Earworms - This Strange Engine (Marillion)

I absolutely love this version of 'This Strange Engine' by Marillion on the 'with friends from the orchestra' album.

It's a song that I think I undervalued when I bought the eponymously named 'This Strange Engine' album originally. There are elements of the music which reference Marillion of old (keyboard break at 05:20), and shades that make it clear the way that the band was (and is) going. I love the way H sings around 07:15. The sax solo at 9:14 that runs into Steve Rothery letting loose on the guitar at 9:43 is wonderful. My favourite section runs from 10:34 to 14:00, and is the part that references Montego Bay.

Put it on and escape...

First Impressions - Tales from the Loop Starter Set (PDF)

It doesn't look like this in PDF...

TL;DR: Great value starter set with everything you need to get going. You will need to buy the core book if you want to go much further, but the dice and map from the set provide the equivalent of £30 in real world purchases. The introductory mystery is excellent.

I was intrigued when Fria Ligan announced a starter set for Tales from the Loop, so went to explore.

The set contains:

• An illustrated rulebook explaining how to play the game
• A complete Mystery called The Recycled Boy
• Five pre-generated characters ready for you play
• A large, full-color map of land of the Loop
• Ten engraved custom dice

The map PDF looks identical to that in the core book (£15) and assuming the dice are the same (£15) then the physical pre-order (which is £20.88 on the Fria Ligan site at the moment*) is a steal if you just have the core book. The pre-order includes PDFs, which I'm using to write this. There's no telling how sturdy the box will be or whether it will fit the hardcovers.

The rule book looks like it's a softcover staple bound but only time will tell. At 32 pages, it presents the core rules clearly in exactly the same style as the main book. I'm pretty confident that most of the pages have minimal edits and there's everything there you'd need to play. No character generation.

The scenario book is 16 pages long. It presents a completely new mystery to play, and it will probably take two sessions to complete. It is presented well and provides guidance on how to play. I found it a compelling mystery - maybe one of the best they've written -  and may offer to run it if the lockdown continues.

There are five characters, all built ready to interact with illustrations. Certainly look better than the D&D Starter Set characters.

This is a good introduction. If you bought it, and like the game then you won't feel burnt as the dice and map values more than cover the set's costs and buying the core book is the next logical step. If you didn't like it, then you've really only got some funky dice from it.

You can buy it on pre-order here.

Recommended.

*As I write this, Fria Ligan are offering a 20% discount on orders for the UK as their agents aren't shipping due to COVID-19. This means that the shipping costs are pretty much eliminated. The PDFs typically take 2 days to arrive via DTRPG.
Ironically, this was withdrawn on the day I posted this as they resumed shipping.

26 April 2020

First Impressions - Mutant Year Zero: Elysium

What happens when you get over your head in the Elysium enclave...

TL;DR: Mutant Year Zero: Elysium features Victorian values noble Houses trapped in an underground Enclave after the apocalypse and locked in a veiled conflict for control. The players are all Judicators, responsible for preserving order in Elysium, working in cross House patrol teams. Each Judicator needs to balance the needs of the Enclave with the machinations of their individual families. Politics, decadence and backstabbing in a world dominated by social status and slowly failing infrastructure. The setting is presented as a mid-length length campaign with an epic end game. 

Let me put this out up front; I love this book and setting. It presses all the right buttons for me and gives me the GM tingles. If you play a campaign in Mutant Year Zero: Elysium you can expect to be out of your depth, caught in intrigue and ultimately in a struggle for survival. There are shades of Cold City, Hot War, Judge Dredd, Logan's Run, Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy and more in this setting.

Clocking in at 272 pages, this is a full cover hardback book with yet another gorgeous cover by Simon Stålenhag, this time of a scene which could very easily happen to a character if they make the enemy of the wrong person. Like Mechatron, it builds upon Mutant Year Zero but is completely standalone. The layout is similar, with a decent index.

The Year Zero Engine is implemented pretty much identically to Mechatron, which I've covered separately, except that program dice return to being skills, and your attributes are now Strength/Agility/Wits/Empathy rather than Servos/Stability/Processor/Network. You get talents from your profession, and also a specialist skill. Your attributes are linked to your age; the younger that you are, the higher they will be. However, age brings contacts and enhanced reputation (which is also dependent upon your profession).

