Refereeing and Reflection

I’ve just put out a review of various Star Trek: Lower Decks spin-off publications over on my books-movies-and-TV blog, one of which may have crossover appeal to regular readers here – that’s Warp Your Own Way, a choose-your-own-adventure gamebook in graphic novel form which does some especially fun things with the format.

Shannon Appelcline has cultivated a bit of a career as an RPG historian, producing material which is less academic than Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, The Elusive Shift, or Game Wizards whilst casting a wider net than Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon. His magnum opus is the Designers & Dragons series, whose core release constitutes a bunch of potted histories of different game companies, arranged by the year they entered the RPG industry; I reviewed the four-volume edition here a while back.

As well as looking to push the series forwards with a volume on companies of the 2010s and a collection of “lost histories” of companies that didn’t make the cut on the first go-around, Appelcline has branched out into a number of side projects under the wider banner. One of these is This Is Free Trader Beowulf from 2024. Taking its name from the iconic mayday message that graced the original Traveller boxed set nearly fifty years ago in 1977 (sorry, gang, I think the Beowulf is toast), this is a “system history” of the Traveller RPG – a journey through the game’s publication history from that iconic collection of three little black books through to Mongoose’s latest efforts.

In fact, the book was put out from Mongoose – meaning that Appelcline is in something of a “court historian” role here where he might not necessarily be able to be as critical of Mongoose as he is of some parties. Ken Whitman’s bungling of both his responsibilities at Imperium Games during the T4 era and later his botched Kickstarter for a Traveller television pilot does feature here, and whilst Appelcline keeps things as civil as you can, it’s pretty hard to lay out the bare facts of what happened in those situations and not have it turn into a character assassination on Whitman.

Then again, I’m not sure Mongoose needs a heavy roasting from a game historian at this point in time. Despite my initial objections to how Mongoose trimmed down their second edition (later mollified when their revision to the core rules put the starship creation rules back in and demonstrated impressive improvements in presentation and editing), it’s hard to argue that Mongoose isn’t one of the most successful custodians the game has ever had.

It’s now around 18 years since they took it on – which means we’re rapidly approaching the point when Traveller has been with Mongoose for longer than it was ever with GDW, and the expansive second edition product line is proof positive that they actually pulled off the trick of doing a major edition turnover for Traveller without the new edition disintegrating in a morass of fan backlash and runaway errata – a trick GDW never managed to pull off. If Mongoose want to put out an officially-sanctioned history which paints them as the heroes who saved the game line, eh, I’m willing to say they’ve earned it.

Presented in a coffee table-friendly format, this manages to include lots of helpful diagrams, illustrations, citations, and product checklists without skimping on the text. The story told here is expansive, taking in not just the core publishers (GDW, Imperium Games, Far Future Enterprises and Mongoose) but also the extended family of third party licensees that have produced material for the game over the years. (Recall that Mongoose was such a licensee, albeit one of particularly great importance, until recently – now Marc Miller has bequeathed the rights of the game to them, whilst retaining a lifelong right to produce his own material, specifically to make sure the rights to Traveller don’t fall into a legal black hole in the event of his death.)

This coverage is not total; there’s a brief mention of early foreign-language licensees, but otherwise the book restricts itself to English-language Traveller material, the Anglosphere-centric approach being a recurring shortcoming of Designers & Dragons (though any such project helmed by one individual is going to face constraints of this sort unless they are so polyglot as to be equally conversant with every language a particular game has been translated into).

Within that limitation, however, the range is truly impressive. There’s some licensees that you absolutely couldn’t do a history like this without featuring extensively; I knew that DGP was closely involved in the development of MegaTraveller, for instance, but until I read this I hadn’t realised just how intimately intertwined they were with the history of Traveller at a time when GDW were keen to outsource as much work on the game as possible because their main decision-makers were more interested in their wargame output and newer RPG products like Twilight: 2000.

Other licensees I’d regard as being truly essential to the story here include Steve Jackson Games – there were a ton of attempts to adapt the Traveller setting to other systems during the “long dark” between the collapse of Imperium Games and T4 and the rise of Mongoose’s back-to-basics take on the game, but GURPS Traveller was far and away the most important and successful, and Appelcline is correct to regard it as critical to maintaining interest in Charted Space during that period. I’d been tangentially aware of BITS (British Isles Traveller Support) and their cheap, cheerful, and high-value “little white book” supplements, but I hadn’t realised how important they’d become to trying to keep T4 alive when the game line was badly behind schedule and hurting for designers to write material.

Although FASA never quite became as central to Traveller as any of those licensees, I suspect anyone attempting a history of this sort would bother to profile them anyway, because of all the companies which were specifically founded off the back of doing third-party Traveller support, theirs ended up being the biggest success story – initially when they put out the first really successful Star Trek RPG, then when they came up with influential properties of their own like Battletech, Shadowrun, and Earthdawn.

Appelcline covers all of these and way more besides, getting deep into the weeds to shine a light on even the most obscure corners of the Anglophone Traveller landscape – some of which I had heard of (like the prolific output of the Keith brothers, whose material burst the confines of GDW and ended up being the basis of a morass of third-party releases) to true obscurities. Beyond that, Appelcline delves into the fandom itself, with a particular emphasis on endeavours like the History of the Imperium Working Group that ended up making their own impact on the game line itself, along with wholly independent forks from Traveller.

In particular – and here’s where it’s a classy move on the part of both Appelcline himself and Mongoose as the publishers – there’s a nice section on the Cepheus system designed as an open Traveller clone and its Clement Sector setting, offering a genuinely sympathetic profile of a fan-driven endeavour which, by any reasonable measure, is directly competing with Mongoose’s official rules. (Of course, this also gives Appelcline a chance to say nice things about how Mongoose responded to Wizards of the Coast’s bungled attempt to tweak the OGL – an utter PR disaster which for a while caused consternation among OGL-using projects which didn’t use Wizards-derived game systems in the slightest, as was the case with Cepheus and other projects relying on the SRD Mongoose put out for their first edition of Traveller.)

If I had one criticism of the book, it’s that Appelcline is a bit too quick to ascribe the early 1980s downturn in the RPG industry in general and Traveller in particular to the Satanic Panic. Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards has outlined how there were compelling factors affecting Dungeons & Dragons over the same time – both a broader economic recession and internal issues within TSR – which had nothing to do with the Satanic Panic, and which offer a much more compelling explanation for the sales downturn of the era than BADD and its ilk; generally speaking in the English-language industry, bad times for Dungeons & Dragons coincides with bad times for the industry as a whole, especially if those bad times are due to broader factors which will also affect the game’s competitors (like, say, a recession).

Moreover, Appelcline is unable to identify even one major incident of a Satanic Panic moral panic outbreak targeting Traveller specifically, or even significantly including it as collateral damage. This, I think, shows a misunderstanding of how this sort of moral panic work. I admit that my evidence here is only anecdotal, but I am aware of multiple people who have attested that when their parents got swept up in moral panics around RPGs, it was specifically Dungeons & Dragons which was the target of it – other RPGs were largely untouched, but Dungeons & Dragons had got a reputation as the Devil Game and consequently had to carry the can.

Many’s the gamer who managed to continue their association with the hobby simply by choosing a different game; one of my oldest and dearest friends even got around parental objections by simply playing Advanced Fighting Fantasy, a game with similar themes, an often even grimmer aesthetic than the one TSR was pushing at the time, and which also had evangelical objections to it – but those were more obscure, didn’t cut through, and according to Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone generally increased sales.

If Advanced Fighting Fantasy could evade a censorious eye through the simple, brilliant strategy of, er, not being called Dungeons & Dragons despite being about essentially the same sort of stuff, surely Traveller would have an easier ride than it? It’s not called Dungeons & Dragons, it isn’t presented like Dungeons & Dragons, it isn’t about the same subject matter. Sure, some hyper-conservative parents might object to the idea that space is real and science is not a lie, but we’re now dealing with people so extreme that they’d object to any book their child bought that wasn’t a Bible or a trite restatement of their sect’s favourite bits of the Bible.

Sorry, Shannon, I’m not buying that bit – Peterson has more than adequately shown that the industry leader’s problems were the making of far bigger forces than a transient moral panic which probably inspired as many sales as it drove away if not more, and if you’re going to accuse the Satanic Panic of slamming the brakes on Traveller‘s growth, you’re going to need more than anecdotes about fundamentalists going after… (checks notes)… an entirely different game, put out by an entirely different publisher.

Beyond this shortcoming, however, Appelcline’s grasp of the wider industry is strong, and regular “View From the Industry” sidebars offer tasters of what was going on in the wider field as Traveller faced significant turning points in its history – a useful way to consider the context these changes took place in.

Appelcline also makes a compelling case that the infamous Traveller: The New Era might have actually ended up being a success despite the extent to which it split the fanbase (a controversy he documents extensively), had it not been facing further headwinds as a result of GDW being distracted and bogged down by other matters like the Dangerous Journeys lawsuit from TSR, their brief foray into current affairs factbooks which initially seemed like a goldmine before turning into a bit of a business disaster, and a disastrous repeat of the sort of widespread errata problems which had previously poleaxed the debut of MegaTraveller.

Although Appelcline acknowledges that RPG editions which make sweeping changes to both the setting and system of an existing game have a bad track record, he argues that changing the Traveller: The New Era system to the GDW house system and the major setting adjustments were both done with genuinely useful motivations in mind. By this point, Appelcline has demonstrated that how the outsourcing during the MegaTraveller era left GDW in a spot where they were short on in-house familiarity with the system – the use of a house system is a tempting solution to such a problem. As for the setting changes, Appelcline outlines how these were intended to make the setting a bit more approachable to newcomers by brushing aside a lot of the accumulated detritus and advancing the timeline to a point which could be taken as a fresh start.

There’s something to this idea: a major problem with RPGs as a commercial prospect is that once you sell a core rulebook to someone, unless the game is shockingly incomplete they can essentially walk away and play forever with the old books as soon as they decide they no longer want to keep up with what you are doing, and if you are toying with the idea of a new edition it’s probably because your core book sales are in enough of a downturn that you don’t expect to reach many new audience members with the existing offering.

Unless you are satisfied with constantly catering to a dwindling audience of old hands, at some point you’re going to need to bring in new blood, and a new core book is about as fresh a jumping-on point as exists; if you want to significantly improve sales from where they currently are, there’s an impetus there to take risks and make changes in the hope of attracting a new audience and accepting that some of your old audience isn’t going to come along for the ride, hoping that the new recruits will outweigh the dropouts.

That’s all very well – but there’s two significant issues with this approach, both of which Traveller: The New Era seems to have fallen into (both on the evidence here and my own experience in the 1990s). Firstly, it undervalues the old guard, who under the right circumstances can be the absolute best sales force your game can want. Ultimately, unless someone becomes an avid collector for the sake of collecting, people will tend to want to make use of the games they buy, and the more active the play community around an RPG is, the easier it is to do that – Ryan Dancey leveraged these network effects expertly to reassert D&D‘s position as top dog back when 3rd Edition launched. Sure, someone who is introduced to Traveller via an existing group may not have paid you a penny – but if they get hooked, they’ll probably become a customer sooner or later, and even if they don’t they still build that network of play and might make a loyal customer of the next person they recruit.

On the other hand, if a significant chunk of a fanbase feels that a game has abruptly decided to abandon them as customers, it’s naive in the extreme to expect them to slink away quietly – especially a fanbase as actively communicative as the Traveller one, which embraced e-mail lists and newsgroups and whatnot rapidly. If people see a fanbase which is in the middle of an edition war, then no matter how good the edition being fought over is that still looks like an unappealing scene people don’t necessarily want to get involved in.

The “radical shifts to win a whole new audience” approach is also predicated on the assumption that somewhere out there that new audience exists in sufficient numbers to justify the gamble. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t – but we can do a little thought exercise to consider where such new audiences may be found, and it doesn’t bode well for the “let’s totally change the system and radically transform the setting” approach. Who are the people who actually make up this potential new audience, and how would the Traveller: The New Era strategy actually land with them?

• People who have never heard of your game. That sounds like a reason for a new marketing strategy, not a new edition. Especially if you are an industry leader like Traveller, putting out a radically reconfigured game that is advertised in essentially the same channels as your existing game seems unlikely to reach anyone who wasn’t already aware of the previous edition. Sure, a shiny new core rulebook can be appealing if you’re about to launch a new strategy through new avenues of promotion – but you can do that just as easily with a gentler, “evolutionary not revolutionary” update to the core book without alienating the old fans. If it’s new to these potential customers, they won’t know how different it is to what came before in the first place. (They could just have easily have been reached with an all-new game, come to think of it.)
  
• People who have heard of your game, liked the idea of the setting, but were put off by the system. You ruined it for a lot of these people by changing the setting – they wanted to play in the cool setting they heard about before, not a different setting. Maybe they will find the new system meets their complaints and they find the transformed setting intriguing enough to have a go with anyway, but you could have snagged them just as easily with a brand new game which happened to match their system tastes in that case. Some of these people could be reached just as easily with a new game, others might have been happy with a new edition which made evolutionary changes to the system which alleviated the problems they previously had with it.
  
