Seeing our last two stories back to back made me think of something. Namely, Jim and my time with Conan and my time with Seven Part Pact and how each game chooses to treat your companions.
So the grandest campaign we have played in recent times was run by the Mysterious Third (Chris) and actually featured a Fourth (Dan, who isn’t even a Forever GM!). So it’s not really Threedom at all. Nevertheless, we must make our report! Since there is much to speak of, including the origins of one of our most important in-jokes, we will be efficient and concise, probably.
So: this was the Modiphius 2d20 system Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of (pub 2017), an official adventure — Waves Stained Crimson — adapted by (Chris) for his regular group and then run again for our pleasure. In it we capsized, captured a ship, killed many people by accident, more on purpose, freed slaves, got hitched, rescued a lost bride, and learned dark sea magicks. Also: we did some VENGEANCE. All very Conan-y.
I was asked if I wanted to be a wizard for a week. I said yes.
It was a playtest of Jay Dragon’s the Seven Part Pact, where up-to-seven (we did six) players are all academic wizards in a fantasy realm (Think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) Each has a title, and an area of magic that’s their domain (think the Wizard of Earthsea). Each’s domain is also an area of responsibility, to ensure it doesn’t fall apart (think, Sandman). They form a found-family of arseholes, each a being of almost unimaginable power, pursuing their own desires and schemes and often butting heads (think Amber). Each also takes a dual role, taking the tasks often reserved to the GM in a specific area – so, for example, the Faustian as a character is about demonic magic and preventing satan from escaping… but is also plays as the The Keeper of the Chains, who is called upon to make the complications in the world.
The Seven Part Pact is a GM-full game. I think it’s the only GM-full game.
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!