One of the most important decisions that you will make for your character is the House that you come from. Every player has a character who is from one of the four families that founded the Elysium Enclave and Titan Power. The houses all work together in harmony officially but the reality is that they are at each other's throats, jostling for control and backstabbing each other. Each House brought something to the table; Warburg - production, Fortesque - military power, Morningstar - art and culture and Kilgore - science. The game will work best with four player characters in use, one from each major house. There are notes on how to handle fewer players or more than one character from the same House. There is a meta-game that reflects the control that each house has, and the character's investigations will affect it.

The characters are all Judicators, tasked with maintaining the peace of Elysium. Judicators are Investigators, Officers, Procurators (lawyers), Scholars, Soldiers or Technicians. Psionics exist, but are frowned upon. The Patrol Leader for each Judicator group is determined by voting (by the players), weighted by the level of control each House holds in the Enclave. Patrol Leaders can reward one of the team with extra XP at the end of a session, and gain more themselves. They're the nominal spokesperson for the team. Judicators carry out Investigations into crimes. Every crime will have one of the Houses behind it, and the character whose House it is, becomes the Double Agent with an aim of sabotaging the investigation. However, this needs to be done in a subtle manner or you could be reprimanded and your personal and house reputation be damaged. If you manage to hide your plotting from the others, you gain XP, otherwise they can. There are some nice mechanics on how this is done at the table. However, it is PVP, which may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Contacts are covered in detail, with twenty different archetypes presented. You cultivate and spend influence points to gain benefits from the contacts. However, the more you draw on the contacts, the more likely your relationship is to suffer from backlash, which can be good or bad.

The combat system is pretty similar, except that there are now four ways to become broken dependent upon the attribute involved; damage, fatigue. confusion and doubt. Lack of food and water is also discussed, along with healing. You can also be contaminated by the Rot, if it gets into the enclave.

Elysium I is a mile deep, and half that wide at the top. It tapers down as it goes deeper into the ground. There are three distinct sets of levels; the Crown (where the Houses are based), the Core (the nice part of town) and the Deep (dirty, poor with most of the factories). The Houses maintain a social strata similar to the Victorians. There are plenty of key details in the descriptions to hang an evocative campaign around.

The GM section outlines the principles of the game; the House above everything, Judicators have a job to do, Judicators aren't the Good Guys, the Enclave will fall, the Surface is uninhabitable, No-one lives forever, this is still Mutant and Humans are the Masters of the World. It's a great way to give you the tone.

The second half of the book has the Guardians of the Fall campaign. This comprises eight investigations (all built to tie into NPCs established in your character's background) and three special investigations. The order of eight normal investigations is determined by the influence that each house can wield. They're all reasonable one-shot investigations which underpin the campaign. They can be dangerous if the players misjudge them. The first special investigation is triggered partway into the campaign, and the final two bring it to a climax which will likely see the fall of the Enclave. It's good stuff, and I can see it working well at the table.

The book then rounds out with guidance on how to take the survivors of Elysium forward into the future; a future shared with Robots, Uplifted Animals and Mutants.

I really enjoyed this book; it is darkly ambiguous and operates in an investigative mode. The Houses drive the players to spark off each other, and the campaign expands in scale in a good manner, with an epic feel at the end. The mechanics for contacts are simple and effective, and the Year Zero Engine clean and simple. Add to that gorgeous artwork, layout and a decent medium length campaign arc that will entertain you for perhaps twelve or more gaming sessions.

25 April 2020

Lacking Liminal

Coriolis online.

I'm finding it a strange evening as our regular game of lockdown Liminal is off this week, as Paul rightly focuses on homelife and also has a bit of space to come up with more nefarious plans as our mini-series of roleplaying adventures expands out a bit further.

It's strange because we've been starting the game at 20:05 after the clap for the NHS and frontline staff in the fight against COVID-19. Now, I'm semi-cynical about the motivations behind this (surely it would have been better to have paid those in these services properly and not cheered when their pay rise was blocked) but there's a wonderful sense of community. Living in suburbia, you can feel disconnected from the neighbours, but increasingly, more and more of them have come out each week. Tonight it was pretty much a full house, so it feels strange to come in and then realise that the game isn't on this week.

It's a good thing in some ways; the kids have been little horrors today. They've not been bad or even mad, but they have played the game of ignoring and being obstructive, which has made it pretty painful for Jill who has been home and trying to get them to do their home-learning. 

