Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1, a quick look at a little game.

I love me a good ole' Old School hexcrawl.

This frequently throws people. I have made it fairly clear that Basic RolePlaying is my preferred rules system, a deeply simulationist game. By that, I mean that BRP attempts to model in math the genres it is applied to. Call of Cthulhu recreates the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, with a sanity system that models how people go nuts in his fiction, not in real life. RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha models the bronze age world of, no surprises here, Glorantha. It does not seek to accurately recreate the economics, sociopolitics, or brutality of the terrestrial bronze age. Pendragon is, frankly, Sir Thomas Malory summoned back from Avalon with dice. It has nothing to do with the middle ages. And Basic RolePlaying is a tool kit to model whatever genre you want. These are not games that depend on randomness. Randomness is an element, and has to be in any game reliant on dice, but they are very structured, intentional systems meant to control the type of play that emerges.

On top of that, I am known for story-oriented scenarios. The three Six Seasons books chronicle the fall of a clan, its time as a warband, and its return home. The Final Riddle is a one-way trip into madness. Again, randomness is present. Characters can fail. They can die. But there is a narrative in place. 

Old School gaming has no interest in simulation or stories. Crom LAUGHS at your narrative arcs! At Old School's core is emergent play. Roll the dice, see what happens. The results of the dice rolls, and the decisions you make, are the story. In the stricter Old School games, you don't know what character you will play until you roll stats for it. Adventures, locations, and encounters can all be determined randomly. Gygax had tons of random tables in the original Dungeon Master's Guide, and modern descendants like Old School Essentials or ShadowDark have followed suit. You can literally build the campaign, and the world, as you go. And unlike the more simulationist games mentioned above, the lighter dice systems of Old School games are little more than pass/fail mechanics. There are fewer skills (if any) to sculpt the expectations of the setting. Worlds are implied in the rules, but not explicitly modeled. You jump in, you play, and the game emerges.

Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1 (man that is a mouthful, let's call it 3Hex from here on) is a little solo-play game with decidedly Old School leanings. Author Mark Quire LAUGHS in the face of your simulations and narratives, by Crom! Yes, I promise to stop doing that. Weighing in at all of five pages, this PDF is essentially a three hex dungeon/wilderness crawl (which might have something to do with the name). One hex is The City, one is The Reach, and one is The Badlands. Each has its own random encounters generated when you enter the hex. The tongue-in-cheek conceit of the game is right there on the first page:

Be an Adventurer! THEY SAID. It’ll be fun and make You RICH! THEY SAID.

It’s not.

None of this is fun, none of this has made me rich. I’ve been stuck in this swamp for four days. There is something growing between my toes that I SWEAR occasionally giggles, I’m super hungry, AND I AM REALLY NOT HAPPY. NOT. HAPPY. AT ALL.

Your naive would-be Adventurer begins in The City, and sets out to win treasure and fame in this and other hexes (but is more likely to starve or die a hideous death). Each day of play, called a "loop," you either roll for an encounter in the hex you are in or more to the adjacent hex. At the end of each day, you gain a point of Hunger (Hunger also acts as damage in this game). At 6 points of Hunger, you are dead. But Hunger can be combatted with one of your three other stats. Groats are the coins in the game, and you start with D6. Vittles are rations, and you can spend one each day to prevent Hunger. Finally there are Upgrades, which are weapons, armor, magic items, and experience, making your little bugger (sorry, your brave hero) tougher and more resilient. Like Hunger, Vittles and Upgrades start at zero and are gained in play.

The core mechanic for tests in the game is to roll 2D6 + your total Upgrades and - your current Hunger. You will want to roll higher than your opponent's combat scores or the difficulty of whatever test you are facing.

Aside from the randomness of the game, what makes it Old School adjacent is the entire core concept. Old School games are notoriously brutal. They were survival horror games, not heroic fantasy. 3Hex leans hard into that spirit. Like Knave! or MÖRK BORG, there are no character classes here, however. You are defined by your gear. Presumably further issues will add more hexes to explore, and perhaps more complexity, but as is 3Hex is a lightning fast solo play with a sense of humor about itself. Like MÖRK BORG the fun is in your inevitable, horrible doom.

Or maybe you could get lucky?

        

Old Gods of Appalachia, An RPG Review

There are places in this world that humanity was never supposed to see- walled in by mountains of burning black rock, isolated by a choking canopy of poison flora, woods where tooth, claw, and hunger still sit atop the food chain. Long before our kind ever set foot in these mountains, when the peaks of the Blue Ridge towered above the stars, and the heart of the plateau still rolled with ridges tough as pine knobs, darkness was brought here in cages made of fear. Our tongues do not have the shape to speak the true names of what they are . . . and that's are, not were. They are hunger, consumption, lust- all the things that settle under the heart and below the ribcage. They are the cancer that will one day eat the edges of this universe, and leave nothing in its place. They are not evil. They are not of Hell or the Christian devil. They simply are...

Old Gods of Appalachia, Season 1, Episode 0: "Prologue"

A Surprisingly Personal Connection

I don't often get to review a game that leads me to discover something about myself.

I was interested in Old Gods of Appalachia (the RPG) since I first caught wind of it. I love the Cypher System and have reviewed it extensively, as well as Numenera and VURT. In addition, I am a lifelong horror buff, though I had not originally listened to the podcast the RPG is based on, the premise of the game (so perfectly summed up in the quote above) sent shivers down my spine. When Old Gods finally arrived I started reading it, and simultaneously listened to the podcast...and that is when the sense of deja vu started to hit me.

When I was a boy of eleven, circumstance drove my family from suburban Arizona back east, to family. We moved to rural upstate New York, to a fairly isolated community in the Catskill Mountains. My great-grandmother had about 200 acres of land there, seven miles deep in one of the "small, sheltered valleys" Old Gods of Appalachia calls as a "holler:"

A holler has a head, a mouth, and often a creek, even if it’s only seasonal. The mouth is the least remote and typically broadest part of the holler, being its start; it’s also typically where the holler’s creek—if it has one—joins a larger creek or stream. The head is the most remote part of the holler, nestled near where the ridges meet. Houses are situated along the slopes of occupied hollers, with a road in the middle, running roughly parallel to the water source.

This was exactly where she lived, along a dirt road impassable in the winters. And it was--like all the narrow little valleys hidden in those mountains--called a "hollow." Bouck's Hollow, to be exact. Author's Note: before publishing this I ran it by a friend who grew up there. He reminded me that I was an outsider...I might have called Bouck's Hollow, Polly Hollow, Preston Hollow etc "hollows" but everyone else did indeed call them "hollers."

