I finally took my posse of Heretic Legion models and played a game of Trench Crusade with Raff at the Sword and Board. Trench Crusade was created by Mike Franchina, the main artist for the game. The rules were designed by the legend himself, Tuomas Pirinen, of Mordheim fame. There is so much to love about this game, where to begin?
Trench Crusade takes place in an alternate version of earth where rogue Knight Templars open a gate to hell and the the next 800 years or so are all about people fighting demons and that sort of nonsense. The game’s present day is 1914, the start of our WWI, just another day in this worlds never-ending war. Mike Franchina’s artwork helps bring the setting to life, elevating it beyond just another Weird World War sort of game.
The rules for the game are nice and simple. There is a single resolution mechanic: roll 2d6 and try to score above a 7. A 12 is a critical success. The number of dice you roll can be modified based on a model’s profile, equipment, situational rules, etc. In such cases you’ll add additional dice to your dice pool. The rules refer to this as +DICE and -DICE. A +1 DICE and a -1 DICE cancel each other out, so you’ll end up with a pool that contains 0 or more +1 DICE or -1 DICE. This then works like advantage or disadvantage in D&D: you will roll all your dice and take the highest two, or the lowest two, depending on the make up of your dice pool. This is the roll you’ll make to shoot or attack. You’ll also make a roll like this when taking ‘risky actions’, like trying to climb a wall or make a diving charge. If you shooting or melee attack is successful, you will make a similar roll on an injury table. Rolling a 9+ takes a model out of action. A 7-8 will knock the model down. A 2-8 will also cause the model to gain a blood token. These can be spent to modify die roles. The opposing player can spend them to make your unit less effective in combat, or make their own units more effective when targeting that model. All in all it’s a nice and tidy system: it’s fast to play.
There is almost no looking anything up, no complicated tables, etc. There is far less rolling lots of dice to accomplish nothing, a common feature of Mordheim. You don’t have to track wounds, as there is no hit points. Tougher units will have an armour score that reduces the results of the injury die, making them more likely to survive. The blood tokens act a little like wound markers, as a unit with blood tokens will be easier to kill in subsequent attacks, but it’s dynamic and not a sure thing. In our game we I was constantly spending the tokens I had inflicted on Raff’s elite demon monsters to make them less effective in combat, trying hard to keep my little heretic troopers alive. I also managed to get some lucky rolls, resulting in one of troopers almost killing Raff’s super-demon. That model is Tough, so when it would be taken out of action the first time it’s simply knocked down. It got back up and demolished that little trooper on its next turn.
We played a one-shot, but as soon as it was done I wanted to start a campaign. The rules look very similar to Mordheim. The models in your warband can get injured, explore, level up, buy new equipment, etc. I’ll need to dig into all of that later. The book also has a healthy set of scenarios that look quite good. The default assumption is players will play 12 games in a sort of escalation league, the last game being the final free for all conclusion to the campaign. You start the campaign with a 700 ducats spending limit, and a limit of 10 models on your team. You end the campaign with a limit of 1800 and 22 models. You could field quite the platoon.
The rules are available online for free—fantastic. The digital rule book takes advantage of the format, with hyperlinks to help you navigate through the document with ease. There is way finding in the left side margin of each page, to help orient your place in the book, but which also serve as hyperlink navigation through the book. The layout and design is lovely. The rules are well written and clear. There is a simple presentation of the rules that takes up about 8 pages and explains the whole game. This is followed up by a longer presentation of the rules which goes into a little more detail, providing additional clarity and examples. The simple rules are likely all you’ll need to read to play if you’re familiar with war-games, or need to refresh yourself on how the game works. Seeing a rulebook like this from a small indie company makes Games Workshop’s “we only sell you overpriced hardcover books that are out of date when you buy them” stance extra annoying.
I currently have enough models to do about 800 points. Evan kitbashed a Commando for me, which I’ll need to prime and paint. I want to try and kitbash more troops as well. Get to a point I could field a bigger posse for a bigger game.