And yet, I really enjoy playing Liminal. It's not just that Dr Mitch is running his own game (he and I play often in the virtual world), it's just that it's a great setting and a really nice system. A book and system I've not read yet because I haven't felt like I needed to. Elina asked who was going to run in lockdown, Paul volunteered and I jumped into a great game with great players. If you haven't looked out Liminal, I recommend it. It's a modern-day urban fantasy set in the UK where creatures of horror, faerie and magic exist. You play investigators; our particular group has an ex-Police Officer who fled from vampires (me), a fae, a werewolf and a hunted mage's apprentice.

My reading rate has rocketed this year; it always does when I'm busy and it's certainly been that. February saw the fire causing the loss of the site (but no loss of life or injury). March saw COVID-19 change the world in which we're living. I've been diving into the virtual pile of books on my Kindle and the roleplaying pile. It's been fun. I don't think I've read this much since before the kids arrived on the scene. 

Mechatron in the flesh.

You'll have seen the roleplaying reads appearing here over the last few weeks. The surprise, impulse purchase of Mutant Mechatron led on to a physical copy (which are like gold-dust at the moment as it's out of print), and electronic copies of Mutant: Elysium. Much as I loved Mechatron, Elysium is even more up my street. I described it to Graham and Tom as:

"Victorian values noble houses trapped in an underground city after the apocalypse. The players are all Judicators, cross house teams (much like judges in JD) who preserve order. Politics, decadence, backstabbing in a word with social strata and a failing infrastructure."

I'm about halfway through so expect to see an update soon on my final thoughts.

Unlike quite a few of my friends, virtual tabletop roleplaying is something I'm used to. I'm playing in three games at the moment; Jag's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition Shadows Campaign and Graham's Coriolis as well as Paul's Liminal. Only Liminal was a consequence of the lockdown. The others were planned and part of my gaming life.

Interesting experience last night with Coriolis; we used Roll20 for the tabletop and WebEx for the video /audio side. WebEx has recently significantly changed their free level to compete with Zoom. We had a rock-solid feed the whole session long. Definitely worth pursuing as Google is moving to bullet Hangouts soon.

I'm a safety professional - decent comms excite me. My bad.

Reasonable day today; I was perhaps overly pleased with the full door graphics we'd installed the last week to nudge people on good personal hygiene. The team at safetypostershop.com had delivered a great bespoke graphic, and the local sign supplier had tailored it well. It's catching people's eyes, and hopefully reminding and nudging them to do the right thing. Having a team member hospitalised for flu-like symptoms makes it all too real.

Working from home tomorrow; that'll bring a fair bit of time supporting the youngster. I'm a bit frustrated at the lack of engagement from the primary school staff. There's no interaction between them and Aidan. At least Nathan is getting feedback and has to submit his tasks. Nat's teachers will also discuss the work with him and he gets regular calls to check on how he is. The primary school is very distant; I feel that they're throwing the work over the wall and leaving it to us.

Anyway; that's enough rambling for this St George's Day. Be safe, be healthy.

D

23 April 2020

First Impressions - Mutant Year Zero: Mechatron

The robots are coming.

TL;DR: Mutant Year Zero: Mechatron is a full colour, 240 page hardcover book which has great layout and art. It is standalone from the core Mutant Year Zero book. The Year Zero Engine is light enough to be picked up easily and add some mechanical fun with the risks of pushing roles. The setting is intriguing, allowing players to explore the world as newly self-aware robots. The Ghost in the Machine campaign written well enough that the characters could take it in many directions. Although there is a set of scenarios, they just provide the framework in the sandbox of a failing, resource-limited bastion of high technology.

Mutant Year Zero: Mechatron was very much an impulse buy following a conversation with the Guvnor about how post-apocalyptic games should be pitched. His views were very much more *punk than mine; I've always been attracted to settings where the characters get to protect the flame of civilisation against the darkness around. 'Hard Times' remains the Traveller setting that resonated with me most. We'd got to exchanging WhatsApp messages about games and Mutant Year Zero came up. The Guvnor was very much up for the core book (mutant humanity) or Genlab Alpha (uplifted animals); I was very much in favour of Mechatron (emergent machine intelligences) or Elysium (surviving humans in a bunker feuding with each other). After a bit of Googling, I ended up with Mechatron as I found a UK retailer who (a) had a copy and (b) was still trading. It's out of print at the moment.

