Silent Legions: the long-awaited Part Two!

In a previous post, I began my review of Silent Legions, the Lovecraftian-horror sandbox game from Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing. I am a big fan of this type of game and its approach to worldbuilding, so I decided to put it into practice.

Pantheon and cults

Before starting to develop my setting, I created a pantheon, an alien race and some cults. I rolled for the gods and discovered that there were four of them, divided into two pantheons. One of the pantheons came up "monotheistic," so obviously that god, who I rolled as a god of fire -- the Sleeping Flame -- is the only god in its pantheon (I suppose that's not really a pantheon, then, but you know what I mean). The other pantheon has three gods, but they don't fully exist yet: I rolled "forerunners" for them, which means that they are waiting to be born into our reality. They are the Sultan of Cold, the King of Thirst and the Devourer of Pain.

So we have one god -- obviously, your passive, dormant type -- that already exists and three younger gods striving to be born. I'm guessing the Flame wants to make sure the others don't burst into our reality and displace it.

My alien race don't have a name yet, but the dice tell me that they've only been here for one to two hundred years and that they're capable of disguising themselves as humans. During their time on earth, they've created a concealed global network of underground structures to house themselves, and obviously one of these is located in the area where I'm going to set my game. They came to earth from another part of our solar system, and they use humans to incubate their larvae. They influenced astronomy -- I'm assuming to conceal the existence of their home -- until a group of humans banded together to stop them. I'll have to find somewhere discovered in the last few centuries to have them come from; Pluto is probably too predictable.

They fear the outer gods -- I decided to have this mean that they fear the new, yet-to-be-born gods. Perhaps they fled from their home to seek refuge from them?

They live within the human community, and they have the power of mind control, which they use to suborn the local government; they produce or have access to some kind of addictive substance they use to manipulate people. They place the highest value on reproduction -- I wonder if maybe they are dying out back home. In their normal physical form (when not impersonating humans) they are like half-intangible clouds with stalked eyes projecting from them. Their behaviour is ant-like; they have a queen and they obey her unquestioningly. They speak in airy, breathy voices, eat by liquefying and absorbing their food and seem to be motionless until they suddenly move with inconceivable speed.

When they die, they erupt into a swarm of immature larvae which will seek to burrow themselves into a human host. They won't mature, but they can do some damage.

By Luigi Castellani. 

I rolled up one cult, the Circle of the Iron Demiurge. They were founded in ancient history by an artist who received bizarre visions of something huge. They took control of a community in ancient history, recruiting their numbers from among artists; they infiltrated an existing faith and repurposed some of its temples, but they were opposed by a rival faith.

Today, they have embraced their uncontrollable artistic visions to the point that many of them are incapable of functioning in normal society. Each member has a hidden tattoo which they use to identify themselves; the cult is bounded together by a twisted form of familial love. The leader is a mad high priest, but he has possibly untrustworthy second-in-command. The cult wants revenge against someone -- maybe the descendants of the religion that fought them in antiquity? They are masters of diabolical sorcery, which is their chief weapon.

Here are the three major and three minor characters I created for the cult:

• Seductive femme fatale
• Merciless crime boss
• Monstrous entity that resembles a human -- maybe one of the alien species has switched sides to work for the unborn gods rather than the Flame? 
• Foolish street thug with grandiose plans
• Sweet old lady carrying on a hideous family tradition
• Ambitious young academic seeking cult secrets

The second cult I didn't bother rolling up; the alien race description made it clear that the other cult in the mix was going to be the mind-controlled slaves of the aliens. I assume they work in tiers with actual shape-shifted aliens at the top and the addicted thralls at the bottom. 

Basically all of this was generated randomly, I want to point out, and it all fits together into quite a nice little antagonist group. Certainly much more detail than I would probably have created in an hour of just thinking about it. And more importantly, not solely the kind of thing I would think of (and therefore the kind of thing my players would be able to predict). 

Locations

I decided to set my campaign right here in Cambridgeshire. The book recommends picking three urban locations, three rural locations and three remote locations, some of which are to be "red herrings," ie locations with no occult tag. I only did eight instead of nine. My locations were: 

• Cambridge (city)
• Cambridge (university)
• Ely
• Little Stukeley (red herring)
• Westley Waterless
• Ramsey Forty Foot
• Ouse Washes
• Gallows Hill

For each of these locations, you generate two tags, each of which contains an enemy, a friend, a scheme, a secret and a place. You pick these from a list of suggestions for each one. 

Cambridge City: Foul Faith. A local religion has been corrupted. Enemy: popular demagogue. Friend: concerned relative. Scheme: consecrate a place with an evil rite. Secret: the religion supports social services for the needy, despite its evil nature. Place: secret fane in important building. 

Crushing Despair. The people of Cambridge have lost hope in things ever getting better. Enemy: political machine boss. Friend: Successful expat returning home. Scheme: discredit source of hope. Secret: Constant plans for renewal always disappoint. Place: street with half the houses empty. 

This is an example of a location and its tags; I'm not going to type them all out because there's nine of them, so here's the summary. 

Ely: Horrific Wealth, Creeping Plague. Ely's privileged residents have some corrupt secret behind their wealth -- but can even that save them from the contagion that's about to break out? Are they, in fact, linked? 

Cambridge University: Drug Epidemic, Damnable Saviour. A new designer drug is doing the rounds among students -- it's even being made by students. But the drug has side effects that one of the cults is keen to harness or put a stop to. A wealthy patron tries to battle the problem, but has secrets of her own. 

Little Stukeley: Clannish Silence, Old Grudges. Stukeleians (is that a word?) don't trust outsiders, and anyone who tries to tell people about what's going on gets put down by the brutal clan leaders. Two factions within the village fight, with an unscrupulous gun runner selling to both sides. 

Westley Waterless: Senseless Violence, Buried Power. A local archaeological site has a hidden being beneath it -- a zealous young archaeologist struggles with the local landowner for access. Does the site have something to do with the bizarre rash of violent crimes in the area? 

Ramsey Forty Foot: Depraved Clergy, Entrenched Poverty. In this poor village, a violent strain of old-timey witch-hunting religion has arisen. 

Ouse Washes: Poisoned Ground, Inhuman Masters. Chemical spills are contaminating the area -- they come from a hidden lab run by a rogue scientist. Is it tied in to the aliens' attempt to create a device to communicate with their offworld allies? 