I’m hopefully we will start a campaign in the city, and I can experience the fuller game. This game certainly is meant to be experienced as a long running campaign. That said, as it stands the rules work well for a fast standalone game. This is a solid skirmish game. Well worth checking out. I mean, it’s free!
I participated—and I use that term most loosely—in Sam’s epic online play-by-post “war-game”Over/Under is officially over. I look forward to all the dissertations about the game in the years to come. There were thousands of players, no doubt everyone experienced the games in ways that are unique to them. I would engage as I did at the start, showing up when I see we’ve all been tagged and posting a salute emojis. I also had a small running personal gag of joining people’s semi-private threads (like the Tempest’s Master of Arms’s office) and excusing myself when people started having private conversations. Other people went all in, playing the game non-stop for basically a month.
I jokingly described the game to friends as follows: [Over/Under] was basically a giant free form LARP, where everyone was gay for each other. And then deep in the background … a war-game—way, way deep. Obviously there was lots going on, but it’s wild just how much the game seems to have gotten away from its creator’s original vision. I picture myself as the player Sam likely imagined: I would check in a few minutes a day; vote when I needed to vote on the bosses initiatives; post random in-game messages here and there. There wasn’t really anything to do if you weren’t a boss. The players that dominated the game went a completly different route. They filled the giant void left by Sam with so much stuff. There were gambling dens, bars, tabloids, cage fights, new unofficial factions, Ponzi schemes … and lots and lots of doomed romance. The mod announcements as the game progressed were mostly about the doomed romance.
It’s kind of incredible this game worked at all. Lots of cooperation from lots of people to essentially not break Kayfabe. Early in the game someone set one of the bars on fire. One of the few times I was around to help with something happening in the game. Except, you couldn’t actually set a bar on fire in the game, restrain or injure another player, etc. Everyone just had to agree, this is what’s happening, let’s see how it all plays out.
Despite morphing into this free-form RPG LARP thing, it does feel like there is something essentially OSR about this whole affair: the void left by the rules was the game. I am curious if the game would have worked if Sam had tried to provide mechanical incentives for the plebeians on the side-lines, versus just the bosses. I don’t think you get the magic of this game without the rules void. Is Over/Under the best argument for System Doesn’t Matter™? Someone else can make that case!
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Random Character Generator. I had promised my friend Nick I’d make him something that spits out the random grimoires from Errant, and finally got around to it last night: Random Grimoire. I’ll probably try and add random Errant characters next. There are several games I want to this generator. One day.
My friends were over to kitbash minis and play Warcry to celebrate our friend Richard’s birthday. There was a small posse of us, so Richard came up with a simple and ingenious way to play mutli-player co-op Warcry that matches the random spirit of the game. We wanted to play a 3 vs 3 game. Each of us took our warbands and split them up into the Dagger, Hammer, Shield groups as usual. We then randomly assigned each group to each player, so each player would bring one of the groups for their team. (For a 2 vs 2 game, you could just one player from each team bring two of their groups, rather than one.) In our game the ways things shook out ended up giving a slight advantage to our opponents, they had a few more points than us, but I don’t think it skewed things thast much. You could grant the underdog team bonus wild dice based on the point differential, though how many is left as an exercise for the reader. Since by the rules you must make your groups with as even a split of minis as possible, and with this format you don’t know which group you’ll take, it likely will lead to fairly even splits anyway. Playing this way means you don’t need to mess with any other rules or the balance of the game. Each team had about 1000 points of minis, would roll initiative dice for their team as usual, etc.
For Mothership Month—a crowdfunding campaign extravaganza—Sean decided to spend some of his marketing budget funding a crazy giant digital LARP. Sam Sorensen is running Over/Under, a 100% bananas play-by-post “war-game”. There are over 1000 players! A much smaller subset are ‘bosses’ who get to make actual decisions and interact with Sam to direct the energies of the various factions in play. I had originally planned to avoid the game, it seemed so overwhelming (and honestly still is), but how often does stuff like this happen? I joined the Tempest Mercenary squad, because Amanda is the person in charge, and have been a loyal soldier ever since. The bulk of my “playing” consist of showing up when I see we’ve all been tagged and posting a salute emojis. I don’t think you really need to spend more effort than that if you want to play as well. If I had more time, I probably would have tried to ply my trade as a misinformation broker. Another time. I still don’t really understand what’s happening half the time. It’s still fun & weird experience nevertheless.