• People who have heard of your game, find the system interesting, but were put off by the setting. You ruined for more or less all of these people by abandoning the system they cared about in the first place. Maybe – maybe – they’ll like your new system too, and the changes you made to the setting will address their objections, but if they already decided the setting was a big pile of arse, why would they look into the revised version of it deep enough to change their mind now? Some of these people could be reached just as easily with a new game, others might have been happy with a new edition which made evolutionary changes to the setting which alleviated the problems they previously had with it.
  
• People who have heard of your game, dislike the system, and dislike the setting. Maybe a few of these people will give this game named after a game they have outright rejected a chance, but it seems more likely that they’ll hear the name and switch off instantly. These could have been reached just as easily with a new game – more so, because they’ll associate the title of your game with all the stuff they disliked about old versions.
  
• People who have heard of your game, are interested in the system, like the idea of the setting, but find the current core offering too intimidating or impenetrable. These people want an easier onramp to your game as it currently exists, not a totally different game that’s been Ship of Theseus’d to the point where it only shares a name with the previous edition. This is a compelling case for an evolutionary update of the core rules to make them more accessible, increase their clarity, and make them overall more attractively presented, not a total rethink.
  
• People who have heard of your game, are interested in the system, like the idea of a setting, but would greatly prefer to be introduced to it by existing players rather than trying to figure it out all by themselves. Changing editions, regardless of the strategy you use, will do nothing for these people – these folk need outreach from the existing fanbase or a proactive demonstration game or organised play network.

Taken as a whole, the above analysis suggests that what RPG companies really ought to be doing to expand their customer base is a) producing evolutionary-not-revolutionary updates to existing games which address significant sticking points and/or ensure the game keeps looking fresh and vibrant, b) making entirely new games to capture audiences disinterested in their old games, c) promoting organised play to leverage the power of the existing fanbase rather than seeing it as a burden to be jettisoned, and d) exploring new promotional routes to raise awareness of their games through hitherto-unexplored avenues. Putting out a game under the old title whilst totally changing the system and radically reshaping the setting doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone who wouldn’t be just as happy with a basically new game, and the blowback from such an approach can be offputting both to the old guard and previously interested potential new customers.

Of course, none of that is cheap or easy – but I would argue that any publisher who can’t afford to explore at least one of those options (preferably several, ideally all) almost certainly can’t afford the massive roll of the dice that’s involved in a Traveller: The New Era approach.

But hey, what do I know? Thanks to This is Free Trader Beowulf, the answer to that is a firm “more than I did before”. This comes highly recommended to all Traveller fans, as well as those interested in RPG industry history more generally. Traveller really is one of the few games outside of D&D which could sustain a history like this – too many other candidates have either not existed for long enough to generate the wealth of material to cover, have had too uneventful and straightforward a publishing history in comparison, or have undergone long periods of inactivity where, in contrast to the “long night” era of Traveller, there really wasn’t much of anything happening other than some stray fan activity here and there. Perhaps a book taking in the Basic Roleplaying family as a whole – or a Call of Cthulhu system history which took in all of the foreign-language markets to a similar level of depth – might qualify, but I can think of precious few others. As it stands, This is Free Trader Beowulf is a rather unique effort, and doubly worth it because of that.

For the last year and a bit, I’ve been running the second edition of The One Ring for my Wednesday evening group. It’s been a lot of fun; we played through the Tales From the Lone-Lands campaign, with me drawing extensively from the Ruins of the Lost Realm for further material whenever the player characters went off-piste. Over the course of play we’ve batted our ideas about the game back and forth, and what better time to go back, do an autopsy, and consider our conclusions?

I went with using a prewritten scenario collection rather than all-original material as a result of several considerations. Firstly, I thought Tales From the Lone-Lands was pretty good as far as published campaigns went, and wanted to use it. By and large, I am mostly satisfied with it; we felt that the scenario Kings of Little Kingdoms didn’t land right, with the revelation about what the culprit is up to and who they’re imitating not really landing well, but otherwise most of the scenarios landed well (including, thank goodness, the conclusion). The second reason I used it was simple enough – I wanted to save time.

Over the course of play, a third good reason to use prewritten material emerged. The general consensus of the group was that if we’re going to do The One Ring, it’s because we want to play through material which cleaves reasonably closely to Tolkien’s worldbuilding and ethos. It’s not automatically the case that a prewritten scenario will capture Tolkien’s tone, of course, but taking your own efforts to mimic the Professor’s style and trying to assess whether you’ve really done a good job is tricky – it’s generally not good practice to mark your own homework.

Conversely, because the scenario was a text by another hand, I could look at it, think about it, consider where I saw the Tolkien-ness in it and where I saw the discordant notes, and adjust accordingly. (The one major instance where I didn’t, in fact, was Kings of Little Kingdoms, which is possibly why it was the weakest episode of the campaign.) A lot of the fun of the campaign came from the group going off on tangents about some Middle-Earth subject or other and simply discussing that – something which is frequently going to be an added flavour of fun in RPGs based on beloved fictional settings that the participants all have fairly developed views on – and it was good to be able to engage in that discussion on the level of another person engaging with the prewritten material rather than chatting about my own inventions.

Likewise, having Ruins of the Lost Realm to enrich the campaign was handy in its own right because it allowed for the players to have a reasonable amount of degrees of freedom, so that when they took an unexpected route across the map I could pull something out for them to encounter as an extra little side story. Of course, I could have just improvised – but I liked the sense that we were all exploring a real place where there were things placed where they were placed, ripe for discovery under the right circumstances.

The most extensive improvised segment of the campaign was the characters’ unexpected trip into Moria, which allowed me to make use of the glorious boxed set and dip briefly into the sandbox possibilities of it.

Although the presentation of The One Ring is gorgeous and we quite liked a lot of the game’s features, some aspects of the system began to grate on us. Early on the players felt they were underpowered, and whilst this did correct itself, it does feel like starting characters are calibrated against “clueless Hobbits about to take their first steps out of the safety of the Shire”, which is reasonable for Hobbit adventurers but most other character concepts call for being a bit more competent straight out of the gate.

To be fair, the core book does offer some suggestions for making things a tad easier, such as calculating target numbers by subtracting attribute from 18 rather than 20 in order to make it easier to get a basic pass on a roll. However, this doesn’t help as much as you think because a lot of stuff ends up being locked behind rolling 6s on your Skill Dice – including getting the crucial extra successes you need to actually succeed at Councils and the like. Getting 6s on the Skill Dice doesn’t seem to happen as much as the designers seem to have been counting on, though it would of course happen more often once dice pools get larger so there may be a tipping point beyond which you start getting those extra effects all the time.

Combat seems particularly awkward early on. Starting the game with 3 dice in your combat skill will cost most of your starting building points, whilst almost all monsters will have at least 3 dice in their combat skill. At one point the entire party was defeated by an encounter I am fairly sure was not meant to be that challenging, and it was largely because they had utterly lousy luck on their rolls for a really sustained period; that’s what prompted the Moria excursion.

We were playing with a fairly small party of just three player characters in most sessions, and I suspect the party suffered somewhat from this; a larger party might be able to get more synergistic effects going with some characters attacking whilst others got special effects off. When we discussed this, we wondered whether the combat system had been balanced and tested around having the full fellowship of the ring in a fight, to see if the system could handle some of the fights in the books, even though you’re rarely going to be using a party that large.

On top of that, combat can often feel quite samey – something exacerbated by the fact that the bulk of foes you can throw at people in a Tolkien game are going to be fairly familiar orcs, Worgs, trolls and other Tolkien baddies, which is simultaneously very true to the setting but also very familiar.

In principle, it should in theory be possible to take a reasonably simple combat system and jazz it up with things like variations in terrain and the like – but in practice the stance-based combat system of The One Ring abstracts a lot of that stuff out. You don’t get a Fighting On The Edge of the Crack of Doom stance where there’s more chance of falling over or a Fighting On That Bridge In Moria stance where you can make it easier for others to run away at the cost of heightened probability of getting dragged down into a chasm in an almost slapstick fashion; all combats involve the same four basic stances for players to choose from.

This is where the way special effects are gated behind rolling 6s on the Skill Dice really starts biting – there were often cases where in theory the player characters had special abilities which could help, but the players didn’t use them as much as they could because getting an effect potent enough to be worse passing on a more conventional attack would require getting those elusive 6s. This heightened their feeling that combat could be a bit samey.

From a refereeing side of things, the main decision in combat seems to be deciding when and how to spend from a foe’s Hate pool, something which is also tricky. On the one hand, if you’re using an opponent’s Hate pool to the fullest extent possible, you can make life very, very hard for the PCs – perhaps harder than you want. On the other hand, if you don’t use Hate as much as possible it feels like you’re holding back; in principle, it feels like Hate ought to be an indicator of how hard an enemy is going to fight, since once they start running out of Hate they rapidly pose less of a threat, and if you don’t let them use their Hate as much as they can then you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

We also felt that monsters might have too much baseline Endurance; if there’s not going to be many tactical choices involved in combat, it should probably at least be fast and frantic and get out of the way quickly. As it stands, there were often moments where the outcome of a combat was self-evident but it took an overly long time for it to finally resolve.

We came to the view that the journeys were some of our favourite parts of the game; the fun of moving the party’s marker across the Middle-Earth map in Roll20 was tremendous fun. I found it a bit demanding – asking the referee to improvises a little event every day of travel can be burdensome – but the opportunities for fun little encounters and incidents were so fun that I considered the effort worth it.

Of course, travel is much better if there’s lovely things to see along the way or at your destination. The art direction of the One Ring books is superb, and the location maps and illustrations are wonderfully evocative. Showing the party this artwork now and then was a shameless cheat mode for getting across the atmosphere quickly, but the reactions I got from the players justified it each time.

I think about a year’s worth of One Ring campaign was more or less the right length. Whilst there’s already enough 2nd Edition material to sustain you for substantially longer than that, at the same time I think the cycle of journey/encounter/journey/encounter with downtime phases interspersed therein could eventually get samey given enough time.

On balance I still think The One Ring is the best Middle-Earth RPG to date, but at the same time there’s an extent to which Middle-Earth is a bit of a claustrophobic setting; the shadow of the War of the Ring and other major canonical events is always there on the horizon, and by the time we got to the end of the campaign I was feeling an urge to shift gear into more open vistas. We’re going to be doing Lancer next, and I’m keen to see how that goes.

One of the signs that a tabletop RPG system has really made it once people start selling reskins of it. D&D hacks have been coming out almost as long as Dungeons & Dragons has; the Powered By the Apocalypse system has become the big beast of the self-proclaimed narrativist end of the market because people seem to find it easy to crank out some playbooks, develop a moveset, and toss a PbtA game out there in the genre of their choice.

Of course, some games are easier to reskin than others. PbtA‘s move format, love it or hate it, has the benefit of each individual move being comparatively simple – you decide what event in the fiction triggers it, you describe what the move represents, you specify the roll, you outline the outcome of the roll. Basic Roleplaying can be adapted as you wish through the simple expedient of adjusting the skill list to suit your setting and then picking an appropriate subset of the existing subsystems (or inventing your own bespoke ones); the BRUGE manual provides handy checklists for this purpose. D&D 5E reskins make a virtue out of the fact that most people interested in such projects don’t really want a radical shift away from the type of gameplay that D&D 5E offers and so you can just do a fairly straightforward surface-level palette swap rather than actually re-engineering anything.

Somehow, Mörk Borg has managed to become one of those indie RPGs people like to make hacks off, despite the fact that producing something which doesn’t look like an abject embarrassment next to Mörk Borg or CY_BORG feels like it would be somewhat demanding. You need a big heavy doom metal concept, you need great art, you need lots and lots of interesting tables and charts with options on, and all of them need to reinforce the setting and atmosphere. A good Mörk Borg-alike needs to be information-dense, in part because the underlying action resolution system is dirt simple and so it’s very much the cool setting content, awesome tables, and engaging artwork that’s providing the meat.

Pirate Borg, the self-proclaimed “worst pirate RPG ever made”, is Luke Stratton’s pirate-themed Mörk Borg hack, developed via his Limithron label and put out in conjunction with Free League via the Free League Workshop program. As well as the core book and small adventures like the introductory scenario Buried In the Bahamas, the naval combat scenario The Battle of Dead Man’s Cove, and fun little endeavours like The Sinking of C’thagn, an adventure provided as a big fold-out poster map with the adventure details on one side, Stratton/Limithron has put out two thick expansion books with a similar form factor to the core. Down Among the Dead is primarily written by Stratton, whilst Cabin Fever is a “best-of” compilation from a Pirate Borg writing jam hosted on itch.io. As a result of all this, Pirate Borg enjoys a level of support beyond that of many indie RPGs.

The basic concept is simple enough – it’s pirates but engagingly spooky, like The Secret of Monkey Island with a doom metal soundtrack. (The illustration for the “Antiquarian” optional class in Down Among the Dead is a homage to an iconic scene from LeChuck’s Revenge, in fact.) The setting is the “Dark Caribbean”, a horrifying alternative to our own world. Here, the islands have been blighted by the Scourge – hordes of the undead out to drown the world of the living in bleakest horror. Despite the danger posed by them, human greed still leads desperate and violent individuals to seek their fortunes here – through piracy or through more official channels – in part because of the incredibly valuable narcotic known as Ash, produced from the refined remains of the undead.

