The adversaries, beasts, constructs and monsters of the Ninth World poses a formidable and often unfathomable threat to life. Characters setting out on a voyage of discovery through the weird landscape of ruins, drit and numenera can expect to not expect much of what they encounter. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition – true enough. […]
It’s Not Easy Being Weird: A Review of Numenera’s Injecting the Weird
Your mounts are quadruped leeches with shrivelled, underdeveloped forearms and an odour like pickled limes. Having arrived in Thexz, entering through a gateway in the wall of solidified whispers that surround it, and left the mounts in stables, you search out your contact. H’eth is an ex-Aeon Priest who speaks with two voices, one like […]
Doing It Old Style: A Review of The Fire Demon – Death Awaits You!
In the 1980s, Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books forged the way for children (and many adults) to enter fantastic worlds, where they held a measure of control in the outcome. The books allowed the reader to steer the plotline of the story through a finite number of variations, many of which ended […]
Blasted Martian Skies: A Review of Rocket Age and Blood Red Mars
Rocket Age embraces the science fiction of a century past and the radio dramas of the 30s, the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and John Carter, blended with the pulp action heroics of characters like Doc Savage or Allan Quatermain. Heroes of the new colonial frontier, varied personalities seek to hunt, explorer, unearth and […]
High Rises, Low Morals: A Review of Venture City Stories
The real superheroes of the City have corporate sponsorship… or at least those heroes who have sanctioned powers and the legal teams behind them to cover for claims of massive structural and collateral damage. Superpowers appear to be a natural phenomenon, a potential in the whole of humanity, activated in a lucky few – or […]
Wheels Within Wheels – A Review of Beyond The Edge: Buried Burdens
The townsfolk of Ample Quarry make their livelihood from quartz mining in the Scattered Lands beyond The Beyond. Once part of the Kingdom of Xendalia, that civilisation collapsed millennia ago and what remains jutts awkwardly and mysteriously from the landscape – pillars and pylons of rocks, ceramics or metal. While mining proves might be thankless […]
A Terrible, Indescribable Thing – A Review of Hideous Creatures: Shoggoth
Long before the gelatinous geometric monstrosities and semi-aware slimes, iridescent and menacing blobs of goo threatened the lives and sanities of those adventurous enough to probe the depths of civilisations past. While dungeon explorers might consider them an inconvenience at best, possessed of little more than a hunger-driven intuition, Lovecraft served up an insidious and […]
All Things to All People: A Review of The Tomb of Caragthax
I must confess before I start this review – I’m not big on dungeon crawls or relentless monster-bashing. I’m not adverse to conflict-based encounters, but I don’t dwell on them. On the other hand, I have another confession – I really like to read material that has the flexibility and potential to reuse and mine […]
The World Hates You: A Review of Trigger Happy
“…that which does not kill you better run away.” Trigger Happy is a game about the sort of people who don’t like you or anyone else for that matter, because they’re misanthropic b****rds with guns and they’re going to beat seven shades of something out o’ you before they even start brainstorming potential opening questions. […]
Wish They’d Let Me In: A Review of The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby
Sometimes there are questions that do not warrant an answer and doors best left unopened. However, when a visitor calls and has time only to utter overexcited relief at finding you before expiring, the things best left undone might prove the only way… The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby is a 34-page adventure for Trail of Cthulhu, […]