I really enjoyed this sort of meta-review from Paul, The New Novely. Paul writes very deep meaningful reviews of the games he plays. We also have very different interests or goals when it comes to gaming.
Stuff coming out of the Forge movement either interested me or repelled me. But at least it was novel! Polaris might not have landed for me but Dust Devils sure as shit did. Dogs in the Vineyard was great and Carolina Death Crawl was upsetting. And the new ideas just kept coming. A solid decade-plus of envelope-pushing. … I can’t tell you the last truly new, engaging idea that hit me out of game design. … Looking forward at the next 20ish years of play and it’s all gonna be pretty much the same? Not a great feeling.
Maybe it’s cliche that OSR fans aren’t that obsessed with rulesets, but I’m not that obsessed with rulesets. I have so many variations of D&D, and will honestly buy more before I die. I like whisky, and have so many different bottles in my pantry. They are all unique, interesting in their own ways, enjoyable to drink. I don’t need stuff to be wildly different. I enjoy subtle refinement. But Paul’s point is a good one: where are people doing wildly different stuff right now? Jay Dragon is one person that comes to mind. Who are the other people trying to do something novel?
The “you don’t need to play to review” folks are just wrong if you want anything deeper.
I don’t think Paul is wrong here, you will certainly be able to tell a more complete story about a game or adventure after you’ve run it. I make more of an effort now to play the games I write about before I write about them, but the net result of doing that is I write less reviews. Some games and adventures do benefit from my having sat down and played them. My Night Witches review after having played the game is far better than the one I wrote before playing. But what I wrote about Another Bug Huntbefore I played it isn’t so far off from how I felt after I played it. And I still haven’t gone back to write about Another Bug Hunt. I try and write when I have the energy and thoughts to write, not when I think what I’ll produce is perfect. This is a blog, not A Survey of Game and Adventure Design, 2020-2025 from MIT Press. There is a lot of good criticism and writing of games that comes from solely from people reading things carefully and thinking deeply.
A recent episode of Between Two Cairns opened with a discussion on what to do when a reaction role doesn’t jive with the idea you have in your head for the situation. Yochai’s sentiment more or less mirrors my own: if you roll the dice, you should just go with what the roll says. There is something chaotic and fun in trying to figure out why the troll in the middle of the dungeon is actually excited to see you. But what if the roll doesn’t make any fictional sense whatsoever? In that case I would question why you are rolling in the first place! I try and assign modifiers to creatures encountered when I want them to have a default disposition that is more negative or positive than a plain 2d6 spread. I also only include any charisma modifiers where it would make fictional sense for a characters charisma to come into play. Finally some monsters are truly mindless and will always want to eat the players, like zombies, perhaps. It’s easy to fall into the trap of rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice. I like Chris’s post on this topic: Information, Choice, Impact.
My house rules for death and dying in D&D are buried in a post about my house rules for my Carcosa campaign. That was the first time I used them, but they continue to be what I use when playing D&D-a-likes:
If your hit points drop below or are equal to zero make a Save vs. Death Ray and Poison: success indicates your character is merely unconscious, completely incapacitated until they can get a full week of rest; failure indicates your character is oh-so dead. If you roll a natural 20 on your saving throw roll, your character not only survives, but is invigorated by his near death. In this case your character re-rolls their HP for the session—the “hulkamaniac” rule.
This is easily generalized for any system with saves and hit points. Mothership and DCC RPG have similar rules for death and dying.
