Supplement Supplemental! (Gloranthan Mythology, the Romano-British Mythos Horror, a Far Future Bestiary, and an Old World Miscellanea)

Time to do some housekeeping again with my regular series of articles in which I pass brief comments on RPG supplements I have something to say about, but not enough to say to fill an entire article.

Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology (RuneQuest)

Last time I did one of these articles I covered the first clutch of volumes issued Cults of RuneQuest, the massive multi-volume collection of RuneQuest cult information for the current version of the game. Most of the volumes in this series concentrate on providing deep dives on the deities and cults of a specific pantheon, but there’s two exceptions. In the previous article I wrote about one of these – the Prosopaedia, a sort of system-free master index of gods and heroes.

This is the other “general” volume – a deep dive into the overarching mythologies of Glorantha, the monomyth which keeps cropping up in the different pantheons, and the deep history and ancient cosmology of the word. It opens with a Foreword by the late Greg Stafford himself (whose work underpins much of the Cults of RuneQuest series), and simply by reading those few pages I felt I understood Greg’s take on mythology and how it fits into Glorantha and how you can make an interesting RuneQuest story out of it much better than I did previously.

The rest of the book does not disappoint. Whilst some readers may prefer a “bottom up” approach – tackling the mass of Cults of RuneQuest by beginning with one pantheon or another and concentrating on the specifics of the cults – this offers a complementary “top down” look at the legends of the setting, and in doing so can both help you get the best out of the pantheon-specific volumes and get a better handle on the underlying ethos of Greg Stafford’s creation.

Some of the features here may seem idiosyncratic – in particular the set of mythic maps, showing the world of Glorantha at different stages of the God Time that preceded conventional time. However, part of the whole schtick of Heroquesting in the setting is embodying, re-enacting, and to a certain extent enacting mythic tales that took place in that time – and so knowing what the lie of the land was like at a particular phase of the God Time can be massively helpful when it comes to cooking up Heroquest-themed scenarios for high-level play.

Other features are just plain useful. There’s a generic breakdown of the template that all of the individual cult entries in Cults of RuneQuest use which is mighty useful, but at the same time too long to be sensibly reprinted in all the volumes. If I’m remembering correctly, at one point the plan was for Cults of RuneQuest to be a pair of two big, fat, super-chunky books – much like the Guide to Glorantha – but that was shelved in favour of the larger number of smaller volumes that the collection is now intended to span. My hunch is that had the “two big books” plan been gone with, this volume would have been the introductory material put front and centre, and I certainly think the rest of the Cults of RuneQuest volumes are significantly enhanced if you have this to hand.

Imperium Maledictum: A Broader Darkness, a Greater Heresy

Cubicle 7’s Imperium Maledictum RPG – their latest game in the Warhammer 40,000 universe – has been available for a good while in PDF, its core book and referee screen pack has emerged in hard copy, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it a bit. Back when it was announced I predicted, based on a close reading of Cubicle 7’s announcements, that it would essentially amount to a third edition of Dark Heresy, with the scope of the game expanded from “You are a rag-tag bunch of agents working for an Inquisitor” to “You are a rag-tag bunch of agents working for a powerful patron, who could be an Inquisitor but other options are available”.

On that front, Imperium Maledictum delivers – it’s the clear system descendant of the Fantasy Flight Game-era Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, and it has a focus on comparatively low-powered characters carrying out missions of a potentially clandestine nature such as covert investigations. As promised by Cubicle 7, PCs are agents of powerful patrons; in fact, patron creation is the start of the character creation process. Which Imperial faction your patron works for, which other factions they are on good or bad terms with, their personal quirks, and the resources they have available to them can all have an effect on play, and all of these will tend to be shaped somewhat by the nature of the patron in question – so working for an Inquisitor will feel different to working for a Rogue Trader.