Gallows Hill: Hateful Tradition, Predator Entity. Bigoted locals enact a cruel local rite believed to appease an evil spirit. There is an evil spirit -- but it isn't appeased. Bodies of the locals' victims are believed to be consumed by the monster, but in fact it eats something less substantial -- a part of the soul, or the sanity. 

It's spookier if you know it's called the Devil's Dyke. 

So there you have it -- that's probably a year's worth of sessions, although they're not all developed, and it took me about two hours while watching television. And as you can see, they're not necessarily Mythos-y; the plot concepts are sufficiently broad that they can fit anywhere. I like enough of these plots that I may well use them, and several of them are not what I would have thought of without using the generator. I particularly love the aliens, the cult, all that stuff. 

There are lots of tools for me to quickly create the next steps as well -- I'd start with this level plus local knowledge, improvisation and charm, and then when the players wanted to actually go somewhere in the sandbox I'd quickly whip up the relevant spells, critters, artefacts and so on. Probably the only thing I'd do more of in advance is the cult's sorcery; given that it's important to them I would want to make sure I had some strongly-established visuals and names to act as clues. 

By Luigi Castellani.

I have discovered my first flaw in the game, though! Well, it's not a flaw per se, more like a caveat; it's just that the tags will require a little adjustment to make them work in a wainscot UK setting (rather than a World-of-Darkness-type setting), and of course they'll need even more fiddling to make fit a specific city. The second point is true anywhere; Cambridge is filthy rich; that's its problem, and the idea of a street with empty houses, rather than people paying £200K to live in a shoebox and be beaten with rods, is risible. But I'm the one that chose it; I was shooting for a more WoD-y concept anyway. And that would be true anywhere; a tag that makes sense one way in New York needs a little work to make sense in Muscatine. 

The national point is a little more an artefact of the game itself; it's set in America, and some of the tags reflect that, assuming that guns are everywhere and there's lots of murders and so on. I struggled with fitting some of the tags to really remote locations, also; if I were to do this again I think I would make it a big city and not bother with the remote country stuff; I'd make "village" the lowest level of resolution, rather than somewhere really out in the middle of nowhere. Mind you, I think that some of the crime assumptions would work OK in London or even somewhere like Birmingham or Glasgow or somewhere; you can believe that film-noir stuff in a way that's hard to believe about Cambridge. So maybe my home is just weird. 

I hope this has given you an example of how the sandbox generation works and why I think this game is so great; I'm not rolling to see how many of this or what type of columns are in the lobby or what kind of guns the thugs have. I'm rolling for the narrative elements, and then I'm fitting it all together like some mad game of Iron Chef. You can see how useful this is for modern-horror setting creation. Honestly, it should be in every World of Darkness ST's tool kit; that's probably the closest thing on the market to a modern horror sandbox, and it lacks anything like this, at least as far as I know. 

Seriously, you guys; if you run any kind of modern horror game, get this one. Link's at the top of the post. 

Silent Legions, Part One:

Late last year, I backed the Kickstarter for Silent Legions, the new horror roleplaying game from Sine Nomine's Kevin Crawford. I'm on record as being a big fan of previous Sine Nomine games like Stars Without Number and Other Dust, so I was in for this without a lot of reflection. Last week I picked up my hardback copy (I've had the PDF for ages, but haven't really got around to digging into it), so here is my review.

By Miguel Santos.

(Incidentally, as one of the stretch goals of the Kickstarter, Crawford put the game's art out for free use, so I'm going to illustrate with a lot of images from that.)

In my next post, I'm going to put some of the tools in the game to use and generate a sample setting, but I've got a busy week ahead so heaven knows when that will actually happen. Anyway, let's get down to our look at the game itself.

System Overview

Silent Legions is a relatively rules-light game, although it's still a "fat" game. I suppose what I mean is that it's rules-light, resource-heavy. The core of the system is a familiar model based on older versions of D&D. You have the traditional six stats, classes and levels, descending armour class, all that kind of thing. The saving throws are different, and there's a skill system, but if you've played any form of D&D -- and I expect that's most people -- it should be pretty easy to pick up.

The four classes are the Investigator, the Scholar, the Socialite and the Tough. These pretty much do what they say on the tin -- they get skills in relevant areas, they have different attack progressions, hit dice and saving throws, etc. The really distinctive feature of the classes is Expertise. Each character has a pool of Expertise points which represent the particular training or specialty of their class. Players can spend these expertise points to do things like reroll class skills or to activate class special abilities. For instance, at first level the Scholar can spend a point of Expertise to automatically succeed on a Knowledge skill roll, while the Tough can spend an Expertise point to automatically self-stabilise when knocked to 0 HP. That kind of thing.

In addition to classes, players also have Backgrounds, which give them some more skills and act as sort of specialisations. A Tough with the Soldier background and a Tough with the Police Officer background will be quite different, for instance -- and Police Officer might also be a good one for an Investigator.

Skills in Silent Legions, as in its sister games, are pretty forgiving. You start with a skill at 0, which allows you to roll 2d6 and add the relevant attribute with no penalty. The typical difficulty is somewhere around 8, so a character with just a +1 between attribute and skill will still succeed most of the time -- and even then, the rules suggest that many uses of skills should just be auto-successes if the character has the relevant skill at all.

Combat, by contrast, is super fucking deadly. In addition to its regular damage, each type of weapon has what's called a Slaughtering die. So, for instance, a shotgun does 3d4 damage and has a Slaughtering die of d10. When you roll the weapon's attack, you also roll the Slaughtering die. If it comes up 6 or better, the weapon does triple damage. So 50% of the time, a successful shotgun blast will kill a typical human stone goddamn dead with damage to spare. Which, you know, fair enough. Don't get shot with a shotgun if you want to stay alive. But it's not like there's a huge number of armour options available out there in the modern world. Primitive armour doesn't work against guns, ballistic armour doesn't work against not-guns, and everything is stupidly conspicuous.

By Luigi Castellani

So combat uses a d20 and has wildly dangerous damage results, while skill use runs on 2d6 and is pretty generous. The result is that using skills is relatively predictable, whereas every single time you go into a fight you're taking your life in your hands. That's true in the other Sine Nomine games, but it's even more true here and it's clearly intentional. I like it. It means that -- fighting monsters aside -- combat is going to be either fisticuffs or murder; the last thing you want is a fair fight with someone who's trying to kill you.