So far, so hardcore. One thing which does give me slight pause is the concept that all of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were, in this setting, all dead when Europeans showed up to settle the islands. This feels perilously like taking Europeans off the hook for the atrocities involved in colonialism at the time, although I suppose the door is left open for a reveal that Christopher Columbus did something horrific and blasphemous back when he visited which devastated the region and unleashed the Scourge.

Other than that, the setting feels comparatively open compared to the claustrophobic worlds of Mörk Borg and CY_BORG; there’s still a drumbeat of increasingly apocalyptic events you’re supposed to drip-feed into your campaign, mind you, but the nature of this apocalypse feels more flexible and, most significantly, you feel less fenced-in geographically, given that you can sail around from island to island. In contrast, the Mörk Borg world is actively falling apart at the seams, whilst CY_BORG takes place in a single densely-packed city.

There’s a simple hex-based naval combat system to complement the “sailing” side of things, which is just as much as packed with flavour as everything else. The mark of a really solid table-heavy game is when you can crack open a book, see one of the tables, and think “oh my god, that looks like so much fun” – as is often the case with Pirate Borg (Down Among the Dead has a set of tables for randomly generating your very own pirate flag, how cool is that?).

All this plus a truly meaty sample scenario in the core book (in comparison to the Mörk Borg sample dungeon, which I think you can blitz through in a session or two, the scenario here could support months of play by itself) makes Pirate Borg excellent value even by itself. The strong support line is a boon, and it feels like you could also fold in material from Mörk Borg itself a bit more easily than with CY_BORG.

Time for another article where I give quick breakdowns of supplements I’ve looked at lately. This time, it’s mostly Basic Roleplaying-based, with supplements for RuneQuest, Pendragon, BRUGE, and Age of Vikings, but I also dip into the grim darkness of the far future to see what’s going on with Imperium Maledictum.

This is the latest volume in the Cults of RuneQuest supplement series; this one covers the pantheon ruled over by the sun-emperor Yelm, whose members take in everything from abstract illumination through to humble cooking fires. Some of these deities have been alluded to in other volumes in the series; The Lightbringers, for instance, is defined in part by the constituent gods’ involvement in the Lightbringer’s Quest to bring Yelm back from the underworld after Orlanth, the lead Lightbringer, killed him in the mythic before-time and came to badly regret the consequences.

However, there is a very clear logic to why these deities have been put into this book: the pantheon as a whole represents a particular cultural outlook, rooted in Dara Happa and with outposts elsewhere, which offers a direct contrast to the outlook presented in books like The Lightbringers. Indeed, the Yelmian version of the narrative has a rather different emphasis, in which the divine justice doled out by Yelm is so potent that it reached out beyond the grave and caused his killers to die, recasting the Lightbringer’s Quest less as an epic journey and more as a penitential pilgrimage of Orlanth and his co-conspirators to apologise to Yelm for being bad, and for Orlanth to sacrifice himself to bring Yelm back.

Of course, each of the pantheon supplements here has something of a cultural focus too, but The Gods of Fire and Sky does a particularly good job of it, showing how this is an essentially patriarchal religion for a patriarchal culture. As I noted in my review of Sun County, this is the sort of thing which would come across poorly if RuneQuest presented this as a default norm, but when the patriarchal cultures in question do not coincide with the default homelands of the core game, which are presented has having a different worldview in turn, that creates a space to include cultures like this in a fantasy setting in such a way that people will take them as intriguing contrasts.

Indeed, as you delve into this tome and read between the lines you can see how the pantheon is not, itself, a monolith; there are cults for the underdogs, and counterbalances to Yelm’s authoritarianism here and there. Most particularly, there is Gorgorma, a monstrous female deity who seems to exist as a dark counterpart to Yelm’s wife Dendara. Dendara is this very proper model of aristocratic womanhood, representing the patriarchal Yelmian ideal of how women should be; Gorgorma is a hideous hag-like monster with an honest to goodness vagina dentata, representing everything this culture is afraid of in women.

Handled carelessly, this would come across like in-character misogyny being rhetorically backed up by the fabric of the cosmos through the existence of deities reinforcing positive and negative stereotypes, but there’s some intriguing twists built in here which makes this pair something far more interest. For one thing, they are explicitly sisters – and not just that, but sisters who are on good terms with each other – there’s a lovely legend about how Gorgorma is admitted into Yelm’s palace after dinner (ie, nighttime, when Yelm’s off in the underworld), so she and Dendara can meet up and play chess.

Both goddesses have these additional wrinkles. Mention is made of a God Learner theory that Dendara and the more widely-known fertility goddess Ernalda are the same deity, to the point where the God Learners were able to do little experiments which should not have worked if they weren’t the same, and yet the goddesses in question refuse to confirm this, suggesting that there’s secret dimensions to Dendara that she cannot openly admit to, and that she might be a far more powerful figure than she allows herself to be acknowledged as in a Yelmian context.

For her part, Gorgorma specifically has a role as an avenger; she lurks in the shadows (to the point where she has idols tucked away in obscure corners of Dendara shrines quite often), she is the darkness that Yelm dare not acknowledge but cannot be rid of, and she’s there for when the patriarchy gets too cruel. Drive too many women to seek the aid of Gorgorma, and human sacrifice, vile curses, and utter horror ensues. Among the controversies brought about by the Lunar Empire is the official sanction they’ve extended to Gorgorma’s cult, which absolutely fits with the Lunar ethos of looking at things which are taboo and saying “Well, that’s all rather shocking, but how can we reconcile ourselves to this and make it a useful part of society?”

The Lunar connection is why it makes sense for this volume to come out at the point when it has – for Dara Happa has become part of the Lunar Empire, and so the Solar pantheon has found itself enmeshed to an extent with the Lunar Pantheon. But not consumed; even though the Solar-aligned Dara Happans and Pelorians in general have tended to be conquered by one force or another over time and frequently end up on the wrong side of history, somehow their distinctive culture has survived it all, from the downfall of Nysalor (who they were fully behind) to occupation by the Empire of Wyrm’s Friends to the current Lunar occupation. An impressive thing about the Cults of RuneQuest series is how with each new volume that comes out, more and more clicks into place, and that’s definitely the case here.

This is the Forest Sauvage section from The Great Pendragon Campaign, pinched out to be its own adventure supplement and with a couple of strongly supernaturally-themed standalone adventures tacked on with it.

Some may carp at this separation of the material, but I actually think it kind of makes sense. Whereas most of The Great Pendragon Campaign operates according to a defined timeline, the Forest Sauvage quest material is a bit looser; in Stafford’s interpretation of it, it’s a perilous faerie realm which comes into being in the wake of Uther’s death due to the lack of properly recognised kingship over the land, and then fades away once all Britain acknowledges Arthur as High King, so you can work in expeditions to King Sauvage’s strange domain at any time in the Anarchy and Boy King periods. In addition, precisely because it’s not tied to the core timeline, it’s an entirely optional part of the campaign, and including it in the book arguably breaks up the flow of the material in an awkward way.

The scenario itself is pretty solid – offering a node-based map and some intriguing means to make the geography of Sauvage strange and difficult to retrace in a way which feels like a distant ancestor to the “depthcrawl” model invented by Emmy Allen for The Stygian Library. The shorter scenarios are good, and the book is rounded out with a rather cute little set of random generators for one-session “you meet a knight on the road”-type scenarios and the like – the sort of story concept which you get repeated a lot on Arthurian lore with odd variations, and which can always be worked in when a long-running campaign needs a filler episode or if you want to do some spontaneous Pendragon play on the spot. It’s all good stuff, but I find my appetite increasingly craving the update to The Great Pendragon Campaign itself.

This is the first really chunky supplement Chaosium have put out for the current version of the Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine – the book which tidied up and updated the presentation of the “big yellow book” version of Basic Roleplaying and which, via the BRUGE acronym, offered us a handy retroactive way of referring to that game line specifically (given that Basic Roleplaying as a system underpins, in various different variants, many of Chaosium’s other game lines).

As the simple, no-nonsense title implies, this is a simple, no-nonsense book – a nice bestiary of creature stats for BRUGE, that regards itself as a spiritual successor to prior Chaosium products like All the World’s Monsters (a cheeky third-party D&D supplement which was their first RPG product) or The Gateway Bestiary (a RuneQuest 2nd Edition supplement which offered monster stats for non-Gloranthan creatures). We’ve all seen books of this type, though to its credit this does seem to have had some thought applied as to how to make it maximally useful to BRUGE referees.

In particular, rather than just being a big A-to-Z presentation of its creature stats, Creatures divides itself up by broad category – you get chapters of Natural Animals, Dinosaurs and Megafauna, Fantasy Creatures, Summoned Creatures, Science Fiction Creatures, and a deep bench of sample (human) Nonplayer Characters for good measure. They didn’t have to do this, of course; BRUGE models creatures using the same rules as NPCs and PCs, because back from the early RuneQuest days onward the BRP family has put a big emphasis on the idea that living creatures are characters in their own right, with motivations however animalistic or alien. A case could be made for merging all of these chapters together.

However, the arrangement offered here strikes me as being particularly useful for referees selecting creatures for their BRUGE adventures precisely because of the thematic grouping. If you’re running a fantasy game, you’re going to primarily draw from the fantasy chapter, if you’re running a SF one you’re going to lean hard on the science fiction chapter, if your game is the sort of thing where summoning demons or angels or elementals or whatever are a thing the Summoned Creatures chapter is your jam, and so on.

Additional sidebars here and there offer useful tips for adjusting creatures to taste or work in new rules options, like guidance on how to model kaiju or the range of specific subtypes of dragons, dwarves, and elves that exist, whilst appendices include optional rules like guidance on using hit locations on the different creatures, conversion notes for using them in Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, or RuneQuest, and pointers on how to adjust creature power levels depending on the power level of the campaign in question.

This is the sort of project where the basic concept is hardly all that ambitious or original, but precisely because it’s such a commonplace type of supplement it’s very easy to accidentally just go with the flow and churn out the same sort of book everyone else is. Creatures, on the other hand, is clearly designed with an eye to thinking about just what makes this sort of tome useful, and as such is one of the best examples of its type I have encountered.

This is your typical referee screen (landscape orientation panels rather than portrait, fortunately), along with a useful booklet providing a nice condensed rules reference. This is, in itself, reasonably competently designed and clearly somewhat useful for use with Age of Vikings, but I think it comes across as a tad disappointing because of the incredibly high standard Chaosium have set themselves with similar material in the recent past. The referee screen packs for Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest‘s current editions are so jam-packed with material that they really make lesser offerings look bad by comparison.

BRUGE got a screen pack recently which was fairly close to the more bare-bones approach taken by this one, but given that BRUGE is the generic, setting-agnostic presentation of the Basic Roleplaying system it’s hard justify packaging meaty setting or scenario material which won’t be relevant to most BRUGE campaigns into a product like a generic screen for it. Age of Vikings is far from generic; it’s got a specific tone and a specific setting, and a fairly thin bench of material at the moment, so bolstering the pack with some setting stuff or a scenario or two would seem to be useful.

Still, at least Age of Vikings is getting one of these. Unless I’ve missed it, Rivers of London doesn’t have one yet despite being out for longer. Pendragon will be getting one imminently; we’ll have to see whether it follows this model or the weightier approach of RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu.

This is an all-purpose equipment guide for Imperium Maledictum, Cubicle 7’s Warhammer 40,000 RPG which is essentially “Dark Heresy 3rd Edition, only your patron isn’t necessarily the Inquisition”. As well as expanding on the range of equipment available, it also has guidelines for hiring on NPC assistants, booking interstellar passage, and the use and abuse of vehicles.

This is useful but potentially quite dry stuff, but it’s spiced up appreciably by the idea that these are the fruits of an Administratum bureaucrat undertaking a doomed effort to complete an audit of the entire Macharian sector – a task which cannot possibly be completed in a single lifetime, but one which the Imperial bureaucracy nonetheless expects of him. In a neat twist, guidance is given for running campaigns with this character as a patron – a concept which lends itself to parties who want to break into other faction’s facilities to get access to their data, turn entire factory planets upside down to try and reconcile a discrepancy in the books, and investigate oddities which show up in the course of the audit.

That’s a cute idea, and neatly Cubicle 7 are able to make this guidance fit onto just two pages at the back of the book – testimony to how well the patron concept in Imperium Maledictum can lend itself to providing campaign seeds you can pick up and play with comparative speed. If every Imperium Maledictum supplement is going to throw in a little easter egg like this, that’s absolutely delightful, and greatly endears the game line to me.

The Sutra of Pale Leaves is a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1980s Japan and sold in two volumes – Twin Suns Rising and Carcosa Manifest. Rather than being developed in-house by Chaosium, the project was spearheaded by the Sons of the Singularity, an indie RPG design house which has put out several products under its own name. The founder Sons of the Singularity are Jason Sheets and Jesse Covner, two Americans who met whilst working in China, but they have ample connections to Japan (Covner in particular following up his 15 years in China with a 7 year stint working in Japan); their design team for this project also includes people from a range of backgrounds, from local Japanese designers to expatriate Anglophone gamers.

This puts The Sutra of Pale Leaves in a particularly advantageous position when it comes to presenting an English-language RPG supplement for gaming in Japan. Having a mixture of people born and raised there and more recent immigrants means that the team is not only steeped in the culture, but can also get a handle on what aspects particularly need to be explained to outsiders without prior exposure (or whose encounters with Japanese culture are limited to some anime and manga).

