Best Practice, Bushido Style

Bushido is a tricky game. On the one hand, it pushed genre boundaries in tabletop RPGs when it emerged and, despite being the product of Western writers holding forth on someone else’s culture, it’s actually aged reasonably well on that front; authors Bob Chartette and Paul Hume gave every impression of having done their research and made a very wise decision to say “this is set in a fantasy version of Japan we will call ‘Nippon’ to distinguish it from the real Japan, the two will diverge in important respects and we encourage you not to conflate them”, as well as being fairly forward thinking for 1970s game designers when it came to saying “yeah, let’s have women warriors if you like, we can diverge from historical norms and assumptions for the sake of a more enjoyable experience”. Despite a system which is rather of its time, it’s aged better than you would expect.

At the same time, it’s had incredibly sparse support over the years – a consequence in part of the fire-and-forget approach taken for much of its history by publisher Fantasy Games Unlimited, who long took an approach of picking up games looking for a home, unleashing a core book, and then kind of not bothering with a support line unless the game’s creators or highly motivated fans were willing to put in the work essentially themselves to cook up product proposals. (The major exception seems to be Villains & Vigilantes, which seems to be the one RPG from FGU to really get a sustained promotional campaign behind it.) This does mean there’s a bit of a gap when it comes to the question of what you actually do with the game.

Despite this, though, Bushido ended up sustaining a fanbase for a surprisingly long time for a product which was essentially tossed out onto the marketplace and left to sink or swim. Thanks to sales of imports and coverage in magazines like White Dwarf it seems that the UK managed to develop a small but enthusiastic Bushido fanbase – enough for the game to pop up in the Arcane top 50 RPGs poll in the mid-1990s despite over a decade of neglect by FGU. In fact, it managed to get the number 17 spot, which considering some of the games it beat (including then-hot material like Rifts, Earthdawn, and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) is incredibly good going.

Now, to be fair, whilst Bushido had very little support beyond the core set at that point, it didn’t have no support; beyond those magazine articles, a smattering of adventure material came out in the early 1980s, and more recently FGU made a return to the line. One of these products would offer an interesting model of best practice when designing Bushido scenarios. The others… would not follow best practice.

Valley of the Mists

Designed by Bushido co-creator Bob Charrette, this is pretty much the only source material beyond the original core rules that FGU ever put out in the game’s early years, and is mainly significant for how it sets the model for subsequent published scenarios. Opening with a rundown of mountainous Hida Province which gives an overview of the basic terrain, the general political situation, and the disposition of the samurai clans, yakuza, and ninja in the area (as well as a cantankerous hermit-wizard who could be a potential contact for the player characters and an overview of the main town of the area), it then provides two plot-based scenarios and a sandbox area for exploration.

Supplement Supplemental! (Lustria’s Secrets, God’s Teeth, and Arkham’s Almanac)

It’s been a while, but I’m back here with another round-up of game supplements I read recently. This time around I’m looking at thick books touching on difficult subject matter. Two of these are guides to fictional places which riff on places in the real world but have crucial differences; one of these gets very, very real indeed.

Lustria (WFRP)

As the title suggests, this is a thick supplement describing the continent of Lustria – the Warhammer Fantasy world’s equivalent of South America. (North America is Naggaroth – a brutal place colonised by the cruel, sadistic Dark Elves.) Whilst the Empire is a fantasy funhouse mirror version of the Holy Roman Empire, Bretonnia is the France equivalent, Albion is Britain and so on and so forth, the course of the colonisation of Lustria has taken a very different course in this setting – for Lustria was the stronghold of the Old Ones, the failure of whose science led to the contamination of the Warhammer world with Chaos, and much of it remains firmly in the hands of the lizard people, led by the enigmatic frog-wizards, the Slann.

That said, the lizardfolk have an aesthetic inspired by Pre-Columbian cultures like the Aztecs, Inca, and so on. This gives rise to some headaches; it means that whilst several European cultures get represented in the setting with distinct, fully-developed human societies, an entire continent’s worth of people kind of get erased and replaced with non-human caricatures. That it’s a colonised population suffering this indignity kind of makes it worse.

To be fair to Cubicle 7, this is not a problem of their own making – it’s Games Workshop’s setting, and whilst they have been admirably happy to let WFRP hit its own tone distinct from the wargames in this edition, they’re hardly going to let Cubicle 7’s team outright redesign an entire continent to address this issue. Equally, though, they didn’t have to grasp this nettle; just like they’ve largely skirted around the flavourful but, in retrospect, extremely dodgy issue of Chaos Dwarves, they could have kept Lustria firmly out of the spotlight, said “there’s all manner of rumour about what’s out there but the fact is it’s out of the scope of the RPG and your PCs will never find out for sure”, and leave it at that.

