Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures: Review

Pitched as "a zero-prep OSR roleplaying game you can play in an afternoon," Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures has quickly become one of my go-to games to run. Even better, with the addition of the Further Afield supplement, it goes to a game perfect for a no-prep one-shot to a game well suited to a low prep on-going campaign. First, though, why pick up Beyond the Wall?

• Easy to understand rule-set, that captures the feeling of AD&D with lots of the fidgety bits and rougher edges sanded off. Almost all the rules a player needs are summarized in a half-page as part of their playbook. Speaking of the playbooks...
• Innovative, evocative and easy-to-complete character creation. With 40 (FORTY) playbooks, almost all of which you can get for free in printable PDF format, there's no shortage of player character options. Named perfectly, each playbook title provides it's own summation of what a character will be much better than "Fighter" or "Arcane Trickster". A few of my favorites include.
• The Assistant Beast Keeper
• The Future Warlord
• The Nobleman's Wild Daughter
• The Reformed Bully
• The Would-Be Knight
• The Village Bear
• But not only do the playbooks walk a player through character step-by-step with 7 tables to roll randomly on or choose options from, Beyond the Wall uses those same tables to have the players (and gamemaster) collaboratively create the party's home village, generating locations, NPCs and ties between the PCs. (You can hear how that all comes together by listening to the Session Zero of our Antagonist Relations Beyond the Wall actual play podcast).
• The scenario packs for one shot games are well-designed, no-prep and tie into the playbooks well. The GM adds to the pre-made tables with NPCs and locations created by the players, which means that the PCs start with investments in the plot (You can hear how that ties in by listening to my Lonely Fun Beyond the Wall setup podcast episode.)  This means that the PCs aren't just going to random NPC A for information or hearing about weird location B for the first time in some block text, but that they feel like they helped shape the NPCs and locations that come up in play.
• Each scenario also features helpful suggestions and sample monsters to use during play, making them easy to use at the table.
• There are a few things that might throw some people off though...
• It's definitely low magic, Fireball is a 5th level ritual that takes 5 hours to cast.
• It has AD&D inspired saving throws that you have to roll above and ability checks where you need to roll below your ability score. (There are optional rules to avoid these in the book, but the assumption is the more OSR style).
• It's not built for players who want to created highly customized, min/maxed characters or strange combinations. The playbooks definitely focus more on character history than unusual class and race combinations. Also, while there are options for Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes and Halflings, Humans are decidedly the default.

Still, it is well worth picking up if you have any interest in having an easy to pick up and play, old school feeling system that's perfect for one-shots. And if you want to hear more about what Further Afield adds, click here to see my review of that supplement (spoiler, I like it just as much).

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***

"Pitchfork Sad" - A review of Shadow of the Demon Lord

My #ShadowOfTheDemonLord players are trying to determine if villagers will be "pitchfork sad" if they steal a different child to sacrifice.

— Mr. Zack (@thatwordyguy) August 28, 2016

Shadow of the Demon Lord! I remember vaguely seeing kickstarter announcements and then stumbled back across it this summer after it was out in print and decided to give it a look. And man, am I glad I did.

The brief pitch of why I enjoy Shadow of the Demon Lord is this... simple, familiar but distinct d20 rules, with interesting races (hereafter referred to as Ancestries, as SotDL does), flexible class options (called Paths by SotDL), compelling monsters, a deadly and dangerous world to explore and a very distinct feel that pervades the system and setting that makes it feel very distinct from D&D. The splatter-gore meets crazed whimsy and dark mystery of the setting gels much better than I was expecting, walking a fine line sometimes between silliness and horror, as evidenced by the goblin warlock art below...

Anyway, if a darker game that allows for some wackiness and lots of random tables for character creation is what you like stuffed into your roleplaying sausages, then read the full review below for a taste of what goes into the meat grinder. (I was going to go with "is your jam" but I figured sausage making was a much more apt metaphor for SotDL, being both a bit sillier/juvenile and also a bit more grisly.)

Also, new table of random Human Skin Tones below! Or click here to skip to that...