As I kept reading, and listening, it was like my childhood flashing before my eyes. The section on weather related disasters in Appalachia (p. 184) talked about flooding. In 1987, when I was sixteen, the Schoharie Creek flooded nearly the entire town, and has flooded several times before and since. In discussing the geology of the mountains, these were the mountains I remembered, shale and limestone, and impossibly ancient. You could climb those mountains and at their summits find the fossils of prehistoric sea life frozen in the shale, and not so far from where I lived was the Gilboa Fossil Forest, petrified trees 385 million years old and believed to perhaps be one of the first forests on the face of the Earth. 

As I read about the people, and listed to the stories, that was when I really began to relate. I knew these people...the townfolk, the farmers in the valleys...and the folk up in the hollows (hollers). In a July 18th article from 1991, the New York Times published a piece about them:

Along the sinuous West Middleburgh Road that makes its way through the rolling green hills lie crumbling old shacks surrounded by chickens, decaying barns, rusting farm machinery and tiny overgrown family plots. Here, families with names that have been known in these parts for more than 200 years live lives that often seem untouched by modernity… The insular life in the hollow has preserved old folk beliefs, arcane slang and diversions, like cockfighting, that are illegal in New York State. Nearly every dirt yard has at least one majestic rooster with a foot tethered on a string to a stake, waiting for the next cockfight. Foxes are kept in cages out in back of properties, which are often more than a hundred acres. Some houses lack indoor plumbing, but few lack American flags...

Now, if you hear a bit of Big City Contempt in some of that, you are not alone, and one thing Old Gods of Appalachia (the RPG) gets very, very right is avoiding ugly stereotypes about the people of the region. But the article is mostly right, and trust me when I say the people in the hollows had just as much contempt for the city folk. 

The point I am arriving at is the more I read Old Gods the more it echoed my own experience. But I grew up in New York, not Appalachia...didn't I? Didn't I?

Turns out, officially, I did grow up in Appalachia.

People don't associate New York State with Appalachia. In a 1981 governmental study, only 20% of those surveyed identified the region as extending north into that state. Yet the Catskill Mountains are just as much a part of the Appalachian Mountain chain as the Blue Ridge Mountains are, and 14 New York counties are also official members of the Appalachian Regional Commission. When Congress created the Commission back in 1965, part of its mandate was to define what Appalachia actually "was" according to cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors. Their conclusion was that these 14 counties did indeed belong. I grew up in the one that forms the northeastern most tip of the region. The culture in the hollows/hollers of that mountain chain runs deep, and the more I looked the more I found. Linguistic connections. Common traditions. Shared beliefs. 

And...well, the weirdness.

There is something in those mountains. You feel it. Something impossibly old. Something deep. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the slopes of the hills where I grew up were all cleared for hops farms. In the 1910s, a hops blight came, and then Prohibition finished the job. The farms were just abandoned, and by the time I was there, the forests had swallowed them back up. You could walk through the woods and come across a wall of neatly stacked shale which had once marked the boundaries of a field, or come across the ruins of a farmhouse, the trees grown right up through the foundations. Then everything would go quiet, and you could almost feel something looking into you. The Green, if you were lucky...the Things if you were not.

But I get ahead of myself, Family. Let's talk about Old Gods.  

 

Part 1 "Where the Shadows Stir" and Part 4 "The Darkest Mountains in the World"

A 418-page PDF and book, Old Gods of Appalachia is full-color, profusely illustrated, and for the print version on thick, glossy paper. If you own Numenera or the Cypher System core books you know the general quality and style you will be getting. Kyle A. Scarborough's cover depicts "The Thing Whose Name Sounds Like Horned Head But Is Not," aka "The Beast," "The Maker of the Poisoned Promise," "The Liar Saint," "The Uncast Shadow," and my favorite--for personal reasons--"The Black Stag." 

The book begins with a full page introduction by the authors and creators of the original podcast, Steve Shell and Cam Collins. Click that link sometime and give it a listen. This Introduction, along with Part 1 and later Part 4, give you a general overview of the setting, so lets talk about that all first.

Set in a slightly alternate Appalachia in the early decades of the 20th century (with some episodes set later and some before), Old Gods of Appalachia (game and podcast) speaks of the powers in these mountains, and the effects of their interaction with the human communities living in them. Most dread of these powers is the Inner Dark. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when these mountains soared far higher and steeper than they do today, Those Who Sleep Beneath were imprisoned beneath them. Not gods, their power is godlike, and should they escape their prison it would be the end of humanity if not all life on Earth. As entire geological ages passed and these mountains were slowly weathered down into the rolling hills and hollers we know today, Those Who Slept Beneath were able to exert some of their power, calling humans to settle in this region, to seek them out, and to dig. The greatest servants of these eldritch horrors are the Deep Things, like the Blag Stag on the cover, the generals of the Inner Dark's armies. Next come the Middle Things, powerful horrors and servants, followed by the Low Things, mostly mindless animal-lever terrors used as hunting dogs and shock troops.

What locked the Inner Dark below the mountains? Possibly the other great power in these mountains...the Green. less malignant that the Inner Dark certainly, the Green is nevertheless the raw and untamed power of life and nature. Creation, destruction, recycling. The Green is the food chain and the breeding cycle, overwhelming instinct, but also health and healing. Folk in these mountains can sometimes use its magic to their own benefit, as well as against the Inner Dark.

There are other powers, independent ones. The Boy. Jack. The Railroad Man. The Dead Queen. But the ones above are the primary forces player characters will be dealing with.

The horror in the podcast and game leans heavily on folk horror, but I would argue it is more of a thing in itself. Folk horror is rooted in old superstitions, paganism, the isolation of a rural setting, cryptids, and folk magic/religion. All of those elements are indeed present here, but the inclusion of forces like the Green and the Inner Dark make Old Gods of Appalachia something different. Folk horror tends to be "us vs. them," with "us" being urban outsiders and "them" being the locals. Midsommer, The Ritual, Children of the Corn, and The Wicker Man are all excellent examples. The outsider comes to the region, gets caught up in the dark local magic, and horror ensues. Had Dracula just been the initial 40 pages of Jonathan Harker's journal, it would have fit the bill. 

But that is not really Old Gods of Appalachia at all. Instead, it is often a case of the rural local people drawing on folk magic, lore, and traditions (see below) against the eldritch power of the Inner Dark, or other horrific enemies. In this way I think Old Gods reinvigorates the genre by jettisoning some of its more tired tropes and at the same time seeing the folk of the hills and hollers as protagonists rather than antagonists.   