So what is Mechatron? It's a full colour, 240 page hardback book (but this review is from the PDF as my book hasn't landed yet). Lovely Stålenhag cover (which - sadly - doesn't reflect anything in the core of the campaign presented) and full colour inside with a cartoon-like artwork which works quite well; it looks like pen and ink. Layout is simple and clear. There's a decent index.

Rule system is the Year Zero Engine (duh, no surprise there) so you're rolling multiple D6 looking for sixes (successes) which are shown as symbols on the official dice.  Most tasks only need a single success, but there are options for difficulties. There are three types of dice used; base dice, program dice and gear dice. Base dice from your attributes, Program dice from your programs (skills) and Gear dice from experience. If you push a roll you re-roll all the dice which don't have symbols showing. There are bad symbols replacing the ones on the base dice and gear dice which only come into play when you are pushing a roll. Base dice fails will result in damage to the attribute associated with the roll or a loss of energy. Gear dice fails result in the gear losing the bonus it gives, so it can be rendered useless.

You play a robot character who has just become self-aware. This is anathema to NODUS, the AI-construct which runs the machine Collective of Mechatron-7, the underwater production facility where the game commences. The game framework has characters looking to eliminate errors (machines which are malfunctioning), struggle for resources, explore the outside world, strive for deeper self-awareness and seal the fate of the Collective.

Each character has a model type (an industrial robot, a battle robot, a coordining robot, a companion robot (yes, you can play a former sex-bot if you're a Serenity fan), a cleaning robot and more), which establishes a special program that makes you unique. You chose three chassis parts - head, torso and undercarriage - which determine your attribute scores, armour and the number of extra modules you carry. There are four core attributes (Servos, Stability, Processor and Network aka STR/DEX/INT/CHA) and each program sits under one of these. You get to pick a secondary function to tailor your character further (and can add others in the future) and you can add modules. Modules give you abilities, activated by Energy Points (EP). You need to spend an EP each day to function, and the supply is rationed by NODUS based on the Collective's ability to generate power.

Your robot also has a hierarchy value; this represents how important a machine they are in the Collective and is used in social conflict. Self-aware robots can question orders given by robots higher up the hierarchy and also humans. By default, humans (and mutant humans) can order a robot around using a manipulate roll.

Your robot type also drives your appearance (along with the chassis), your personality and relationships with other PCs and NPCs. You get to pick a 'big dream' that your self awareness has brought on. Finally, you get some gear.

The book then describes the perilous state that Mechatron-7 finds itself in since the humans of the Titan Power Noatun abandoned the facility. There's a distinctive map; more of a picture with annotations. The various districts are described at top level, but the Collective's world is slowly deteriorating; in the campaign presented, the characters can drive the outcome. Every scenario will bring further deterioration and more danger for our robot friends. Scenarios are described as work orders which the machines must carry out. There is enough detail to play in Mechatron-7 but not so much that it becomes a straight-jacket as it is painted in broad brush strokes.

The GM section starts off by describing the principles of the game, reminding me very much of Dungeon World and its Apocalypse World siblings. There are selections of robots and creatures to encounter and example artifacts to discover.

The final third of the book covers the Ghost in the Machine, a campaign framework which dives into why the machines are becoming self-aware, why NODUS is suppressing this and the impact of the return of humanity (in the form of mutants). There are four work orders presented; the set up of the campaign will immediately put the characters in jeopardy as they are responsible for hunting down malfunctioning robots (usually self-aware, just like themselves) for the Collective. There are also four further 'key events' which provide the story arc; they're designed to be interspersed as you run the work orders and will bring about the fate of Mechatron-7. The final scenario will play out against the backdrop of a huge battle, which has its own set of rules.

At the end of the campaign, the machines will likely emerge onto land into the Zone, their world changed forever. There are notes on how to take this further, and also on how to interlink the campaign into an existing Mutant Year Zero game.

The only thing I felt was missing was some of the background from the original core game on the Titan Powers. However, as the world is presented in a state where the robots and machines have lost much knowledge and history, this would not be an issue in play.

Overall, I like this game. The setting is intriguing and the campaign written well enough that the characters could take it in many directions. Although there is a set of scenarios, they just provide the framework in the sandbox of a failing, resource-limited bastion of high technology.

21 April 2020

First impressions - Tales from the Loop: Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries

Our Friends the Machines - the first mystery collection for Tales from the Loop.

