FATAL and Friends Reviews Condensed

 

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.

 

Unknown Armies Halloween Jam 2025 Feedback

 

It's time for another Unknown Armies 3e jam review. The event ran from October 7th through October 23rd and the specifications can be found here. The event received fifteen submissions. The ones shaded blue are my own.

mellonbread reviews Starwater Strains

I wrapped the Starwater Strains collection a month or two back. I didn't believe the cover art was real until I actually had the book in my hands. I love Endangered Species but the best stories are squirreled away at the end and there are a lot of duds to wade through. Wolfe At The Door has some bangers, but also several stories I only enjoyed reading in conversation with his other work (and some juvenalia that's only worth reading out of historical interest). I think Strains strikes the right balance of rich-but-approachable. Like in At The Door the stronger entries are strategically placed to prop up the weaker ones so there's never a losing streak, and the longer entries are bookended by shorter ones so the reader never leaves exhausted.

As usual, I'll skip the summaries and go straight to my thoughts.

mellonbread reviews Shotguns vs Cthulhu

Shotguns Vs Cthulhu is a 2012 short story collection by Pelgrane Press, full of pulp action stories where humans fight supernatural forces. I won't be providing full plot summaries because I believe reviews like this are only fun for people who have already read the story.

Unknown Armies Pashacon Jam Results

Another Unknown Armies jam wrapped a couple weeks ago. Parameters will be familiar to anyone who's been following this series. Let's see how we did.

 

Unknown Armies 2025 Jamuary Jam Results

Ken Currie

A couple months ago Unknown Armies fan server user Cliomancer ran another Unknown Armies jam. It had similar rules to previous jams, with a list of prompts and a short wordcount limit.

John Tynes Ain't Dead Contest Results

Komoda

The John Tynes Isn't Dead Contest just wrapped. Submitters had a couple months to write submissions based on entries to the Unnatural Phenomena page, an Unknown Armies fansite dating back to the early 2000s (and mirroring content from other, now defunct fan pages).

 

The jam was initiated after Atlas Games allowed the Statosphere community content program for Unknown Armies 3e to die by neglect, ignoring DrivethruRPG's communications on the subject and subsequent fan communications asking about the status of the program. UA3 was basically abandoned anyway, but the disappearance of Statosphere through bureaucratic incompetence added insult to injury.

Reaper Miniatures by Sculptor

I just finished my latest pile of Reaper miniatures (ignore the Wizkids Manticore on the right) and thought it would be fun to go through my collection by sculptor.

Reaper is my go-to minis brand because it's the only one you can semi-reliably find in game stores outside the usual spread of Games Workshop/5E/Marvel/Star Wars/maybe Infinity. Stores have to stock what moves, and indie miniatures are a big risk. I've never found anywhere that carried Reaper metals so I've only tried the plastics. 

They've got the typical flaws associated with plastic figures. Bent weapons that won't stay straight even after multiple boiling/ice baths, mold lines that inevitably cut across the most detailed parts of the figure and can't be removed without gouging out facial features, occasional quality control issues that look like someone doodled on the flat surfaces of the mini with a scalpel... Price of doing business. In exchange you get cheap, durable figures (I dropped several to no ill-effect while photographing for this post) and a huge variety of characters and monsters. The bulk of the figures are fantasy but they also offer smaller pulp, modern and sci-fi lines.

This will be a non-representative sample of each sculptor's work, since I just buy and paint whatever looks fun. I've been painting miniatures on and off for about nine months now, so this is how the models look in the hands of a beginner-to-middling painter. If you want to see more examples, check out Reaper's Show Off Painting board.

mellonbread reviews The Wolfe at the Door

Gene Wolfe's posthumous collection The Wolfe at the Door collects a bunch of Old Man Wolfe's short stories that were never included in previous collections, or in collections nobody read and are long out of print. I'd read one of them before and the rest were all new to me. 

Gene Wolfe has a handful of dedicated scholars who have produced a body of secondary works attempting to solve  the puzzles and mysteries he litters his books with. As much as I deride these talking heads for dressing up their confabulations as authoritative interpretations, they've undeniably put in a lot of work to help people understand what the hell is happening in the stories. Due to being uncollected and unpopular, the stories in Wolfe at the Door do not have a large body of critical work yet. You're on your own and it's up to you to figure out what's going on - or decide there isn't a mystery at all and you should just enjoy the ride.

I'm going to go story-by-story and pick out my favorites. This review will not make sense unless you've read the collection.

Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's Unknown Armies Con Scenarios

 

 

While looking for entries to use in Tormsen's Unnatural Phenomena Jam, I found links to some of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's old Unknown Armies con scenarios from the early 2000s on the defunct game.eire site. The Wayback machine had captures of all the relevant .zip files. 

 

John Tynes ain't dead but he's under a noncompete at Wizards, which is basically the same thing. Meanwhile Hanrahan is the best of the Pelgrane devs, his blogposts are better than most of the other guys' published products. But was he always a scenario writing powerhouse, even twenty years ago? I uploaded his UA con adventures here for people to read. I've never heard anyone talk about any of them so hopefully you enjoy reading along.

 

This is not a full review since I haven't run/played any of the modules. I'll likely never run them regardless of quality. If I ever get enough players together for Unknown Armies again I've got a bunch of my own stuff at the top of the pile to be run.

Review: Book of Fuligin

My copy of Book of Fuligin came today. This is a Book of the New Sun fancomic that was crowdfunded a couple years ago. Various artists and writers contributed short comics or illustrations set in the world of the Solar Cycle - the posthistoric dying Urth created by Gene Wolfe. Submitters were prohibited from using characters from books for original stories, though some of the submissions depict the canonical events of the novels. I've had the PDF version sitting in my Gmail for months but I forgot I even backed this project until I got the email asking me to update my shipping info. I'm very glad I did.

The book is a hardcover with good cloth binding. The cover is a minimalist illustration of Severian and a tangle of thorns on a black field. There's a embossed Terminus Est with a single blood drop on the spine, which looks great. There's an illustration of Old Man Wolfe on the interior covers (front and rear) that makes him look like Doctor Robotnik. The matte black they chose for the cover and pages accumulates fingerpints like nobody's business and looks gray in good light. I wouldn't nitpick this except that the cover claims the book is "written and drawn in the darkest of inks" and I just discovered through miniature painting that you need a gloss to make black actually look black.

 

The package came with a loose page that had a cool drawing of Severian.

 

Enough about the physical product. Let's dive into the stories. This review assumes you've read the New Sun books and won't make sense if you don't. It will contain spoilers for plot details from the novels and will give away some setting or thematic elements of the stories in Book of Fuligin. If you got a copy from the Kickstarter I suggest reading it before you read this. As of this posting the publisher says there are a handful of spares they might sell after they make sure the backers are taken care of. You may yet get a chance to grab one if you haven't already.

2022 Delta Green Shotgun Scenario Reviews

The 2022 Delta Green Shotgun Scenario Contest wrapped a few weeks ago. I've largely lost interest in Delta Green over the last year or two, but I sent in three scenarios anyway.

 

Reviews of all 53 submissions under the cut.

FATAL and Friends Reviews

Over the last year, I wrote some reviews of games for the Somethingawful FATAL and Friends thread.

You can read the reviews here.

The RPGs I reviewed were:

• Eclipse Phase: Zone Stalkers
• Esoteric Enterprises
• Castle Gargantua
• How to Host a Dungeon
• Mothership
• Maria in Three Parts
• Think Before Asking
• Delta Green Shotgun Scenarios