To that end, Part 4 digs deeper into the setting, with an overview of central Appalachia (the game does not extend south into Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia, or north into New York). The geology, geography, weather, flora and fauna of the region are summarized, as well as the history and origins of its people. there is a broad look at the people and how they lived, both in the hollers and in the towns and cities. Communication, transportation, entertainment, commerce, and because of the time period Prohibition, are all discussed Specific locations and characters from the podcasts are detailed here as well. 

One of the more critical sections (as touched on above) is the discussion of Appalachian magic, ranging from the folk magic known as "witchcraft" and "granny magic" to the magic of the Green and the Inner Dark. Magic plays a bigger role than it might in a Call of Cthulhu adventure, because this is not the alien magic of Lovecraft's "cosmicism." Sanity, and madness, is not at much a part of the game. Yes, the magic of the Inner Dark is ultimately corrupting, but the folk magic of the hills and the power of the Green can often be called as a weapon against it. These are ultimately isolated, self-reliant communities that must look out for themselves when the monsters come crawling. They cannot wait on the learned men from Miskatonic to always show up on time.

Part 2 "Welcome to the Family"

This section then, a full 100+ pages, is character creation. This sounds like a lot, but if you know games powered by the Cypher System at all you will see it is really about offering you a selection of detailed choices rather than complexity.

But here is where I come to the first mention of what I am not going to be doing here. As mentioned earlier, I have a very detailed and in-depth review of the Cypher System here, so if you are not at all familiar with the game and you want to understand Old Gods of Appalachia's rules, I urge you to go there. Here I would prefer to focus on this incarnation of the system. 

At your core the characters in Old Gods are still defined by Might, Speed, and Intellect, with Pool, Edge, and Effort being important factors of those traits. There are still six tiers to rise through.

Characters are also still defined by Descriptor, Type, and Focus. Namely "I am an (adjective) (noun) that (verbs). The character Types are now Protectors (Cypher System Warriors), Sages (Adepts), Explorers (Explorers), and Speakers (Speakers). All have been give rewrites to make them fit better into the specific setting.

Some of the Descriptors are familiar, but a surprising number are new here, again, tying specifically into the Appalachian setting. For example, "Superstitious" comes with a boxed text of Appalachian superstitions your character likely subscribes to. The same is true of the Foci, with setting-specific ones like "Serves the Green" and "Fears no Haints" to others that resemble ones we have seen before, but are repurposed here for the period ("Cures What Ails Ya" or "Makes a High Lonesome Sound").

Through these descriptions, Old Gods frequently offers quotes from the podcast, tying these game features back to characters and situations in the anthology. The section finishes out with "Goods and Currency," which almost feels like it really belongs in the section on Appalachia for the amount of detail it gives on the setting.

Part 3 "Playing the Game"

This is really just the Cypher System rules...determining the task stat and difficulty, modifying the difficulty, and rolling a d20. Skills, assets, and effort all work the same way. It is still player-facing, meaning the GM doesn't usually roll any dice. Experience is still handing through intrusions, and the game includes a number of setting-specific character arcs to play through.

Part 5 "Running the Game" and Part 6 "Adventures"

After thorough and comprehensive advice on running the system, Old Gods of Appalachia comes back to the setting again with a really terrific assortment of just under 100 setting-specific Cyphers and about half as many Artifacts. Cyphers are one-use items, Artifacts can be used multiple times but often with a chance of "coming due," losing their powers permanently or needed somehow to be re-awoken. For me, these two sections really make the game unique. For example, the "Circle of Safety" cypher is a mason jar filled with churchyard dirt, ant eggs, seven nails, lye, gunpowder, and saltpeter. Pouring the contents in a circle around you and setting it alight will protect you with a nearly impenetrable barrier. A 'Fear Knot" is a hemp rope woven with animal hair soaked in spring water of seven days. Whisper your deepest fear to it, and the next 24 hours you are given protection against fear. The cyphers, and the artifacts, are all drawn from folklore and folk magic, giving tremendous flavor to the game.

"Haints, Spirits, and Revenants" come next, the chilling antagonists of the podcast and Appalachian folklore. The Powers mentioned earlier are all here (the Boy, Jack, the Dead Queen, etc) as well as a wide assortment of Things of the Inner Dark and a few "must-include" NPCs like the Witch Queen. I will not describe them because I want to spoil neither the podcast not the game for you, but for a game being called "eldritch horror" this is another area it distinguishes itself in.

The horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, as magnificent as they are, arise from Lovecraft's "cosmicism," that humanity is insignificant and without meaning in a vast, uncaring cosmos. The entities encountered are horrific because they are alien. Old Gods of Appalachia is different. The Inner Dark is about the horrors buried deep in the human heart. There is more a sense of Stephen King than Lovecraft to the podcast and it carries over beautifully to the game. These horrors will tempt you and corrupt you, because they seem to have an understanding of humanity that the Great Old Ones do not. It creates a very different sort of horror experience at the table.

Finally, the book closes with not one but two sample advantures, both exemplifying the kinds of stories Old Gods of Appalachia can tell.

Closing Thoughts

Neither Lovecraftian cosmic horror nor folk horror, Old Gods of Appalachia seems to be an alloy of both, making it neither. Lovecraft, I think, is "city horror," and more than that, "modern city horror." It is about a world that has lost meaning, or perhaps never had it...a world in which each new discovery takes us closer to madness.

Old Gods of Appalachia is different. "There are ancient powers...but listen to the wisdom of your ancestors so that you can deal with them. The game includes cities but is is deeply rural, and it expresses darknesses and secrets I think one can only understand if you embrace the setting, where modernity had been kept at bay and old truths remembered. 

I am particularly pleased that Shanna Germain and her team remained so committed to using the Cypher System here. I liked Invisible Sun but never fully grasped why a modified Cypher System was designed for it. Maybe because I grew up on Chaosium, I like house systems. Cypher was perfect for this. 

Buy this game if you are looking for a unique form of horror. Listen to the podcast and I can almost guarantee you will but it.

    

 

    

 

BASIC ROLEPLAYING UNIVERSAL GAME ENGINE, A REVIEW OF THE 2023 RERELEASE

A Few Brief Notes Before We Begin

I reviewed Basic Roleplaying (hereafter BRP) pretty extensively back in 2020. If you are new to the game, and want an in-depth look at it, please look there first. Here, I am going to talk mainly about the 2023 rerelease available from Chaosium here and DriveThruRPG here.