TL;DR: A mixed anthology. The full length mysteries are strong, especially the first two. The mixtape mysteries are ideas I'd approach carefully. The blueprints give some nice ideas for scenarios, whilst the hacking the Loop chapter is a useful checklist of things to consider. As ever, this looks gorgeous with Stålenhag's art set in a clean, attractive layout. Recommended on the strength of the longer mysteries.

Our Friends the Machines & Other Mysteries is the first anthology of mysteries and background material for the Tales from the Loop RPG. It is an attractive 104 page hardcover book that matches the style of the core book. There are three fully developed adventures, a 'mixtape' of mystery ideas, blueprints of machines and some guidance on how to hack the look to your location. The book is a compilation of all the stretch goals into print.

It looks gorgeous; the end papers include the same map of a version of the Loop in the Norfolk Broads. Along with the map in the section on hacking the loop, this is presented three times.

The first two mysteries are much stronger scenarios than those presented in the core book; both of them set off the GM in me thinking about 'how do I run this'? The first - Our Friends the Machines -  riffs on a popular product line in the 1980s and the implications of machine intelligence. The second - Horror Movie Mayhem - touches on one of the same themes that one of the core book mysteries covered but more successfully. It's a classic SF trope; the players may well guess what's going on, but that's half the fun.

The third scenario - the Mummy in the Mist - is different to mysteries that have been presented before. There's an element of a bait-and-switch in the plot (or a flip) as the reality of the scenario is revealed, showing an element which hasn't been addressed in previous work. The scenario should work well, but is very much a sandbox with things going on in the background.

The mixtape collection is pretty dark; the mystery ideas presented are in some cases nastier than those developed into full scenarios elsewhere. There's opportunity to be mined here, but I'm not certain I'd want to draw deeply on these. Indeed, it's interesting to read these in the light of the issues that happened at UK Games Expo 2019 with the Things from the Flood game. I'd definitely tread warily with some of these scenarios (especially 'Girls just wanna have fun' and 'Every Breath you Take').

The blueprints selection presents two robots and two magnetrine vessels with some ideas for mysteries which could involve them.

The final section talks through how to hack the Loop into your home town, using the Norfolk Broads as an example. It's very top level, being effectively a list of bullet points to consider, but would help a beginning GM through the process. Personally, I'd have placed a UK Loop in Cumbria or Scotland, but the Broads works better than I expected.

All in all, this is a mixed collection. The full length mysteries are strong, especially the first two. The mixtape mysteries are ideas I'd approach carefully. The blueprints give some nice ideas for scenarios, whilst the hacking the Loop chapter is a useful checklist of things to consider. As ever, this looks gorgeous with Stålenhag's art set in a clean, attractive layout. Recommended on the strength of the longer mysteries.

17 April 2020

The Letter for the King

The Letter for the King - a classic comes to Netflix.

Looking at Goodreads, I read 'The Letter for the King' back in May 2018. My review of the book probably damned it with faint praise:

The Letter for the King (Tonke Dragt) 

This is a Danish Young Adult classic. A young squire is called to adventure the night that he should be completing his vigil to become a knight. It’s a simple story, told well, one that I would have appreciated more when I was younger.

I appreciated it enough that I bought the sequel and noted that it may be a good story for the kids to engage with, especially the 9-year old.

I was interested when Netflix announced that they had acquired the rights, as it's one of those stories that I suspect could easily upset people if not done well. I'm in the position that this isn't one of my childhood classics that's being potentially trampled over (unlike pretty much every adaption of Susan Cooper's 'Dark is Rising' Sequence or Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books) so I was more intrigued.

It is done well, with good production values. It feels 'young adult'. The protagonist, Tiuri, is more of an outsider than he is in the novel. He's also less of a hero and lacks confidence at the start. They've pushed the diversity side (both racially and sexually) much further than the book (unsurprising as it was first published in 1962) and the story has a mix of moods. The dark streak remains with the feel that Tiuri has everything to lose by doing the right thing. There is a nasty political element. There's a touch of comedy with the other squires ('novices') who end up pursuing him. Magic is significantly increased and I don't recall the driving meta-plot of the prophecy from the book.

