device of the setting existing between and outside of the real world and the afterlives that “should be” makes my brain embrace all of the weirdness and want to engage with it, especially with the meta-conceit of essentially seizing the dreamlike qualities of the Limbos in order to regain memories and remember who your character really is.

Running Afterlife

This section summarizes and expands on the mechanics presented in previous sections. It also defines the modes of play and switching between them (in this case, what it is like to travel the Tenebris, versus encountering a Limbo, versus having a Break or suffering a Memory).

It gives advice on setting difficulty and defining what happens when Things Get Worse. There are some guidelines for creating your own Limbos, and charts to help generate inhabitants that the PCs may encounter.

There is also a section on the various factions in the Tenebris, their motivations, and their goals. There is also a section on tracking the activity level of the various powers in the setting, to determine how ascendant and important they are in your version of the Tenebris.

Character Creation

Character creation is situated at the end of the book, most likely because creating characters is essentially a very active “session zero” for the game, where you don’t determine anything about your character until everyone is together on The Boatman’s ship, arriving in the Tenebris together.

Each character gets three dice of Clarity, which allows them the potential to reroll the results they get as they begin to remember details about themselves. If characters have Clarity left at the end of character creation, they can spend it to move points from one attribute to another.

Characters roll on the following charts, which give you base level numbers for your Core stats and Attributes depending on the entries:

• My Life Was . . .
• What I Learned . . .
• What I Know Now . . .

Even once you come up with all of this, you don’t have a huge amount of details on your characters, but you have a framework to start building on, and your memories (which you have more control over defining), will let you add context. Even at that, some of the facts of your life (you murdered someone, you were a liar, etc.) may not be what you want to build on, so you can roll a Clarity die to see if you can reroll on the chart.

This isn’t framed as “that last roll never happened,” but “you started to remember something, but that wasn’t exactly how it was.” I like that this contributes to the fuzzy nature of trying to rebuild your identity in the Tenebris, and how fragmentary memories can be misleading.

That said, I’m not sure that I’m thrilled with the idea that spending your Clarity dice only allows you a random chance to roll a new memory from the charts. While the game is very much about playing to the story, and not manipulating the rules, this mechanic rewards saving your Clarity dice to customize your character at the end more than just having a chance to play with different established details in your past life.

Appendix

The appendix includes the Death Marks, listed in alphabetical order, as well as providing alternate lists for all of the steps of character creation, which could be useful for long-term play, as well as varying results when players end up with similar results within the same group.

Resonance

 It strikes a wonderful balance between the surreal and the structured, with a set of mythological conceits that provide a container for the chaos within. 

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There are so many imaginative elements to this setting, and fun details to play with. I love the concept of the Limbos, and the agency that players have in claiming fragments and regaining memories. It is such a strong, fun theme to play with, and the details of the people and the Mirages in the Tenebris act as a really well-defined pacing mechanism so that the players have more to do then just racing to the next Limbo.

Stagnation

I’m not a huge fan of spending a resource for only the chance at rerolling a result, especially when Clarity is the only real input that a player has on their character in character creation driven by random rolls. While players have more agency “on the back end,” first impressions can be strong, and this mechanic feels like its rewarding arranging numbers more than controlling narrative elements. There is discussion in many places in the book about player input and getting the permission of the table for elements of the story, but with some of the themes of the game, I would have liked a more concentrated and direct treatment of table safety. It’s not missing, it’s just not a single reference point that can be accessed.

Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

This is an imaginative setting, with fun and accessible mechanics, and lots of tools for adding creative content into games. There is space for player agency and contribution to the story, but lots of room for the GM to have fun adding the fantastical to the game. It strikes a wonderful balance between the surreal and the structured, with a set of mythological conceits that provide a container for the chaos within.

Do you love surreal fantasy, and if so, what games have captured the feel that you want the best? How much does a setting need to make sense for you to enjoy it? What other games have you played that dealt with the disposition of souls after death, and what are your favorites? Let us know in the comments below, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

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Traps. We all know what they are and how they work. Bait something with the proverbial carrot, the machinations whir, boom! Trap sprung, prey caught. Simple enough in theory but have you ever looked at your traps and wondered, “Gee, this isn’t a very good trap! What am I doing wrong?” Well I’m going to dissect your problems and show you the correct way to go about trap-making to the point your rogue will curl into a ball and learn to fear your evil reign whenever you even mention a pressure plate!