Heck, even if you succeed at murdering people, there's Madness to worry about. Madness in Silent Legions is a type of cumulative damage; it builds up, rather than wearing you down like it does in Call of Cthulhu, and you can buy down your total by buying Deliria, which are sort of behavioural coping mechanisms. You can accumulate Madness from different types of source: there's Bloodshed, Horror and the Occult. It's not a bad system, and it would be easy to bolt onto other games where you wanted a relatively light sanity system. It also -- and I think this is a good thing -- makes it very clear that the Madness you get from the things your characters are exposed to in the game and actual mental illness are totally different; you can have a character who is mentally ill but has a Madness of 0.

Magic

In Silent Legions, there are two types of magic: Spells, which are time-consuming rituals you do beforehand, which then produce a suspended effect, and Disciplines, which are more sort of psychic-powery and have an immediate effect. The distinction reminds me of the difference between Thaumaturgy and Evocation in the Dresden Files game (and, for all I know, books), although the parallel isn't exact. There are rules for learning both types of magic, and anyone can do them (although you need some Occult to do Spells effectively). You buy Disciplines like Skills, and then advance through ranks in them, much like Psychics do in Stars Without Number. In either case, you can either spend Expertise to cast the Spell or use the Discipline or rack up some Madness by doing so -- since Expertise is a pretty limited currency at lower levels, this seems like it would happen quickly.

Now, the Spells for which there are rules in Silent Legions are merely the spells of the "Gray Path," i.e. the kind-of-evil path that any old person can study. Most spells are not so gray -- they're flat-out evil and if you were to learn them, you'd no longer be a PC. These spells don't have a list; instead, they have a big old random-generation process. And it's in this section of the book that we really start to get into what I love about Sine Nomine games: the GM tools.

A ... World of Darkness? 

I feel like I never do a very good job of expressing what I love about the way Crawford presents game master tools. I always just say something like "it's all done with random tables" and then I think people put this down to a quirk of mine -- and in a way, it is. I definitely love random tables for reasons I can't fully explain.

But the setting generation tools in Stars Without Number, Other Dust and now Silent Legions aren't just "random tables." They're thematic hook-generating tools. They're like ... Traveller world creation if it only focused on the things that make for good adventures.

Key to the system is creating locations with tags. When you start assigning locations on your map, you generate tags for them. A tag is a short descriptor, like "Alien Bloodline" or "Senseless Violence." There are both occult tags and mundane tags, so you can create locations that don't necessarily have anything Mythos-y about them or you can mix the two to set a horror against a realistic background. Each tag comes with suggested hostile NPCs, allies, objectives, dark secrets and so on. A tag is a little scenario-generating engine, and each location has two of them.

By David Lewis Johns

But it's not just setting generation. The GM tools in this book give you resources for creating a pantheon, alien races, occult artefacts, spells, monsters, locations, cults, crime scenes, scenarios ... the list goes on. And although you generate these randomly, there isn't the goofy effect you get from most random tables (at least not in most cases). Each result could possibly kick off a compelling scenario. It must have the highest good-content-to-page-count ratio of any Lovecraftian anything since ... since I don't know when. There's even a system for running the conflicts between cults behind the scenes -- I like the idea, which is almost like its own little minigame, although personally I tend to just run these things by GM fiat. Still, it's got a lot of interesting ideas.

I don't think I'm doing a very good job explaining what I love about this and why, so I'm going to give you a more practical demonstration using two methods. First, if you haven't done so already you should go and download the free Stars Without Number rules. Once you've done that, check out the system tags. If you think those are a good idea, imagine the same thing adapted to a Lovecraftian horror setting by someone who gets it and then expanded to every other aspect of what you might want from a horror game. If that sounds good, you should buy this game.

Second, as I said, I'm going to put this into practice myself -- although at the rate I'm currently writing, it might not be until next week when I have wrapped up current work and returned from Salute 2015. But I think I can do a better job of showing why I like this game than telling, so stay tuned.

An Elegant Statement of OSR Philosophy

One thing I wasn't expecting to find in the rulebook was a really plain statement of one of my favourite things about the OSR's approach to systems. It's something I've encountered when running my D&D game, and it's something that I, as a dude who spent a long time immersed in a certain way of thinking about game design, find really interesting. Let me find it:

One of the most useful traits of old-school inspired games is that the great majority of them are crudely compatible with each other. They may not use the exact same scaling, and they may differ in details or particular mechanics, but you can usually look at one and see roughly how it might fit into another. 

As the GM of a sandbox campaign, you should take shameless advantage of this. ... The most important tool you have for salvaging this material is a certain insouciant attitude toward mechanical specifics. Do the pieces not fit together exactly? Are the save categories different? ... Don't worry about it. 

After years of teeth-gritting rules-fights in a national gaming society (and that's necessary, I get it -- a group with hundreds of members is a different animal) and the painstaking approach of indie games designers back in the early 2000s when I was paying a lot of attention to that stuff, I found the ability to sit down at the table and say "fuck it" unbelievably liberating. It sounds silly -- GM fudges game and improvises a lot; no kidding -- but somehow it was a big step for me and it's nice to see it written down.

Wrap-up

I like Silent Legions. I liked the previous Sine Nomine games and I like Lovecraftian horror, so I was pretty much in the bag for this right from the beginning. But you are not me, so let's see whether this is right for you.

You want to run a Lovecraftian horror sandbox: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

You want to incorporate Lovecraftian horror elements into an existing OSR game: I would say so. You might not be able to use some of the setting-creation stuff if you're coming into an existing campaign, but I think the rest of it will still be very useful for you.

You want to incorporate some material into an existing Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu campaign: Again, yes, I think so. A lot of the artefact and creature and cult stuff will come in handy -- and the scenario generation as well. In many ways, I think this approach to monster creation is a lot more useful than the Cthulhu Pokedex, but I may just be a cranky old bastard who wants these kids to get off his lawn because they remind of when he too was young and a little too keen on this stuff.

So yeah, I think it's pretty good and you should get it. But if you don't believe me, stay tuned for an upcoming post in which I put some of this stuff into practice.

What makes a monster "Lovecraftian"? Part 2: Practical tips

In my last post, I talked about what makes a monster "Lovecraftian" and came to the conclusion that there are a few different definitions. In this post I'm going to talk about how to give monsters in games that Lovecraft touch. In most cases, I find, it's not really the monster that matters at all -- it's the context in which the monster appears. Let's take a look.

Art by Luigi Castellani, from Silent Legions.

