quick reviews
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QuestWorlds: An Engine Looking for a Showrunner
Most of the games I get excited about start as a scenario in my head, not a ruleset. I write something like Barbarians at the Gates (mythic Rome, hard countdown, necromantic siege politics) and then go hunting for an engine that can carry it without me spending three evenings hacking in surprise undead rules and
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Hot War: Fallout, Monsters, and the Messy End of Empire
There’s something distinctly British about imagining the end of the world and immediately worrying about the paperwork. For many of the generation before mine, the formative apocalypse diet was Threads, grim BBC docudramas, and public-information films that strongly implied your best defence against nuclear fire was a kitchen door and a tin of emulsion. Reading
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Arcana Rising: Fireballs, Day Jobs, and the OSR Urban Fantasy That Got Away
There’s a very specific brain-worm that afflicts some of us. The conviction that surely there must be a game out there that does “modern wizards in our world” in a way that clicks with your group. I’m not talking high-concept urban horror and this isn’t about superheroes either. I’m talking about people with rent, phones,
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Out of the Ashes: Community at the End of the World
Sometimes I look at my fantasy campaigns and realise we’ve spent several sessions arguing about which direction to march in and about twenty minutes talking about what anyone is actually marching for. We do the epic road trip, we do the last stand on the battlements, and then the curtain falls before anyone has to
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Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells: A Hexcrawl Stress-Test
I’m doing this review because I’ve got The Evils of Illmire sitting on my desk like a wet promise. I want to run a hexcrawl. I want the feeling of a map full of bad decisions, where the party stares at a stretch of swamp and argues about whether the safest path is the one
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Hillfolk: Talk First, Fight Later (Maybe Much Later)
Hillfolk sits on that part of my shelf where the “conversation-forward” games congregate like gossiping aunties at a wedding. But I didn’t come to it for the soap. I came looking for a low-magic, community-first historical game, something that could live in the day-to-day friction of a tribe trying to survive winter rather than the
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After: Stonepunk Dreams at the End of the World
Every few months I get the itch for “my” post-apocalyptic game. I’m not looking for the one with gun-nuts in ice-cream vans or zombies in tactical vests, but something stranger: broken worlds, new cultures, weird ecology, big feelings about the end of everything and the awkward beginning of whatever comes next. Then I look at
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Dolmenwood: Pixie Boots on Firm Old-School Ground
There are books you leaf through and think, “Lovely art, someday.” Then there are books that smell like a campaign, the kind that squat on your shelf and mutter rumours until you give in. Dolmenwood is the latter: three brick-thick hardbacks that look like a children’s fairy atlas left out in the rain and retold
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Golden Scars & Bad Decisions: Reviewing Cosmic Dark
The phrase “cosmic horror in space” covers a multitude of sins and a fair number of excellent games. What makes Cosmic Dark interesting is not just the corporate-hellmouth vibe, but how confidently it structures that vibe into something you can run tonight. The book opens like a briefing from a smiling HR ghoul: you’re Employees
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a|state 2e: Hope, Grit, and the Corner You’ll Bleed For
I’m the kind of GM who likes frictionless rules and plenty of texture: fiction first, mechanics that nudge rather than nag, and a setting that gives me a reason to care whether the power stays on in a tenement. Also, I am an unrepentant sucker for good art; this book is a stunner. Paul Bourne’s
