More Things In Potter’s Lake… But Seven Dogs Learn Few New Tricks

Abstract Nova is one of those RPG publishers who you can’t quite place as belonging to any particular trend or niche. They’re not major players in the RPG publishing scene, but they don’t seem to want to dive into the fully avant-garde indie end of the genre anyway – all of their stuff seems to be some form of traditional RPG, though often with off-kilter subject matter. Nor do they seem to be especially caught up in any particular “scene”, like Forge-style RPG theorising or OSR archaeology. At the same time, their products seem to all follow the same general pattern – a pattern I’ll pick apart for you here through an examination of two of their games.