Time. Lovecraft's monsters are old. Heck, it's right in the name, in some cases: Great Old Ones! But what exactly that means can vary. Some Lovecraft creatures have been around for thousands or millions of years -- in some cases they actually died out long before the period of the story. In other cases, though, the history is a little shorter-term. The history of the Deep Ones in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" goes back a few generations. But discovering the history is usually important. Heck, that's practically all that happens in "The Call of Cthulhu."

Place. I'm sure there are one or two examples, but I can't think of a Lovecraft story off the top of my head in which people are just minding their own business and a monster comes along and goes at them. In almost any case, the monster is tied to a place; that doesn't necessarily mean a habitat, but it's definitely a trend. Sometimes it's shocking because the monster doesn't belong, but a lot of the time the monster does belong -- and it's you who doesn't belong -- or the monster takes a place and begins warping it so that it belongs, like Joseph Curwen or the Deep Ones.

Revelation. A big briefing in the setting that says "yes, these are bad things from outside space and time and they threaten reality and blah blah blah" is not a good way to be introduced to a Lovecraftian horror. This actually works differently from a lot of monsters, where you want there to be some buildup. "Going to the woods? Watch out for the owlbear!" works, but I'm not convinced it works for something where the knowledge of it is supposed to be threatening. I'm looking at you here, Mage.

I guess what I'm saying is that a genuinely Lovecraftian creature is less about the beast's characteristics than about its context. The monster has a place and a history, which basically means that it has a setting and a story.

Which may explain why Lovecraftian critters shorn of their context -- like in the CoC monster books, to be perfectly frank -- don't really mean much. And it does remind us that, as I mentioned in  But with all the Pokemon-collecting, it can be easy to lose sight of that.

(Once again, I come back to how good the GM advice in the Call of Cthulhu d20 rules is.)

Pointlessness of actual game: 100%.

Now, just today I got my physical copy of Silent Legions, the fantastic new sandbox horror RPG from Sine Nomine. I haven't yet finished reading through it (although I read the PDF back when I backed the Kickstarter), and I will post a proper review once I'm done with it, but I did note a really interesting point about monsters in there:

Norms. One good idea is to have the monster violate some kind of rule or norm -- like a physical law, perhaps as addressed by the rules. This could be as simple as having them violate the law of gravity by floating, or it could be something weird like violating causality or experiencing time in reverse. It doesn't have to be big, but it needs to be something that indicates that this is not just a piece of hostile wildlife like an owlbear or a human stand-in like an orc or a supervillain like a lich. Obviously this is easiest in a realistic setting, because just doing monstery stuff is a violation, but whatever the rules of your setting are, bend them.

Language. If you're going to have an indescribable monster, a primarily verbal medium like an RPG seems like an ideal place to have that. Could you run a scene with a creature you literally can't describe? I kind of want to try it now. But I do think that, nine times out of ten, a very detailed, Barlowe-y approach to a monster is not gonna get you anywhere in a tabletop game; things have to be described in a shorthand kind of way -- and sketchy description that focuses more on verbs is actually going to be well-suited to that. I'm not going to pause to describe the creature any more than I would with a gnoll or a bugbear, but I was always going to use words to describe its actions, so it costs me nothing to say that it "lurches" or "shambles" or "suddenly appears" rather than that it "moves."

I guess part of what I mean about laws and language is that you have to consider whatever your setting establishes as a norm and then mess with it. If your setting already has Ilithids and aboleths and gricks and giant squids, then you're not going to be able to just throw down some tentacles and call it a day. (Well, I might do this, but then the mythos-y elements in my D&D setting are more pulp adventure than horror; I'm trading on the known tropes rather than trying to create actual Lovecraftian dread.) (You could have just said "like in Hellboy, right," James.)

Actually, maybe all I mean is go look at Hellboy for a setting that has cyborg apes and ghosts and werewolves and vampires and still manages to make its cosmic horror monsters qualitatively different.

And of course, that's leaving out the old Kirby-anecdote approach (you know, the one where Kirby goes to the comic company and some youngster says he's going to do things "the Kirby way" and Kirby says "doesn't that guy realise the Kirby way is doing it your own way?" Words to that effect, anyway). After all, the whole point of Lovecraft's "anti-mythology" was to escape boring old ghosts and goblins. If Cthulhu is too tamed, skip it and do something else.

So anyway, that's just me thinking about the topic late at night by myself. I will now take a moment for obligatory plug time!

Speaking of Lovecraft and monsters, I wrote a thing -- a little ebook that is a Lovecraftian (I hope) horror story set in the Viking age. It's called The Barest Branch, and you can buy it on US Amazon, buy it on UK Amazon or pick it up in both Kindle format and .pdf on DriveThru. You might like it, and it's not very expensive.

Yoon-Suin Part 2: putting it into practice!

OK, so in my previous post I talked about Yoon-Suin, which I think is a cool resource for generating exciting gaming settings. So on Friday I took it for a test drive, rolling up a random campaign setting within the Yellow City, the ancient metropolis at the heart of Yoon-Suin. I created the names for the groups, but everything else is pretty much random. First, I rolled the groups within the PCs' social circle.

The House of Imperishable Pronouncements is an archive. I rolled "ambition" as the source of conflict. For NPCs, I rolled Sri Ja, a bookish neophyte, and Luhagala (I am not doing a good job with the capitalisation and accents, because I jotted these down in all caps), the archive's wealthy benefactor. Meanwhile, another archivist, Chan Chal, is sabotaging the archive by destroying ancient records on behalf of a mysterious patron.

The Fane of the Coral-Hued Devourer is a shrine. I rolled "love" as their source of conflict. They worship a chaotic crocodile god which rules the concepts of death and pain. It demands sacrifices of birds, which I envision as being like the little birds that clean a crocodile's teeth. The NPCs for the shrine are Ven Dan e, a hardass traditionalist priest. Rumour has it that he has miraculous gifts. Meanwhile, Gun Jit a is a pissed-off reformer who opposes Ven. One of the randomly-generated NPCs was Dar shak, a dyer who is a dandy with dusty and ragged clothes. I decided that his dapper appearance was because he was trying to impress a girl, and so I made him be in love with Gun. 

The Lower Green Temple District Mob are a cockroach-herding clan, which is about as low as you can get in the Yellow City's hierarchy if you're a human. Their conflict source is "folly." The first NPC I rolled was Ga Gan, husband of the head of the clan. Kala, a former challenger for leadership of the clan, grumbles and plots in the shadows. They are also harbouring an outcast from a noble house, although I forgot to generate this guy. I didn't have a good sense of how these guys collected to the larger plot, although they might have something to do with the missing explorer under the next item.