To make the best traps, you have to follow a few rules that seem obvious but are often forgotten. As much as you might think that your trap is perfect, you have to remember that three or more people will be actively trying to solve your clever tricks by either bashing it, brute forcing through it, deactivating it, or simply ignoring it. Traps have to be made with the party in mind. Some will excel at trap busting and can speed-run through a mega dungeon in one session if they are good enough. Others will struggle with any kind of trap you throw at them and forget they can actually take the time to search around them or use their resources creatively. Knowing your party’s strengths and weaknesses is half the battle with actually making the traps the true challenge you’ll be facing. Of course, this can vary greatly depending on what characters you are GMing.

So before I mention anything else, I have to bring up the rogue. Why? In most games that have a rogue or rogue-like character, they tend to be the most dexterous and the most adept at finding traps and disabling them. Some even go to great lengths to excel at this type of skill set and become trap maniacs, hoping that the Perception checks they make every five minutes will reveal something for their spidery little hands to mess around with. Varying on what system you are playing, the rogue will most likely be your sworn enemy if you are a trap-loving GM. Go beyond my suggestions because those rogues will ruin. Your. Day.

The first and biggest rule you have to remember about traps is that they can’t be solved by just a roll of the dice. Imagine. You are going through a dungeon with your group, hoping to set off a pitfall trap on them when the party rogue uses a Spot or Perception check to look around. They roll. They succeed. The trap has been ruined in a short minute and they navigate about it in one way or another. A simple example but one seen too often. If you’re going to be setting up traps, you have to make it more advanced than that.

Layering on traps can be an effective tool for this issue, having the party focus on one trap when pow! Another trap activates right after they think they’ve solved the first one! If you’re in a bind with simpler traps, like when using kobold or goblin enemies, have them roll more dice instead. Layers of camouflage covering different sections of the trap or multiple aspects and mechanical parts can require several rolls being involved to deactivate it. Even if they get one part right, they will still have more chances to fail, giving the trap more presence and an actual risk involved. Do they risk setting it off at that point? Do they try another route? This gives some interesting decisions and can dynamically change a dungeon layout. Using one easily passable trap to trick the party to set off another one is also a great method. A pitfall that has a hidden pressure plate right after you cross it is a great example. A good rule of thumb when doing this however is to consider how much it will take to beat the trap in question and will it be worth it for your particular party to interact with.

The next thing to consider is how many traps you place in your campaign. One trap, two traps, three thousand traps, the same thing will always happen. Once that first trap happens, the rogue goes Perception super sleuth and slogs the party down by demanding a new roll every ten feet they move. Nobody likes this and much less you who might have eight or so traps in the dungeon still waiting. It’s a tiring process and even if in character they don’t do this, there is a lingering overhead thought amongst the group of the possibility of more traps. It’s always a difficult task to balance out meta knowledge in your groups but a few simple tricks can help alleviate this.

Having your party deal with traps only once in awhile and in specific places like dungeons and ruins is the easiest solution and can actually be used to perk up some of the less involved members in a group too. Sometimes the biggest trap can be the illusion that you have a trap readied for them, though this can backfire easily with more paranoid players. You can also give those who do constant trap checking a bit more leeway when looking for traps. If they roll to check for traps in say a normal room, you can give them one check and describe that the whole room is safe even if they might just be doing just one area. Not only does it hasten the pace but requires less work to describe the area and can ease tensions for the group. Keep in mind that you should aim to create a balance for your group so that they will actually move more than fifty feet in a session but still be wary of situations you present to them. This takes at least a few trial traps to see how they react but you’ll eventually learn what’s good for them and use that knowledge to improve your future sessions.

Pitfalls are fun and all but basic traps like them, no matter how many you have or how well they are incorporated in a dungeon, will fall flat once a player knows how to navigate them properly. A wooden board over the pit. Throwing heavy rocks onto pressure plates. Using the ten foot pole to hit far reaching parts and switches. Those are classic workarounds but in more recent table tops, these are the poor man’s choices with the sheer plethora of spells, magic items, and abilities often at their disposal. So when the players fly over your pitfall trap for the third time in a row, it’s time to consider your options.