So, it has had layers and complexity added, and the story has been significantly developed. Yet, at the heart the story remains the same; a young squire hears a knock on the door of the chapel where he is carrying out his vigil before he becomes a knight. If he breaks the vigil, he may lose his chance to become a knight. If he ignores the call for help, he ignores the values he is supposed to display. Honour and duty demand that he acts, setting a tension up in the plot.

The kids and Jill enjoyed this; we watched it as a family. There will be another series.

16 April 2020

Migration Notes

A view of the Mojave

It's taken nearly a year, but I've pretty much finished the transition of my old iMac to a macMini. I picked up a cheap Fusion drive 2014 model with 8GB RAM last year, and the initial transfer was reasonably smooth, right up to the point I took it from High Sierra (10.13) to Mojave (10.14). At this point, it decided that it no longer wanted to talk to the App Store or iCloud Drive, which was problematic. I messed around for far too long trying to fix it, and in the end bought an external HDD to clone a back-up to and a second to Time Machine a second back up. Paranoid, moi?

Reinstall of macOS failed to sort the issue, so new user created (which worked), and I started to migrate all the files, data and licences across. As I type this, the final files are copying back (the photo archive) and hopefully that will be that.

I'm pleased that I have most of my data in the cloud as well, as it has meant I can start to bring it down at my own speed from Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive.

Fingers crossed, but hopefully I now have the platform in place to restart doing DTP, something that my MacBook (which is 12 years old) is struggling with.

15 April 2020

First Impressions - Tales from the Loop RPG

Tales from the Loop RPG

TL;DR:  This is an evocative and fun game fuelled by nostalgia and SF tropes. Although some of the mysteries that the kids face and the problems they have can be scary and dark, there's always a feeling of hope. The game engine is light and modern, and the production values and artwork superb.

Tales from the Loop is a RPG I helped create indirectly; I'd discovered the fantastic artwork of Simon Stålenhag on the internet a while before the RPG was released. I'd loved it, so when Fria Ligan announced a Kickstarter of an artbook of his work, I backed it straight away. One of the stretch goals was that they would create an RPG and give backers a PDF. Needless to say, that goal was met and Fria Ligan proceeded to create the game. They then Kickstarted the game itself and I backed it to get the full package (which included dice, a screen and a set of mysteries (scenarios) in a separate book.

Before I go any further, it's worth mentioning that, because I was born in the early 1970s, this RPG is addressing the period I was the same age as the characters that you get to play. It's a nostalgia trip for me.

Fria Ligan commonly release an alpha and beta version of the game for error trapping by backers, and I enjoyed working my way through the alpha when it landed. I played in a great scenario home-brewed by Evil Gaz at Furnace, and never really got back to reading the core book. I'd skimmed it (it looks delicious) and was content that I understood it enough to run if I needed to.

The launch of the game coincided nicely with the Stranger Things zeitgeist which rolled through geekdom; in the game you play a group of kids aged 10 to 15 typically, in the 1980s that Stålenhag's art depicts. You go on adventures together and solve mysteries. Adults are distant and kids have to fix things themselves. The kids cannot die in the adventure (they will always come back) but they can be broken physically or mentally which effectively takes them out of play as they cannot succeed at any test. Real life has the challenges of the daily grind; relationships, school, homework, bullies and family.

The game uses the Year Zero Engine, first seen in Mutant: Year Zero. This is a dice pool engine using standard d6's with a roll of a six being a success. Multiple sixes can cause better or more lasting effects. Failure can be avoided by spending a luck point to re-roll dice, or by pushing. Pushing will give you an ongoing condition that penalises dice rolls. The engine is quite swingy; it's possible to roll a bucket of dice and get nothing. The number of dice you roll is based on the governing attribute and any appropriate skill. You can get bonus from a number of things, including your character's iconic item if it's appropriate.

Two settings are presented for the Loop, a huge nuclear physics facility where weird science is carried out. The first is the original setting in the Mälaren Islands in Sweden and the second is set in the USA, in Boulder City, Nevada, beside the Hoover Dam and perilously close to the bright lights of Las Vegas. Personally, I'd go with the original, although the new Amazon Prime Video series of the setting (based in Ohio) suggests that it could well work in the USA. Just enough detail is given on the backgrounds for a GM to hang a game around. Detail is provided about the technology; in most cases this is reflected by a trait with a rating that shows how hard it is for a character to overcome (the number of successes needed). There are lists of music, films and more that get the 1980s vibe along with descriptions of what life was like then for the younger audience.