Instead, they’ve made the creative decision to open up the RPG somewhat to exploring other regions of the setting – the Salzenmund and Sea of Claws supplements providing avenues to get Empire-based characters off on seafaring adventures to other lands – and so this means they have to tackle Lustria and flesh out both the lizardfolk and the various attempts to colonise the region.

Supplement Supplemental! (Static Solo Scares, Old-School Architecture, and Freshened-Up Cats)

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…)

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.

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.

Supplement Supplemental! (ISIS vs. Delta Green and Mr. Darcy vs. Cthulhu)

Time for another entry in my occasional series of articles giving short thoughts on game supplements which prompted some thoughts for me, but which I didn’t feel inspired to do a full article about. This time it’s a Lovecraftian special, with supplements for Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu which take those games into unexpected settings and eras.

Iconoclasts (Delta Green)

Although the Delta Green Kickstarters have already yielded a healthy crop of core books, supplements, adventures, and campaigns, the stretch goals just keep coming. Iconoclasts, by Adam Scott Glancy, is one of them, and is a truly epic scenario – weighing in at a bit over 200 pages, it’s got the sort of form factor one would expect of full-length campaigns, and it could conceivably take a fair bit of time to play through, though it’s really a single investigation and the thing which has caused the page count to expand to this extent isn’t a large number of encounters or incidents so much as it’s the extensive material Glancy needed to provide to make the concept work.

Ever since the early days of the standalone edition of the game, with scenarios like Kali Ghati, Arc Dream’s been tossing out the occasional Delta Green scenario which departs from the assumed “investigating X-Files cases on US soil” baseline that’s been the norm since the original supplements; Iconoclasts is perhaps the most ambitious one yet, and also goes deeper than ever into the “ripped from the headlines” approach (which means it may risk becoming dated over time).

Set in 2016, the action focuses on Mosul under the brutal rule of ISIS – yes, they’re the titular iconoclasts. Unfortunately, they’ve gone and broken the wrong relic and set something terrible free. Delta Green tasks the PCs with setting up a forward HQ in a friendly airbase in Kurdish northern Iraq, gather what intel they can, and then undertake a mission to get into Mosul and suppress the horrors – by any means necessary.

Empire In Ruins, But WFRP In Fine Shape

The emergence of hard copies of Empire In Ruins and the Empire In Ruins Companion sees Cubicle 7’s “Director’s Cut” version of The Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition come to a close. The Enemy Within project has been one of the most welcome aspects of the new edition; though the original first edition releases were justifiably well-regarded, they were also very much of their time, with some design decisions and refereeing tips which may have made sense back in the day but don’t reflect best practice now (and were potentially frustrating even when originally published).

In addition, the multi-part campaign infamously fell apart towards the end in its original release. The episodes up to and including Power Behind the Throne were always considered to be the strongest, but then instead of the intended followup, The Horned Rat, seeing the light of day, instead Something Rotten In Kislev by Ken Rolston was published as the next episode. This was, at best, incongruous – Ken hadn’t written it as an Enemy Within episode but intended it as a self-contained Kislev-based adventure set, and some of the liberties taken to get the PCs from Middenheim to Kislev were rather heavy-handed, and once they got there more or less nothing that happened was particularly relevant to the ongoing plot threads established in preceding episodes.

Things went from bad to worse with Empire In Flames, the original finale of the campaign. Despite being penned by Carl Sargent, who was more closely involved with the wider Enemy Within project than Rolston (Sargent was the author of Power Behind the Throne), it’s generally regarded as the worst episode of the lot – entirely tonally inconsistent with what came before, and on top of that extremely railroady, with the PCs spending a lot of time watching NPCs doing cool stuff but not doing very much themselves (with some notable exceptions).

Supplement Supplemental! (Redactings, Crawlings, and Harvestings)

Here’s another in my occasional series on game supplements which I read and have some thoughts on, but not enough thoughts for an entire article. This time I’ve got a slightly unfocused expansion for Wrath & Glory, a couple of issues of an old-school D&D zine, and a Call of Cthulhu campaign.

Redacted Records (Wrath & Glory)

This feels like an odd little grab-bag of material for the official Warhammer 40,000 RPG, a bit like the Archives of the Empire volumes offer grab-bags of material for 4th Edition WFRP. The cover and the back cover blurb make it seem like this is a space hulk-themed supplement – a sort of update of material from Ark of Lost Souls for Deathwatch – but this only covers about a third of this supplement’s content (and since the book is only about 100 pages long that’s not a lot). Other material includes more frameworks for your PC party, a brief chapter on unusual servitors, an overview of some cults from two of the worlds of the default setting of Wrath & Glory (the Gilead system), and the start of a greatly expanded Talent list. (Literally: it covers A-I, implying that there will be followup chapters in other books covering J-Z.)

