Esoteric Enterprises is an urban fantasy/grindhouse horror dungeon crawler by Emmy Allen of Dying Stylishly Games.
The setting is similar to RPGs like Unknown Armies and World of Darkness, or books like Kraken and... Gil's All Fright Diner, maybe? There's an occult underworld in the city that somehow stays hidden from mundane humanity, despite being jam packed with crazy magic and monsters.
The gameplay is a clone of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a clone of Basic/Expert D&D, or one of those other old school editions. You roll 3D6 in order to make a character, you roll D20s to attack things and make saving throws, you get the picture. It does a few genuinely cool things to improve the old system (which I ran for maybe a year in undergrad and didn't really care for), and also some annoying things that make it worse.
Coal City Blues was my first campaign of Esoteric Enterprises. I expected it to go for a couple sessions, and it ran for eleven. I can't actually recommend Esoteric Enterprises. It's an unfinished product, and that's not something I want to reward. But it surprised me. The mechanics range from incomplete, to frustrating, to straight up broken, but the world creation system really brings the game to life. It's the first RPG I've ever finished a campaign of. And I've got plenty of "finished" games sitting on my shelf that are much worse (I'm looking at you, Mothership).
Here are my writeups of the game
- SESSION ONE
- SESSION TWO
No comments:
Post a Comment