It’s time for another entry in my slow trawl through the Fighting Fantasy back catalogue. In my previous article, I mentioned that we’d been travelling through a bit of a golden age for the series. We’ve now made it up to 1992, the ten year anniversary of the series, and plans are afoot at Puffin Books to evergreen the series – get the thing to 50 books, call it a day, and then coast on long tail sales of the back catalogue. That, however, is not what will come to pass..
Siege of Sardath
Scenario
You are the heroic protector of the settlement of Grimmund, a small community in the depths of the Forest of Night. With sword, bow, and lore learned from valued allies, you do what you can to keep the place safe, and have been honoured for your efforts with a place on the Grimmund Council. One day, you are awoken from strange and troubling dreams and called to an emergency meeting of the Council. Matters have been troubled of late: monsters stalk the woods and the elf-paths have closed, cutting Grimmund off from their dwarven allies at Sardath. An adventurer, one Morn Preeler, has just arrived with news – hence the hastily-assembled Council meeting. Preeler declares that the Forest itself is making war on Grimmund, and the startled Councillors begin making plans to take the fight to the forest.
You, however, are not so sure. You’ve always been acutely aware that the Forest has its perils – but also that the Forest is the basis of the livelihoods the folk of Grimmund eke out in its shadow. Its dangers must be resisted, but to burn out the forest would be to weaken the town gravely – possibly fatally. On top of that, your unquiet dreams have left you convinced that some other dark force is at work. When you express your doubts, Morn offers to take you to one side to better explain his discoveries to you and talk you around. Once you two are in private, Morn swiftly declares that he is not Morn – but an impostor who has stolen his form, and who now intends to slay and replace you!
Siege of Sardath is the sole Fighting Fantasy book by the mysterious Keith P. Phillips, who so far as I can tell never wrote any other gamebook material and seems to have been a complete unknown. This puts you in the position of not really knowing what to expect – though goodness knows that siege narratives and “track down the big bad” stories are a well-worn default in the series. Indeed, the return to Allansia and more classic fantasy tropes after a run of weird, outlandish, and horror-tinged gamebooks gives this something of a back-to-basics air. Let’s see how that shakes out.
Time for another entry in my occasional series offering brief mini-reviews on RPG supplements interesting enough to pass comment on but not quite spurring enough thoughts for a full article. This time around, it’s various items from the Basic Roleplaying family of systems.
Alone Against the Static (Call of Cthulhu)
South Dakota, the 1990s: Alex and Charlie are a couple whose relationship is not doing great. Charlie’s brother, Mark, has offered them the use of his cabin in the woods, which should give them a chance to have a nice getaway to have some fun, talk things over, and patch things up. As Alex and Charlie settle in for their first night, they decide to watch a movie – but the broadcast reception out here is lousy and the vast majority of Mark’s videos are horror movies, which they’re not in the mood for.
Eventually, they hit on a tape which they hope contains something different, and it certainly does – because it proves to be camcorder footage of the cabin from the last time Mark and his wife visited, filmed by an unseen figure a la Lost Highway, cutting off partway through and playing this hideous white noise static. Then the power to the cabin cuts off. The next day, one of the couple wakes up to find that the other has taken the car to town to try and get help fixing the power. A day alone in the cabin – or walking in the surrounding woods – can’t be that bad, right? (Oh yes it could…)
I’m back again on my Fighting Fantasy nonsense! And why not – after all, as I said in the previous article we’ve hit a real peak of the line in our slow progress through the series. It’s a good while now since Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were writing for the series directly, entrusting the authorship of new gamebooks to a coterie of new authors largely associated with Games Workshop in some capacity or other.
This era may have seen a pivot from quantity to quality – after all, with a fairly extensive back catalogue to sell Puffin needn’t worry about competing lines crowding Fighting Fantasy out on bookshop and library shelves any time soon at this point in time. 1990 had seen only three books published, and 1991 would be similarly sparse. 1992, however, would see the release schedule picking up, as the series surged to hit its 50 book landmark in time for the 10th anniversary of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. In this article, we’ll cover two of the three releases of 1991 (since we already covered the first one last time), and the first two releases of 1992.
Spectral Stalkers
Scenario
You’re a down on your luck adventurer traipsing around the land of Khul, when one day at a Midsummer Fair you get your fortune told by a half-elf fortune teller. What they have to say astounds you: they claim you are due to undertake a journey which will take you beyond the bounds of this world entirely, all the way carrying a dangerous burden and hunted by perilous enemies. Surely that’s all flim-flam and charlatanry, right? But then why do they seem so insistent about bundling you out of their tent…?
This was the final Fighting Fantasy book by Peter Darvill-Evans, who in 1991 was about to begin an exciting new chapter in his life – helming the New Adventures series of all-original Doctor Who novels for Virgin Books, which provided a welcome extension to the Seventh Doctor’s saga, became the first majorly successful bit of tie-in media during Doctor Who‘s wilderness years, paved the way for the BBC Books series and the Big Finish audio dramas which would carry the torch for the second, post-TV movie period of the wilderness years, and saw the honing of new talent who would go on to make major contributions to the revived show. (It also produced, as a by-product, the Time Lord RPG, which Darvill-Evans co-authored.)
Before he went off to do that, he offered up this parting shot. His previous two Fighting Fantasy efforts – Beneath Nightmare Castle and Portal of Evil – were pretty solid, and it looks like this one is going to lean into the world-hopping aspects of the latter fairly hard. Let’s see how this goes…
Whilst many are digging deep into Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been enjoying a replay of Planescape: Torment, and have ended up jotting down my thoughts over on my blog for reviews of books, videogames, movies and whatnot.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Refereeing and Reflection 