The factions available include the Administratum (the Imperial bureaucrasy), the Astra Telepathica (the psyker-hunters), the Adeptus Mechanicus (tech-priests), the Ecclesiarchy (the clergy), the Imperial Guard, the Imperial Navy, the Inquisition, and Rogue Trader dynasties; you can also work for an “Infractionist”, which is the “you work for an organised crime boss or the leader of a trade guild, not for the government” option. To my eyes, this means that right out of the gate the game has good support for not just covering the same sort of territory as baseline Dark Heresy, but also the sort of “you work for the Ecclesiarchy”/”you work for the Adeptus Mechanicus” concept that supplements like The Lathe Worlds and Blood of Martyrs pointed the way towards, as well as some flavours of Only War game (such as one focusing on investigations on behalf of the Commisariat or similar rather than high-octane front-line action).

It’s less well-suited to the lower-powered flavour of Black Crusade game, since out of the book it supports PCs from the criminal underworld but not outright heretic PCs – that feels like the sort of thing which perhaps could go into an appendix in a Chaos-themed supplement, mind. At the same time, it wouldn’t be completely unviable to homebrew a “cult leader” patron type based off the patron examples here to nudge the game in that direction. Although you can work for a Rogue Trader dynasty in this, the action isn’t likely to be much like Rogue Trader, which casts the PCs as the commander and bridge crew of a Rogue Trader ship – the PCs are more like an “away team” dealing with missions which can’t be handled from the bridge of the ship.

Imperium Maledictum does not even pretend to support something like Deathwatch (and thus also can’t handle the Chaos Space Marine tier of Black Crusade); you can’t make a Space Marine character, there’s no Space Marine patrons. This makes sense – fundamentally, that’s the sort of power level which Wrath & Glory handles better anyway, and it was evident from their revised version of that game’s core rules that Cubicle 7 recognised that, refocusing the game around its strength and pruning away subsystems which weren’t working and, in some instances, didn’t really reflect the sort of play Wrath & Glory is best at.

With Wrath & Glory catering to higher-level play, the “why can’t I play an Inquisitor?” feedback which led to the creation of the Ascension supplement for Dark Heresy (and, later, the somewhat higher power scale of Dark Heresy 2nd Edition) is neutralised – it’s much more viable to simply play an Inquisitor in that. This frees up Imperium Maledictum to more overtly and clearly embrace the playstyle which Dark Heresy 1st Edition was going for, but which on its original release didn’t entirely match what some wanted from a Warhammer 40,000 RPG – namely, a grubby, low-powered, leverage-every-advantage WFRP-in-space deal.

If you’re buying into that sort of thing, you’re probably one to let the dice land as they may – so random generation of your patron, your character, and a swathe of other things besides is available. Not mandatory – but there’s XP incentives for letting the dice decide rather than making your own picks from the options, which can help push past decision paralysis in character generation. The useful booklet with the referee screen (which, thankfully, is in the correct orientation – with the individual panels in landscape orientation, rather than the portrait orientation Fantasy Flight incorrectly insisted on using) offers even more handy tables for quick inspiration.

Taking all that into account, if you were hoping that Imperium Maledictum was essentially going to be Dark Heresy 3rd Edition, you got what you wanted here – and you got a toolset allowing you to undertake a somewhat broader variety of campaign concepts than that, albeit at the same power level. It’s certainly a better tool for the sort of gritty, street-level investigative campaign Dark Heresy excelled at than Wrath & Glory is, and since that’s the sort of thing which interests me more than higher-powered games in the 40K setting it has edged out Dark Heresy itself as my favourite Warhammer 40,000 tabletop RPG.

Maelstrom’s Domesday Generational Saga and Gothic New Era

In case you didn’t read my last article on the Maelstrom range, a quick summary: back in the early-to-mid 1980s, the Fighting Fantasy boom saw a clutch of mainstream publishers competing in the gamebook field, and in their rush to feed the fad some of them ended up dipping into tabletop RPGs. Corgi, not wanting to be left behind as Puffin raked in those sweet, sweet Fighting Fantasy profits, put out a version of Tunnels & Trolls in trade paperback, largely to support a run of UK editions of solo adventures for it, and also published Dragon Warriors. Not to be outdone, Puffin not only put out some Fighting Fantasy RPG materials to complement the gamebook line, in keeping with Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s original plan of using the gamebooks as a gateway drug to multi-player RPGs, and they also put out Maelstrom – an RPG designed by Alexander Scott, who was 16 when he started out on it.