Subverting the expectations of the players is key to a good series of traps. Take what they conventionally know about a trap and twist it on its end! That pit they are trying to cross? It actually has a transparent ooze that uses its tendrils to swipe at passing prey, party included. The arrow trap that trails down the hall? Malfunctioned and shoots in a cone shape now. The pressure plate that was discovered on the floor? It’s magical and certain races activate it instead of just anyone, confusing the orc and surprising the gnome. In fact, using spells against the party for your traps can be tremendous fun, especially spells that aren’t necessarily damage dealers. Nobody expects the giant rolling boulder to actually just be an illusion after all. Surprising your party and setting solid but fair rules on how your traps work can be rewarding for both players and GM if done correctly.

Less a rule and more a suggestion is that not every trap should be meant for the rogue to solve. This might trigger the red alert for some of you but consider this. The party has no rogue. The rogue is more of an assassin build. Or for whatever reason, they didn’t get the trap necessary skills needed to perform at their very best. It happens and sometimes parties get rather lopsided in their composition.You may be stuck with all front-liners or your group is more based around magic or social themes. Rarely will a group be perfectly well-rounded so it’s good to consider traps that even without a rogue can be solved utilizing the party’s strengths.

Of course all of this stems from an understanding of who is in your party and how much you know about your players and their characters. Even the most shy will be able to contribute in some way if you make a trap that only their character can solve. Have a strength-based trap that would require the barbarian to lift up a portcullis for an extended period of time. Use a series of precarious platforms a monk could hop upon to get the switch in the back of the room. The wizard may need to solve a series of arcane writings in just the right order so the party doesn’t get thrown into an extradimensional maze. Incorporating traps that other party members would excel at can set a great variety for the party and give you a better arsenal at your disposal. Not only that but you can easily get the whole group involved with one or two well thought out traps instead of just having them rely on one person to get the job done.

I shouldn’t have to mention this one but don’t let your party know about your traps. It is not up to you to remind the party that they have the ability to ask you what they see around them. You’ve worked hard on these traps and, in the nature of their design, they are meant to surprise their victims with often lethal consequences. So after spending time and creative resources, are you going to point out to the party without any reason or provocation about the “slightly raised rock” in the middle of the path? It might be a personal experience but I’ve seen plenty of GM’s reveal such information to my party and, of course, we pounce on it, leading to them having less than desirable results.

Make sure to keep your traps hidden or else you’ll be setting up for immediate failure. What I don’t mean is that you have to have every trap secreted away behind a Perception check. What I mean is that if you put a sign that points down two paths and it says “One is trapped”, don’t have a footnote where it points to the right side that screams that the trap is down that road. They should know that going down into a long forgotten ruin will bound to be trapped and they should take precautions beforehand to deal with them. Keeping them a secret is also incredibly satisfying, especially when the trap fully works and everything falls into line against the party.

You are the GM of a massive, ever expanding world of canonical content and homebrew designs. Use every resource and every clever idea at your disposal. Look at real life examples and older editions of your choice of game for inspiration. Find something interesting and incorporate it into the most insidious thing your party can encounter. If your party finishes the session talking about how they activated a trap or how they overcame one then you have achieved the apex of what it means to make a proper experience for your party. The biggest thing we can achieve in our time of playing any tabletop is the memories we make out of it. So I hope that the advice I’ve given will prove to work for you in some way or another, making plenty of memorable splatter death falls and Indiana Jones style situations. If any of you have these stories, don’t be shy and share them in the comments below!

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Tabletop gamers are fairly all over the place and I would argue that we’re now possibly the most diverse subculture in the world now. We have folks from all genders and backgrounds, with interests ranging from cosplay to technical programming to working out in the gym. Long gone are the days where it’s only ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’ rolling the dice, as you’re just as likely to find a ‘jock’ or even model at the table.

This diversity isn’t simply limited to stereotypical backgrounds either: for every child under 8 getting into the game, we have a veteran gamer over 60 that’ll regale you with a tale of their first slain dragon, be that over 40 years ago, or just last week. In that vein, while there are plenty of able-bodied players, there are also scores of adventurers with disabilities that often get looked over.