The chapter on creating 'The Kids' presents some archetypes (Bookworm, Jock, Weirdo, Popular Kid Troublemaker and more), and then walks you through generating a character. Your age determines how much luck and what level attributes you have. Your luck decreases and your attributes increase as you get older. Characters cease to be playable aged 15 (but you could always move them on to the standalone sequel game, Things from the Flood, which embraces the 1990s). Every kid has a problem that they need to overcome and a drive that motivates them. Relationships are developed with NPCs and the other players. There is some encouragement to play siblings.

There is a chapter describing how to create Mysteries for the kids to overcome. It discusses how you obtain a balance between everyday life and the mystery (alternating scenes is suggested) and the different phases of a mystery. Ways to establish the mood of the scenario are covered with discussion on how to run bigger mysteries and campaigns. It's good material.

Two ways of play are suggested; having a mystery landscape where the GM riffs off the character contacts, drives, problems and actions, and then a more traditional scenario. The landscape approach has a chapter, and then there are five chapters which cover a year of game time for the kids. The first chapter sets up the background to the mini-campaign; the subsequent four cover off an adventure each season. There's a good amount of variety and it shows how to build a campaign well.

The book has a decent index and table of contents. The layout is superb; clear and easy to read in a modern style. The book is a 192 page, full colour hardcover. Stålenhag's drawings are used throughout and you'll recognise them if you have the art book.

As many other reviewers have said, this is an evocative and fun game fuelled by nostalgia and SF tropes. Although some of the mysteries that the kids face and the problems they have can be scary and dark, there's always a feeling of hope. The game engine is light and modern, and the production values and artwork superb.

Highly recommended.

First Impressions - Delta Green: Control Group

Delta Green: Control Group.

At the end of 2015, I backed the Delta Green Kickstarter at a level far beyond that which I'd normally do; I committed to take all the books and stretch goals. I've not regretted it; even though the product has been slow in coming out, it has been superbly made. It's also been reasonably canny, as it's meant I've avoided the Brexit impact on the pound, and locked in the costs. Every time a book arrives, it feels like a bonus.

Needless to say, Delta Green: Control Group is gorgeously laid out and illustrated. It is a collection of four scenarios, suggested as ways to introduce players to Delta Green. In reality, it's three introductory adventures and then a larger one which could lead to a mini-campaign. In the first three, the characters will not be part of Delta Green. The final adventure could even be their first mission as such. The scenarios are not interlinked in any way. The three introductory adventures feel like they are convention one-shots, and are likely to have a high lethality rate if not approached correctly. That is completely in line with the way that backgrounds are built for the game, but usually, you refer back to them rather than play them through.

The adventures are not your typical mythos scenario.

The first, Blacksat, follows a team of astronauts and civilians as they ride the Space Shuttle in 2010 to fix a broken military satellite. Needless to say, the technology harkens back to the kind of thing that was in MAJESTIC's sights and will prove extremely dangerous in the unforgiving environment of space. This has a huge lethality potential and could easily result in a TPK.

The second, Night Visions, is set in 2011; the players are US soldiers and officials trying to negotiate an alliance against the Taliban with a minority living in a remote mountain valley in Afghanistan. This is a survivable scenario, but the player's natural instincts may well make it hard to do so.

The final introductory adventure, Sick Again, was quite hard to read, faced as we are with the coronavirus pandemic. It's 2012 and the characters work for the CDC and are rushed to a remote town in rural Arizona where they fight to understand, control and prevent a dangerous and strange viral outbreak. This scenario has layers; there's a mechanic to drive the medical investigation out from which will fall a more traditional Delta Green encounter. I feel that the GM will need to be on the ball to run this well. The scenario is adjacent to areas that have been covered in earlier works such as Future/Perfect, but it does not overlap. I think the cover of the book is based on this scenario.

The fourth scenario, Wormwood Arena, is set after the other three, perhaps between 2013 and 2019. It's suggested that you could use the surviving characters from the first three scenarios as the core of the team here as they are brought into their first 'proper' Delta Green operation. As mentioned earlier, this is an investigation into a harmless-seeming Kansas self-help cult, so very traditional in approach. It is larger in scope than the previous games, probably needing at least two sessions to work through. The first part of the scenario is focussed on the undercover investigation. The second part could get very messy, with potential contact with a powerful being that could threaten humanity if it awakes. The scenario ends with suggestions for follow up; it even outlines ideas for how you could follow this up with a mini-campaign if the characters fail.