The original gimmick of Maelstrom is that it unabashedly embraced a specific real-world historical period – the Tudor era, specifically – as the setting for the game at a time when, outside of Call of Cthulhu‘s use of the 1920s, this was uncommon. Between the richness of the Tudor setting and the emphasis on ordinary people and historical detail, the original game might have been a bit less flashy than typical and might have had some system wrinkles, but there was something memorable about it nonetheless – when Arcane magazine started running monthly features on overlooked games of yesteryear, Maelstrom was the first game to receive the treatment.

In the game’s discussion of the titular Maelstrom – the underlying metaphysic which provides the basis for how magic and the supernatural work in the game – it tossed in the idea that characters could fall into there and end up in other time periods. When, decades later, Graham Bottley of Arion Games took it upon himself to secure the rights to Maelstrom, reprint it, and produce a line of supplements for the game, the “other historical settings” concept prompted him to look at making a range of additional Maelstrom editions adapted to different eras – Maelstrom Domesday was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign and was set in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and Maelstrom Rome was a fairly thick standalone book which was set in, naturally, the Roman Empire.

For this article, I’m going to be looking at the wave of products that emerged from the second Maelstrom Domesday Kickstarter – this one to produce a massive adventure book for the game along with some juicy supplemental material – along with the fourth game in the line.

The Domesday Campaign

As the title implies, this is an epic campaign for Maelstrom Domesday – so epic, in fact, that it’s published in two volumes. It seems to be highly influenced by The Great Pendragon Campaign, in that both provide to their respective games a massive resource for playing through an enormous campaign which unfolds over generations, with one adventure per year or thereabouts covering a century or so, the assumption being that the player characters you start out with will, should they survive, rear children who when they reach adulthood will become the next generation of player characters.

It’s understandable why Bottley would look to Pendragon for inspiration here, since both Pendragon and Maelstrom Domesday are medieval RPGs which take a step beyond merely looking to the medieval period for aesthetics and look for a deeper engagement with the era than that. However, there’s also fundamental differences between the two games – Pendragon embraces a certain amount of deliberate anachronism in the spirit of Malory or Geoffrey of Monmouth‘s seminal Arthurian texts (or, for that matter, T.H. White), whilst Maelstrom Domesday is specifically interested in real-world history (albeit with some additional supernatural bits woven in). Pendragon characters are all knights, doing knightly things; Maelstrom Domesday characters are typically investigating paranormal weirdness on behalf of a patron.

The World Is Your Setting Guide 6

Time for another instalment in my occasional series about books on real-life subject matter which can be potentially handy for games set in the real world (whether in the modern day or in history). This time around, I’m looking at books which offer interesting insights into historical cultures or subcultures. We’ve got genres of entertainment which are obscure today but were massively popular in their time, slices of occulture which offer a weird take on late Antiquity heresies, Victorian esoterica, or the conspiracy theory subculture of the early internet, some spicy Byzantine gossip, and some more general guides to the England of several different historical periods.

The Fabliaux translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin

Running a game in a medieval (or quasi-medieval) setting? Want some inspiration for the sort of entertainment that might be enjoyed at the more lowbrow end of the scale? The fabliau was a type of Old French narrative poem which was popular from the mid-12th Century until the end of the 14th Century, and involved astonishingly rude and sometimes downright explicit treatments of sexual subject matters and merciless mockery of social mores. Peasants, clergy, nobility – all estates of medieval society get it in the neck in these poems.