Second, in the interest of full disclosure, I have written several books for RuneQuest and contributed to others. RuneQuest is the game that BRP was invented for, but I had nothing at all to do with the 2023 rerelease. Having used the game system for forty-one years--I have literally played every Chaosium game that used BRP and a few games produced by other companies that have--I have a bias. To be clear, I love this engine.

Not a New Edition

Credited to original author Steve Perrin and the author of the 2008 omnibus "big gold book" edition, Jason Durall, the 2023 Basic Roleplaying is a revision and a rerelease of a classic. I picked those three words carefully. This is a revision and rerelease of the 2008 big gold book. Nowhere does it present itself as a new edition. If you are expecting a complete rewrite and overhaul of the game system--as with 3e, 4e, or 5e of Dungeons & Dragons--you are not going to get it. That is because of the third word I used, classic. You don't rewrite the rules of chess every time a new chess set is released. You don't need to. BRP has been played, tested, and loved all over the world for more than four decades. It remains immensely popular in Chaosium games like RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha and Call of Cthulhu, not to mention games produced by other companies, such as Delta Green or Aqularre. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

Okay Then Drew, Why A New Revision?

Because there are smart people at Chaosium.

Look, let's get the elephant out of the room first. Earlier this year the gaming industry was rocked by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro attempting to yank the Open Game License, effectively trying to remonopolize something that had been open for 23 years. The response of other companies, led by Paizo and companies like Chaosium, was to create a true, irrevocable, open game license, the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License. This would not be held by any specific company--who might be tempted as Hasbro was to yank it later--but like similar licenses would be held in trust to ensure systems participating in the license remained open to fair use. Chaosium, which already had an open game license for Basic Roleplaying, knew this was a smart move and committed to it nearly right away. The new rerelease of BRP was to get it out under the ORC license...but instead of just re-issuing the 2008 BRP, they moved rapidly to put together the art and lay-out teams responsible for the terrific look of recent Chaosium products to make 2023 BRP worthy of being on the shelves alongside any modern RPG product.

2023 BRP is not just "sexier" than the previous release, however. This is where Jason Durall comes in. The release is cleaner, leaner, and up-to-date in terms of language. 

What's In It?

The core mechanic of BRP is roll percentile dice under a skill or characteristic percentage. That's it. If you have "First Aid" at 55% on your character sheet, and you roll a 55 or less on two ten-sided dice, you succeed. Everything your character can do is right there on the character sheet, with a percentage beside it. If you don't have a skill that applies, take one of your characteristics--Strength, Constitution, Size, Intelligence, Power, Dexterity, Charisma, (and in modern settings Education)--multiply it by five and roll under the result as a percentage.

That's it. That's the entire system.

The rest is optional. Basic Roleplaying draws on previous games that have used its mechanics (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Superworld, Ringworld, ElfQuest, Pendragon, Nephilim, etc) to pull together a ton of optional rules. You are not required to use any of them, but they are there in case your campaign needs them. 

For example, "hit points." The default method to determine how many hit points your character has--effectively the amount of damage they can take before being incapacitated or killed--is to average your Constitution (health, endurance) and Size. But what if you want something grittier and more realistic? There is an optional rule for "hit locations," where limbs, torso, head, etc have their own hit points. What if you want a more heroic option? Use "total hit points" and add your Constitution and Size rather than averaging them.

Again, BRP is a rules buffet. Take what you like, ignore the rest.

Playing a horror game? Use the optional Sanity rules adapted from Call of Cthulhu. Running a superhero game? The "Powers" chapter is for you. "Spot Rules" has rules for almost anything you can conceive of--aimed attacks, acid, asphyxiation, aerial combat (and that is just a few of the "A's")--but again, they are options if you need them. You can very easily turn BRP into whatever sort of genre you need it to be. 

What's New?

We have some goodies from the latest edition of RuneQuest. Passions are here, more (again, OPTIONAL) ways to define the psychology of your character and use them in the game. Reputation is here too, showing how recognizable your character is and what people think about them. Augments are here, using Passions or skills to provide a bonus to specific rolls. For example, you want to use your Bargain skill to negotiate a deal. You might augment it with Insight...getting a "read" on the people you are bargaining with and using that for your negotiations. 

What Is Not Here?

The percentile characteristics of Call of Cthulhu are absent (easy enough to do yourself...just multiply by 5). Pushing is missing, as are bonus and penalty dice. I think the message here is "if you were thinking of using the ORC to produce Call of Cthulhu supplements outside of the Miskatonic Repository," think again. As a Jonstown Compendium author, to my mind that is fair.

Also missing is some of the simplification used in Rivers of London. But to be fair, none of that was ever BRP, it was specific to RoL.

Final Thoughts

Look, if you have the 2008 edition, you do not need the 2023. That has never been the way Chaosium played the game. Early on, D&D learned that to sell copies you have to reinvent the wheel every five years. But Call of Cthulhu barely changed through six editions, and even the 7th edition is essentially the same game. RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha is basically 1978's RQ2 with additional features. Sharks have not evolved since prehistoric times because they haven't needed to. Sometimes a design is just classic.

Having said this, you should want the 2023 revision. It reads better, it is cleaner, and it has the amazing production values of modern Chaosium products. I am not throwing my copies of the big gold book out, but I am looking forward to the print version of the 2023 and it will be the one I use going forward.

This is one of the simplest, most flexible, most customizable engines in the tabletop gaming business. That is why it has lasted this long. You can talk about antiquated game systems, about out-of-date mechanics, but you are saying nothing other than personally preferring your Pokemon cards to chess. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing wrong with a classic either. This is a definitive update of a definitive game system.  

   

           

The "Special Reference Works" of Courtney C. Campbell

IN HIS OWN 1978 "SPECIAL REFERENCE WORK," The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook, Gary Gygax wrote;

Considerable enjoyment and excitement in early play stems from not knowing exactly what is going on...(e)xploration, travel, and adventure in the "world" will eventually reveal the secrets heretofore hidden, and the joy of actually earning them will be well worth the wait. (p. 7)

This is an early articulation of the "three pillars" of classic Old School gaming: combat (the "adventure" part, the joy of getting your character into and out of scrapes), social interaction (the "travel" part, encountering all the odd NPCs with their quirks and motivations), and exploration. Really, all of this can be summed up as "discovery," and it was the thrill of discovery that kept players coming back to the table. Combat was part of it, but not as much as it would become in the decades ahead.

