I sometimes get requests to repost my reviews from the FATAL and Friends thread. People have trouble sifting through the forum posts, or the site goes pay to read, or they just want everything in one place. Copying all the reviews would take work, and I don't like some of my writing from five or six years ago. My early work was too people-pleasing. Even when I argued with other posters it was because I wanted them to like the game I was talking about, or at least the parts of it I liked. The point of an RPG review is not to sell the book, that's the publisher's job. I am flattered that people like to read my longform writing with lots of pictures and examples but I also think I could make the whole thing shorter and skip to the conclusion. So here's that.
Thank you to everyone in the thread and elsewhere who read and replied to my work over the last eight years, I wouldn't have gotten this far without you.
An Eclipse Phase sourcebook about the Titan Quarantine Zone on Mars. A cool wilderness to explore, monsters to fight, mysterious traps and treasure, an encounter deck to populate overland travel, and some interesting social context for the spaces where the Zone brushes up against Martian law enforcement and civilization. I got a lot of mileage out of this one. You can use it with the official scenario Million Year Echo and the fanmade module Red Red Red.
Eclipse Phase 1e has a problem with morph and gear bloat, huge lists of stuff that you cannot realistically use in actual play. Walking tanks and plasma rocket launchers and all the other fun stuff that costs a fortune and brings an instant response in a surveillance society where even firing a pistol is hard to conceal. The Zone is a place where the players can cut loose and get some mileage out of all that high powered transhuman technology that normally stays locked up in the splatbooks.
ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES
A modern urban fantasy dungeon crawler. The game system is mediocre but the underworld generator is best-in-class. The monsters, treasures, traps, magical spells make it easy and fun to create an undercity and fill it with factions. It takes some hand-fitting but I used the rules to create four different cities and played in a fifth, and each one was unique and interesting.
My original review was full of harsh criticism of this game. I stand by most of it, but I was wrong to describe it as "unfinished". Everything you need to play is there in one book. I added custom areas and lots of rules for gang management that made the game more complicated, then made it simpler. My changes made the game better but it works right out of the box. The core rules may be a lousy hack of Lamentations but I've gotten more mileage out of EE than I have out of most good games.
CASTLE GARGANTUA
A giant-themed fantasy dungeon generator. Travel through a procedurally generated dungeon with four themed areas and a series of handcrafted minidungeons to challenge Gargantua himself on the final level of his sprawling palace.
Castle Gargantua is Esoteric Enterprises if it was even more evocative and even less mechanically functional. It's from that era of dungeon crawlers where everyone wanted to be Lamentations, so everything is weird, gross, fun to read and plays like shit. The one time I tried to run it out of the book it sucked. The players loved climbing on the giant furniture and fighting the crazy monsters, but realized very quickly that none of their exploration decisions really mattered. It gave me a lifelong distrust of point crawls and anything where the layout of the dungeon changes when the players look away. The monsters, traps, unique treasure and themed areas are great. I've been recycling them for half a decade. It's the best example I've ever seen of "atmosphere" in an RPG and how a book that has it can punch far above its weight.
HOW TO HOST A DUNGEON 2E
A solo game where you draw cards and doodle on a map. You pick your starting civilization and do a world generation procedure that takes you through the various ages, playing cards each turn. The cards have cute drawings and game statistics that show how they interact with one another and with the dungeon areas. The monsters and people and places on the cards work together to create a narrative skeleton that the player interprets to create the story of the dungeon.
I bought a physical copy of the game and created four dungeons with How To Host A Dungeon. A dwarf fortress, a demonic pit, a wizard academy and a dark elf colony. They were all different and fun but by the end I felt satisfied that I squeezed all the juice out of the orange. I used how To Host A Dungeon to generate the skeleton of ANGUISHEDWIRES, but I wouldn't say it helped all that much with creating, stocking and keying all the individual rooms. It's not there to generate a playable adventure, it's there to create a fun map with a narrative attached.
MOTHERSHIP 0E
The original pamphlet version of the rules, before the Kickstarter and box set. It sucks. The combat and stress/panic systems are both slow and clunky as hell. It's good to remember that just because rules are simple and take up a
small amount of page space, does not mean they will be fast and decisive
in actual execution. If monsters and being scared don't work properly in your Alien-like, what's the fucking point? Mothership got popular because of its graphic design and modules and it shows.
UNKNOWN ARMIES: MARIA IN THREE PARTS
The Free RPG Day quick start for Unknown Armies 3e. A rules tutorial, four pregenerated characters and a mission for them to go on. The rules tutorial is great, the pregens are okay, the mission is a Delta Green operation reskinned for UA. A cop tells you to investigate and cover up a supernatural incursion. It's a fun adventure but it's not representative of what you actually do in this game. All of its rough edges can be smoothed over but they suggest design by committee. The pregens have Relationships that do not actually reflect their written backstory. None of them have a relationship with the dispatcher NPC who's supposed to be in charge of their mission. Not a big deal but it does support my repeat assertion that Relationships were an afterthought even to the designers of the game, and can safely be dispensed with as a mechanic.