On top of that, all of the participants are well-placed to take a look at Japan’s thriving Call of Cthulhu play community and draw on innovations originating there, whilst at the same time being steeped enough in English-language materials for the game that they know how Chaosium typically presents their products and how Anglophone readers expect scenarios to be presented – so they can act as intermediaries not just on the level of national culture, but also in terms of the different roleplaying subcultures they hail from.

I haven’t seen any of the Sons’ products issued under their own flag, but now I am tempted. Looking over their site their Call of Cthulhu output seems to steer towards big, chunky campaigns, and one suspects from the two-volume presentation here that their original manuscript for this must have been along similar lines, with Chaosium making the commercial decision to present it as two books (with the baseline details about the underlying threat of the campaign and the setting information about 1980s Japan being repeated across each, so you don’t need to buy Twin Suns Rising if you only find the scenarios in Carcosa Manifest interesting and vice versa). The material being split in half like this isn’t actually as much of a problem as it might be, however, because this takes an approach to presenting a Call of Cthulhu campaign which stands apart from many prior efforts.

Prewritten long-form campaigns in tabletop RPGs have always had sat awkwardly with the risk and peril involved in actual play; if you’re sitting down to play a long campaign supplement you probably want to start at the beginning and play all the way through to the end, but at the same time unless you’re regularly fudging results there’s always the possibility of a total party kill early on derailing everything. Call of Cthulhu is far from immune to this.

Some campaigns, like Masks of Nyarlathotep, Horror On the Orient Express, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, or Children of Fear, essentially tell one big story; sure, there may be little stopovers and sidetracks along the way, but there’s an inciting incident at the start which kicks off the action of the campaign, which is resolved when that inciting incident is resolved, either by the arrival of the player characters at a predetermined end point (as in Orient Express) or through the player characters exhausting the avenues of investigation in the order of their choosing (as in Masks).

Either a TPK or a Ship of Theseus-like process of attrition can mean you lose everyone who was there for the original inciting incident. Of course, you still have the same players present playing different characters if you’re a big cowardly custard who doesn’t enforce You Die In The Game, You Die In Real Life rules when you referee – but even so, playing someone who only heard about it rather than directly witnessing it can mean it loses its impact a tad. You also, of course, have the fundamental problem of how to actually bring in a full group of new player characters if a TPK occurs. Some campaigns put some thought into how this might be done – the most recent edition of Masks puts some thought into it. In other instances, however, it can be simply implausible for a new party to pick up where the previous one left off, putting the referee in the position of either ending the campaign early or fudging to save PCs, neither of which feels entirely satisfying.

Other campaigns have taken a more episodic approach, which makes it a touch easier to cherrypick scenarios from them to run in isolation if you don’t fancy the full-fat version of the campaign as well as introducing new characters along the way. The Order of the Stone, A Time To Harvest, and Tatters of the King are recent examples of this sort of approach, but it’s also the basis of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, the very first Call of Cthulhu campaign.

The nice thing about this is that each episode probably has its own inciting incident, which is a great way to bring new characters into the fold with some instant motivation, and it also means that if you end up with the entire original party replaced through slow attrition it’s less disruptive to plausibility and flow. At the same time, many such campaigns still assume you have at least some survivors from at least the immediately preceding episode – other than Order of the Stone, I don’t think any of the examples I cited really give enough thought to the question of “what if there was a TPK in the previous episode?”

The Sutra of Pale Leaves, in contrast, takes the episodic approach one step further. Unlike the other campaigns I’ve mentioned, each individual episode really can be played as its own standalone thing, and because it’s been developed that way each individual episode defines ways to make it work with a fresh party. What makes it a campaign isn’t continuity of player characters – I’m sure it’s possible to survive to the end, but it’s a perilous challenge to say the least – so much as continuity of theme, since each story is related to the titular Sutra and its connection to the King In Yellow (or, rather, a radical reimagining of that particular corner of the Mythos through a very different cultural filter than the Robert Chambers 1890s Paris version we’re all used to).

The risk of such an approach, of course, is that if each episode is too much of an island it make not feel like the events of one scenario feed properly into others. Continuity is provided above and beyond the recurring opposition through various means, such as the use of Confidants – NPCs who can tip player characters off to the action and can be the means by which new parties are brought into the Sutra’s orbit. Pointers are offered here and there where the outcome of one scenario might have direct implications for another one; in addition, the basic details on the campaign include a nice set of pointers for how the overall social environment might change depending on whether the PCs succeeded or failed at containing the social contagion in previous episodes.

There’s even a “bad end” scenario – The Fixer, a truly dark story suitable either as a standalone, or as a post-TPK coda if the PCs fail at the last hurdle, or as the last hurrah of a party which has found itself socially or mentally destroyed by the consequences of their investigations.

I don’t know how much of this consists of innovations from the Japanese Call of Cthulhu scene and how much can be attributed to the Sons of the Singularity themselves, but one thing which does seem to be a Sons trademark is the use of “lore sheets”. As presented here, these are snippets of information the referee can offer to players to represent their characters possessing particular background information; in some instances, accepting this means also accepting a certain character trait or background feature to your character (you can always refuse), and it can be possible to use these to get situational bonuses based on your knowledge.

As for the content of individual episodes, they offer a dizzying cross section of reimagined traditional horrors, deep dives into emergent subcultures of the time, and snapshots of wider society. You could imagine several of these scenarios adapted as J-horror movies – or, for that matter, as anime; how much you lean into the style and tropes of such media is of course down to you, but it definitely feels like a product of that milieu which happens to be a Call of Cthulhu campaign, rather than a Call of Cthulhu campaign swiping ideas from the wider world of Japanese media for the sake of it.

All of this is excellent – I think this is the best Call of Cthulhu campaign put out under Chaosium’s name for years. It also raises the question of what more material is out there for the game in Japan which hasn’t made it to the Anglophone market yet. Translation isn’t free, of course, and as I understand it some material (particularly by third parties) put out for Call of Cthulhu in Japanese strays far from the game’s horror roots – but equally, there’s surely some stuff which would be worth translating for the enjoyment of a worldwide audience. The cross-pollination between different RPG scenes has given rise to delicious fruit here – come on, Chaosium, let’s keep this going!

Handsomely presented with gorgeous cover art and hardcover presentations in trade dress which allows them to sit seamlessly next to your 6th edition Pendragon collection, the new “Pendragon lore” releases from Chaosium consists of two extremely useful reference works used by Greg Stafford in devising the game in the first place, and useful to referees and anyone researching Arthurian myth in general.

Le Morte d’Arthur is Thomas Malory’s epic summation of the body of Arthurian myth as it existed in the 15th Century, a work which both encapsulates how diverse the preceding Arthurian sources really are and ended up becoming the touchstone for numerous major works thereafter, from Pendragon itself to John Boorman’s Excalibur to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and so on and so forth. This version adds marginal notes from Arthurian scholar John Matthews and from Greg Stafford himself (Greg having fortunately finished these prior to his untimely passing in 2018), as well as a short foreword from Michael Moorcock. The Arthurian Companion is Phyllis Ann Karr’s encyclopaedia of Arthurian concepts, delivered along with a set of excellent essays on the subject, which has been put out in various editions, having been originally commissioned by Greg Stafford as part of the research process for an Arthurian boardgame before it then got used extensively in preparing Pendragon.

The two books (along with a graphic novel adaptation of Le Morte d’Arthur that got released alongside them) are among the fruits of a Kickstarter – one originating not with Chaosium, but with Nocturnal Media, who’d been acting as custodians of the Pendragon line prior to the game making its return to Chaosium. Many of you will already know the backstory here, but for those who don’t, a recap: Nocturnal was a small RPG publisher founded by Stewart Wieck, one of the original co-founders of White Wolf. His biggest claim to fame in that context was having top credit on the first edition of Mage: the Ascension, but he also was part of the writing team on the original releases of Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, so between influencing two of those games and taking the lead on Mage he arguably had as much of an influence in shaping the World of Darkness line as Mark Rein-Hagen himself.

As well as providing a home for Pendragon after White Wolf’s ArtHaus imprint let it go, Nocturnal had its hand in various other pies, and as with many such publishers in the mid-2010s they were fairly regular users of Kickstarter; products I’ve covered here which they put out through Kickstarter include their English translations of Aquelarre and Würm, as well as the Paladin spin-off of Pendragon. Wieck died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017, leaving a range of projects in an unfinished state, with varying levels of notes and plans left behind for how to get them across the finish line.

By this point it was around two years since Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen exerted their power as shareholders to eject Charlie Krank from Chaosium and install the Moon Design Publications team as the new driving force behind the company; this new incarnation of Chaosium underwent a baptism of fire as they scrambled to make good on the Chaosium Kickstarters for 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu and Horror On the Orient Express that Krank had bungled badly enough to threaten the company’s very survival, and lo and behold they more or less pulled it off.

So: you had a business which had a proven track record in getting this sort of thing back on track to the extent possible, as well as having the confidence to level with backers honestly in instances where prior commitments were simply unfeasible to meet; on top of that, that business was in the same line of work as Nocturnal, and Greg Stafford was a trusted friend and close business partner of key people in both companies. There was a deal to be made there, and it was duly made; Chaosium stepped in as needed to get several Nocturnal Kickstarters across the line, and in the case of Pendragon would eventually take over the line entirely after a transitional phase where they were just partnering to market and distribute material.

Bit by bit, the dangling Kickstarter commitments have been dealt with; indeed, the Nocturnal Media website has shut down and I can’t find any trace of their social media any more, so as far as I can tell the remnants of Nocturnal have moved on. Gallant Knight Games are currently working on a D6 System Kickstarter project – Nocturnal having bought up the rights to West End Game’s old cast-offs before Wieck’s death – and their updates mention an approvals process, so it seems like Nocturnal isn’t quite dead, but there’s little sign for them being anything other than a holding company to get royalties out of that licence and the Nocturnal PDFs sold on platforms like DriveThruRPG, rather than an active publisher who’ll be making more products in their own right any time soon.

It seems like this Kickstarter was part of the package when Chaosium took over the Pendragon line, so good for them that they’ve finally brought it to fruition; looking over the updates it appears to have faced significant delays, sometimes due to issues faced by key contributors, sometimes due to printing delays and the disaster which is container shipping in this day and age (PDFs were out years ago), and a chunk of it has been down to the fact that James Lowder, Chaosium’s executive editor who was handling this, has a lot of other demands on his time. Fundamentally, this Kickstarter had 517 backers, who contributed $45,000 and change, and of those only 332 actually backed tiers with print products; that’s nothing to sneeze at, but equally if there’s a job which will disappoint some 300-500 people and maybe prompt a few hundred dollars worth of refund requests if you delay it and a job which will disappoint more people or risk greater expense if you put it off, you’d be a fool not to prioritise the latter.

Another thing the new regime at Chaosium are willing to do from time to time is to compromise on a Kickstarter’s initial offering, taking the view that it’s better that the core product gets delivered in some form or another than the entire package be threatened as a result of a doomed effort to deliver something which just can’t be made to fit a sensible budget. With the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter, for instance, they dialled back on the productions of shirts, hats, and other stretch goal tat, defending the decision on the basis that the backers at the tiers which got all those cool extras were generally getting a massively good deal on the game material the Kickstarter delivered (which is, after all, at least in theory what the point of the exercise was).

Here, it seems like there’s been compromises on the format of the books; originally these two were going to come out in a weird bespoke 8 inch by 8 inch format, since this was regarded as best showcasing the cover art, but that idea got nixed in favour of making them the same standard format as the rest of the Pendragon line. The underlying reason may relate to what Lowder says in this update about how, since Chaosium wanted to keep the books in print and available rather than disappearing from sale after the Kickstarter is fulfilled, they needed to consider issues which perhaps hadn’t been thought about for the purposes of the Kickstarter itself. Printing a book in a non-standard format is the sort of headache which may make sense for a one-off print run for a small number of people, but if you want to scale up production and have repeated print runs, shifting to a more standard format may well be the better call, and if the books are going to be accessories to the Pendragon line it makes sense to bring their format in line.

Other changes from the original plan include using The Arthurian Companion as the title for Karr’s book; the original plan was to call it The Arthurian Concordance, but it was called the Companion the last time Chaosium put it out and it would be frankly weird to shift the title every edition. Still, it seems like some form of the original plan has been delivered, and in a way which can be enjoyed by well more than the original 500-odd Kickstarter backers, which is all for the good.

One may, of course, ask what the point is of the Morte d’Arthur tome, since as a very, very old and well-known book you can readily get a cheap or free copy of it thanks to a lot of translations to modern English being in the public domain. At the same time, given the sheer amount of horridly presented copies of public domain works that get spat out onto Amazon and the internet in this day and age, there’s something to be said for getting a copy that’s from an at least somewhat reputable publisher, especially if you want it in a nice hardcover presentation with a ribbon bookmark. On top of that, the annotations by Matthews and Stafford are a significant aid to unpacking what Malory is presenting you with, and add further value.