The Old School Revival or Renaissance (with a nod to George Lucas we might even call it "Return") is about the rediscovery of discovery. Instead of well-lit dungeons where half the party has infravision anyway, these are darker delves where your torch is your best friend (one of my favorite treatments of the "light is your best friend trope" is in Veins of the Earth). Instead of building a character, players roll them, and their "feats" and "bumps" will largely derive from what magic items they uncover. And instead of GMs planing narrative arcs and engaging in hours of world-building, the entire gaming group gets the thrill of discovering the world as they go along.

Now there is a lot of creativity in the OSR, but every now and again a product comes along that knocks you back on your heels and plants a grin on your face. Recently for me, a series of three books--On Downtime and Demesnes (2019), Artifices, Deceptions, and Dilemmas (2021), and Bestial Ecosystems Created by Monster Inhabitation (2022)--did just that. I will let you, dear reader, work our the acronyms of those titles for yourselves. These are the brainchildren of one Courtney C. Campbell, who author's bio in the first work captures the flavor of the writing in general. 

System agnostic, these books would make wonderful additions to a brand-new OSE campaign just as easily as they would a 1st edition AD&D game that has been going on for decades. I have even used bits of them in my RuneQuest campaign. It doesn't matter what "Old School" game you are playing. You want these.

The first volume, ahem, OD&D, is completely dedicated to what characters do when not in the dungeon. It focuses on creating villages, towns, and cities, on making them logical and believable, but chiefly on making them fun. With ideas ranging from "Influence" (characters building up power bases as they settle in a community) to what to do with all that gold (philanthropy? research? orgies?), it is simply brimming with brilliant ideas. One of the earliest, "Navigation," was a sort of lightbulb moment for me that I was embarrassed to confess to never once having thought of in running and writing RPGs for decades. Basically, it takes time to get around a city, and characters get lost. The bigger the community the more time it takes. Trust me. I have lived in Tokyo for a decade and I still get lost on a weekly basis.

There are rules on gaining optional skills and talents, but making them location and character-based, not generic class features. There are rules on henchmen and hirelings, there are hundred of quirky random NPCs. All of them clean, simple, and self-contained. The book is a buffet to add spice to your game.

AD&D (Courtney's book, not Gary's) has a subtitle that had me doing a spit take with my coffee, "Killing Characters Fairly." Like OD&D, this is a compilation of ideas, rules, and suggestions, this time on how to make hazards, traps, and encounters...fair. I don't mean "balanced!" Again, this is Old School philosophy. But as the author says on the back "No longer will your players complain about traps or unfair encounters. Now when they meet their doom, they will blame themselves for their own foolishness!" It is filled with images and examples of rooms one might encounter in a dungeon, truly devious traps that if players are cautious and logical they should be able to get around, and the kind of hazards (natural and not) that can get you killed while adventuring.

Finally, BECMI. This book is dedicated to the monsters, but this is not a collection of stats. Instead, Campbell goes monster by monster alphabetically, covering all of the truly classic beasties, and offering suggestions of how to make them different for each campaign. In some cases there are four, five, or six pages of clever ideas. Essentially, these prompts get you thinking, ensuring that players will forever be on their toes. Do unicorns, for example, "gain their power from the chaste and pure of heart" or are they "warlike fae sustained by bloodshed, righteous fury, and fanatical zeal?" There are scores of ideas, some dark, some comical, but mainly clever.

We are told not to judge books by their covers, but these are really evocative and quirky, throwbacks to the eerie and awesome game art popular in the pre-Dragonlance days. The art wraps around, so on the shelf they really stand out.

These books are currently available on DriveThruRPG in PDF and print-on demand. I link the bundle here, but scroll to the bottom of the page for other buying options. There are terrific examples of the energy and creativity coming out of independent and community content creators, at a time when we need to remind ourselves how valuable those folks are. 

         

CRIMSON KING, ANOTHER RUNEQUEST REVIEW

Moonstruck

Blame it on Aristotle.

It was his theory, that because it was the "moistest" organ in the body, the brain was the organ most affected by the Moon. Our closest heavenly neighbor clearly pulled on the tides, so it followed it also pulled on the wet lump in our heads. Later, the Roman philosopher Pliny concurred. The Moon, you see, caused dew to form, and therefore also caused water on the brain.

This notion, that the Moon is connected to madness is a peculiarly Western one, and a relatively modern one at that. The connection is not really there in the language. The English "Moon," from the Old English mona, is related to words like the Latin menis and the Sanskrit masah, all of which derive from a PIE word meaning "month." They are related to words like "meter" and "measure." This of course is because the phases of the Moon were a nearly universal way to measure time. Meanwhile, Luna, which gives us "lunatic," simply means "brightness" (related to the Latin lux and English words like "lucent" and ironically the opposite of madness, "lucid").

Mythology doesn't seem to associate them either. The Egyptian Moon god Khonsu was associated with time and fertility. The Hindu Chandra was associated with night and vegetation. The Mesopotamian Sin was associated with cattle, likely because the crescent Moon looked like bull horns, and thus Sin looked after cowherds and shepherds. The same association with horns probably made the Japanese Moon god Tsukuyomi the patron of hunters. The Greek Selene was also described as having horns, and her late association with Artemis confirmed hunting aspects. The Roman Luna has horns too, and was associated with brightness and fertility...but not insanity.

Yet when it comes to Greg Stafford's Glorantha, and the mythology thereof, the connection between the Moon and madness is definite. The Red Moon hovers there in the sky, and when it is "full" (at least from the perspective of Dragon Pass, the region where much of the action of the setting takes place), werewolves run wild and Chaos is strong. The Red Moon's Seven Mothers cult teaches the Rune spell "Madness." The elemental spirits of the Red Moon, "Lunes," inflict madness on their victims as well. So it would seem that Stafford, whose Glorantha was created to explore mythology, got it wrong here. 

Except of course that for Stafford mythology was a living thing, an on-going process. It doesn't stop with Homer and Ovid, pinned down like dead butterflies under glass. The association between the Moon and madness has been a common one in European folklore and mythology the last two thousand years, so naturally he included it in the mythology of the Red Moon, the Lunar Empire, and the Red Goddess. In the same way that Orlanth cannot be said to be Thor--or Jupiter, or Perun, or Hadad, or Indra, etc.--the Red Moon is not any single cultural or mythological notion but an amalgamation of many such notions. Indeed, in the case of the Red Goddess is it obvious, as she is an amalgamation of goddesses. She has the associations with lunacy, sure. But she is also connected to cycles and time, to Life and Death, and light as well. The "lumi" in "Illumination" is related to "luna" too.