If I had to recommend a starting point for UA3 I'd say the Canned Rules Tutorial with One Shots: American Dreams
ECLIPSE PHASE: THINK BEFORE ASKING
A fanmade module for Eclipse Phase 1e. A cell of Firewall agents (space Delta Green) hunt for weapons of mass destruction in an anarchist habitat cluster on the outer rim. Sandberg's Eclipse Phase modules expect the GM to have a high familiarity with both the rules and setting of Eclipse Phase. They are made to be played with the setting books (Rimward, Sunward, Gatecrashing, etc) and anything explained in those books will not be explained in the module because it's all already laid out there. That's mostly fine because the only person reading a fanmade Eclipse Phase module (maybe any EP book) is an Eclipse Phase superfan who's already devoured all the published content.
The two problems I have with Think Before Asking, even after accepting the premise, are
- Minimal NPC stat blocks, leaving the most labor intensive and time consuming part of Eclipse Phase module creation to the GM
- An incredibly fragile chain of clues in the investigative section of the module, counting on the players to be masters of the setting and rules so they can use their superhuman skills and abilities to forge a path to the conclusion
After brushing aside the wispy thin investigative beard, the players enter the haunted house section of the module and encounter the reason why I still say this is the best Eclipse Phase module ever written despite its flaws. The only time I have ever seen Eclipse Phase's core setting elements brought to the foreground in a way that is interactive, intelligible and fun for the players.
DELTA GREEN SHOTGUN SCENARIOS
I haven't read a Delta Green adventure in years. If you want shotgun scenario reviews you should hit up someone who's still in the scene.
SCENIC DUNNSMOUTH
A village generator from the original run of Lamentations modules. Four clans of dissolute aristocrats and bayou hillbillies feud in a swamp with a horrible secret. The generation system parcels out the most interesting elements with deliberate care because it wants you to reserve them all for repeat playthroughs. I think a module you play multiple times like a video game is a fascinating idea, but I would not count on repeat runs of a scenario if the first one isn't actually fun. Go all-in and grab the pieces you think are most interesting.
This is a first party Lamentations module. It's not written by the dipshit who wrote the corebook, but like Gargantua it takes its cues from his house style. I didn't like it when I read it but I've come around on Dunnsmouth over the years. Yeah Uncle Ivan does bad stuff to women. He's a serial killer. Yeah Magda is a conniving bitch. She's being stalked by a serial killer, what is she supposed to do? The Elven mpreg amulet needs no justification. The key to fitting all the pieces together and making it fun is the tax farmer premise given at the end of the book. It gives the players a reason to investigate and interact with a lot of stuff that would otherwise never be relevant. You should pirate it.
THE SWORD AND THE FLAME 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
A set of wargame rules from the 1970s for the colonial wars of the British Empire. Though it was written almost fifty years ago, this game is simpler and faster moving than many wargames in service today. The rules expertly blend realism, flavor and functionality while keeping the pagecount to an appropriate minimum. There's some fussiness with what phases all the different actions happen in and special rules for acting out of turn, which I think is all unnecessary given the superb initiative system with the cards. The rules for ratios of troops and point systems are all half-baked, it works better if you play it with a mutually agreed on scenario. You can't let the British troops just sit behind a wall and defend it, you have to put them on the offensive and make them work for it. It's a game for clubs and conventions rather than competitive play.
Wargame types (and wannabe wargamers who found the site in middle school) may remember the Major General's Page, a collection of play reports and houserules for The Sword And The Flame with a bunch of beautiful handcrafted terrain, landships, blimps, martian tripods...
DUNE 2019
This is the Gale Force Nine rerelease of the original Avalon Hill Dune board game. I adore Dune and I played a bunch of this game through treachery.online. The online platform handles a lot of the housekeeping and fussy special rules and lets you get down to backstabbing. I am not a big board game fan but this one is my favorite. Every faction plays differently and when you understand your strengths and play in a way that emphasizes them you end up acting like the characters from the novel. The Fremen use attrition to bleed the imperial powers dry. The Bene Gesserit manipulate events and assassinate people. The Harkonnens are brutes who use treason and a golf bag full of evil devices to win fights. The Emperor sits on his ass and collects rent checks until it's time to make a move.
It has its flaws. You spend a lot of time in the auction phase waiting for other people to bid on shit. If you allow backchannel alliance communication the game can really slow to a crawl as everyone works out the optimal play. The physical game has lots of itty bitty components to make the box smaller and cheaper, and the core rules leave out a lot of special cases and exceptions that are clarified in a series of subsequent FAQs. Oh and you need six people to commit to two or three hours to play it.
GF9 has released many more Dune board games since 2019. Some of which, I'm told, are even good. I have not played them but I have played the first two expansions for Dune 2019. Ix and Tleilax was good, CHOAM and Richese was not. It was clear that they ran out of ideas and I didn't play the expansion after that.
