- The Lost Valley of Kishar
- Coddefut's Stipule
- Magical Murder Mansion
- Delta Green: Control Group
- Over the Edge 3rd Edition
- Forbidden Lands: Raven's Purge
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| Reviewing is tiring work |
Whew, that's a lot! If I want to cover all of those, I'm going to have to keep each one pretty brief. That works for you, right?
The Lost Valley of Kishar
I just finished reading through this last night. I have a great affection for open-ended wilderness adventures with lots of little sites and factions. That's what we have here. A very compact affair for low-to-mid level PCs, there's a lot going on in this adventure with no particular requirement that the adventurers get to the bottom of it all. There are a lot of different genre elements that manage to hang together well - winged apes, science fantasy, liches and curses - it's all there. And the organization is tight; Lost Valley gets in and out in 36 pages. It's not dry and it never overstays its welcome, and its all digestible enough for a GM to quickly get the big picture. Designed for generic OSR gaming. Highly recommended.
I've reviewed this elsewhere. Coddefut's Stipule is an intro adventure to the upcoming Mythras Lyonesse supplement. As the name would suggest, this is a licensed setting for Jack Vance's Lyonesse novels, which was a high fantasy series set in a more magical version of Britain. It is of course written for Mythras.
This particular adventure is meant to be an introduction of that setting and a showcase of its sensibility. On those scores it succeeds. The adventure text is rich in Vancian verbiage in both the player-facing and the GM-facing portions. The premise is that the party is being forced by a hostile local authority to investigate why fishing boats have been vanishing near an island which was the home of a wizard, since abandoned.
It's not high magic, which is fine; best to be restrained for an initial outing. The setup is very railroaded, but the resolution is very open-ended. The text is a little dense to parse at the gaming table (maybe they could have dialed-back the Vance a tiny bit there), but since the whole thing is pretty simple, the damage is limited.
Easily recommended.
Magical Murder Mansion
A new Skerples joint is always a welcome sign. The Coins and Scrolls blogger is known for, among other things, his canonical beginner's dungeon Tomb of the Serpent Kings. In keeping with that concept, this could be said to be Skerple's canonical funhouse dungeon; the subtitle is "A challenging funhouse dungeon." As with his prior effort, this is a pitch-perfect realization of the concept. And that's coming from the guy who recently put out his own canonical funhouse dungeon set in a wizard's house.
In 30 pages, Skerples manages to detail almost 75 different rooms. It's an extremely easy read and the material is whimsical and fantastic. Another one written for an unnamed OSR system, another strong recommendation.
There's an interesting concept, here. Most of these adventures are one-shots that are designed as introductions to the world of Delta Green. Each adventure is disconnected from the others, providing players with pre-generated PCs that belong to some government organization (FBI, Army, CDC, etc.) that gets sucked into some Mythos fun. The final scenario is the sole adventure designed for fully-inducted DG operatives, and it is assumed that players will use characters from the earlier adventures. These pregenerated PCs are intricately designed with past histories and relationships to each other, which is probably best suited for players who enjoy the role-playing aspect of role-playing.
A bit of an odd duck. How many times can the same players be introduced to the Mythos? I guess the GM can pick his or her favorite of the first set of scenarios and then jump to the final one. It's a great on-ramp to modern Mythos, but it would be a mistake to view this as a campaign.
CoC/DG adventures are a bit different for someone more used to OSR. There's less structure and more exposition. There's a lot of text to wade through, and I can imagine how it could have been better organized for play. This is an issue I've seen with lots of adventure in these settings, so I won't knock it too much. There are probably fewer moving parts, overall, so the GM shouldn't need to reference specifics quite as often.
As for the adventures themselves, they're all pretty damn good. Rather than provide the GM with plots, they describe situations. There's a lot of guidance on how to handle different player choices, but the assumption is clearly that there's no fixed outcome. One of the nice things about Mythos games and horror in general is that PC failure is much more in line with the genre, which lends itself to this open-endedness. For fantasy adventures, the end of the world is a rare event (see Death Frost Doom), but in Lovecraftian role-playing, it's always an option.
Highly recommended, again.
A bit of a funny beast. I was a huge fan of the 1st and 2nd editions from the 90s. This new edition basically rewrites the rules, but the setting is completely intact and even a bit extended. The new mechanics are simpler than the original game, which is pretty odd since OTE always had an extremely simple and elegant ruleset. Fortunately, I'm mostly on-board. It's actually quite elegant if you're looking for something very modern and super-duper-ultra-simple.
The book is quite attractive and the binding is actually very nice and solid (stitched, if I recall correctly). The description of the setting, the weird-modern Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, carries all the flavor of the original rules and goes into even more depth. It's an easy read and there's a lot of nice detail, but it might just be more than is needed. The earlier editions were a little more lean-and-mean when it came to the setting; there's more than enough to get started, and game designers always need to assume that GM's will be extending their settings on-the-fly. One nice addition: the tourist-style map of The Edge is attractive and gives you a very good sense of space.
If there's one thing that I'm truly opposed to in this game, it's the storygaming emphasis in the new rules. OTE 3e doesn't go full PbtA, but there's a lot of guidance for the GM that urges a lot of player narrative. Examples frequently have the GM telling players things that their PCs wouldn't know, and soliciting them for interpretations of die rolls. For that matter, too much of the book is given over to guiding the GM on how to run a campaign and handle standard GM duties. It's like a metastasized version of the extraneous "what is role-playing?" section that many games stick at the front.
All of this is easily ignored, fortunately. The downside is that there's a lot of extraneous material in this book, at least for my purposes, which means that there's a lower wheat-to-chaff ratio. I'm a fan of bang-for-my-buck, so at 275 pages, OTE 3e feels pretty flabby.
Whew, it's going to be hard to keep this one compact. This is a full campaign for the Forbidden Lands RPG, and in fact, it's pretty clear that the expectation is that this is the default campaign for that game. There are even references to it in the core rules.
Fortunately, Raven's Purge is fantastic. Instead of describing plots, it describes locations and situations. There are hooks for each location, but in a roaring campaign, there are tons of reasons that adventurers may find themselves at and of these points of interest.
The art is beautiful, and the location maps look like straight-up drawings of overhead views. Only one or two of these places bears any similarity to the traditional dungeon. Most of them are places like castles and ruins, where there are a few things going on in general locations rather than carefully-described individual rooms. It feels much more natural. The flavor is high fantasy with a streak of the old grimdark.
Highly recommended with a caveat: it's almost obligatory if you own Forbidden Lands and nearly useless if you don't.
Indeed. Several in there that I've not heard of.
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