Given the nature of the subject matter, it’s no surprise that they fell into obscurity compared to, say, the Arthurian romances (which are a more posh cousin of the form). Nathaniel Dubin’s The Fabliaux presents new translations of about half the fabliaux which are still extant in manuscript form. (There’s exactly 69 of them here, a number I assume was chosen because that’s about the level of a lot of the comedy here.) Dubin allows himself to take some liberties with the translation, both to try and conserve at least the rhyme couplet format of the originals and to get across the irreverent style and penchant for wordplay of the originals, all of which would be possible to convey in a literal translation. Sometimes he struggles – a lot of the rhymes here are a bit of a reach – but for the most part he succeeds at showcasing the lively style of the material.

You wouldn’t want to read directly from this at the gaming table unless you’d already had a conversation with your players about the sort of material you’d be using and you knew your players were fine with hearing sexually charged, highly scatological, frequently kind of misogynistic poetry. (Though in a number of fabliaux, the women end up getting the better of their men, other fabliaux include outright rape jokes.) Nonetheless, if you wanted inspiration for the sort of format the more ribald bards might be performing in inns of ill repute, you could do worse than taking a look of here and getting a dose of authenticity.

For my part, I’m rather interested to see that the sort of highly cynical take on historical societies that games like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay indulge in seems to be mirrored in some ways by the medieval period’s own satires of itself: it’s interesting to see that the idea of a medieval Europe of foppish nobles, ignorant peasants, and greedy, self-serving clergy are not fresh concepts, but are comic motifs and forms of social criticism which were in vogue in the era too.

Goetia: A Damned Good Time

Goetia was an event run by Omen Star – the team of Kol Ford and Rebel Rehbinder. It took place at Ingestre Hall over the 19th to 22nd October; that was its first run, and as of the time of writing Omen Star have not stated definitively whether or not a second run will take place. It is, however, definitely Omen Star’s intention to keep running other events, and the Goetia concept included some experimental features worthy of note, so a review can both serve the purpose of analysing the Omen Star house style and considering lessons learned from the experiment.

The Seal of Solomon is, purportedly, the sign used to command the demons of the Goetia.

The concept of the game runs as follows: somewhere in the 1930s, a clique of occultists is gathering to carry out one of the boldest magical operations ever attempted. The majority of the attendees have cultivated or obtained, wittingly or otherwise, an ongoing relationship with the spirits of the Ars Goetia, the most brimstone-infused section of the grimoire known as the Lesser Key of Solomon. The secret society which has organised the gathering consists primarily of people who have ended up in a similar relationship with the Fallen – those who were not cast out of Heaven for participating in the original revolt (as was the case with the Goetia) but who were ejected subsequently for procreating with humans and siring the Nephilim.

By purposefully allowing themselves to be possessed by the Goetia and the Fallen, the gathered occultists hope to stage a re-enactment of the Second Fall – the time when the Fallen, cast out of Heaven, purchased for themselves a place in Hell. What they do not realise is that in the world of the supernal and transcendent, time is an illusion – and what will transpire in the house will not only be a re-enactment, but the actual reaching of the deal itself. And the deal will be sealed with their lives…

How this translates to a LARP is as follows: each player ends up with not one but two characters, their human occultist and the Goetic demon who will possess them. (The Fallen were NPCs played by members of the crew.) As structured by Omen Star, the story pans out over two days (following OOC workshops on Thursday evening and Friday morning to early afternoon): in early Friday afternoon you play your humans, having just arrived at Hoxton Manor. After nightfall, a mass ritual is roleplayed and the characters are all possessed by their demons, who from this point are in command; the human being is stuck as a passenger in their body, able to act only to the extent that their demon chooses to let them out.

Come Saturday morning, your human character has reasserted themselves (though your demon can jump in whenever they wish), and must deal with the emotional fallout of what happened last night – and the dawning horror that nobody can leave the grounds of the house. Saturday evening sees the demons return in force to enjoy a seven-course banquet served up by the Fallen as part of their bid for entry into Hell, the forging of the pact between the Goetia and the Fallen, and the abandonment of the humans by their demons, as they cast aside their mortal vessels and abandon them to their ultimate fate.