I normally re-roll hit points per session, something I picked up from Brendan. (I would say this is an atypical reading of how OD&D explains hit dice, but one I am a fan of—poor rolls for your HP seem less punishing. Carcosa did something similar and more bananas with HP/HD as well for that matter, but I ignored those rules.) If this isn’t how you play, I would return people who roll a natural 20 on their save back to the game with their max HP.
If you want to also include the possibility of permanent scars and dismemberment I would make a table keyed on how much you made your death save by. But I don’t usually play with those sorts of tables. I prefer the simplicity of you’re dead or you’re not.
Sucks Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) turned out to be such a dick.
My friend Warren messaged me a few days ago. “Ram,” he said, “reminder to write the Rammies, Ennies are in 2 days.”
Wait, what? The year zooms by and I’m always caught on the back foot. Even with the warning I didn’t really have time to get any of my thoughts down until … well right now. This post wasn’t written before the Ennies began, it will show up some time in the middle of their show. Oh well. I don’t really care about what the Ennies have to say one way or the other, and you shouldn’t either, but I won’t fault someone for loving the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry. Someone had to fill that void, why not ENworld? So much voting!
At the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in gaming there is only one voter: me! There is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2024. I had to think a little bit hard about these rules this year, as my copies of Swyvers and Gardens of Ynn arrived safe and sound at my brother’s door in the UK. I’ll see those books in a couple weeks, and so they will be in the running next year. Till then …
Best Game: Break!! by Reynaldo Madriñan and Carlo Tartaglia
I waited, along with many friends, many years for this book. And then it finally arrived. I wasn’t always sure it would. But Rey and Carlo took their time and made something special. In the time between me first seeing Rey and GreyWiz working on Break!! to its eventual release it became a big chonky game. It’s not really the sort of game I play anymore. Character creation is 200 pages of this book! Come on, man. Of course, that also doubles as a lot of world building. Break!! has such an imaginative setting, a natural extension of Reynaldo’s Baroviania game. Reading the book it draws you it. Drew me in. I am prepping an inevitable game. Break!! feels well suited to eat 5Es lunch. The character creation is so detailed, there are lots of options and abilities and all that. Lots of ways to customize characters and gear to your liking. The vibes for the game are so perfect. Kitchen sink fantasy that feels very much its own. Carlo’s art is incredible. I would watch the Break!! Saturday morning cartoon. Perhaps one day we will get one.
Best Setting: Gackling Moon by Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp
Some motherfucking OSR nonsense from the man himself Patrick Stuart. Gackling Moon began its life on Patrick’s blog. For those not familiar, the book describes the Moonlands, a bizarre place for adventure. The book features art by Tom Kemp and feels like you are reading an in world artifact you would pick up at a museum exhibit about the region. This feels like Patrick’s take on the 2e Gazetteer as literary fiction. In many ways this is probably stretching the limits of what counts as a gaming book. There is so much creativity jammed into Gackling Moon, but actually turning that into an adventure to play is left as an exercise for the reader. Maps, stats, everything is absent. That the book features random tables is really the only explicit nod to gaming. But I disagree with those who would argue this isn’t a gaming book: everything was clearly written with an eye to how it would play on a table. This approach feels like less of a stretch—a gazetteer for a fantasy world—than the stat-less monster manual that was Fire on the Velvet Horizon. (That book is amazing, by the way.) There is clear precedent for this style of fiction. Tom Kemp’s art is such a perfect match for the book, and contributes to the feeling this is the companion book to some gallery or museum exhibit. Gackling Moon is maximally creative. Often quite funny. More people should check it out.
The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2024: The Mothership Boxed Set by Sean McCoy & Friends.
A weird pick: Mothership has already won this coveted spot, but this boxed set is actually really fucking good. The game has matured in that time, lots of tweaks here and there. I’m less interested in those changes and more interested in what I would consider the centrepiece of this boxed set, it’s Warden’s Manual. I love this book! Mothership’s Warden’s Manual is exactly what I want from a “DMG”: practical concrete advice on getting the game you bought to the table. How do you prep? What do you do in your first session? Etc. It’s all the juice. This boxed set made me want to run the game again. And I did! The box conveniently includes an adventure, Another Bug Hunt, which I enjoyed running for my friends. Mothership has grown into a real behemoth since I first wrote about it. This game is probably someone’s first RPG, the Kickstarter raised so much money and had so many backers. What a lucky person.
