The Eternal Boundary - Review

The Eternal Boundary, the first published module for the 2nd Edition AD&D Planescape campaign setting, I was lucky enough to get a physical copy from a friend as a gift and have enjoyed running it twice. First, using 5th Edition D&D rules and some home-brew planar race and faction options and the second time this last summer using the original 2nd edition ruleset as part of my Roll20 Great Modron March campaign. I’ve touched on the Eternal Boundary module before when I discussed using Perplexities as Hooks but wanted to do a full review.

As the inaugural Planescape module, aside from two brief single page adventure prompts in the setting boxed set, the Eternal Boundary does a fantastic job introducing some of the seedier areas of Sigil as well as the kriegstanz or undeclared war between the factions and the power of belief in the setting.

Spoilers for the Eternal Boundary Follow...

Godless: The World of Fire and Blood (review)

GODLESS: The World of Fire and Blood

(You can read my review of Shadow of the Demon Lord here...)

This is the Shadow of the Demon Lord system with a post-apocalyptic setting bolted on and man, oh man, does it work better than I expected. There’s not a ton of alteration to the stuff from the base SotDL game, the ancestries get a post-apocalyptic background, the Clockworks become Transcendent, more cyborg than steeampunk. All the fey ancestries lose iron vulnerability and a few other things are tweaked, but for the most part it just adds the post-apocalyptic stuff. This does mean that you need a full copy of Shadow of the Demon Lord to play Godless, but you went out and picked that up right after my initial review on my recommendation, right?

It’s got all the strengths of SotDL: the stripped down, mostly intuitive, easy to run rules. The excellent path mechanic for advancement are kept, with a few new post-apocalyptic paths provided like Grease Monkey and Road Warrior. The specificity of the tables from SotDL, the interesting things that gave the game so much flavor are just as perfectly seasoned for a post-apocalypse in Godless; take this sample pair of interesting things: “A self-help book written by Tony Robbins” and “A bag of plastic toys made to look like food.” It sands off a little of the unevenness of SotDL as well, by leaving the setting largely unspecified, instead just providing suggestions for how to “Destroy Your World” to generate a post-apocalyptic Earth.

So what’s new? First, and one of the things I like best, are stories. Stories are a bit of character creation business in Godless, a more robust background mechanic than the core book. Which could be kind of confusing but look at it like this, the ancestry backgrounds are interesting, dangling hooks, a sentence or two, like this human background from Godless “An overprotective mother kept you locked in a cellar for your entire childhood. You escaped after she died.” Just a bit of strange character development meant to jolt a player’s imagination. The stories however, well, I’ll let Godless explain it “Characters in the World of Fire and Blood have endured much hardship and struggle before the game even begins. The stories of their past inform how they fit into the present and give guidance about how they might develop as the campaign unfolds.” Unlike the backgrounds which might give an interesting thing or a bit of corruption or insanity, each Story gives professions and a mix of benefits and hindrances. Take the Deluded story, for example…

Deluded

A rash of new religions appeared following the Cataclysm. Dismayed by the false promises in their holy books, people invented their own faiths—some new interpretations of the old, others invented from whole cloth. You follow one of these new religions and are called deluded because you cling to your faith in the face of the indifference of the cosmos.

• Professions: Gain one profession from the Fanatic table and one random profession.
• Strong Beliefs: When you would make a challenge roll, you can choose to make that roll with 3 boons. Once you do so, you cannot use this talent again until you complete a rest.
• Righteous: Your faith guides you through a world of unrest and uncertainty. After you complete a rest, you must spend 1 hour in prayer. Until you do so, you are impaired.

Brief, but flavorful, beneficial but not too constraining. A PC with the Deluded story could go on to take the Priest novice path, but it would work just as well for a Rogue, Warrior or Magician path. But tucked away there, where you might almost miss it there’s a little hint for the player for how their PC will interact with the world: “You follow one of these new religions and are called deluded because you cling to your faith in the face of the indifference of the cosmos.” The other nine stories are equally as good, providing both a launching pad for a PC and a sense of a character arc or direction for the player to keep in mind.

I didn’t get a chance to test out the Vehicle rules, but they look to straddle that sweet spot of providing enough options to have a really good car chase seen and not so many fiddly bits that it’s a massive pain to run. The new spells, creatures and items are all excellently suited to the post-apocalyptic feel and include things like explosives, zip-ties, spells to process fuel, tolerate radiation and the Inheritors (sentient man-sized cockroaches).

While there are only three adventures for Godless (as of March 2018), they are every bit as well-crafted and easy to run as the Shadow of the Demon Lord scenarios. I ran two of them, In a Pig’s Eye and Dancing in the Ruins.

***SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURES FOLLOW, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***

Corpse Chewer - Or a semi-improv, low prep 13th Age One shot you could run too

After the election my wife asked me to run a combat heavy one shot RPG as a distraction, I've been burnt out a little on 5e D&D lately, so I decided to run 13th Age instead.

I like 13th Age for this kind of adventure/monster fighting combat heavy game because...

• It's basically D&D. I mean, it's not official Wizards of the Coast branded D&D(TM) but it's got a unified d20 mechanic like recent D&D, the classic classes, races and a lot of the feel.
• It's good at what it does and focuses on that. It's not the game I'd run if I wanted to run a social intrigue game (probably, right now, V20 Vampire the Dark Ages would win) or the game I'd run if I wanted a gritty game where the PCs struggled to survive (for now, that would probably be Shadow of the Demon Lord) but for a combat heavy game where PCs will have cool stuff to do during combat and you want a high fantasy feel it's an excellent choice. 
• 13th Age PCs are surprisingly simple(ish). For the game I just used some pre-made 4th level characters (and recommend you do too) and they all fit onto a single page without needing a magnifying glass to read the type. Even if players make their own PCs, they really only need their class write up at hand to play and won't need to flip between multiple sections of the core book the way any of the spellcasting classes in 5e D&D do (and remember that 5 of the 12 classes of 5e have spellcasting and gain or can gain spells, though that Totem Barbarian who gets two spells as rituals won't need the book as much as the wizard, but still...)
• Icon Relationships, Backgrounds and One Unique Things encourage player investment, even for one shot characters.
• A few memorable one unique things from when I ran this...
• Renowned as a 'fuck-up'.
• Attracts random cats when she sings.
• Half of his face looks like a corpse.

So, without further ado, here is Corpse Chewer, a semi-improv, low prep 13th Age One shot. It's semi-improv because I'm providing the skeletal sketch of the plot arc and combat encounters but you can improvise the description of the dungeon and environs itself and some of the flavor bits can be tailored to the icon relationships the players pick.