Basic Roleplaying: The BRUGE and the ORC

Chaosium have recently put out Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine, BRUGE essentially being a revision of the old Big Yellow Book version of Basic Roleplaying. I reviewed that here, and more or less everything I said there applies here: this is far from a “basic” volume when it comes to the sheer amount of rules presented, but the intention is that you aren’t meant to use each and every rule in there – as is the case with GURPS, you’re meant to pick and choose which options you want to go with in order to tailor the system to the shape you want.

For my money, I think BRP – in either its Big Yellow Book or BRUGE incarnations – does somewhat better at making this user-friendly on the referee than GURPS does. If you strip away all the options, the underlying baseline system is flat-out simpler, and the worksheet for choosing which options you want to incorporate is very handy and does a good job of helping you decide what combination of rules you actually want. In this new version, there are some notable differences in terms of content – RuneQuest-style Strike Ranks have been reserved to RuneQuest, a slimmed-down and less genre-specific Sanity system is provided instead of the full-fat Call of Cthulhu one, and most particularly rules for Pendragon-style Passions are offered. More generally, the text has been tidied up, clarified, and generally given another round of polish.

Nonetheless, I think if you judge BRUGE solely on its text, and a comparison of that with the Big Yellow Book, you are missing a trick; the differences are slight and in many instances may simply come down to a matter of taste. What’s different here is the presentation and the legalities, the latter being a bigger deal than the former, but both significant.

Let’s deal with the lesser matter first: the presentation here is much nicer. The physical book is printed on nicer paper, in hardcover, with a nice ribbon bookmark. The art is of superior quality and in full colour. The layout is nice and readable still, but at the same time makes much better use of space. The Big Yellow Book was published during the years when Charlie Krank and Lynn Willis were running Chaosium more or less by themselves – Sandy Petersen and Greg Stafford having each stepped away from the company whilst still retaining their stakes in the ownerhsip – and in that period, Chaosium’s general layout practices and the like didn’t really change that much. For that matter, they hadn’t exactly evolved rapidly in the years prior to Stafford’s mid-1990s withdrawal from active involvement, though industry-wide standards didn’t evolve all that rapidly in that period so this wasn’t so noticeable.

Dawg: Beyond a Joke

One of the most memorable running gags in early Knights of the Dinner Table comics was Dawg – hapless referee B.A. Felton’s self-published turkey of a game based around playing a dog. Eventually, in issue 22 of the comic, the Knights played it, having tracked down one of the remaining copies (B.A. having destroyed the inventory after being upset by its critical panning), and thought it stank, and that was it bar for the occasional reference as far as that storyline went.

It was not, however, the end of Dawg as a concept; in 2009, issue 150 of the comic saw Dawg published as a small, self-contained RPG by Ashok Desai (“based on an idea by B.A. Felton”) in the articles section. Now Kenzer and Company have released it as a standalone booklet – combining a somewhat tidied version of Desai’s game with some short Dawg scenarios and articles about playing and running the game by other hands that ran in later issues.

Though the system diverges from the version in the comic in important respects (it’s designed to be playable and fun, not amusingly bad), the baseline concept is the same: your player characters are ordinary dogs, strays or pets, mongrel or pedigree, just living their lives and doing doggy things and getting into hijinks. You can communicate with other dogs fairly well, and to a certain extent with other animals (cats are troublesome), but humans are weirdos and handling your human to get desired behaviour out of them can be troublesome.