Honourable Mentions
I say this every year, but this year was a particularly competitive one. We had another beautiful boxed set with Wulfwald by Lee Reynoldson, Owe My Soul to the Company Store by Luther Gutekunst & R. Devlin, Knave 2e by Ben Milton & Peter Mullen, the nazi killing romp that is EAT THE RIECH by Grant Howitt & Will Kirkby and my new favourite rank & flank war-game, Hobgoblin by Mike Hutchinson. I am a big fan of the first entrants to Troika 1:5 series, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse by Andrew Walter and The Hand of God by Mike Knee and Andrew Walter. I’m really looking forward to the adventures to follow.
The Kickstarter for Wandering Blades is coming to a close. Wandering Blades is a new game from Daniel Kwan—who is notable for Ross Rifles, the Asians Represent Podcast, and living down the road from me. It’s an OSR game that swaps out your typical medieval-fantasy out for some wuxia vibes.
I wrote about Daniel’s previous game Ross Rifle’s back when I played it during BreakoutCon. The game is an interesting (and educational!) Powered by the Apocalypse game about the First World War. Daniel has also done a lot of freelance work, mostly in the PbtA or 5e space. Wandering Blades is interesting because you can see him bring those influences and experiences to the design of an OSR game. It’s interesting to see ouroboros of influences at play. Daniel mentions being influenced by games I would consider to have borrowed or been inspired by PbtA games. It’s all a bit of a circle.
The game has all the trappings of a D&D-like: attributes, hit points, character classes, levels, etc. There are some different names, but if you have played anything vaguely D&D-ish you’ll figure it out. The game has two core related mechanics: checks and saves. You try and beat a difficulty score on a d20 when making a check or a save. A save is reactive, you roll it to avoid a bad outcome. Daniel suggests some sample DCs so you don’t have to think too hard about setting them, the main thing I dislike about DCs. Where the game really branches out is when it comes to combat.
A lot of OSR games focus on problem solving. You will often hear this maxim that combat is a failure state. The rules for many OSR games often often produce grotty nobodies trying to survive long enough to become the sorts of powerful heroes you read about it books. (But I ask you, what campaign ever lasts that long!) Wandering Blades is trying to capture the mood of a very different sort of genre. The characters aren’t usually grotty nobodies, they are capable bad-asses. They might get hurt or die, but they are certainly taking a lot of people with them if that’s the case. The game does a lot of work mechanically to try and capture what makes a fight in those sorts of stories feel dynamic and interesting. This part of the game reminds me of 4th or 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, where the designers tried to go further than “roll a d6 for damage”.
The two core character classes in the game are Youxia (wandering hero) and the Outlaw. The Youxia belongs to a martial arts sect, and has access to a variety of martial arts techniques to use in combat. Daniel describes a few different techniques, each with a very different mood. Outlaws gain skills as they level, but also have access to a small set of combat techniques. Players manage an additional resource, Qi Points, to perform their combat techniques. There are actions and reactions you can perform on your turn in combat. You might parry a blow, or counter attack if an enemy misses you. There is a lot more detail to the rules compared to a lot of OSR games I typically play. I was reminded a lot of Break!!, which also feels influenced by 5e and more “trad” games.
Wandering Blades feels like a good bridge game, something that you could probably use to pull in players who prefer games like D&D 5e. The characters you create have a bit more detail and mechanical weight to them. The rule set isn’t too far off from the core of D&D. The vibes aren’t particularly dark and grotty. I suspect the game won’t be a big leap for most 5e fans. If you’re an OSR fan that gets annoyed at games that aren’t doing any heavy lifting when it comes to mechanics and design, you may enjoy what Daniel has tried to do.
You have 24 hours (after I post this) to go back the thing. Go do it! Gotta support Canadian content.