C'mon Drew, Can We Get to the Freakin' Review Now?

I mention all this because Nick Brooke's Crimson King is simultaneously an exploration of ALL of the multiple facets of Glorantha's Moon goddess and completely, utterly, insane. Nuts. Bonkers. Deranged. Mad. Literally, quite literally, out of its mind.

Yet even more than with his previous Jonstown Compendium entry, Black Spear, I find myself completely unable to explain why I say this without ruining the entire scenario for you. In fact in writing this review, I had to go to the Jonstown Compendium page to see what Nick had to say about it so that I knew how much I could say about it...and the answer is, "not much." 

So I am not going to tell you where it is set, or who the protagonists are, or any of the plot. In fact, as I looked over what I had initially jotted down for this review, I had Buffy Summers in my ear asking "Huh? Can you vague that up for me?" As a demonstration of exactly how much of a nerd I am I also had River Song in the other ear warning "spoilers." So you and I are going to have to tread lightly here.

Set in the year 1627 S.T., Crimson King is a roleplay-heavy scenario in three acts (it could, with little effort, be set in a different year). There is a fight scene, sure, but Crimson King is more improvisational theater than tabletop wargaming. It is superbly illustrated, but that is a hallmark of Nick Brooke's projects. Brooke brings interior illustrations by Linnea Mast, Mike O'Connor (from Black Spear), Dario Corallo, and Brooke's fellow Greg Stafford Memorial Award winner Katrin Dirim (2020 and 2021 respectively) to the project, with striking cover art by John Sumrow. It sees the players taking on the roles of powerful dignitaries of the Lunar Empire, the movers and shakers you might say, and places them together at a dinner party somewhere in Lunar territory. Along with the usual palace intrigues there is a conspiracy afoot and then things take a sharp turn. 

A really sharp turn. In fact, (REDACTED: SPOILERS).

Where was I? Oh yes. Crimson King is full of details and ideas that flesh out various facets of the Lunar Empire and its religion, with detailed descriptions of famous Lunar luminaries and aspects of the Moon (each beautifully illustrated by Dirim). There is a lot here that could be dropped into any Lunar campaign. It is nominally a sequel to the author's The Duel at Dangerford and the aforementioned Black Spear, but there is no reason it has to be. It could easily be dropped into any campaign. It also...um..."reinterprets" elements from A Rough Guide to Glamour and Life of Moonson but you really don't need those either.

On the other hand, if you know any of these products you will have a much better idea of what you are getting here. Crimson King is distinctively a Nick Brooke Production. It is playful rather than stuffy, juicy rather than dry, and tongue-in-cheek rather than solemn. It references pop music and Terry Gilliam (not to mention Star Wars, Casablanca, Mission Impossible, the Eurythmics and John Carpenter). If you are looking for academic, and by this I mean "self-important" rather than "informative," this is not that. It takes the MGF concept ("maximum game fun") and runs with it.

And yet, damnit, the thing I most want to tell you about Crimson King is the one thing I can't. The scenario has one of the best "pulling the rug out from under you" scenes I have seen in recent RPG memory...in a good way. There is a twist in this that makes it terrific, but that is about all I can say.

You will come to Crimson King for the phenomenal production values, gorgeous art, and trademark Brooke wit. You will remember it for the setting and the ingenious plot twist. Crimson King is lunacy of the highest order, absolutely insane. Yet for a hobby in which people sit around have a consensual hallucination...is that really a bad thing? 

     

     

     

      

HYDRA - ADVENTURERS FROM THE LUNAR PROVINCES, a RuneQuest Review

The Joy of Jonstown

One of the greatest assets of a program like the Jonstown Compendium is content. Glorantha--the setting of the world-famous RPG RuneQuest--is a big world, but publisher Chaosium has never been a big game studio. The result of this is that no matter what products they are currently focused on producing, fans are going to want something from outside that focus that Chaosium is not working on. The best example of this is the oft-repeated lament that everything is focused on Dragon Pass and Prax. "What about Ralios?" "Fronela?" "Kralorela?" "Pamaltela?" Et cetera ad infinitum. One of the best features of the latest edition of RuneQuest is that it ties characters deeply into the setting (previous editions, like RQ2 or 3, were somewhat more vague with cultural backgrounds like "Barbarian" or "Townsman"). This makes it tricky, however, to play characters and campaigns outside of the detailed cultures in the core rulebook.

Jonstown Compendium to the rescue. Now instead of waiting for Chaosium to get around to the East Isles, we have Scott Crowder do it...and if that was not enough East Isles for you, Hannu Rytövuori, David Cake, and Nils Weinander delivered more. Simon Phipp has brought us to Dorastor several times, Paul Baker turned his eyes on Kralorela and Teshnos, and dozens of other authors have served up much, much more. Really, just do yourself a favor and get the catalogue for all the amazing content out there. The point is the Jonstown Compendium helps to make RuneQuest a tremendously well supported game.  

And on that note, I have a review to get to.

Adventurers From The Lunar Provinces

Since the world of Glorantha was first revealed to mortals in 1975's White Bear and Red Moon, the core struggle in the setting has been between the Lunar Empire and the new, upstart kingdom of Dragon Pass. The Empire invaded the mountain nation of Sartar, the desert region of Prax, and had designs on the sophisticated southern matriarchy of Esrolia, until an upstart hero named Argrath came along. A sort of Alexander figure, Argrath liberates Prax, becomes Prince of the newly liberated Sartar, and is invited to become hegemon and defender of Esrolia all in the space of four years. He then turns his eyes north to the Empire that once held his new domain and exiled him.

Now, it's been traditional--but by no means mandatory--for RuneQuest adventurers to come from the regions Argrath claimed and to nurse anti-Lunar attitudes. This gets oversimplified somewhat in chat rooms and discussions casting Argrath as the "good guy" and the Lunars as the baddies. I think a lot of this was the zeitgeist of the period RuneQuest originally appeared. The first edition came out when a little-known film called Star Wars was in theaters, and it was easy to cast the Sartarites and Praxians as plucky rebels against a mighty Empire equipped with its very own titanic orb of doom hanging in the sky ("That's no moon," but it was, the Red Moon that hovers in the sky over the Lunar capital of Glamour). As a result, many people played the rebels and the Lunars always had British accents.