The major mechanic it inherits from the comic version is Canine Compulsion – the stat which nudges you into doing dog-like things when something happens to trigger your instincts. The higher the stat, the more often you may find yourself obliged to go chase a car, bark at a postal worker, eat your own poop and then be sick everywhere, or otherwise do something which causes complications. (Cats have a Feline Compulsion to encourage cat-like behaviour.) This is the sort of mechanic which obviously requires both buy-in from players and at least some restraint from referees, but is a neat concept which, like personality mechanics in other games, helps create a sense of your character as having a will of their own. You might know that your dog should concentrate on the immediate crisis at hand, and your dog probably knows that too, but there’s a new dog over there with a butt your dog’s not sniffed yet and the temptation can be overwhelming…

The resolution is an interesting variant on a percentile mechanic – you roll 1D100, add your stat, and try and beat 100 – but also uses your tens dice as the Style die and the units die as the Speed die – if you roll 59 and succeed, you did so much faster but perhaps less stylishly than if you rolled 82 and succeeded. This has an interesting side-effect where the higher your skill is at something, the easier it is to get a sloppy Style roll but still succeed at it, but this kind of makes sense – if you’re not confident at something you might only succeed with a good effort, whilst if you’re good at it you can half-ass it and make it look unimpressive. Why your dog cares much about Style can be a contextual question – though obviously if your owners are showing you off at a dog show it can be a big deal.

Character creation is the most fun bit – with the system able to cater to a wide range of dog breeds, distinguish between strays and pets, and so on. (A greatly simplified method of making cat characters is slipped in towards the end). It’s certainly much less crunchy than Pugmire, but it’s admittedly trying to offer much simpler characters than Pugmire – there’s no supernatural stuff (at least by default – “Cerberus escapes the underworld and the dogs have to get him home” is one of the adventure seeds), no magic system, and combat is simple and quick rather than getting into fine tactical detail.

Overall, Dawg reminds me of a very modern take on a very old-school type of RPG product – the sort of thing Fantasy Games Unlimited in particular were good at offering up, where you’d get a full game in a comparatively short booklet with very basic art and layout. Unlike, say, Bunnies & Burrows – the first RPG in that sort of mode that FGU put out, and a surprisingly crunchy game given its concept – Dawg benefits from subsequent years of game development yielding a better understanding of what you need to cover to get a playable RPG, and what you can simply set aside.

This yields a game which might not offer much in the way of depth – it’s unlikely anyone’s going to run years-long campaigns of this (though who knows, it might be possible with a group who are very into the concept and emergent campaign events you get enthusiastic to play out in the long haul. That said, it also seems like it would be fun as a light-hearted, unpretentious pick-up game. Many indie RPGs are sufficiently niche and specific in concept that they can be a little difficult to run on a pick-up-and-play basis, but Dawg doesn’t seem like it would require much in the way of explanation of core concepts prior to creating characters and beginning play.

Supplement Supplemental! (A WFRP Grimoire, a Cthulhu Railroad On Ice, and a RuneQuest Encyclopedia)

It’s time for another Supplement Supplemental article – part of my ongoing series where I put reviews of supplements where my thoughts aren’t sufficient for a standalone article, but where I do have something to say about the books in question. This time around I have a significant rules update and magic resource for WFRP, a chunky Call of Cthulhu campaign, and the first volumes in a major new series of RuneQuest resources.

Winds of Magic (WFRP)

Winds of Magic is Cubicle 7’s magic-themed supplement for WFRP 4th Edition. There’s a tweaked magic system in here, adjusted to address longstanding complaints like the issues with Channelling in the baseline rules, much as the combat-focused Up In Arms supplement provided a revised combat system; one suspects that if Cubicle 7 get around to doing a WFRP 5th Edition/4.5 Edition/whatever, we will eventually see those tweaked systems folded into the core rules.

However, just as Up In Arms offered a host of additional material based on combat and combat-adjacent matters, Winds of Magic also offers a wealth of additional stuff under the broad umbrella of magic. Unlike Up In Arms, it has some significant previous supplements to model itself on – because a good chunk of this is dedicated to providing detailed breakdowns of the eight Winds of Magic, and their associated Colleges within the Empire that study them, much as was provided in 1st and 2nd Edition with the Realms of Sorcery supplements.

An approach, this cleaves somewhat closer to the 2nd edition Realms of Sorcery than 1st Edition, in terms of focusing on how magic is practiced in the Empire, rather than trying to cover a large range of non-Imperial magics above and beyond that. The arrangement of material differs somewhat – after providing general overviews of the history of magic and the colleges, the writeups of the individual colleges are provided along with the broader discussion of the Wind they are associated with (including the additional spells offered here), so each Wind-specific section covers everything specific to that Wind.