The foreword by Michael Moorcock had me intrigued, but on further research it’s the one Moorcock provided for Matthews’ previous version of Le Morte d’Arthur from 2000, which this is an updated reprint of. That’s a shame; it would have been exciting if Chaosium and Moorcock were on good speaking terms again, because it might then be possible for them to perhaps regain the rights to Stormbringer, lost for decades now due to relations breaking down between Moorcock and the previous regime at Chaosium. Still, when it comes to doing justice to someone’s work Chaosium have done a solid job of keeping Stewart Wieck’s old promises for him, and in the process have made available two decidedly useful resources.

In Liberty’s Shadow is really the first truly chunky supplement for Rivers of London, Chaosium’s RPG based on the urban fantasy series created by Ben Aaronovitch; the game’s had a few scenarios come out for it as well, but other than that players and referees have had to make do with the core book, their imaginations, and the admittedly fairly thick stack of Rivers novels when it comes to material for the game prior to this supplement coming out.

The default assumption of the core Rivers of London rulebook book is that PCs will be members of the Folly – a group that’s one half secret society, one half obscure Metropolitan Police department, which focuses its efforts on providing community policing to London’s “demi-monde”, the local occult subculture whose nature is subtly shaped by the esoteric geography of the city. That’s a very specific focus, both in terms of what player characters are likely to be getting up to and the geographic scope of their exploits, but that also tracks with the focus of the series. The full-length Rivers of London novels which form the backbone of the series are very much focused on Peter Grant and his work, which almost entirely takes place in the UK and only occasionally strays outside London. Things get more diffuse in the penumbra of expanded media around the series, which includes short stories, novellas, an upcoming TV show (assuming it doesn’t die somewhere in development hell as TV shows often do), and a graphic novel series co-written with Aaronovitch’s old Doctor Who buddy Andrew Cartmel; some of the expanded media stories have touched on other parts of the world, focused on characters other than Grant, or explored periods prior to the present day. Even then, these are very much occasional exceptions.

Given the core book’s strong focus on the Folly and London, one might think the natural first significant supplement to do would be a “rest of Britain” book. Although the Met doesn’t have UK-wide jurisdiction, it’s still well-placed to lend help to other forces, and Folly PCs aren’t necessarily Met officers in the RPG since the Folly does have civilian consultants. As a result, you’d expect to be able to set Rivers of London scenarios elsewhere in Britain with reasonable ease – the consultant PCs aren’t really disadvantaged by being outside London, and any police officer PCs can be “on secondment” to a local force (the Folly perhaps pulling a few esoteric strings to help this along) for the duration of a scenario. Aaronovitch has done entire novels in the series set in other areas of the UK – I believe the latest one takes place in Aberdeen – so he’s probably got a deep bench of notes on the wider occult geography of Britain, and the rest can be cooked up from urban legend, weird bits of true history, and a sprinkling of folk horror.

As such, In Liberty’s Shadow is a bit more of a departure than I expected, focused as it is on fleshing out the demi-monde of the USA and the various groups that interact with it. This isn’t entirely untouched territory for the series; Aaronovitch has done an entire novella set in 1920s New York, and in the present day of the series there’s an FBI agent who helps out Peter Grant sometimes. Even then, it still feels like a supplement which falls mostly outside the scope of both the default assumptions of the core rulebook and the usual scope of the novel series.

That, however, may be exactly the point. When I reviewed Rivers of London I pointed out how both recent controversies and a grim history may make it difficult for some game groups to feel happy about playing PCs who are employees of or associated with the Metropolitan Police, particularly a branch which is specifically tasked with policing a minority community. There’s aspects to Rivers of London which can alleviate these issues to an extent, but not entirely – but of course, as reader RogerBW pointed out when we discussed it, if you aren’t wholly keen on playing a game about sympathetic Met officers, it’s difficult to see why you’d bother picking up Rivers of London to begin with.

Difficult, but not impossible: you can imagine a group whose members can take or leave the policing side of the series, but are really enthused by its depiction of the demi-monde and the occult forces underpinning it. In Liberty’s Shadow reads like a book specifically for that audience, because it very much regards the demi-monde as being conceptually central whilst the whole “police” thing is much more peripheral; the tweaks here for creating US-based characters, along with the various clubs, factions, secret societies, and pregenerated characters off up here makes it extremely easy to run a Rivers of London game without a single police-affiliated PC, with investigations instead revolving around cryptid hunters investigating the periphery of the demi-monde, or demi-monde do-gooders trying to tackle problems facing the community.

Here, the setting goes a long way towards helping this; having not read the relevant Rivers of London books I don’t know how much of this stuff comes from Ben Aaronovitch himself and how much was made up by Chaosium’s writers, but I’m sure it meshes reasonably well with what Aaronovitch had in mind for the States since he was involved in the design process, offering up some introductory microfiction and a few other contributions here and there.

The crucial thing is that the USA does not have its own equivalent of the Folly. There’s that one FBI character from the stories and a few colleagues supporting her work, and that’s kind of it. This seems to be the consequence of, on the one hand, the strong libertarian streak which keeps flaring up in American politics, and on the other hand the machinations of various magical groups each intent on making sure their rivals don’t get too much influence. The main groups practicing Newtonian magic in American history – Newtonian magic being the variety that the Folly uses – were all entwined in the American Revolution, since Newtonian magic propagated through the sort of circles that Revolutionaries like Ben Franklin were part of, but they landed on opposite sides of the Civil War and ever since then they’ve never wholly seen eye to eye – or been able to get enough momentum to start governing magic in the US to any significant extent, beyond the odd bout of genocide against Indigenous practitioners coinciding with bouts of genocide against Indigenous folk as a whole.

(Wisely, the book opts not to do a whole distinct system for Indigenous magic – it acknowledges that practitioners exist, it notes that there was probably some cultural cross-influence between them and colonist Newtonian practitioners, and it otherwise leaves you to handle non-Newtonian traditions the way you would any other per the core book – namely, either reskinning some Newtonian spells accordingly or giving characters bespoke abilities.)

The downplaying of the police side of things is critical because if playing law enforcement in London can be awkward for many players and sits especially uncomfortably in the wake of stuff like the Sarah Everard murder, policing in America is an even more fraught subject. Whenever Black Lives Matter becomes prominent in the news, some people over here in the UK tut about how awful many of the American police forces are and talk about how our police, though flawed, are much better than that. I’m hesitant on that front; I don’t think the British police are automatically better than American police, but I would say that they are different. There’s key distinctions in the history, the shape of the institutions and the underlying philosophy of how they do police work and what policing is for differ as a result, and that puts a different spin on the type of institutional-level harms done by the respective countries’ police forces. You can’t really treat the history of British and American policing as being essentially equivalent without glossing over a whole lot of the specifics of where they’ve gone wrong – an endeavour which risks obscuring, rather than spotlighting, the specific abuses both countries’ law enforcement institutions have perpetrated over the years.

In a post-George Floyd world where ICE is acting like a homegrown American Gestapo and shooting women in the face for politely saying “I’m not mad at you” and trying to peacefully disengage from a confrontation, playing characters associated with American law enforcement or the Federal government will turn off more groups than it might have, say, back in the 1990s at the height of The X-Files. Even though in this book, as in the core, the assumed campaign start date is 2016 (so you don’t have either Trump presidency to worry about), there’s going to be anxieties there. Some groups might want to grasp that nettle, though to be honest if you want to play a game which explores just how dirty it feels to be involved with the American government in this day and age Delta Green is a far better fit. At the other end of the scale, other groups will not want to touch US government and police stuff with a bargepole.

This is where the supplement’s focus on the American demi-monde really shines, because it showcases how the world Ben Aaronovitch has cooked up has scope for these stories which have nothing to do with law enforcement and yet can still be gripping. After in between a couple of setting chapters which give you the tools you need to dial the level of law enforcement affiliation in your US-based campaign to whichever level you want and a stack of appendices offering additional creatures, magic, and ideas, the supplement is rounded out with two scenarios which explore two distinct ways to tell Rivers of London-adjacent stories set in the USA, both of which could be just as amenable to a law enforcement team as to a bunch of civilians, and will likely play extremely (and entertainingly) differently depending on where on that line you lie.

The first adventure, Woolly Bully, is basically your standard monster-of-the-week story – the sort of thing you absolutely could convert to Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green if you had a mind to. The other one, A Regular Picture Palace Drama, has a very different and distinct texture all of its own, based as it is around a chase between the PCs and various other parties to secure a certain occult artifact. The overall air of it makes me think of the Coen Brothers adapting Tim Powers’ Last Call; it feels, in fact, like it’s landing somewhere close to Unknown Armies, if you hosed it down of all that grimy 1990s edginess. It simultaneously feels like the sort of scenario which Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green aren’t quite the right vehicles for, and something which fits Aaronovitch’s world, whilst at the same time being well outside of the wheelhouse of the Folly.

In Liberty’s Shadow, then is a supplement which broadens rather than deepens the game it’s written for; rather than giving more meat for groups who are keen and happy to play the game close to the core book’s default assumptions, it instead opens up a whole new landscape for players to enjoy, should they wish. Is this strategically sensible? I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, I’m sure it helps make the game more appealing for groups who like the idea of playing in Aaronovitch’s setting but don’t care for the Folly or London; on the other hand, I’m not sure how big of an audience that is. It certainly makes the idea of running an occult road trip campaign in Rivers of London appealing. At the same time, I feel like if a game only gets “broadening” supplements and doesn’t get any major “deepening” supplements, it risks coming across as a concept which doesn’t actually have that much petrol in the tank when it comes to sustained, long-term interest. If Chaosium are already looking away from the Folly to find new stuff to do with Rivers of London, it’s not a ringing endorsement of the potential of the core game concept to provide for years and years of ever-deepening play.

A few weeks back I was browsing the Cubicle 7 website and saw that they had a big sale ongoing for their hardcopy books for their Doctor Who RPG – as in the second edition core rulebook was going for £16, with the PDF bundled in, which is £6.33 less than they’re selling the PDF of the core rulebook (first or second edition) for on DriveThruRPG. In fact, there’s really steep discounts on physical product across the entire line – including the Doctors & Daleks books which adapt the game to the D&D 5E system – which makes me strongly suspect that Cubicle 7 are expecting to lose the licence and are trying to get rid of their old stock.

It would not be enormously shocking if this were the case. The second edition – heavily branded around the Thirteenth Doctor era – came out in 2021 and after that has had a fairly desultory amount of support compared to the extensive releases that were put out for the first edition, which emerged in 2009, went through three distinct printings (for the Tenth, Eleventh. and Twelfth Doctors), and had a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks put out for it, including a multi-volume series covering each of the first twelve Doctors’ eras respectively and guides for running campaigns based around UNIT or the Paternoster Gang. Oh, sure, there’s also been the Doctors & Daleks product line, but taking a big-name licence of theirs and repackaging it for 5E D&D seems to be Cubicle 7’s standard move if the licence in question of theirs allows it and they don’t expect to have enormous amounts of time left on it – see how they put out Adventures In Middle-Earth towards the end of their custodianship of The One Ring, and those books have largely been quick repackaging of second edition materials.

Between this and the lack of any content playing on the 60th Anniversary specials or the Ncuti Gatwa era, it certainly seems like the Doctor Who RPG simply isn’t that much of a priority for Cubicle 7 any more – particularly when they’re also quite busy with a range of Warhammer RPGs (two Old World-based ones, one Age of Sigmar-themed one, and two Warhammer 40,000 ones), and are also gearing up to put out a new edition of their The Laundry RPG based on Charles Stross’ eldritch espionage series.

This seems to be the curious doom of official Doctor Who RPGs – despite in principle being a choice bit of IP to build a game around, the franchise seems to have struggled to find a licensee who’ll actually make a major priority of making a success of an RPG based on the show. FASA basically treated it like the neglected, unwanted step-sibling of its Star Trek RPG, to the point where they basically used a reskinned version of their Star Trek system for it despite it being a poor fit. Virgin Books put out Time Lord at around the same time they kicked off the New Adventures novels, but it’s pretty obvious that that was a little self-indulgent treat Peter Darvill-Evans let himself have rather than something they were going to seriously support. And now the Cubicle 7 line seems to have spent the last few years in a state of managed decline.

But there was that brief little window when Cubicle 7 were going all-put to support it – an era when the line genuinely seemed to be doing well, had plenty of material coming out for it, and was getting critical plaudits, which has all come crashing down. It might be tempting to blame Chris Chibnall for this – goodness knows you can blame him for an awful lot of other stuff, given the absolute and total hash he made of the Thirteenth Doctor era. (And no, I’m not one of those people who think Chibnall botched the era from the start by casting a woman – in fact, I think his strongest season as showrunner was his first, the one when he was most overtly and consciously trying to follow a progressive agenda and showcase diversity, and part of the downfall of his era was the way all of that started to bleed away in favour of nostalgic bilge.) Having the core rulebook of the game be quite so heavily branded around an era which was so heavily rejected by many audience members (those who were still watching, at any rate) can hardly have helped.

However, I think Cubicle 7 made some unforced errors of their own with this edition of the game which can’t be attributed to Chibnall. Both editions of the game credit David F. Chapman as their lead writer, and both at least claim to be powered by the Vortex System, a bespoke game engine also designed by Chapman. However, the changes between the first edition (in its three distinct forms) and the second edition have taken what was a fairly solidly-designed if unexceptional little system and added some seriously wonky aspects to it – and on top of that, it’s flat-out changed the way action resolution rolls are interpreted, a change so fundamental that it’s really stretching the definition to claim that they both operate off the back of the same system. As it happens, I picked up a Humble Bundle package comprising PDFs of a large chunk of the first edition line a while back, so I’m in a position to compare here, and the results aren’t pretty.