The Society for Cartographic Rectification are an association of explorers. Their source of conflict is "treachery." Their chief guide is a Lamarakhi headhunter named Ha Rij, and the Society has a contact named Pa Nit A, a crooked fence who buys the artefacts they find. But they have a problem: their wealth was all being held by one of their members -- and that member is missing. I pondered having the body found by the cockroach clan, but haven't decided yet.

After that, I rolled up some random NPCs. I've already mentioned Dar Shak, the lovestruck dyer. I also rolled:

A jit, a legless fakir with a burning desire for knowledge.

Chi dat ma, a hunchbacked, skeletally thin goldsmith afflicted with jealousy for the possessions of others.

Polaha vo, a slugman botanist who carries a cane. He has a rival he seeks to outdo.

Wu U, a hedonistic narcissist slugman who is an apprentice mathematician. He lives only for pleasure.

I also rolled some random rumours:

• A tea shop owner is trying to intimidate the proprietor of an opium den. 
• Whisperings and moanings are coming from the catacombs of a long-forgotten sect. 
• A mine in the Topaz Isles has discovered a new type of gemstone with strange effects. 

I think that's plenty to be starting with. This isn't meant to be a full suite of plots, so not everything has to be interconnected. It's meant to be the backdrop for a starting campaign. But it's definitely full of adventure potential, whether the possibility for conflict among the characters or the different groups sending the characters off to retrieve or explore the things they want. I have a notion that Polaha vo may be involved in developing new and exotic types of tea, which would be a fun thing to do: send the PCs all over the shop looking for rare blooms. 

Yoon-Suin! It's pretty good. (Part One)

One of the things I was most excited about on returning from holiday was that my copy of Yoon-Suin would be waiting for me. In fact, it was too big to fit through the door, but my wife kindly picked it up from the post office for me and I've been devouring it all week. The version I have is the print edition from Lulu, which sells for £12.50 plus shipping, but you can also get the PDF, which sells for a mere £6, and even then it's only because of the crappy exchange rate at the moment.

I cannot put my finger on what this cover reminds me of,
except that I'm sure it was something in high school. 

Yoon-Suin is the work of David "noisms" McGrogan of Monsters and Manuals, and it is a campaign setting for old-school fantasy RPGs (although I think it would be simple enough to use it for more recent games; that's certainly what I intend to do). It's somewhere between a sandbox creation tool like you'd find in a Sine Nomine game and a more detailed setting guide.

Ooh, it's even got a trailer: 

It has an absolute crapload of tables, which if you know me will tell you that I am inclined to like it. Here, have a look: 

Note the unconventional sideways-digest format (or whatever you call it). Some people don't like this because it makes it hard to shelve the book, but it does mean that it lies flat relatively well (relatively) and that the tables fit neatly and readably on one page. I bet it displays well on laptop screens, too.

Yoon-Suin is a fantasy setting that borrows influences from a sort of south/southeast Asian milieu, a world where everyone is drinking tea and smoking opium and the sun is beating down except when it isn't. The heart of this thing is the Yellow City, a metropolis ruled by an aristocratic caste of slug-men, with hapless crab-man slaves at the bottom and humans on most of the rungs in between. Temples and observatories pursue arcane secrets, hereditary clans of cockroach wranglers scrape for a living in dusty alleys, noble houses pursue convoluted intrigues, all that sort of thing. Meanwhile, out in the wilderness, explorers hack through trackless jungle, tribes of grasshopper-men herd their giant caterpillars across the plains, and umpty-bazillion (well, OK, "one hundred") little kingdoms and city-states endlessly plot and war, sometimes with the aid of giant crayfish.

The author has described Yoon-Suin as:

"Fantasy Tibet by somebody who has never been to Tibet and knows nothing about it, but likes the idea of yak-folk and self-mummifying monks".

Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic.

OK, so it's sort of a weird fantasy world based on a different source than your typical European-style one. But what does the actual book give you to run this world with? The answer is a lot.  In addition to the description of the setting (in the form of a traveller's journal), we get a whole Yoon-Suin bestiary. And I'm not talking about the usual setting-specific update to the Monster Manual you get in most setting books, I mean 78 new critters (although some of them are Yoon-Suin-ified versions of D&D standbys). For each region of Yoon-Suin, we get not only lots of tools for generating hex content, but lots of mini-plot-generating tables. I don't know how to describe these better than "like in Stars Without Number, y'know," but basically they're little random tables that create not only locations and their inhabitants but the interactions between them.Here, for example, is the table for generating a band of revolutionaries hiding out in one of the ruins of Big Rubble the Old City that surrounds the Yellow City: 

You'll probably need to enlarge that to read it, I guess. 

So basically there isn't a huge map of each region with every piddling little thing detailed; instead, what there is is a method of generating the region quickly -- and not just generating the stuff but also the tensions and relationships (and therefore the game hooks) that go with it. I'm particularly fond of this method because it makes it very easy to generate the kinds of things that will fit well with how my group likes to play (and how I like to run). I described this thing in an older post as "like Traveller but if its world-generation system focused on the kinds of things I care about," and the same principle applies here. It's much more interesting to me to know that this village has been swept by a craze for a new kind of tea rather than that it has 900 inhabitants and they mainly grow sorghum. 

There are loads of these kinds of tables, basically one each per thing that you might find in that region, with more detailed sections on the more important characteristic features. And a bunch of stuff on monster lairs. But just in case you want something a little more fleshed-out, there's a big section in the back of each region with sample locations appropriate to be dropped into that area. 

Now, I've been reading Yoon-Suin on the assumption that it is the kind of place that my players (who, as you can see in earlier posts, are sailing for adventure on the big blue wet thing) are going to rock up to and start meddling with, meddling being pretty much their thing. And that's all well and good. But what if you want to start a campaign in Yoon-Suin? This is where I think the book really shines. 

Basically, there's a whole system for generating the social groups that the PCs have starting connections to, as well as what problems those groups have (i.e. what they might need the PCs to go out and do for them). For me, it's the perfect middle point between being richly complex and being usefully simple, and I wish a tool like it existed for, say, Dragon Pass. (Adds "create simple campaign-start generators for Dragon Pass" to list of crap to do, around item a million.) 

I like this subsystem so much that I think I will roll one of these up and do a second post on it, just for fun. 