Between this and a wealth of NPCs, details on item creation, additional spells, magical locales, and other fun details, this is likely to be useful to most referees. As a result of excloring well-trod territory, there’s a fair amount here you’ll have seen in some variant before, but having versions system-adjusted to the new edition is handy, and the thought given to how the information is arranged means that this may be the best-organised version of “tentpole WFRP magic supplement” yet.

Time Lord: A Doctor Who RPG From the Heart of the Wilderness

Sharing a common language means that the UK RPG scene is very strongly influenced by the US RPG scene. Whereas the language barrier means that, for instance, The Dark Eye has ended up being the big beast of German-language RPGs, the Japanese translation of Call of Cthulhu is the Great Old One of that RPG industry, and Drakar & Demoner is the wellspring of the Swedish-language field, in general what happens in the US scene will make waves over here, and UK-based publishers will at least somewhat look to the US market for a ready supply of customers who can be accessed with, admittedly, some export or distribution hurdles to clear (though less in these days of PDFs and print-on-demand products) but no need to produce translated materials.

This has particularly been the case since Games Workshop stopped writing and stocking RPGs; with the loss of our largest and most home-grown producer and distributor, the hobby became dependent on distributors who were largely extensions of the US distribution chain; the rise of the Internet and social media likely accelerated this, because it means that UK gamers are likely reading about and discussing RPGs, watching Actual Plays, and otherwise interacting with the rest of the hobby community in circles in which US gamers are the most visible and prolific presences, outside of UK-specific forums and the like.

Nonetheless, there are differences, some of them stemming from our history, and to my mind the earliest foundations of that history come down to three groups of games – you can think of these as three interconnected rings, because the groups overlap a little. They don’t tell the whole story of the UK RPG scene by any means – but they do represent the major movements of its first decade or so, the era that began when Games Workshop first started importing RPGs from the US and ended when Games Workshop walked away from RPGs altogether.

First, there are the American RPGs which were imported and republished by Games Workshop. Dungeons & Dragons was famously the first one, but relations between Games Workshop and TSR got less collaborative and more competitive once TSR gave up on their plan to acquire Games Workshop and set up TSR UK and that prompted the republishing of a wider range of games under in Games Workshop editions. Traveller was along the first, Paranoia was a notable one, but perhaps their closest relationship was with Chaosium, with Games Workshop putting out their own printings of RuneQuest (2nd and 3rd Edition), Call of Cthulhu (2nd and 3rd Edition), and Stormbringer.

The next interconnected ring here are the RPGs which Games Workshop developed in-house – the most famous is WFRP, which drew heavily on all three of their Chaosium imports, but there was also Judge Dredd and Golden Heroes (the latter strictly speaking being an update of a small self-published British RPG, but it was the Games Workshop edition which most people encoutnered first). Arguably in this category is Fighting Fantasy – sure, it didn’t come out through Games Workshop, but the original gamebooks were cooked up by Workshop co-founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as a gateway drug to RPGs (and, therefore, a sneaky means of boosting Games Workshop sales) and the standalone introductory RPG was likewise devised by Steve Jackson with that end in mind.

And that leads us into the third ring: the weird little subset of tabletop RPGs which were put out by mainstream UK publishers, not by games companies, in the form of standard-sized trade paperbacks. This was a phenomenon fostered and kicked off by Fighting Fantasy, and of course there were a great many attempts to hop on the gamebook bandwagon, but some of those extended to being fully-fledged RPG systems. The original version of Dragon Warriors was one of these, Corgi put out a version of Tunnels & Trolls with the art replaced with redrawn versions by Josh Kirby, and there was Maelstrom too. Many of those games don’t seem to have that much traction in the UK scene any more, and perhaps never did – but simply by virtue of being put out by major publishers and put on shelves next to regular books, they perhaps did a lot to get the word out about RPGs and put the concept before a wider range of people than the specialist game publishers may have been able to reach.