The weird thing about the supplement is that much of this feels like it’s been chopped out of a larger body of work – as well as the J-Z sections of that additional talent list, you’d expect similar cult rundowns of the other worlds of the system to exist somewhere, for instance. Still, as a sort of half-supplement-half-magazine thing it’s not useless – but I feel like it should be presented as being Volume 1 of a series, like the first Archives of the Empire book was, because it’s very apparent that this is merely the first of a series of miscellanea-themed supplements with not much connecting theme.

An Unearthing of Ancient Mythos Tomes

The new regime at Chaosium have been justifiably cautious about how they use Kickstarter, given that they got parachuted in originally because the previous incarnation of the company blew itself up through mismanagement of the Kickstarter for 7th edition Call of Cthulhu and Horror On the Orient Express. Nonetheless, they have made use of it here and there, but usually for very deliberate purposes. Brand-new product for current editions of their games don’t get funded by them through Kickstarter; they leave that action to their various third party licensees.

Instead, they have made judicious use of the platform to fund projects to make available spruced-up PDFs and reprints of classic editions of their games, making game materials historically important both to the game lines in question and to the RPG hobby as a whole easily available again. Their first project along these lines was the RuneQuest Classic line, which made RuneQuest 2nd Edition (and, as a lesser priority, 1st Edition) and almost all of its first-party supplements available again. Though successfully delivered, that product ended up taking a while, in part due to the large number of 2nd Edition supplements unlocked via stretch goals.

For their next Kickstarter – for which I’ve recently received the physical goods (delayed by the shipping apocalypse) – they made sure to cap off the stretch goals at a sensible level. Call of Cthulhu Classic is a line rereleasing the 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu core rules, with physical products in two formats – both boxed sets based on the original boxes. For much of the 1980s, Chaosium had a neat inch-deep form factor on their boxed sets (which prevented them having too much in the way of empty space inside, unlike many boxed sets of the early decades of the hobby), and the inch-thick version of the Classic box presents just the 2nd Edition rules (and the 1920s Sourcebook which came with the core rules and various other bits and pieces); the two-inch thick version makes use of the extra inch to incorporate no less than five supplements for the game from 1982 to 1985.

However, is this a treasure trove of forgotten lore, or a Sanity-blasting compilation of horrors better left buried? Let me crack open the box and find out…

The Enemy Within Gets a Squeaky-Clean New Chapter

Having given thoughtful rereleases to the first, second, and third chapters of the Enemy Within campaign, updating them all to WFRP‘s 4th Edition and providing them with new companion volumes along the way, Cubicle 7’s version of the saga has now reached a crucial juncture. Originally, the Power Behind The Throne was followed by Something Rotten In Kislev, but this has more or less always been controversial. Some people simply dislike that adventure, and even those who find it more to their taste admit that it doesn’t actually belong in the Enemy Within sequence at all: Ken Rolston wrote it as a standalone thing, and then plans changed at Games Workshop’s end and it was hastily re-edited to be crowbarred in as a fourth episode. The transition from the victorious end of Power Behind the Throne to the start of Something Rotten In Kislev, in which the PCs are pointlessly arrested and then forced to go to Kislev as agents of Middenheim, is regarded as especially clumsy, not least because it gives the PCs a massive motivation to abscond as soon as they have a chance, rather than co-operating with the Middenheim authorities.

Another problem with Something Rotten In Kislev is that it ends with the PCs rattling around in Kislev – which of course then created the headache of getting them back to the Empire for the final episode of the campaign, Empire In Flames. Or maybe you wouldn’t bother: Empire In Flames is a reviled product, a rushed product knocked out in a hurry to bring the saga to an end as Games Workshop were in the process of shutting down their in-house RPG publications entirely, farming the later development of WFRP out first to Flame Publications and then Hogshead.

Indeed, when Hogshead were producing their reprints of The Enemy Within, James Wallis declared that they weren’t going to do Empire In Flames – the feedback on it was so universally negative that there was no choice but to scrap the damn thing and write something new to replace it. Wallis, however, has always been a better editor of other people’s work than he is a creator of his own material, and this new conclusion was one of several Hogshead projects which sat in development hell and then died when he sold off the company.

The basic idea that The Enemy Within needed a do-over on the ending, however, has been picked up by Cubicle 7 – who have taken it even further by saying “Well, if we’re changing the ending, we may as well do something about Something Rotten In Kislev too”. What they have done, specifically, is “leave it the fuck alone” – at least as far as incorporating it into The Enemy Within goes – and instead finally release The Horned Rat, the original intended followup to The Power Behind the Throne.