Both versions of the system are attempting to tackle the fundamental problem that the range of cromulent PC concepts in a Doctor Who RPG range from ordinary human beings all the way through to, well, the Doctor – and the thing about the Doctor is that Doctor Who stories tend to centre the Doctor a fair bit. It’s the same issue that every Doctor Who RPG faces: on the one hand, if people want to play a Doctor Who roleplaying game it’s most likely because they want to play the Doctor and a group of companions travelling through space and time, but on the other hand you risk some serious disparities in importance within the party. How do you square that circle?

In both editions, this is handled through the idea of Story Points, a metacurrency which can be spent to sway the narrative your way. The more stuff you buy at character gen which shifts you away from baseline human normality and towards something alien and special, the more likely it is you’re going to start off with less Story Points than a baseline human character. This means if you’re playing the Doctor you’re quite likely to be rolling extremely well a lot of the time (especially on Ingenuity rolls, since with a score of 9 you’re a full 4 points past standard human baseline), but you’re having to be fairly conservative about how you use Story Points and so are a bit more vulnerable to quirks of the dice, whereas someone playing a regular human companion is going to be able to be more free about spending Story Points in turn.

One of the major changes between editions is that Traits have been removed entirely in second edition. In the original edition, Traits were your standard point-buy Advantages and Disadvantages system from other RPGs; some would have beneficial effects on your character, some would be disadvantageous. The Doctor, in first edition terms, had a whole bunch of Traits, including a stack of negative ones, and that was another factor which helped to balance things out somewhat. For instance, the Doctor has many, many, many enemies as a result of having defeated many, many, many villains over the years – which means that the referee has the ideal excuse to have the enemies spend most of their time targeting the Doctor, creating opportunities for companions who have less infamy to sneak around and accomplish stuff whilst the Doctor is drawing the ire of the Daleks (or the Cybermen, or the Master, or the Chumblies, or whoever the referee is throwing at them this session). Traits had their little definitions in the rulebook, which gave enough examples that you could get a sense of how they were weighted so if you wanted to come up with a bespoke Trait it wouldn’t be enormously difficult to do so.

That’s all fine and good, but does have the downside that it can be a bit fiddly, prompt a bit of decision paralysis, and slow down play if a character has a particularly large number of Traits (as was the case with the Doctor). The removal of Traits, in principle, seems to have been motivated by a desire to significantly simplify the game in this respect. The problem is that, arguably, Traits haven’t been removed – they’ve just been renamed, made much vaguer, and are presented in a much more confusion fashion.

What second edition has instead of Traits is Distinctions. These are somewhat more thematically narrow than Traits, because they’re really meant to represent stuff which the existing Attribute and Skill combinations can’t really model – like being an alien, or beginning the game a bit more experienced than everyone else, or whatever. You don’t have positive or negative Distinctions like you did Traits – instead, Distinctions are meant to allow you to do cool stuff, possibly at the cost of spending Story Points when you do it, and rather than giving you game mechanical penalties you’re just meant to look out for situations when roleplaying a Trait might cause you problems, and if it does that’s one situation when the referee is meant to dole out Story Points to you.

Instead of having a distinct list of priced-out Distinctions to choose from, you’re instead meant to largely just negotiate your Distinctions with a referee. All Distinctions should in principle be more or less balanced against each other, because they all cost the same thing – every Distinction you take at character generation reduces your total Story Points by two. The game even has a fair idea of how much that’s worth, because one example of a Distinction it offers is being Experienced, which gives you an extra four points in Attributes and four points in Skills… unless the referee decides otherwise and thinks you should be able to get a flatly better distinction, the example given in the relevant sidebar being a “Very Experienced” Distinction which gives you 4 extra Attribute point and eighteen extra Skill points. Even if that’s a typo and they mean “eight”, that still makes a significant difference! You are only allowed to take two Distinctions, unless you’re an alien, in which case you can apparently take as many as you like, except the baseline alien stat profiles already incorporate adjustment to your starting Story Point totals to account for how they set stats beyond the human baseline.

The Doctor, then, has either taken three Distinctions (one to be a Time Lord, one dose of Experienced to get the initial stat boosts necessary to get the Time Lord base statline, and another dose of Experienced to push her stats up even further), or just the two, one to be a Time Lord with the base stats and adjusted Story Point total and one to make them Experience – the text can be read as offering both explanations. Except that taking Time Lord taxed her double on Story Points, so was it one pick or two?

It’s all very, very confusingly presented, and if you want anything aside from being Experienced or being an alien, it’s all down to the referee to figure out and balance. Well, not to worry! There’s a fairly extensive refereeing chapter, so there’s probably guidelines in there to help you get the hang of it – after all, it would be a pretty big oversight to leave novice referees without any help here, and the book does say the game’s designed to appeal to first-time gamers as well as old hands at RPGs. Let’s take a look and… oh.

In fact, there’s no guidelines at all on how to actually adjudicate Distinctions, beyond the discussion of Distinctions in the character generation section – which is incredibly diffuse and poorly organised. (It took me a while to piece together the above explanation.) Honestly, it feels like it would be difficult to write a rundown that was this obfuscatory and confusing on purpose – it’s like the initial notes from a planning meeting for second edition somehow got printed direct into the notebook without going through any intervening development stages. An experienced referee may well be able to muddle through this process, look at lots of stat blocks, and bit by bit get a sense of how substantial Distinctions should be – and there definitely is a sense that Cubicle 7 think a Distinction should have a certain definable magnitude (at least when they aren’t having moments of madness which leads to them, say, deciding that giving someone an extra 14 skill points for free on top of the baseline bonuses for being Experienced is remotely sensible). They should not have to.

What’s really bizarre is that they’re clearly not averse to putting in lists of powers and the like! Gadgets like the sonic screwdriver are bought with Story Points, and the section on Gadgets gives a nice list of example properties you can give them for those Story Points. Note that this means that the Doctor, as statted up at the back of the book here, is going around with only three Story Points, because she started with a base of 12, ended up spending 6 to be an Experienced Time Lord, and then spent 3 for her sonic screwdriver. Unlike in previous editions of the game, she doesn’t have the psychic paper – if she did, the problem would be worse. (By comparison, in previous editions the Doctor has 8 Story Points but a bunch of negative Traits which cause him problems a lot of the time.)

If there’s one really damning aspect of the second edition design, in fact, it’s that glaring disparity between how Distinctions are explained and how Gadgets are statted up, particularly since getting a Gadget at character generation is a viable option. (The Doctor starts out with one on her character sheet, after all.) Having Distinctions and Gadgets be both entirely handwavy and freeform would pose major headaches for inexperienced referees trying to figure out how much to give participants in return for their sacrifice of Story Points. Having them both be more pinned down, with fully worked-out lists of options but the capacity to devise your own using the options you’re given to help calibrate would be more rigorous, at the price of pretty much abandoning the plan to ditch Traits. Handling them differently, particularly since you can make the case that “has a Gadget” is basically a Distinction, is absolutely incoherent game design – not in the Forge-y sense of “is trying to serve two creative agendas at once”, but in the normal meaning sense of “The left hand of this design team doesn’t know what the right hand is doing”.

The other major difference between the incarnations of the system is how dicerolling works. In the first edition, your baseline roll (absent any boosts to the result or your dice pool from Story Points) was 2D6 + Attribute + Skill + any bonuses or penalties from applicable traits, and the magnitude of success or failure depended on how much you beat (or failed to beat) the difficulty number set by the referee (or by the opposition in opposed rolls). An optional rule allowed you to instead roll a third D6 – the Drama Die – the result of which would give you the magnitude of success or failure (with success/fail being determined by the score on the other two D6 you roll); this was intended to speed things up whilst still allowing for a variety of outcome, which simply ignoring the success levels and taking a binary success/failure approach wouldn’t do. Using the Drama Die also means that getting exceptionally good successes becomes more possible for characters rolling on a low Attribute + Skill pool and it’s a bit easier for characters rolling with a high one to get a really bad failure, which can be handy if you enjoy wild swings of fortune (which Doctor Who has in abundance, at least in some eras of the show).

In the second edition, the method of interpreting the results of the dice is almost entirely different. Success or failure is still a matter of rolling 2D6 (as baseline – a D&D 5E-esque advantage/disadvantage-like mechanic has been folded in and again Story Points can affect this), adding Attribute and Skill ratings, and trying to beat a difficulty number. The difficulty numbers remain the same, which is bit of a problem, because Traits would have previously affected the roll but now they’re gone (kind of).

The real change, though, is how you determine whether you got success with a bonus, plain success, success with a downside, failure with an upside, plain failure, or failure with additional problems. Remember, in first edition this was either based on how much you beat or missed the difficulty number by (and so the range of results you could get would swing about depending on difficulty and your stats), or by rolling a drama die. You don’t do either of those here; instead, you look to see whether your 2D6 roll (or 3D6-discard-lowest/3D6-discard-highest or whatever) got any 1s or 6s coming up on the dice. If you have both, they cancel out; that aside, if you have a 6 then you get either success with a bonus (if you beat the target number) or failure with an upside (if you didn’t), and if you have a 1 then you get success with a downside or failure with more problems as appropriate. Finally, double 1s mean you get a really ostentatious critical fail even if you’d have beaten the difficulty otherwise, whilst double 6s are a massive critical success even if you don’t hit the difficulty number.

In some respects this is a fairly quick and easy system, and that’s probably what motivated the change, but there are consequences here. In first edition, your probability of either getting a snacky extra bonus or an additional hiccup when making a roll would either be situational (if you’re doing the “subtract difficulty from the roll you got”) method, or if you are using the Drama Die would come up one in three times, since you’d get an extra snag if you rolled a 1 and a bonus advantage if you get a 6.

If you work out the probabilities on this one, however, then on a typical 2D6 roll there’s 9 ways you can get a 1 coming up which isn’t cancelled out by a 6 (both 1s, first die 1 second die 2-5, first die 2-5 second die 1), and likewise 9 ways you can get a 6 coming up which isn’t cancelled out by a 1. This means you’re getting these special effects going off about half the time you’re rolling the dice, with about a quarter of all rolls requiring the referee to come up with some sort of complication or critical failure disaster and a quarter tasking the referee with making up a bonus or flashy critical success result on the spot. (Of course, with the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, you’re likely to have 6s come up substantially more in the final result when people are doing 3D6-drop-lowest and more 1s with 3D6-drop-highest.)

By way of comparison, that 1 in 3 chance of a special effect kicking off in first edition (if you use the Drama Die) is double the chances of getting a wacky mishap (the only special effect available) on the Ghost Die in the Ghostbusters RPG, a clear predecessor of the Drama Die mechanic. One in six things the PCs attempt causing wacky chaos feels about right for something like Ghostbusters; one in three things they do going unexpectedly well or poorly feels a bit too swingy for Doctor Who.

I realise that systems which allow for a little extra spice over and above simple success/failure metrics are fashionable, and they’re often fun – but equally, I do think you want to be more sparing than this when it comes to how much that special sauce comes up. There’s two reasons for this. The first is simply this: if you’re getting special effects kicking off around half the time, are they actually that special? The second reason is that the more often “you have to come up with a special bonus/penalty” comes up, the more demands you’re making on referees to improvise additional results mid-flow. Now, of course improvisation is part of the job description, but on the other hand the requirement to constantly come up with new complications and serendipities on the fly in response to rolls can be burdensome even to experienced referees, and outright daunting to inexperienced ones. Again, this game is trying to present itself as being accessible to beginner roleplayers – a good call given that the name brand recognition puts it in the very limited set of games which has a shot of cutting through D&D‘s dominance of the English-language market and coming onto the radar of people who’ve otherwise not encountered tabletop RPGs.

The auto-failure and auto-success options also pose a potential trap for incautious referees, since with these in play you’re either in a position of making a judgement call every time someone proposes something on the far side of plausibility as to whether you’re going to allow someone to roll, or accept the possibility that an early Stone Age cave dweller might be able to successfully land a 22nd Century hypersonic fighter jet. Doctor Who is hardly the most realistic science fiction show out there, but even then there’s offences against basic plausibility it will balk at.

I’m not saying that the first edition dice system is brilliant either, mind you – there’s issues with it that are also very much present in the 2nd edition system. In particular, difficulties run from 0 to 30, a range which seems to be required by the extreme span of potential Attribute Plus Skill totals. For instance, the Doctor’s best combination there is Ingenuity (9) + Knowledge (6) or Technology (6) for a total of 15, meaning that with the base 2D6 she can get results from 17 to 27. The 17, being a double 1, will be an auto-fail, but otherwise on those rolls on her best stat combo she’s guaranteed to get at least a success at anything up to a Hard task, will on average succeed at Difficult tasks, and has at least a shot at succeeding at Very Difficult or Improbable tasks on a flat roll, only needing to resort to Story Points or the like when the task is Inconceivable.