So is there anything I didn't like about Yoon-Suin? Not much. There are a few minor points I noticed: 

• I like the scribbly art by Matthew Adams, but more of it would have been even better. Graphically, this is a pretty bare-bones presentation compared to some of the other things I've been reviewing lately (on the other hand, £12.50 isn't much for an RPG book these days. I can't remember what Red and Pleasant Land cost, but I suspect it was about double that). There are also a few cases where the reproduction of the art isn't perfect. 
• It could have used another going-over by an editor; there are a few minor errors in the text. 
• I am not familiar enough with old-timey rules to know whether the monsters are useful mechanically. I'm just going to do it with 5e anyway. 

The next thing I need to figure out is where the border is between Yoon-Suin and Qelong on the map.

Right then: in my next post, I put some of the Yoon-Suin random table love into practice, creating a setting for a theoretical campaign. With my current schedule, though, this might not happen until the weekend or even later. 

Random Viking loot and gifts

Some time ago, I reviewed both The Sagas of the Icelanders and Mythic Iceland for this blog. One thing that I thought that was missing from both was a set of examples of items for gift-giving or Viking loot. Sagas understands the importance of gift-giving, but doesn't give you much of an idea what sort of things you might expect to give or get as gifts, while Mythic Iceland just gives you the amount of wealth you can expect to get plundering such-and-such a type of place.

So I had a bit of a trawl through my saga library and compiled a list of different gifts and loot items. I've also chosen some archaeological items that seem likely to be loot or trade goods. Obviously, these are typically high-end items (well, most of them), but they should give you some idea. I've compiled them into a series of random tables for your convenience.

Clothing

1. A cloak that once belonged to King Myrkjartan. 
2. A white headdress embroidered with gold thread. 
3. A shawl decorated with black stitches and a fringe. 
4. A cloak lined with white fur. 
5. A pile of beaver, sable and marten skins. 
6. A silk robe with gold embroidery and clasps. 
7. A full set of coloured garments made from English cloth. 
8. A fur jacket. 
9. A fine cloak from abroad. 
10. A pair of gloves with gold embroidery. 
11. A headband studded with gold. 
12. A Russian fur cap. 

Note that the history of clothing is important -- "a cloak worn by a king" came up so many times that I just stopped writing it down. Giving someone your old clothes isn't seen as a sign of cheapness, it's a sign of how close you are, so close that you would wear the same clothes. 

Clothing is also a good way to insult people -- in Njal's Saga, Skarp-Hedin insults someone so badly that a peace settlement collapses by offering him an inappropriate cloak as a gift. (It's probably to do with the idea that the cloak is unisex?)

Jewellery

1. A necklace of glass beads.
2. A gold bracelet. 
3. A gold arm-ring, "a big and good one."
4. A gold finger-ring. 
5. A gold brooch. 
6. A set of oval brooches. 

Not a lot of variety here -- gold arm-rings and bracelets turn up about a million times; arm-rings in particular are a very traditional gift from leaders to their followers. Interestingly, one of them has a spell on it; a queen gives it to her lover as a parting gift, but the spell prevents him from having sex with the woman he's leaving her for. Although we know silver jewellery was common, it doesn't turn up as a gift in the sagas much. Snobbery. 

Jewellery could be looted, too, so you get brooches or ornaments from Ireland or Britain or France or wherever in Scandinavian settlements or graves all the time, like this Frankish trefoil brooch: 

 

Weapons and armour

1. A fine sword and a gold-inlaid spear.
2. A gold-plated helmet.
3. An axe inlaid with gold.
4. A sword with a walrus-ivory hilt.
5. A gold-inlaid atgeir. 
6. A spear with a gold-inlaid socket. 
7. A knife with a walrus-tusk handle. 
8. An axe decorated with gold on the blade and silver mounts. 
9. A winged spear. 
10. "That sword which is called Dragvandil."
11. A shield depicting scenes from the old sagas, with strips of gold framing the pictures, set with gemstones. 
12. A spear that rings whenever someone is about to die. 

Again, object history is important here -- a lot of these swords have names, and the ones that don't begin that way wind up being called things like "King's Gift." They aren't necessarily good weapons -- at one point, someone -- I think it's Egil -- discovers that although the gold-inlaid axe a king gave his son is very beautiful, the blade is weak (although he also used it very carelessly). 

Cash money, capital, livestock, real estate, weird stuff. 

1. A wooden bowl with a silver handle, filled with silver coins. 
2. A ship, together with its sails, rigging and equipment. 
3. A twelve-oared ship. 
4. A trained fighting-horse. 
5. "A good big treasure-chest."
6. A hundred ells of fine-quality cloth and twelve furs. 
7. A jet-black ox, nine years old. 
8. An Irish dog. 
9. A black horse. 
10. A farm. 
11. An island with 80 oxen on it. 
12. A share in a trading ship. 
13. Timber to build a church. 
14. A stallion and three mares. 
15. A carved ship ornament. 
16. A set of walrus ivory chessmen. 
17. A banner with a raven on it. 
18. Three sea-snail shells and a duck's egg. 
19. A cheese. 
20. A magician's staff. 

There's also the category of monastic or religious loot, which doesn't turn up much in the sagas, but does turn up in the archaeological record. 

Religious paraphernalia

1. A bible or prayer book. 
2. A reliquary. 
3. A bishop's crozier. 
4. A pectoral cross. 
5. An episcopal ring. 
6. An exotic foreign religious object. 

Anyway, I hope that's handy. The important thing is that if you're going to give a gift it should have a history. A big bowl of silver coins, OK, that's just money, but in the sagas objects tend to be unique, to have a history to them. They're often the cause of strife or envy, or they can form a continuity between different parts of a saga -- Gunnar's halberd (which may be an atgeir, who knows) spends more time in Njal's Saga than Gunnar does. 

And of course this applies to every similar culture in fantasy settings. I spent a long time coming up with unique gift and trade items in my Orlanthi HeroQuest game, for instance. 

Maelstrom Domesday -- full readthrough

In a previous post I talked about creating a character for Maelstrom Domesday, an updated version of the classic 1980s British game with the setting moved to Yorkshire in 1086. You can find the game itself and its various supplements on DTRPG. (And Arion Games has a big sale on through new year, so you can pick them up cheap. I think I may get the scenario just to give the game a try.)

Having finished character creation, I thought I'd take a look at how the abilities I acquired actually work. 

