IMPORTANT NOTE: this interview was originally for the TEETH RPG newsletter, which is very interesting and good, and you should subscribe to it. We conducted it just as the book was being distributed. I am sure we’ll talk about Deathmatch Island in detail elsewhere, since we’re very PARAGON-y over here, and there is much to talk about. Suffice to say, it’s a fascinating implementation of what we think is one of the most interesting RPG systems, and its creator, Tim Denee, is well worth getting to know.
We first became aware of Graham Walmsley’s work with Cthulhu Dark, an influential Lovecraft-in-miniature masterpiece which removed everything that distracted from investigative stories into beings beyond our ken (and perhaps even beyond our barbie), and gave it a firm underclass-looking-up-perspective.
Now, with Cosmic Dark, presently kickstarting, he’s back, turning his attention away from beings from beyond the stars, in favour of taking us all up there in an an A24ish sci-fi space-elevated genre RPG.
It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game in any meaningful way.
However you can skim and see what pops out.
This is the Skim, and this is what we got from skimming Mythic Bastionland.
IN A SENTENCE
Kieron: It’s OSR1 hexcrawl2 Pendragon3 in miniature4 (complimentary5).
Reviewing role-playing games is a controversial business. There’s some people who believe you can make a meaningful judgment about a game by careful consideration of its manual, and there’s other people who understand that’s nonsense.
You don’t need to read a game to review it. You can just look at its cover and make all the judgements you want. Of course, some people say you shouldn’t judge anything by its cover. Those people sound like the sort of people who didn’t have all their games stolen on the way home from Gencon on the train back to my home.
Recently we three — Kieron “DIE” Gillen, Jim “TEETH” Rossignol, and The Mysterious Third (Chris) — embarked on a hex crawl. To do so we combined a zine, The Vast In The Dark by Charlie Ferguson-Avery, and a lite dark fantasy RPG system, Mörk Borg by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. The word Mörk means dark (or gloom), so our calling it The Vast In The Mörk is a sort of joke by virtue of it actually being the same words. We’re clever like that. But in no other way.
Jim’s note: an initial version of this was originally published in the TEETH RPG newsletter, some years ago.
We’ve not had a great deal of opportunity to play new RPGs lately (at the time of writing), so it was a delight and a relief to indulge in an interesting one this week. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Chris Gardiner of Failbetter Games, James Hewitt of Needy Cat Games, and Kieron Gillen of in the Garrick’s Head, or at least that’s where I remember first meeting him, a long, long time ago.
Together, at Gardiner’s prompting, we played a game of multiple GM PBtA journalling game, The Thief & The Necromancer, by D. Vincent Baker (aka Lumpley Games). It was a rather an interesting experience, and I shall tell you about it!
Jim, Kieron and The Mysterious Third (Chris) have a regular group. We’re forever GMs, and play short campaigns where two are forever GMs no more. This is Threedom, and these our our stories.This time we report on Beowulf: Age Of Heroes.
Kieron: I’m smiling at your notes for this chat, Jim. “Oh no, we played 5E! Sort of.” The ‘sort of’ is carrying a lot of weight. Handiwork games seem to be folks really who are interested in bending 5E significantly, and there’s a lot of that here. As the basic intro Beowulf is set in the world of the Anglo-Saxon poems about a Danish hero who kicks the ass of a monster, and then its mum and then has a bad time with a Dragon (though kicks its ass on the way out). The game’s got a lot in, but its core thing is as a duet game – one GM, one player. That’s about all I knew going in – Warped 5E, literary-historical-setting, duet game. Is that a fair description?
I was probably making a cup of tea, as I usually am.
I just stared into the middle distance and thought “all role-playing games are either High Art or Fanfic” with a force that made me know that it was fundamentally true – which meant, on some level, it must be fundamentally false.
All dichotomies are false. You can never take this too seriously, as it’s a classic The Map Is Not The Territory trap.
However, given a certain definition of Fanfic and High Art, I think it’s can be a useful map. When I say “a certain definition” I mean “Mine.”
I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.
I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.
This is probably overkill, but it breaks my heart, and made me laugh. You can’t resist yourself sometimes. It is actively strange that RPG folks write rules about everything, but have avoided giving actual advice on basic play culture ideas. Generations after generations of players, falling into this particular trap. No more, I say.
Go! Print out! Stick it in manuals worldwide. This can be a better world, or at least one where people go down dungeons and fight kobolds more often.
It may work on other RPGs too.
I wanted to include it on the page, but I ran out of space, but a recent episode of Fear of a Black Dragon discussed this topic at length. If you want further inspiration, you can listen here. The segment starts 19 minutes in.