As I was wondering in what ways could I account for disabled folk and such, a copy of the FATE Accessibility Toolkit fell into my hands.

In going through it I’ve found that, while it’s grounded in covering FATE specific mechanics, it has a lot of fantastic tools and advice for GMs and players regardless of system.

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How much of it is FATE?

While picking up content for FATE as a FATE player is automatically a no-brainer, I have to stress that the content here is more universal than the system can contain.

In the 126 page pdf, if you don’t count the first 5 pre-pages and the last 4 closing pages, it has 117 pages of raw content. Going through it, I marked roughly around 50-55 pages that explicitly referred to FATE mechanics. This allows the rest of the book to act as a handbook and guide to handling disabilities and such in a positive manner.

While it certainly helps to understand FATE (such as the difference between Aspects and Stunts) it’s general enough in its coverage that you get a solid idea.

At the end of the book, in the Appendices, it also covers several major sans-system tools such as the X-Card, the Script Change tools, as well as an ASL Reference section. As the pdf (at my time of review) is a prototype it doesn’t have the full, comprehensive charts just yet, but I’m excited to see it in its completion.

---

The Core of it

The most eye-opening part of the book for me turned out to be the “The Nitty Gritty of Specific Disabilities” section. In its 43 pages, it goes through disabilities such as blindness, deafness, chronic illness, autism, and many more. It starts with informing the reader what the disability is like and what sorts of situations one might go through, before leading into how to incorporate it into the game.

A deaf character might have the aspect Perfect Lip Reading, allowing the character to perfectly understand a conversation until the target turns away, or a character with chronic illness might have Lay Medic (lore), giving the character bonuses to know hospital procedures and recognizing conditions. Personally, it was particularly nice to see the book also tackle subjects like schizophrenia and PTSD and show it in a really positive manner.

Not only was the Nitty Gritty chapter written with care, but with accuracy as well as the writer consulted or worked with contributing authors to get a comprehensive look at each disability. You can clearly tell as the writing style changes quite a bit where the writers change hands.

Each part is then punctuated with several small blurbs, giving advice to players and GMs alike, as well as advice on how to handle antagonists with the disability as well. What tropes to avoid? To lean into? Often the answer is simply “Don’t make their disability their critical weakness and undoing.”

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Game Elements

For the FATE players, the Accessibility Toolkit comes loaded with tons of suggested content. While it comes with the standard fare of Aspects, Stunts, and Extras—all handily organized via disability—it also involves its own unique elements of Conditions, Adaptive Devices, and a little gem called Anchors hidden on page 14.

To sum them up quickly, Conditions reflect states your character will sometimes be in due to their disability. It’s something done to help model disabilities. Adaptive Devices, which is paired with conditions, can actually grant bonuses and special abilities (Extras) to your characters. “Anchors” are an alternate rule to track mental trauma, which can grant your character bonuses when you’re out of resources, at the risk of affecting the Anchors that keep you stable. As someone that constantly has to balance between my mental health and doing what needs to be done, Anchors honestly spoke to me and made me feel heard.

With what the book already gives you, you can practically plug-in and play from the get-go. It has a surprising amount of content between its pages.

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And my point!

I think we need more content like this. Not just for FATE, but for more systems out there. I originally thought that I’d like to see this sort of book for all systems but after some time to think, I think that this just had to be FATE. Almost no other system focuses as heavily on player added content than one that literally requires the players to create their Aspects, then numerically ties that in with the game’s mechanics. It’s a system where its driving principle is based on empowering the players and their capacity to affect the narrative. So of course this system was where this sort of empowerment had to start.

As someone that has had friends with disabilities, personally goes through a few mental health concerns myself, and has consequently become more familiar with such conditions outside of my prior realm of understanding, I am overjoyed to see this sort of content on the metaphorical shelf. From a first glance, disabilities can seem difficult to tackle and something to tip-toe around, but they don’t have to be. Improving the handling of a situation starts with becoming informed.

If you happen to pick it up in its prototype stage, by the way, you’re also directly contributing to getting it full art and an ASL hand sign chart! Something to think about.

~Di, signing out

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