So, skills: Skills are ranked from 1 to 6, with each level having its own effect. You roll against the relevant attribute (which you will remember go from 1 to 100, so this is basically a percentile system), and having the skill usually adds 10% per level to your score. However, it's worth checking, because some skills have different effects. For instance, higher levels of Herbalism allow you to use rarer herbs, speed up your prep time, and so on, while Combat Training adds to your damage, increases the protective value of armour, and that kind of thing. 

Combat is done by percentile, like skill checks -- you roll and compare your result to the other player's (each player has attack and defense scores) on a matrix sort of like the one used in HeroQuest. This tells you how much damage you've taken. Each hit heals and is treated separately. There are also serious and critical wounds, which have extra consequences, including being hideously scarred, losing an eye and whatnot. I haven't tested it in play, but combat looks lethal, with a big advantage for the guy with the higher skill and the better weapons and armour. 

There's the usual other stuff -- diseases, poisons, fire, falling, earning your patron's favour, most of it simple spot rules. Instability is the game's answer to Sanity, and is basically another form of damage you can take. 

Magic (or Magick) is at the centre of the setting, but player character magick is pretty subtle. You can't use it to do anything that would otherwise be impossible, so it's mostly things like avoiding detection, changing minds, putting people to sleep, spotting things, all that kind of thing. Even so, if you have a non-magickal method of doing stuff, you're better off using it, because magick use carries with it the possibility of a Maelstrom breach -- that is, a moment where the weird chaotic magickal dimension that underlies ours pokes through. This can mean anything from turning people ill-tempered for a little while to summoning hideous entities from other planes (though the odds of this are pretty slim on a simple spell). 

So rules (particularly character creation) take up about half of the book, and the other half is all setting and GM resources. The bestiary covers wildlife and a handful of different monsters, ranging from "minor" creatures like elves and boggarts and the undead to "major" ones like giants and dragons. I think it's understood that there aren't going to be a lot of common monster types in this game -- most problems are going to be caused by a creature that is, in proper weird fantasy style, unique. 

The original setting guide is not easy reading. 

Then there is a lot of material on daily life 1086 and Yorkshire in particular. Now, I feel pretty good about my grip on the world of the late 11th century, but this seems clear and well-organised, detailed without beating the reader to death with minutiae (although my tolerance for historical minutiae is probably in the top 5%). 

I really like the way Yorkshire villages are laid out -- a few facts from the Domesday Book, and then a piece of local folklore and an adventure hook for each. The setting section covers 37 manors in this faction, plus one small town (Selby) and one large city (York). The town and city get much more detail, with relevant NPCs and multiple plot hooks. 

Then you get the appendices, which cover diseases, medicinal herbs (a lot of medicinal herbs), a quick timeline and a glossary. 

Production-wise, the book is OK. The layout is clean and usually readable, the art is sparse but generally pretty good. I haven't looked at any of the electronic products, but if they're laid out like this I would assume they're easy to read onscreen and economical to print. There are some fuzzy bits of poorly-reproduced art, and at least one repeated piece, but nothing too jarring. 

When I bought this game, I initially thought that it would be something like Spaceship Zero -- essentially a high-concept campaign-in-a-box that I might run for a limited series of games and be perfectly content with. Reading it through, I find it has a lot of worky bits that can be pulled out for other games. It could mash up very simply with Cthulhu Dark Ages, for instance, or with Mythic Iceland. The village writeup format is good, and I'll probably swipe that for other games. Maybe also the medicinal herbs, although they're not weird enough for a fantasy game. Maybe for another Taming of Dragon Pass type game. And it's a pretty good resource for any type of game set in 11th-c. England, fantasy or otherwise, although I already have a fair few reference works on the subject. 

So yeah. I am going to try to run this at some point! I have a pretty clear idea of the campaign already. 

Dragonmeet, Red and Pleasant Land

Despite having lived in the UK for over a decade on the current stretch, I had never been to a Dragonmeet until this past weekend. This year I went partly off my own bat and partly as a volunteer for Isles of Darkness, a live gaming society I'm part of. I didn't get to do any actual gaming, but I got to meet and talk to people, to see some cool new games, to sell a few things in the Bring & Buy and to buy some things I wanted, so I was happy with the experience.

My photo of our booth came out blurry, but this was the view from it. 

I believe they were reporting about 1,500 people through the door, which was more than in previous years. Certainly the trade hall seemed to be doing a lively business and the lines for tickets were long. I thought the venue was good, although for some reason it was really difficult to get into the car park.

I'm going to do this post in two parts. First, brief list of cool stuff in no particular order:

• It was nice to briefly meet Dave Chapman, whose "RPG a Day" blog series helped energise me to think about gaming in general again. 
• I got to see some friends I rarely see. 
• Live recording of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff was lots of fun, and featured a complete campaign idea generated within a few minutes. I wonder if the hosts' lists of un-run campaigns are as long and frustrating as mine. 
• Response to IoD booth was very positive. I hope that this is a trend for us, both in improving our outreach and in making our games more accessible to new players. 
• I got a cute little notebook from Squarehex; the sheets have graph paper on one side and lined paper on the other, so when you open it you've got a map on the left side and the key on the right. It's A6, so it's more going to be groups of dungeon rooms than whole dungeons, but that's OK by me. Also they are currently Kickstarting an A5 version, which has just hit its goal. If I hadn't got one for myself, that A6 would have made a great stocking stuffer for me. 
• I picked up a copy of Maelstrom: Domesday, a variant of Maelstrom set in the 11th century -- which is to say a game that might as well have had "play this, James Holloway" written on the cover. Expect a full review once I've finished reading it. Both the original and the new version are available on DriveThru (and currently on sale!) from Arion Games. I am pretty excited about this; from what I saw of it, it looks like exactly my thing, and it's clear the creator likes a lot of the same things I like (game designers come from the oddest backgrounds; this guy's an immunologist). Will it live up to the excitement? Come back next time to find out!
• I also got a copy of Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne, a little story game about, well, witch burnings. I'm not sure it's medieval history per se, but again, grubby middle ages seemed to be a thing for me this year. Again, I'll review that when I get the chance. 

But the big purchase for me was Red and Pleasant Land, Zak S's latest offering for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG (although effectively for D&D in any of its many incarnations). This thing is ... man. It is pretty good. And it's pretty. It's hardbound, but with -- is it called a cloth binding? That sort of textured cloth cover rather than the usual glossy binding you get in RPGs. It's got a bound-in red bookmark. More than anything else, it looks like a book of fairy tales. I mean, exactly, to the point where I wonder if this is a coincidence. 