DUNE 2D20
Dune 2d20 is mediocre with sparks of brilliance where the designers were allowed to use their imagination. The battle system has its moments like all the special Move actions or the dueling minigame where you track the position of all the weapons and try to force them past the other guy's guard. Bene Gesserit and Mentats are overpowered as fuck but in ways that reflect the source material and support the rest of the team rather than playing the game by themselves. The big list of Feats has some inspired systemization of Dune setting elements, like Gurney Halleck generating Momentum for the group by playing his baliset or Jessica adding to Threat every time she uses the Voice. It's good enough that it's worth running rather than hacking together your own system if you want to run a Dune RPG.
I was looking forward to the House management book because I thought it would beef up the underbaked Agents and Architects play mode from the corebook, but instead it adds an additional minigame that doesn't help. What's there worked fine when I ran it. I'm going to run it again as a one-off at Gencon this year and that'll probably be the last time I touch it.
I was looking forward to the House management book because I thought it would beef up the underbaked Agents and Architects play mode from the corebook, but instead it adds an additional minigame that doesn't help. What's there worked fine when I ran it. I'm going to run it again as a one-off at Gencon this year and that'll probably be the last time I touch it.
UNKNOWN ARMIES 3E BOOK FOUR: EXPOSE
A book of character build options, NPCs, monsters and a whole lot of media reviews for Unknown Armies 3e. Overshadowed by Book 5 but still nice to have for UA superfans.
UNKNOWN ARMIES 3E BOOK FIVE: MINE
A book of character build options, NPCs, monsters, locations and spells for Unknown Armies 3e. This one has a lot of returning spell schools from prior editions of the game, including all time greats Epideromancy, Pornomancy and Entropomancy, which makes it more popular than Book Four. Both books are nice to have because in UA3 if you encounter something you like in a splatbook, even as a player, you can mandate its inclusion in a game through the corkboarding process.
MONSTER BOOKS
We got a few of these. In the review thread I made dungeon or two for each one. Check those out here.
The Monster Overhaul has a strong focus on ecology, motivations and interactivity. It's flexible and easy to customize without demanding a heavy creative lift of the user. The implied setting is OD&D, with its mix of fantasy monsters, dinosaurs and aliens. It's the best monster book I reviewed in this series.
The CC1 Creature Compendium successfully recreates the feel of the original AD&D 1e Monstrous Manual. It blends interesting flavor and worthless trivia that sometimes leaves the DM hanging. The Implied setting is an ultra-hostile ecology like Hender’s Island, Catachan or Chtorr. It's a triumph of flavor and evocative prose/illustrations over practical playable information.
The CC2 Creature Cache is an experimental offering by the Creature Compendium dev. Its creative mechanical reinterpretations of old pulp scifi/fantasy art are hit and miss. The implied setting is Planar fantasy with psychic monsters and spirits teleporting between worlds every which way.
It has no cover so here are some toys
The OSE Encounter Activities bring the OSE monster manual to life with a list of things for the monsters to do when you meet them. It's evocative and fun, not always practical thanks to entries that stray outside the bounds of the source text. The implied setting is Basic D&D with supporting detail to differentiate all the entries that are too similar in the base game. It's a solid enhancement for a book you already have.
The BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus combines two community sourced bestiaries for the Basic Fantasy RPG. It's a sprawling collection of mundane and utterly fantastical entries with no unifying theme. There's zero editorial control, zero implied setting, anything you can think of is true. It's a twenty year tribute to the fan community that kept Basic/Expert D&D on the map.
HIS MAJESTY THE WORM
His Majesty The Worm is an indie dungeon crawler that uses tarot cards. It has solid "slice of life" mechanics, world creation rules that range from barely there to pretty damn good, and the best tactical combat I have ever seen in an RPG. I have a lot of problems with this game, most of which are fixable or don't matter. The pacing issue is what made me put it down. It just takes too long to do anything. Every phase of the game has a big fat block of procedural rules that require multiple rounds of outreach to everyone at the table to resolve. A single exchange of blows gives everyone at the table an opportunity to react, sending everyone shuffling through their hand of cards for the optimal play on the first initiative count while you have thirteen more to go. Combats approach 5E or Pathfinder in table time to resolve. If you are willing to put in the time it's a lot of fun. If you feel exhausted when a session sprawls past the four hour mark, give it a pass.
MYTHIC BASTIONLAND
Mythic Bastionland is an Arthurian fantasy adventure game built on the Into the Odd engine. Mythic pairs the best developed version of the ItO system with a world class world generation system that's rich in both atmosphere and gameplay, without placing undue demands on the DM or players. The battle system is fast and brutal but offers interesting decisions beyond just attacking every round. It has the best treatment of resource management, ability score damage and overland travel I have ever seen. It's a wonderful game to play with a small number of players, one to three.
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