This was not universal, however. Full disclosure, my second RQ2 character (and the one I played most of my adolescence) was a Lunar. And since one of the core features of Glorantha is that is rejects the whole "black/white, good/evil, light/dark" ethos of many other settings, a lot of other people were interested in playing the Lunars too. 

Peter Hart's Adventurers From The Lunar Provinces focuses on the southern reaches of the Lunar Empire...not the Lunar heartland, but the tribes and nations it brought into the fold prior to all the headaches down south with Argrath. As such it might be better to think of these peoples as "Lunarized" rather than "Lunar," a distinction without a difference really as the Lunar Empire is as much a proselytizing religious movement as it is a military and political entity. This 58-page PDF is a companion to Hart's upcoming adventure Hydra!, set in the Lunarized kingdom of Tarsh. Tarsh is described in the core RuneQuest rulebook, but Adventurers covers the neighboring nations north of it; Aggar, Imther, Vanch, and Holay. 

And "cover" them it does indeed. The first section of the book details character creation, following the style and presentation of character generation in the "Adventurers" chapter of the core rulebook. You will, of course, still need possession of the RuneQuest rulebook to make use of it. 

This means that Adventurers details the base Passions, cultural Rune and skill modifiers, and family histories of the homelands mentioned above. The layout is nearly identical to the core rules, clean, well-edited, and easy to use. Art comes from public domain works, alongside RuneQuest-specific art from Jonstown alumni Dario Corallo and Martin Helsdon (from their superb art packs). Altogether it is a great looking book.

But two things really jumped out at me. The first is Adventurers' focus, and subsequent detail, on characters with military backgrounds. This is because Hydra! will apparently feature characters who are career soldiers or conscripted. You can, of course, use Adventurers to create other sorts of characters, but to prepare you for Hydra! Hart focuses on soldiers here. This means tables to determine what regiment you are from, what type of unit, patron deities, home base, and a corresponding page reference to the unit descriptions in Helsdon's terrific Armies & Enemies of Dragon Pass.

The second--and honestly this is reason enough to pick up the book in itself--is that Hart provides you with twenty pregenerated characters from these Lunar Provinces. These are full descriptions, complete with an illustration. I include one below. Each is unique, different from the others, and ready-to-play. On the other hand, they could also inspire players with ideas for their own characters, and would be of tremendous use to any RQ GM who needs a Lunar soldier to drop into an on-going campaign. Note too that they represent the diversity of the Empire. While some belong to Lunar cults, for example, there are plenty of followers of Yelmalio and Humakt as well.   

Along with all of this are handy timelines, lists of key battles, and even a terrific list of important temples in these regions. Maps come courtesy of the Argan Argar Atlas. Finally, in a tradition dating all the way back to Rurik Runespear and the travels in both Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, we have "Jonstown to Eneal--From the Journal of Salvatrix the Sober." This gives an insightful look into the region, the cultures, and the kinds of adventures that happen there.

Closing Thoughts

Adventurers From The Lunar Provinces is a sterling example of what the Jonstown Compendium has to offer, a product that is useful to GMs and players alike. Shifting the focus from Dragon Pass north, it nevertheless could be used to drop Lunar soldiers anywhere into a Dragon Pass or Prax campaign. Highly recommended, and has out appetites whet for Hydra!.

In the next review, we will take a look at Nick Brooke's new Crimson King, a product that features the other side of what makes the Compendium great...doing stories that Chaosium is unlikely to tell.  
  

    

LOOKING FOWL AND FEELING FAIR: DUCKS INVADE THE JONSTOWN COMPENDIUM

“I see. I look foul and feel fair. Is that it?”

- Strider, The Fellowship of the Ring

GREG STAFFORD's "GLORANTHA" is a flat world floating on a cosmic ocean. The sky is a dome. Metal comes from the bones of dead gods. Elves are sentient trees. Giant babies float down river on ark-sized cradles, and once my player character was hired by a talking fish. Yet with all this wonderful madness, the one element of Glorantha that is certain to generate controversy and complaints are the Ducks.

"Durluz," if you're nasty.

Ducks have been there from the beginning. "This is a race," RuneQuest informed us in 1978, "cursed by the gods during the Great Darkness...(i)t is unknown whether they were originally human and became feathered and web-footed, or originally ducks cursed with flightlessness and intelligence." Hardly comical, they are a cynical and grim race who manage to survive on the edge of Delecti the Necromancer's marsh. Hunted and hated, it is seldom wise to piss one of the little buggers off.

I am firmly in the camp that loves the Durulz, and when the AD&D crowd used to sneer at our Gloranthan Ducks back in high school I sneered right back at their hairy-footed halflings. I am loud and proud in my Duck defense. And thank the gods that I am clearly not alone. Authors Drew Baker (Highways and Byways, Return to the Big Rubble, Gloranthan Family Backgrounds, etc)  and Neil Gibson (Legion) have joined forces on not one, not two, but four Duck-tastic Jonstown Compendium releases (the fourth as of this writing is not yet released) detailing the race. With a wink and a nod to the classic Gloranthan Trollpak they are calling the line DuckPac. 

DuckPac has been released separately, but I suspect we might get a bundle down the road (this has been the pattern with Baker's releases). I will talk about the three titles currently available here.

Book 1: Myths, Legends, & Lore is pretty much as the title says, a 52-page PDF  introducing the Durulz of Dragon Pass. The real meat of the book begins on page 12, where the Ducks tell us their origins, how they came to be named, all about their culture and lifestyle, then about their anatomy. 

There is then a long and frankly moving section on the "Duck Hunts," one of the darkest chapters of their recent history. This is where the Duke paradox (see, I resisted the urge to say "pair of ducks" there) is truly highlighted. Our first instinct is to see them as comical, but in reality, Glorantha uses the Ducks to explore some very dark territory indeed. The "Duck Hunts" are nothing less than a pogrom, an attempt at genocide that mirrors some of the least savory chapters of terrestrial history. The treatment the authors give it here is grim--this is not a book for kids--but masterfully illustrates why the Ducks are far more than a punch line. They are, in fact, the underdog and a very persecuted minority. The secton on the "Duck Hunts" drives that home beautifully.

The book finishes out with a gazetteer of Durulz lands, complete with a map (see below). 