Hans Christian Andersen for visual comparison, little Skaven for size comparison. 

And it looks gorgeous inside as well; lovely soft heavy paper, intelligent and tasteful use of colour. It makes most full-colour rulebooks look like some old bullshit.  

Initially, this made me want to tear up all my dungeon maps, but now it just makes me want to make some new ones. 

Continuing the Vornheim trend of printing right inside the cover. 

Lots of new monsters. 

OK, so it looks terrific. What's it about? RPL is basically a setting guide to a place called Voivodja, otherwise The Place of Unreason, a land where the rules of conventional reality are treated with a certain levity. The land was once entirely covered by the palace of a mad king, but now his gardens grow wild over it and the ruins of the palace form a substrate of "interiors" (ie dungeons) under it. Rival armies of vampires, each one of them with its own goofy-yet-creepy character, strive for mastery, so you've got plenty of plots, alliances, battles, intrigues, covert missions, hidden agendas, all that kind of thing. As I'd come to expect from Zak S's previous book, Vornheim, you not only get examples of these but lots of good ways to generate them on the fly. I am a big fan of the randomly-generated Intercepted Communique Table. 

Voivodja is basically a mashup of Alice in Wonderland and vampires, which doesn't sound like a combination that would work but does. I think this is because vampires, at least in many vampire stories, are sort of petty and obsessive in the same way that the characters in the Alice stories are. I mean, a mad monarch who lives in the ruined splendour of a crumbling palace, pursuing ever more cruel and recondite pleasures while everything falls to chaos around her ... that's either a vampire or an Alice character, depending on which angle you look at it from, right? And RPL succeeds in looking at the thing from both angles simultaneously, not 100% perfectly -- there were one or two moments where a piece of either straight whimsy or straight horror felt a little out-of-place to me -- but pretty close. 

I mentioned Vornheim, which I'm a big fan of, and this is definitely similar in some ways, but it's much more worked-out and detailed -- Vornheim was packed with usable stuff, but this is just so much larger. Let's look at what's in here: 

• A guide to the setting, including not just places but customs, including weddings, a duelling code and how to act like a weird homicidal Alice character. 
• A whole new character class, the Alice or Fool, with a random level-up table and a new ability, Exasperation. 
• 47 monsters, including a shit-hot random demon (or "Guest" as they're known in Voivodja) generation table that reminds one strongly of Realms of Chaos. 
• Two good-sized dungeons, being the headquarters of the two main antagonists. Making two whimsical-vampire-monarch's-castle dungeons different from each other is no mean feat!
• Some maps of sample locations, showing each of the setting's three main terrain types. 
• Systems for running duels, large battles and characters with social rank. 
• A shedload of random tables, including location generators, adventure hooks, an "I Search the Body" table and a way of determining where characters who missed a session have been. 
• Player handouts, including a fragmentary map for one of the dungeons. 

So I was reading this at the con and lamenting that although it's great, my own D&D game is more of a mud-'n'-blood, scoundrels-on-the-run sort of a thing and I'd find it hard to put something as out there as this book into it without it seeming like a jarring transition. The person I was talking to pointed out that what this setting sounded like, with its mad monarchs and weird creatures and gardens run amok, was the Hedge from Changeling: the Lost. And it is. In fact, I think it would contain a heck of a lot of good material, not just to lift whole but as an inspiration for constructing a local Hedge guide. 

I'm going to get some use out of this -- I can already see the bits I'm going to swipe -- but mainly it's just inspiring me to try to do something as good within the idiom of my game as this is good within its own. 

At long last some wargaming!

So gaming buddy Chris came over last weekend and we did some gaming! I have been on a big Saga kick recently, so we played a couple of games of that. My armies are still being developed, so there are a few substitutions in here.

The first game we played called on the players to contest a pair of river crossings. I like the core scenarios in the Saga rulebook, which tend to lead to Dark-Ages-appropriate self-sacrifice.

Anglo-Danish huscarls prepare to defend the bridge crossing. Briefly. 

The Viking berserkers prepare a suicide attack on the ford. 

Anglo-Danish warriors prepare to lay down their lives heroically. 

Here are some more general photos of some of the units. I painted a lot of these many years ago (over 10 years, in fact, when I lived in Durham), so be merciful.

Vikings: Foundry, Gripping Beast and Essex

Berserkers: Gripping Beast and Foundry

Levy archers: Gripping Beast and (I think) Essex.

Warriors: Gripping Beast (the bald guy is one of their plastics) and ... Harlequin?

The next game saw the Anglo-Danes trying to protect a convoy of valuable things, including a group of civilians, a flock of sheep and a bishop. I didn't have treasure bases made, so I had to stick some of my loose models to bases I had lying around. I should make some permanent ones. Time to buy more civilians and livestock! I do like civilians and livestock.

Chris used solid blocking tactics that kept the objectives shielded, swinging his line around to obstruct my shot at them. I wonder how this would have played out with more mounted troops on the board. I was a bit perplexed that the English chose to save the civilians and the sheep while leaving the bishop and his massive chest of gold to be captured. Very humane people, the English.

The bishop, one of his lads and some, er, holy relics. 

The Anglo-Danish forces form a defensive line in front of the refugees. Please
excuse the ruins of Osgiliath down front -- scenery is also still in development.

The centre of the field becomes a swirling melee, but the English defensive
line is holding. A group of Viking warriors break through on the right to attack
the bishop and his retinue, but it isn't enough. 

The line holds at great cost and the women and children escape. Also the sheep.
Figures: Essex, Black Tree(?), Gripping Beast, Perry, Irregular, I dunno.

I am turning into a pretty big fan of this game. Funnily enough, for a big dark ages guy, I don't have a lot of appropriate terrain, so I need to get on that.

We also played a quick game of Bolt Action, which was good fun. I didn't get any photos. I like the way the system handles pinning and combat stress, although I do not usually have any time for tournament-competitive systems. But the mechanic looks pretty robust, and I am looking forward to giving it another try. There are good inexpensive Red Army plastics out there ... and it's been a while since I've got to do a little UUURRRAAAAAHHHH!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to lately. Not a lot, but hopefully I'll have some good stuff to report when I go to Dragonmeet on Saturday. I'll be manning the Isles of Darkness booth for part of it, but am hoping to make some of the panels and do a little shopping.