Itch.io Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid, Part 2

Jul 23, 2021 14:38

In which I mostly review tabletop rpgs and supplements. (And a couple of random bookish things mixed in with them.)

Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Castlevania - An extremely thorough look at the Castlevania series of games, with the development of characters and game systems across them, version differences, regional differences, and commentary; all clearly written by folks who love the series. (Though my big point of contention is that “hardcore” fans love the high-difficulty games and throw shade at the easier ones; I didn’t develop my real love for the series until the added the rpg elements and dropped the difficulty.) I found this entertaining and it had a bunch of trivia tidbits I didn’t know.

Running Away: a small guide by Neen Lancaster - This is an artsy zine with a series of dreamy, one-age imaginary situations. I found it less meaningful and more up its own ass; or in simpler terms: it does not appeal to me.

Valiant Quest (standalone ttrpg) - Is a fairly classic fantasy rpg and a lot of the book is details of classes, races, abilities and spells. It’s got a very similar overall feel to Dungeons & Dragons, just with a different set of base mechanics and some different flavor text. (You could take any classic D&D adventure and, but swapping out the monster stat blocks, run it under this instead.) The action economy is better than basic D&D, but that’s also because it’s set up the same way Pathfinder 2E is and that’s an easier overall system to pick up if you already know any D&D variant. The elemental affinity system for magic and certain characters is also interesting, but unless you’re trying specifically to run The Dragon Prince on tabletop, it’s not worth the complexity involved.

Doikayt: A Jewish Tabletop Roleplaying Game Anthology - There are some interesting ideas here, some of them more distinctly Jewish, and some a Jewish reflavoring of a more common theme. “Emet” (the Golem game) is likely to be something I'd bolt onto another system that had real rpg mechanics behind it; I like the general flavor to it. I also know where to look to generate a Jewish-flavored medieval town; the world building entry is solid. There are a few cases like “Talmud” where the presentation is cute (if you get the references) but it's unplayable. The rest are pretty much all structured storytelling party games, for when you have a room full of theater kids who happen to be Jewish. If I try any of them, the one I was most interested by was “The Wise Men of Chelm,” because it's about coming up with really goofy ideas to ordinary problems.

Four Elements’ Light (standalone ttrpg) - A ttrpg love letter to the Golden Sun series of video games, which I was immediately skeptical of because the ability-based puzzles and djinn collecting/class upgrading are the things that really stand out in that series. This is a homebrew dungeon crawler/heroic fantasy game that I know I’m never going to attempt playing, because the rules are so complicated that I don’t want to learn and teach them for a one-night session, but also not complicated enough that I can trust they dealt with common situations well. The one thing that I would consider using (in concept if not in exact mechanics) is the djinn mechanic: Like the games, they give you a free spell, then they’re “charged” when you use it, and you can use djinn charges to summon something. This feels like it might work as a hack to D&D 4E, where combats are typically long and tactical-attach encounter powers to djinn, and you can cast a powerful summon spell when you’ve used enough of them. That aside, I think I’d get a better Golden Sun feel from a game where everyone had a selection of cantrips and had to use them to solve problems in creative ways.

Unnatural Watches (D20 supplement) - A collection of anachronistic chronometers for your D20-compatible games. Unfortunately, they’re all presented in a “smug teenager” tone. There are a couple of cute ideas, but this isn’t as clever as the author clearly thinks it is.

Interstellar Errands (Minimalist TTRPG) - A DM-less setup for a single night’s adventure in space; clearly intended to be even more freeform storytelling than Lasers & Feelings. (The line between DM-less game and prompted improv theater game is very thin.) I’m intrigued by the “roll for an outcome and then tell how you got to it” mechanic and may playtest this at some point.

Trusted with Its True Name: LeGuinian Magic (rpg commentary) - This is not a system; this is an idea, barely fleshed out into a blog post. To summarize: Magic needs to require awareness of the world via true names and personal interaction, so you don’t just mechanically summon the rain, you have an awareness of how the rain feels about being summoned and how the landscape reacts to it. Which, sure, that’s a neat little worldbuilding hook for your storytelling fluff and freeform games, but provides nothing mechanical to hang it on. I want someone to give me 10 pages of how you’d apply that to a D&D 5E campaign, including GMing magic as an NPC and impacts on game balance.

The Fane of the Hungry God (D20 supplement) - A standalone dungeon crawl; provides a map with 5 notable locations, stats for 6 monsters, a treasure table and a random encounter table to pad things out. If you need a one-session adventure to thwart That Which Hungers From Below, here you are. Definitely going in my “I need a game but have no plans” pile.

What’s So Cool About Time Loops? (Minimalist TTRPG) - An interesting setup for a single session, and man, I do love me some Groundhog Day loops. The formatting of this is a little gimmicky, the system is a little fast-and-loose, and I honestly think that you need the GM to plan a lot more for a loop plot than this suggests/implies. But I’m going to put it in my list of things to try.

Thrown for a Loop (Minimalist TTRPG) - On the other hand, this is an even rougher system that seems to be specifically want to play a Groundhog Day loop episode of the TV show Eureka. It narrows down to that specific scenario but doesn’t give you nearly enough material to work with in actual gameplay, so you can’t use it as a flexible minimalist game or as a pick-up-and-play module.

Cook & Hero (Minimalist TTRPG) A hack of Honey Heist created as a base to run Bakto’s Terrifying Cuisine. I’ve wanted to run the latter since I got it in the last itch.io bundle, so this is going on the to-play list.

You Have 7 Days (Minimalist TTRPG) - Clearly an attempt to make a tabletop version of The World Ends With You, but it heavily relies on the GM and players being fans of the game (with a thorough knowledge of the terms, scenarios, tropes, etc.) and basically wanting to co-write fanfiction for it. There are no mechanics and everything is arbitrary; this is probably unplayable except to the guy who wrote it.

Queering Spacetime (Card Game) - A game where you play girls with big queer crushes on each other trying to get around the lesbian sheep problem. Mechanically, it’s a flirty discussion version of Guess Who where you try to figure out each others’ traits by answering prompts and planning dates. This game is not For Me, in that the thing I like about meeting and flirting with new people is actually learning real things about them; the end result is worth the process but I don’t feel a need to pretend the process. Also, it irks me that they made an umbrella “queer” game but the characters are mostly afab and all female-of-center presenting. I’m guessing it’s to keep the TERFs away from their wlw target audience; and boys can go play Dream Daddy or something.

Cryptkeeper (Card Game) - A single-player card game about attempting to fix the crypt you accidentally cursed. I’m reminded a bit of Cheapass Games; the premise and the writing is clever, but the game seems middling at best. Winning actually seems to require a level of metagaming/card counting, because you need to have an Ace among your items, then arrange to both draw a 10 (the amulet) and uncover a 10 (the altar) within one turn of each other. I was amused reading this, but I’m unlikely to play it.

Kissing Comrades and Do Something are not games, they are political commentary in short game format. They aren’t “playable” in any real sense. Along the same lines, Alone on a Map is a mild single-player gamification of creating an rpg world map; mostly just some structure if you already like doing that sort of thing.

Overall: I have a new list of minimalist rpgs to playtest at some point and draw bigger conclusions about; we’ll see in the future if any of them work out.

book reviews, rpg reviews, reviews

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