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.
That’s me, by the way. That person is me.
At the top of the article is the photo I proudly took on the bed before leaving, showcasing everything I picked up, and clearly trying to demonstrating I’m a sophisticated person with wide-ranging tastes across the medium. As in, the sort of muppet who probably does deserve to have all his stuff stolen.
Here are my reviews.
Girl By Moonlight: Forged in the Dark game about magical girls, which I’ve heard a bunch of things about, before and since, in terms of how it bends the Forged in the Dark system in unusual and compelling directions. Forged in the Dark was first seen in Blades in the Dark by John Harper, where you play a rogue in a hellish city, a life I imagine a lot like that lived by whoever stole my luggage.
A Huge Red Dice: I bought it thinking it was going to be a lovely gift for my dice-obsessed daughter, but it was really for making the thief say “What the fuck?”
Void 1680AM: Award-winning post-apocalyptic journaling mix-tape game which clearly couldn’t be more my jam if it was actually a fruit-preserve I’d prepared. When I posted about all of this circa the actual theft, designer Ken Lowery did say he’d get me a replacement copy, which was very sweet, which means that Void 1680AM wins the Old Men Running The World Best Game of Gencon 2024 award. Congrats, Ken!
Jiangshi: Blood In The Banquet Hall: Award-winning game of a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant while fighting hopping vampires. I saw co-designer Banana Chan on Saturday night at the Rowan Rook & Decard Party and I think I said how excited I was to finally get a chance to play this, now I had bought it. I believe this was the last copy in the entire print-run for this edition of Jiangshi? A collectors edition, I’m sure, and certainly collected by whoever lifted my luggage from the rack when I wasn’t paying attention.
Slugblaster: Probably award winning too? I do like award-winning things. I think this was the end of the print-run too. That thief got some real gems. It’s a game which people have found hard to explain. Not me. I can explain it very easily, as I haven’t played it and only have this small photo of its pizza-box-shaped packaging to go on.
It’s Jet Set Radio Future, the RPG.
I also love imagining the thief finding this, being relieved that there’s something useful in the luggage, opening it expecting to find a pizza and then being crushingly disappointed that it’s another fucking indie RPG.
The Pendragon Starter Set: I’m not 100% sure what this is. It’s either a way to get a quick taste of Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian romance or it’s a cash-in branded sourdough starter. I will never know, unlike the person who stole my luggage, who could be chomping down fine bread even as we speak.
Beloved: A romantic ritual for you and your partner, with both journaling about your life together and sharing elements in a yearly ceremony with newly crafted vows. Aww. I presumably bought it as an over-optimistic gift for C, as if anyone with a two year old has time to write love-journals in rose-petal-ink while sitting in a grove in Lothlorien.
I Have The High Ground: Two player narrative game of flirty sword-fights which sounds great. The equivalent of “low ground” in South London trains is a seat where you’re facing away from the luggage rack, which no-one ever takes, unless they’re extraordinarily jetlagged and not thinking straight.
Axolotl with a Gun: I have no idea about what Axolotl with a Gun is about. What is a “gun”? What is a Axolotl doing with it? Just be clear, designers! Gnomic names are a bad idea. The word “gnomic” is probably a bad idea. I think “gnomic” means “features gnomes”
Viva La Queer Bar: I’m a sucker for a queer solidarity game, and “ends up in a queer bar” is one most common DIE RPG tropes, so I was glad to finally get a copy of this game about running a queer bar and all the joys and pains herein. There are several good queer bars between London Bridge and Nunhead, and perhaps my copy found its way to one of them.
Aying At World: For its second edition, John Peterson’s seminal RPG history Playing At the World has been cut into two halves, with one leaning on the history of D&D and the other the material related to the three pre-existing elements which become pillars of the game. As pictured, the title has been also split. Aying at World is the D&D history stuff, while Pl The will be all the stuff about the Brontes I ripped off for DIE.
DCC Special 7: All the weird dice which you use to play Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’m just sitting here hoping that the thief was in a predicament, and needed to randomly generate numbers from 1-7 or 1-30 and not sure what they’re going to do, and then opening my luggage and weeping in relief.
Shanty Hunters: A game about the hunting of shanties. There’s a boat on the cover. Maybe you find the shanties on a boat? Maybe you use a boat to get to the shanties? I think it may be using Gumshoe? Anyway, my luggage was stolen.
An Origin Award for DIE RPG: It was touching to briefly touch this award, before my luggage was touched by a thief on a South Eastern train to Sevenoaks. Since then, I received another award for DIE RPG and also failed to get it home, as this time as I gave it to our lovely Italian publisher rather than it being stolen. I don’t need a thief to not get my stuff home. I can not get things home all by myself.
The Privilege Of ????: I could google to check what the missing word. Instead, I will follow in the spirit of the person who reviewed DIE RPG from the manual and hated my stuff, but liked the scenarios and then decided that because they liked the scenarios they presumably hadn’t been written by me, despite the fact that every scenario (except Grant’s one) clearly says they’re written by me right at the top. Anyway, point being, The Privilege of ??? was definitely not written by Kieron Gillen.
Making a Tabletop RPG for YOUR Particular Kid: A distillation of a lot of knowledge from TTRPGKids, about making games, which does make you consider an alternative possible result of my Gencon haul disappearing. While it’s easy to imagine the crushing disappointment of whoever lifted my bag, we should dwell on the alternative. That this strange haul of weird games is actually a gateaway, the equivalent of Bilbo getting the one ring, or the Sex Pistols stealing Bowie’s equipment? Maybe it could be the start of something wonderful.
(When I started that paragraph, I didn’t think it would end up with me as the David Bowie in the metaphor, but here we are.)
In this case, an actual guide to creating your own games arrived in their hands. The stolen luggage is both an introduction to something they may not know about, and also an encouragement for them to try it. Maybe they’re curious? Maybe they think it’s fate that this ended in their hands? They read the games. They play them. Ideas absorbed, perspectives challenged. Games can be this? A design genius emerges from this chance theft. A few years down the line, I find myself browsing their award-winning games at a con, get talking about how they started playing and we realise the truth and we all laugh and laugh and then I demand my copy of Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall back, you fuck.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.
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