Book 2: Duck Adventurers is 90 pages on creating Duck player characters. This book mirrors the "Adventurers" chapter of the core RuneQuest rules and like them, includes several pregenerated characters. They start with Homeland and then go into Family History, which includes a section on the infamous "Duck Hunts," a generational trauma that will likely color your character's perceptions and feelings. Rune affinities follow, as do Characteristics, Occupations, and Cults. There are not a lot of surprises here. Occupations are familiar to us from the core rules but rewritten with a Duck focus (and we do have the new Occupation "Kafari," Ducks who master the business of river trade). There is a Duck name generator, the return of the "What the Such-and-Such Tells Me," a popular RQ/Glorantha tool that has an elder of the culture answering questions for younger members, and a terrific end section on playing Ducks. This includes a new table of Duck-sized weapons, a discussion of Duck movement rates, how to address the stereotypical "cowardice" of Duck characters, and a surprisingly detailed section on underwater combat. Then, if this was not enough, a terrific section of Duck specific items and artifacts. We finish with pregenerated characters and a sample Duck settlement.

Now, before we get on to book three, we need to talk about art and layout.

I've been saying in several of these reviews that it is really getting harder to tell what is a Chaosium product and what is a Jonstown Compendium product these days. DuckPac exemplifies this. With art credits going to Drew Baker, Neil Gibson, Tania Rodriguez, Rick Hershey, Lee O'Connor, Dominic Reardon, John Spelling & Forge Studios, these are the best looking Ducks I have seen in 40 years of playing RuneQuest. The tables, the maps, the diagrams, all are top notch. See for yourself:

Click to enlarge

With Book 3: Redfeather Dreaming we have a 133-page soloquest, a tradition I know I am not alone in being delighted to see revived for RuneQuest. Obviously this is the book I can say the least about, but it consists of more than 300 scenes or "story fragments" that have a high degree of replayability and could easily be adapted for a GM to run for a player. 

While the Ducks have had a sourcebook before (Mongoose published a Duck book for their version of the game), this is the first time we have ever seen anything worthy of the classic TrollPak. DuckPac is brilliant, a cohesive, sensitive, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek examination of what arguably is Glorantha's most iconic species. It's a "must have." 

THE CATTLE OF CTHULHU, a review of GET ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES

IT IS GENERALLY AGREED that 1979's Alien is essentially H. P. Lovecraft in space. It's not a perfect match--HPL was not big on working class heroes and no one delivers long monologues on the insignificance of humanity or the benefits of ignorance--but hey, one of the survivors is a cat, and that he would have approved of. The gist of the film is a group of people are out traveling the space lanes when they run into something, well, alien. Not Star Trek or Star Wars alien, no, this is the kind of alien that the more you think about facehuggers the longer you are put off wanting sex. The kind of alien that you cannot wrap your brain around. The kind of alien that is inimical to humanity.

Now I mention Alien because the crew of the USCSS Nostromo are just hard-working folks out there in the middle of nowhere doing their jobs, people trying to put food on the table. They weren't asking for any of this. They are not big bad space marines out on a bug hunt (Aliens), psychopathic inmates (Alien 3), or military doctors looking for the ultimate biological weapon (Alien Resurrection). The Nostromo crew are just operating a space tug, bringing cargo from point A to point B. Basically, they are space truckers on a long, desert highway. Or, if you think about it, cowboys out on the range.

2017's Down Darker Trails brought Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu to the 19th century American West, but Trails paints with broad strokes, covering the entirety of the "Old West" setting. What John LeMaire's Get Along, Little Dogies--a new supplement for Down Darker Trails available from the Miskatonic Respository--does is to focus on one aspect of that setting. It is 134 pages zeroing in on the "cattle drive." In other words--and I swear this is the last time I will beat the Alien analogy like a dead horse--John is concentrating on the helplessness, the isolation, of crossing a wide, empty expanse and encountering the Mythos far from the streets of Kansas City or Tombstone.

Out on the range, no one can hear you scream.

If I lost you back there, let me explain. The Miskatonic Repository is the Call of Cthulhu equivalent of the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest. It is Chaosium's community content program for its immensely popular and venerable game of cosmic horror. 

"Community content" is a slur in some circles, but those circles are continually getting smaller. With ENNIE award wins and bestselling titles, venues like Miskatonic and Jonstown are increasingly holding their own. As pointed out by Chaosium's own community ambassador Nick Brooke recently, they allow authors to do the kinds of projects that a publisher like Chaosium can't, either taking their games is bold new directions or diving deep into specific aspects of their settings. The latter is what John has done for Down Darker Trails.

 

In Part 1 Get Along, Little Dogies starts by giving you the reality. John provides a history of cattle drives in the American West and a discussion of their difficulty and necessity. There are in-depth explanations of where and when these drives happened, the various roles people played in them, and what it was actually like to be out there on the trail. All the terminology is there, the little details, and the author has to be commended for his exhaustive research. Useful spotlight rules are included, like a full page on lariat usage. 

Chapter 4 presents a number of episodes, "mini-scenarios" like "Gathering Lost Cattle," "River Crossing," and "Stampede" that turn the realities of the cattle drive into gamable challenges to play out at your table. Reading this chapter I kept thinking how much fun it would be to spend an evening just roleplaying a cattle drive sans the Mythos. 

But that isn't really what we are here for, and it is in Part 2 we are presented with a 40-page scenario that shows the Mythos colliding with characters just out there doing the job. Playable in a single session, "Get Them Dogies Rollin'" could easily be expanded with the episodes mentioned above, and could serve as a terrific springboard into a greater Down Darker Trails campaign. 

Obviously I am going to get necessarily vague here to avoid spoilers, but I will say the scenario is a memorable one, both for the uniqueness of the situation and setting and the way John has woven those all-too-familiar Lovecraftian tropes into the mix. The story provides a number of challenges both real and Cthulhian, and an escalating sense of dread.

The book rounds out with tons of NPC statistics, as well as stats for cattle, horses, and the scenario's new creatures. A few premade settings are offered to launch the story, a mix of believable historical ones and...well shall we say a "darker" option.

Get Along, Little Dogies holds its own nicely against any 7th edition Call of Cthulhu title, and that is a remarkable achievement for a one-man operation. It looks and feels like a 7e title should (and given the praise I have lavished on 7e products here that is saying something). Full of maps, detailed statistics, and a plethora of character hand-outs it is clear that the author has put the work in. There is art on nearly every page, a mixture of period pieces and the author's own work. If you like Down Darker Trails you are going to want Get Along, Little Dogies. It is a terrific expansion full of ideas to be mined. As mentioned its core concept--you out there in the desert, in the darkness, isolated and alone--ratchets up the horror. Yet even Basic Roleplaying players interested in historical roleplaying (or players of a game like Deadlands for that matter) will not be disappointed by this title. The author has clearly already put in the blood, sweat, and tears of research so you don't have to.