By comparison, Yaz’s best combo is Coordination (4) plus Athletics, Conflict, or Intuition (all 3), for a total of 7. Her range of 2D6 results on that is 9 to 19, but the 9s will auto-fail; if she doesn’t roll double 1s, however, she’ll automatically succeed at Easy tasks, will on average be able to succeed at a Normal task, and has a shot at beating Tricky or Hard tasks, so the top of her potential success range (without special effects or skill specialisations kicking in) overlaps only slightly with the bottom of the Doctor’s range. This isn’t a matter of the 2nd edition being unusually bad at designing characters either – these totals are comparable to, say, what the Twelfth Doctor and Clara have going on in the Twelfth Doctor edition of the 1st edition core rules.

This makes selecting difficulties a fucking pain, because if a character is an alien whose special skillset happens to be applicable to the challenge (and the thing about Ingenuity in Doctor Who stories is that it should probably be applicable to almost anything) then they could be rolling on an incredibly extreme score, but if they’re a regular human companion then they are basically not going to be accomplishing in the top third or so of the difficulty range very often at all. Whenever you set a difficulty in middle ranges, you’re presenting a task which is a reasonable challenge for a human character, but if an alien specialist is present whose area of expertise this is, it’s never going to make sense for them not to do it, whereas if you set difficulties at the higher end of the scale you’re basically saying only the Doctor or someone similar can succeed.

If you tend towards higher difficulties, then the advantage regular humans have in terms of having more Story Points to play with is cancelled out because they’ll constantly need to use them to accomplish anything; if you tend towards lower ones, the disadvantage the aliens have of having less Story Points bites less because they’ll have less need of them when a straight 2D6 roll will serve them in their specialist area 35 times out of 36. Either way, the clever twist with Story Points used to try and account for the Doctor often being the centre of attention and companions being disadvantaged in terms of knowledge, experience, funky alien abilities, and the capacity to regenerate ends up being undermined by the system, leaving you once again in the situation you wanted to avoid where playing the Doctor is simply better than playing a companion.

Since this is a fundamental problem with both editions of the game, I understand why a 2nd edition may have been necessary, but for the most part the 2nd edition doesn’t really solve this problem. The capacity to get an auto-success on a double 6 or auto-fail on double 1 at least means the Doctor will sometimes fail regardless and will mean companions have at least some hope of succeeding even when the Difficulties are stacked against them, and the fact that a quarter of the time you’ll get a bonus even if you fail and a quarter of the time you’ll get a penalty even if you succeed likewise helps somewhat, but these effects simultaneously seem to cause their own issues whilst not really being enough to solve the central problem.

Moreover, many of the amendments to the 2nd edition – the removal of a Traits chosen from a set list (but eminently homebrewable if you want) in favour of a freeform-but-not-really Distinctions system and the changes to dice resolution – seem to be in pursuit of further simplifying a game which is already quite simple, and in this respect I think Cubicle 7 have lost sight of what inexperienced referees actually want. I think one of the reason that D&D has the level of success it does as a gateway drug RPG, alongside the first-mover advantage and name recognition, is that it’s actually not astonishingly rules-light – no game whose core rules encompass three hardcovers can really be said to be, after all. Those rules provide guardrails and training wheels to help newcomer referees, as well as providing enjoyment to people who genuinely enjoy them; some participants will stick to those rules in the long term, others will seek more crunch, others will shift to lighter systems as their tastes require.

I’d actually say that rules-light traditional-style RPGs can often be more challenging for a referee to run than rules-medium and heavier RPGs, precisely because by stripping away a lot of rules infrastructure from traditional-style games but retaining the division of responsibilities between referees and players puts much more burden on the referee to do work that is already done for them in a game with more detailed rules. For example, D&D‘s spell lists might be more restrictive than a freeform magic system and require an eyewatering page count to accommodate, but precisely because they provide a defined set of effects they require less adjudication from the referee. Not “no adjudication” – there’s always going to be edge case uses of spells – but at the very least a beginner referee doesn’t have to decide what level Magic Missile should be or what damage it ought to do, the game’s already made those decisions for the referee.

Now, trad-style rules-light systems, when they are done right, can be very, very easy for experienced referees to run and for experienced players to play, precisely because such participants are already used to improvisation in an RPG session and don’t need the training wheels. I think what has happened here is that, in part, Cubicle 7’s designers have mistaken “extremely easy for me” for “extremely easy for a beginner”, not appreciating that beginners will need a leg up that experienced gamers won’t.

Beyond all this, the 2nd edition rulebook also feels like kind of a bad deal compared to, say, the last version of the 1st edition rulebook. There’s no sample adventure in 2nd edition, for instance, despite the page count saved by pulling the trait list. There’s also only four pregenerated characters – the Thirteenth Doctor, Graham, Yaz, and Ryan – whilst the final 1st edition core book gave you the Twelfth Doctor, Clara, Danny, Madame Vastra, Jenny, Strax, Kate Stewart, Osgood, Saibra, Psi, Courtney Woods, Rigsy, Robin Hood, Journey Blue, and generic sheets for “Unit Soldier”, “Scientist”, “Rock Star”, and “Adventuring Archaeologist. Not only is this an all-round better deal than the 1st edition book, but it’s also a properly varied range of characters from various types of alien to human beings with special abilities or resources through to regular human companions.

I’m genuinely at a loss to pick out where 2nd edition brings something new to the table to account for the dozens of pages of material from 1st edition it yanks out and throws in the garbage, despite the Twelfth Doctor 1st edition rulebook and the 2nd edition rulebook having the exact same page count; the 2nd edition book just makes up the difference with a fairly padded-out layout.

As surely as eighteen months is too long to wait, sixteen pounds is too much to pay, at least for the 2nd edition core book. In its 1st edition, Cubicle 7’s Doctor Who RPG had a functional but unexceptional system which still showed signs of strain when trying to model the Doctor, what with him having Attribute+Skill totals of 15 in some areas and over 20 Traits (which is way too many to keep track of) when it was largely calibrated around regular human companions. The 2nd edition still has the same basic problems of the 1st edition, but comes up with an exciting new pile of problems for itself by kicking down one of the supporting pillars (the Traits system) and mucking about unhelpfully with another one (the dicerolling mechanic). Say what you like about Time Lord, at least it provided stats for all the classic-era companions and Doctors without needing a whole multi-volume hardcover supplement line to deliver that information.

So, it’s the last day of what has been a fairly slow 2025 on this blog – I’m expecting things to pick up in the New Year – but I just had to jump on to discuss something I discovered today and mildly infuriates me, in part because it’s evidence of some seriously grifty behaviour on the part of some RPG publishers and in part because it’s one example of a broader problem.

Every so often, Facebook’s advert engine will bombard folk with a bunch of adverts for the same particular thing – probably coinciding with someone bunging them some money to boost their ads. A friend was posting about this, and I decided to comment pointing out a group of adverts I’d been getting a lot of – these ones promoting the D&D “date night bundle” offered up by RPG Maps Forge (archived version), whose main business seems to be putting out tools for digital mapmaking.

All well and good – but when I clicked away from Facebook it reloaded the page and I lost the advert, requiring me to do a bit of googling based on aspects of it I remembered in order to find the RPG Maps Forge website. In the process I ended up finding the shopfront for Fantasy Date Night, an outfit putting out a curiously similar product bundle (archived version). Note how closely aligned the marketing copy is on both pages – they even both have videos on the theme of “one partner passes a flower to the other across a gaming table”. (I’m actually quite amused by RPG Maps Forge’s version of that video, because it looks like continuous footage of an infinite numbers being passed across the table one by one).

We can dig deeper here. In both cases, the cover art for the adventure books on offer looks like it might be AI-generated – but let’s set that aside, because that’s just a hunch I have and I think there’s issues here going beyond whether there’s been cheesy tech-driven shortcuts in the production process. Both product lines have, through an astonishing coincidence, seem to have received the same number of reviews and the same average scores from those reviews. (Fantasy Date Night refers to them as “Verified Reviews”. Verified by who? Not me, that’s for sure, you can’t click through to see all of them.)

Most interestingly, at the top of both pages, they both claim that they’ve hit an average rating of 4.76 stars based on 1723 reviews. Then, towards the bottom, they both run into contradictions; in RPG Maps Forge’s “Customer Reviews” section it claims an average of 4.87 stars based on 127 reviews, whilst on Fantasy Date Night’s page the “What Couples Say About Their Quest” section leads off by claiming a 4.87 star average on 1723+ reviews. How weird that they should both deviate in this fashion, with a totally different number of reviews, but arrive at the same result!

It gets weirder when you look at the substantive content on offer. There’s some serious conceptual overlap going on here. Both of the collections have a scenario themed around the idea of the PCs getting a message from the future spurring them into action – RPG Maps Forge’s one is called, with an astonishing amount of creativity, Letter From the Future, whilst the one from Fantasy Date Night is called Echoes From Tomorrow. RPG Maps Forge also have one which is directly and specifically about a masked ball – The Midnight Masquerade – whilst Fantasy Date Night has The Veil of Stolen Hearts, which sounds like a city-based mystery but depicts a masquerade ball on its cover.

At the same time, it feels like there’s some self-plagiarism going on among the Fantasy Date Night scenarios as compared to the RPG Maps Forge. Each RPG Maps Forge concept seems fairly simple at heart but is at least has divergent styles; one is about a message from the future which has an impact on the characters’ relationship, one has you and your sweetheart’s PCs attending a ball and trying to unmask a hidden villain, one has them exploring an enchanted garden. By comparison, the Fantasy Date Night ones have two scenarios along the basic theme of “You’re in some sort of nocturnal festival full of secrets, will you uncover the mystery or be distracted by the magic of the night?” – Veil of Stolen Hearts has a Venetian masquerade theme, The Starweaver’s Bond sounds more rural.

Both of these sites seem to be fairly recent. RPG Maps Forge’s domain name was registered on the 6th August 2024, via Contact Privacy Inc. using Tucows as the registrar, Fantasy Date Night’s domain was registered on the 8th December – just a few weeks ago! – via Domains By Proxy using GoDaddy. This isn’t cast-iron proof that it’s different people behind each site, of course – but perhaps there’s reason to think that Fantasy Date Night and RPG Maps Forge’s products are made by different people, despite the fact that they both say that they are “Made by a couple that LOVES DnD”.

Most obviously, both of the product lines have different cover art and different styles of internal presentation; Fantasy Date Night is using layout and fonts along the lines of the Dungeons & Dragons 5E house style, whilst RPG Maps Forge’s products have a style which is more distinct to them. This is particularly notable when you consider how close the conceptual overlap is between Letter From the Future and Echoes From Tomorrow; it simply doesn’t make good business sense to make two products which are so similar but then have entirely different art and layout, and sell both products at the same time in product lines which are very closely conceptually aligned. It feels like any individual publisher can probably justify having one “D&D for date night” product line, but doing two with near-identical ad copy but slightly diverging aesthetics seems to have no justification in the normal course of things. (But… put a pin in that.)

On top of that, RPG Maps Forge seem to have a better handle on how this whole “web commerce” thing goes – they have a page for their terms of service, they have a page for their privacy policy, they have a page for their refund policy, and you can look on those pages and see that they’ve got a business contact address in Romania. There’s no such policy pages on the Fantasy Date Night page, which seems to be a weird omission, particularly since it would be the work of seconds to just link back to the original pages. Nor does the Fantasy Date Night page link back to any of RPG Maps Forge’s other pages or products, which most people would expect them to do if they were by the same people.

The biggest reason you might think Fantasy Date Night and RPG Maps Forge are two different outfits, in fact, is that Fantasy Date Night is achingly anonymous. Nobody is named on their page. Their Facebook link just goes to a page which solely promotes Fantasy Date Night. For all that the products sell themselves on being “Made by a couple that LOVES DnD”, they don’t actually bother to tell us anything about that couple, not even anonymised.

Conversely, RPG Maps Forge at least seem to have some kind of history. Their About Us page (archive) introduces us to Lucy and Mark, their “founders and CEO” who have made successes of themselves despite the burden of being born without surnames, and provides a narrative that they started out by offering the “RPG MM Course”, offering lessons in how to make maps for RPGs, before they developed that into their RPG Maps Forge package. There is, at least, a narrative there which doesn’t exist for Fantasy Date Night – Lucy and Mark start off with online courses, then start selling a package of tools for them, then do these scenarios as a sideline to that. This Fantasy Date Night outfit seems to have come out of nowhere, borrowing Lucy and Mark’s advertising language and some adventure concepts rather flagrantly. End of the story, right?

Well, no, because both RPG Maps Forge’s date night products and Fantasy Date Night seem to be heavily based on the Date Night Dungeons product line (archive) from a group who initially were doing business as RPG Tools before they shifted to the less generic Urban Realms. This has a substantially longer pedigree – there were Kickstarters to launch products in the line in 2020 and 2022, comfortably predating either of the others, and the products have spawned a spin-off line in the form of the Lady Blade novels and RPG products. Their earliest Kickstarters date way back to the mid-2010s.

I’ve linked the RPG Tools version of their advert because this has some notably close parallels with both RPG Maps Forge and Fantasy Date Night’s advert. Although the colour scheme is different, the overall layout of all three adverts has some significant similarities, and there’s also some interesting parallels in some of the ad copy. For example, the Date Night Dungeons advert states that it’s “Designed By A Couple Who Loves DND”, which is so close to “Made by a couple that LOVES DnD” as stated on the other two sites that coincidence seems implausible.