And then… there was Time Lord.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 12)

Time for another entry in my slow, gradual journey through the Fighting Fantasy series. In my previous article, I started to get into the era of the series which I’ve been looking forward to covering ever since I started these reviews way back in the Ferretbrain days: the era when the series started to go in a sustained darker direction, offering a compelling fantasy-horror hybrid. I also reviewed some pretty good gamebooks! After a period when the series seemed to go for quantity over quality, the priorities reversed, resulting in 1989’s Fighting Fantasy releases being a pretty good crop.

For this article, we’re going to enter the 1990s – in fact, our pace of getting through the timeline is picking up. Just as 1989 saw Puffin scaling back the pace of releases, with only 4 books released, 1990 only saw three books released in the mainline series – less than any year since 1982 (when only one book, the original Warlock of Firetop Mountain itself, came out). With a fairly extensive range by this point, it seems like a decision was made to focus on quality over quantity – which is all very well so long as quality actually gets delivered.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there was a span back there when Fighting Fantasy ran into a bit of a succession problem – Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone, and other writers who’d contributed to the early series had all rather drifted away from actively writing gamebooks before they could cultivate a new generation of “regulars” who could relaibly provide decent-quality contributions to the series.

Some newcomers only provided one or two new books, but then drifted away again; in some cases this was a shame (it’s a real shame Graeme Davis didn’t write more for the series after Midnight Rogue, and Marc Gascoigne’s Battleblade Warrior showed promise), in other cases this was for the best (Martin Allen’s Sky Lord may be the worst ever Fighting Fantasy gamebook.) From the mid-20s to late-30s, it seems like Luke Sharp was being groomed as a new “regular”, having put out four entries in the series, but by my reckoning only one of them is particularly good; the other three are mediocre at best, with one – Chasms of Malice – perhaps being the only competition for Sky Lord for the title of “worst ever”.

However, new writers did emerge, and the four gamebooks I will cover this time can be argued to be the work of a generation of “new regulars”. Six authors contributed to these books (since two of them are co-authored pieces); five of the six have previous Fighting Fantasy credits, and the newcomer is paired up with one of them, so all the books are written by people for whom this is not their first rodeo. At the same time, none of the authors made their Fighting Fantasy debut prior to 1986 – and three of the four books don’t have any contributing authors who debuted prior to 1988, so they are all designers who joined the series after it was well-established, rather than being from that early crop. Three of the authors in question will make further contributions to the series before it wraps up for good.

Master of Chaos

Scenario

A legendary artifact, the Staff of Rulership, has been stolen by the dark wizard Shanzikuul – perhaps the very same one who once allied with the Dark Elves centuries ago and was believed dead since the failure of that scheme. With the Staff in hand, Shanzikuul may be able to unite myriad different bickering evil and chaotic factions under one banner and become a threat to the whole world.

You have been persuaded to venture forth to Khul, the Chaos-haunted continent, to deal with this problem. Only an experienced warrior like you can hope to get close – Shanzikuul’s magical senses would detect a fellow magician with ease – but at the same time, a well-supplied warrior travelling to Khul would also attract unwanted attention. Thus a plan has been formed – you will deliberately get yourself press-ganged as a galley slave on the Diablo, endure the Diablo‘s ocean voyage to the city of Ashkyos, and then escape the ship, find a way to secure equipment and supplies, and travel upriver into the wastes of Chaos, making for the ruined city of Kabesh. It is a desperate plan – but that is what will be needed to stop the Master of Chaos…

This is another Keith Martin gamebook – Keith Martin being the pseudonym used by veteran WFRP author Carl Sargent for his Fighting Fantasy books. As we’ve seen so far, Sargent proved an adept hand at writing gamebooks, with his previous efforts, Stealer of Souls and Vault of the Vampire, being excellent contributions to the series. He’s set a high bar for himself here – let’s see if he clears it.