We also get more upfront details about that couple! We learn that they’re Tom and Cathy Thrush, we learn that they provided the original impetus behind Urban Realms/RPG Tools and later got assistance from their friends the O’Dells, and so on. By itself, of course, that could all be made up – but what is harder to fake is a decade-long history on Kickstarter and a track record of, from a random sampling of the comments and some searches on Reddit, reasonably satisfied customers.

On top of that, the Date Night Dungeons advert offers details which suggest that the Thrushes have actually put a significant amount of game design effort into figuring out how to adapt D&D to one-on-one play; whereas the RPG Maps Forge and Fantasy Date Night pages gloss over the game design aspects a tad, and their products seem to each contain a brief one-off adventure (or if there are multiple scenarios in each book, they don’t foreground that particularly well), the Date Night Dungeons products seem to offer more meat on the bone.

There’s several scenarios in each book, each providing a linked mini-campaign, and they suggest if you want to share GMing duties you can alternate the GMing role from adventure to adventure – a rather sweet adaptation of the central conceit of Alas Vegas. They’ve even worked out a romance subsystem, as well as making the effort to make 5E and Pathfinder 1E/D&D 3.5 versions of their scenarios, both of which are things you just don’t bother doing if all you’re interesting is getting some cheap bucks out of the D&D crowd. Likewise, they’ve actually bothered making physical products, whereas the RPG Maps Forge and Fantasy Date Night products are digital-only – Kickstarter doubtless having helped somewhat there.

So the timeline seems to be clear here. RPG Tools/Urban Realms did Date Night Dungeons and the concept came out there, and there’s receipts for them doing this before RPG Maps Forge claim to have run their first mapmaking course. More recently, RPG Maps Forge have done their own product line heavily inspired by the concept of Date Night Dungeons, including with advertising that significantly cribs from RPG Tools/Urban Realms’ own advertising, and then in the last few weeks this Fantasy Date Night website appeared from out of nowhere, borrowing great piles of text from RPG Maps Tools verbatim and having a very similar but aesthetically tweaked product line. Is that all to the story?

Well, not quite. See, in principle there’s nothing wrong with different RPG products taking inspiration from each other. Date Night Dungeons, for that matter, aren’t even the first such product on the market – D&D Duet, a Patreon-supported product line from Grove Guardian Press, has been doing this sort of stuff since 2019, a full year before that first Date Night Dungeons Kickstarter. Remember too that in 2020 Chaosium put out the one-on-one adventure collection Does Love Forgive?, a translation of a Polish-language product from Black Monk; there seems to have been something in the air contributing to one-on-one play having a bit of a moment in 2019-2020, and notably that extends to before COVID so lockdown can’t be the sole driver of that. There’s clearly an appetite for this sort of thing, there’s nothing wrong with someone trying to meet that demand.

What is a problem is when someone takes someone else’s product concept outright and uses it as a cheap means to turn out seriously substandard product, and in a manner which creates confusion in the market. I think it’s less likely that Date Night Dungeons and D&D Duet would be confused for one another – they’re presented in very different ways, after all – but when you’re borrowing someone’s advertising phrasing to the extent that’s happened with RPG Maps Forge and Fantasy Date Night and Date Night Dungeons, the scope for confusion is significant. What about quality? I’m not really in the position to compare and contrasts the contents of these product lines in depth without paying money for them, which I don’t want to do. Fortunately, some people already have – including informed consumers in a position to compare and contrast at least two of these product lines. There seems to be at least some organic good press for Date Night Dungeons, but for RPG Maps Forge’s line the feedback is less good, with complaints of incoherent scenarios which fail to include plot-critical information and give the impression of being written by AI. Again, I’m not going to go into an AI rant at quite this point, not least because it’s perfectly possible to write a terrible RPG scenario with your own two hands, but that’s not an especially good look.

Perhaps the most significant feedback, however, is to be found in this Reddit thread, initiated by someone who’s got experience of both of Date Night Dungeons and the RPG Maps Forge product lines, and is therefore in a position to compare and contrast. So this isn’t just a matter of people getting the products and then finding that they just kind of dislike the one-on-one concept in general – they can enunciate what they do and don’t like about the respective product lines, and the premise of a romantic D&D game for your sweetieflumph is something they’re interested with, and they see little to no value in the RPG Maps Forge product line. They also note that they’re on friendly terms with the RPG Tools/Urban Realms crew and got in touch, and apparently the RPG Maps Forge products have caused significant problems for Urban Realms.

This is also part of a shaky track record on the part of RPG Maps Forge. There’s a large thread on Reddit from a few years back about their core product – the mapmaking tools – with dissatisfied customers annoyed that the advertising didn’t make it sufficiently clear in their view that it’s just a bunch of brushes for you to use with editing software rather than an actual mapmaking software package like Campaign Cartographer, and allegations that some of those brushes were stolen or plagiarised at that. I’m not saying these allegations are true or not – I’d need to buy the product to check – but I am saying that this is a company that’s struggling with reputational issues.

And this, of course, might be the answer to the mystery of Fantasy Date Night – why on the one hand the advertising copy is so closely aligned with that of RPG Maps Forge, why the product lines seem so similar, and why despite all this they have entirely different covers and layouts and the Fantasy Date Night pages and RPG Maps Forge pages don’t acknowledge one another at all. I say “might be” because I cannot, of course, prove this, but I do have a theory which cannot presently be ruled out: my theory is that Fantasy Date Night is presented by the same individuals behind RPG Maps Forge (who might or might not be called Lucy and Mark, depending on how much credence we give their bio), and it’s their attempt to do a total reskin and revision of that product line with a website that’s not directly linked to theirs in any way (so long as people don’t look too closely at those review numbers), because they’re running into reputational problems and they’re thinking they might do better if they have a wholly separate line which isn’t so connected to a name that turns up unhappy Reddit threads when you plug it into a search engine.

But I could be wrong! Maybe RPG Maps Forge put out a lazy product line with advertising copy leaning on the way Date Night Dungeons advertises itself, and then they got ripped off more blatant and harder by someone else.

Either way, though, it does mean that it seems overwhelmingly likely that there is something shady going on with Fantasy Date Night. Either Fantasy Date Night is being presented by wholly different people from RPG Maps Forge, in which case they’re doing an out-and-out scam including plagiarism of advertising copy which makes RPG Maps Forge’s borrowings from Date Night Dungeons seem tame in comparison (though still kind of shady), or Fantasy Date Night is RPG Maps Forge’s date night line given another lick of paint and presented in a way which obscures who’s selling it, and I can’t really think of any legitimate, trustworthy, non-grifty reasons why somebody would do that.

I could, indeed, go off on a rant about AI here. As I said, I can’t prove whether or not AI was used in the text of RPG Maps Forge or Fantasy Date Night’s products – I don’t have access to the text. Nor am I in a position to prove that the artwork was done by AI, rather than just artists who have the misfortune to paint like AI paints. Nonetheless, it would be very easy to take the gamble that generative AI was indeed used to spit out these modules (and, perhaps, do the advertising copy as well) and characterise what’s going on here as being a sign of AI being a horrible tool that’s ruining the industry.

I think that’s an overly simplistic way of looking at this situation. Generative AI certainly is ugly to look at and flavourless to read, and it would certainly bother me any time a finished RPG product attempted to fob off AI-generated material on me. I’m less worried about artists or writers using generative AI to spitball concepts and get inspiration or references – whatever form this technology settles down into, I think it will always be more valuable as something which assists a human in performing a task rather than just spitting out the finished product outright.

But I think this situation is simultaneously something which you can’t 100% blame AI for. Fundamentally, what happened here is that RPG Maps Forge wrote what is, by all accounts from people who are actually available to answer questions about and discuss their experience, a set of fairly mediocre scenarios, and took a lot of inspiration from how Date Night Dungeons were presented when promoting them, and then either Fantasy Date Night ripped off RPG Maps Forge or Fantasy Date Night is RPG Maps Forge in a funny hat and fake moustache. If all generative AI tools in the world were turned off tomorrow, this sort of thing absolutely could still happen. All it would take would be someone motivated enough to throw some shovelware product out there, and lazy enough to utterly half-ass the shovelware – we went through the entire 3.X era of D&D with the RPG market being absolutely flooded with OGL shovelware, none of which was written using ChatGPT or the like because those models didn’t exist at that point in time.

What you can say about AI in this situation is that it makes it way easier to do this sort of thing – both in terms of spitting out the slop content to begin with, and doing a quick aesthetic reskin and rewrite of your own (or someone else’s) material if you want to start selling it under a different flag if you get the impression people don’t trust the first version of your product line. (Again, I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but I am saying if someone did do that thing, it would look a lot like what’s going on with RPG Maps Forge and Fantasy Date Night.)

What is true of much generative AI is that it doesn’t do stuff unprompted – prompts are literally how you get it to do stuff in the first place. If you see an AI system doing something, you can eventually trace it back to something a human being asked it to do, though there may be significant misinterpretations involved as far as that human intentions go. And if you asked AI to produce some cheap and cheerful D&D modules for one-and-one play with romance themes and got something out which looked like what’s on offer from RPG Maps Forge or Fantasy Date Night, you would neither be surprised by the output nor think that the AI had gone especially off-base in implementing your prompt.

So if we’re seeing stuff like this happen, it’s because a human being wanted it to happen – we can decry AI for giving them a tool for making it much easier to do, but we mustn’t let the human being off the hook, and we’d hardly be happier if all of this slop were cranked out by hand. If we’re going to accept that Fantasy Date Night is a grift – and on the face of it, it certainly seems to be either a grift where RPG Maps Forge’s product is being repackaged whilst obscuring its origins for no apparent legitimate purpose, or a grift where RPG Maps Forge’s product has been ripped off wholesale – then the next question we can ask is “why would someone work this grift in the first place?”

And the answer to that, unlike some of the mysteries I’ve been going on about above, is dead simple: grifters gravitate to where they believe they can find marks.

That is why I think that the D&D 5E community would be well-advised to be on guard. Really, anyone in any corner of any hobby should exercise a little discretion and discernment when being asked to part with their hard-earned cash, but I think the 5E community is in a position where it’s unusually attractive to grifters, for reasons it isn’t enormously difficult to figure out.

Firstly and most obviously, at least in the English-language market 5E has the largest player base. In addition, because 5E is the most prominent and well-known RPG in the market, it’s the easiest for a grifter to quickly get up to speed on and create the impression that they’re conversant with it, and a large customer base means that it’s easier to grift one corner of that market, go away, and pop up elsewhere that someone hasn’t heard of you, whereas the community for an itty bitty cult game is likely to be too small to do that sort of thing in. And, of course, more customers in the community means more money sloshing around for the taking, if you can convince them to part with it.

Secondly, 5E’s player base includes more inexperienced players than many other RPGs. That’s partially a knock-on consequence of having the largest player base, but is also a factor of the game having wider cultural recognition than almost any other RPG and stuff like the Critical Role fandom driving newcomers towards it. It’s very often a gamer’s very first RPG experience, and if it’s the most widely-used onramp into the hobby, you’re going to get a disproportionate number of newcomers in that corner of the hobby – and that’s exactly the sort of person who doesn’t have the experience of the field which would make it easier for them to smell a rat and think “wait, is this slop?”

Thirdly, there’s a sizable constituency within the 5E player base, even among experienced players, who have had only narrow exposure to the wider RPG industry. This would be the people who exclusively play D&D 5E, are only interested in playing it, and frequently annoy advocates of other systems by asking for ways to wrangle 5E’s system way out of shape to accommodate some other game experience it’s less used to when there’s tried and tested solution which target the exact thing they’re going for and which can be easily learned – sometimes for free – which they won’t touch.

Now, if that’s where your tastes lie, that’s great – and it doesn’t preclude you from having a nuanced and deep understanding of who the reputable, reliable third party content providers for 5E are (and who’s just running a slop factory). You can absolutely be a knowledgeable and informed customer within the D&D-only space. But it’s also true that the D&D-only space will include a constituency of people who’ve only ever seen Wizards products and haven’t really stepped into the world of third party products before – and those are going to be the people who are vulnerable to buying slop with shiny presentation, especially if they’re insufficiently online to know where to go to check out a company’s reputation (or suspicious lack thereof).

Now, all three of those factors – D&D being the largest English-language game, D&D being the most common on-ramp for new players, and D&D including a significant constituency of people who didn’t really look outside the D&D ecosystem – are things which were true during the 3.X era boom in shovelware supplements too – and lo and behold, some of the shovelware which was churned out back then was pretty bad. If today’s generative AI tools had been around then, there’d have probably been a lot of AI slop represented in the OGL shovelware tidal wave of the 2000s. As it stands, the tidal wave of 5E shovelware is here – abetted in part by Wizards shitting the bed on the OGL so thoroughly that not only did they dial back on their attempt to exert more control over the third party D&D market, but they also put the entire 5E SRD out as Creative Commons, making it even easier for people to make use of D&D material in the market, and putting themselves in a position where they are probably quite reluctant to try and enforce any IP rights against third party publishers outside of direct piracy and plagiarism of Wizards’ own work lest they end up with another publicity shitstorm.

As such, we should continue to expect people to put out bandwagon-hopping, shoddy products aimed at the 5E crowd for the foreseeable future, and exercise at least some level of caution in checking the reputation and track record of people offering material that sounds like a great deal. And that’s needlessly going to make it harder for good faith publishers like Urban Realms/RPG Tools.