Full colour, hardback, 180 pages long, beautifully illustrated, with clear and easy to read layout. You can taste the ashes that Delta Green's battles create as you read it.

Recommended.

First Impressions - D&D 5e Essentials Kit

This time, it's a White Dragon!

TL;DR: this is the one to buy the kid who has read up on D&D and wants to get into it. AKA me in 1983. At £20 (street), it fills a great niche between the £90 for the core D&D rules and the £15 for Starter Set. You get a lot for your money.

I picked up the D&D Essentials Kit when it was announced, and I'm glad I did. It comes in a similar box the Starter Kit, but this one is full of material. It reminds me very much of the Holmes Basic D&D kit that I started with many years ago, except that it has dice, not chits.

This is a full game; unlike the Starter Kit, the Essentials Kit includes character generation rules. The core rules are 64 pages long, full colour and perfect bound; a cut down from the Player's Handbook. You can play one of four races (dwarf, halfling, elf, human) and one of five classes (bard, cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard) and the rules cover up to 6th level. So it's covering a similar span to the Starter Kit in character development, except you get blank character sheets here. The number of available backgrounds is cut down to five. The back of the book has a summary of the conditions. There are new rules for sidekicks, effectively henchpeople for when you have a solo player or a low number of characters. There's no index but a comprehensive table of contents.

Two books and much nicer dice.

The second book in the box is also 64 pages long and is the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign. More on the contents later. I've covered both books with library grade slip-on covers, but I do that with most roleplaying books.

Small but effective DM screen.

We also have a better set of polyhedral dice, and a small but surprisingly useful DM's screen. It's flimsy compared the official screen but will be fine if it lives in the box. We've also got loads of cards.

Lots of cards, but it's self-assembly.

The cards come on punched sheets so you need to separate them, and also assemble the deck box for them. There are cards for sidekicks to hire, for the conditions a character suffers (so you can hand it to them), reference cards for combat, initiative order cards and magic item cards. Finally, there are quest cards tied to the quests in the campaign.

The final item in the box is a sheet with codes to unlock the campaign on dndbeyond.com; this also unlocks additional content to allow you to take the game beyond 6th level with more adventures. There's a code to purchase the full Player's Handbook digitally for 50% less (so $15).

The 'Dragon of Icespire Peak' campaign shares the same base as 'Lost Mines of Phandelver' in the Starter Kit, set as it is around the town on Phandalin on the Sword Coast and deals with the consequences of the arrival of a dragon in the region. It opens with guidance on character generation and how to use sidekicks and discusses the adventure structures used and how to approach them. The whole set up is very reminiscent of a MMORPG; sometimes it made me thing of my lost hours playing 'Torchlight' on the Mac. You start off with three quests available which the townmaster will pay for adventurers ad ne'er-do-wells to complete. When you complete two, you unlock an additional three quests. When you unlock two of the next set, you unlock a final three sets of quests. Working through these should mean that the characters have a fighting chance to deal with the White Dragon at the heart of the adventure. The scenarios can also point you at each other encounters and adventures. There are fourteen different locations detailed. The dragon's lair is not a quest that is handed out; the players can decide if they want to hunt the beast out. 

Each location has a map for the DM, but no player maps (not even digitally). There’s a large separate colour map of the Sword Coast and Phandalin. The locations have short descriptions and there is not much scope for waffle and unnecessary text. Tactics and responses from the opposition are covered. The level of guidance is lower than that given with the Starter Set's campaign, but it's a definite step up from B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. The campaign will reveal itself as the players explore the frontier region.

You could easily integrate the campaigns from the Starter Set and Essentials Kit together, and it would be pretty awesome to do so.

This is a fantastic introductory set; it retails for £5 more than the Starter Set and it feels so much more value for money. As a starting DM, I'd want this set, not the Starter Set, because it is more flexible and has everything I'd need; a decent number of dice, screen, cards, much more comprehensive rules. You could use this set with one of the core adventure books if you wanted to. This is the set to give to a kid who wants to get into D&D and has read a bit about it. This is Basic D&D for the new millennium.

That said, the voice and arc of the 'Lost Mines of Phandelver' is stronger than the 'Dragon of Icespire Peak'. That's because Icespire is a true sandbox with points of interest and the journey to the conclusion of the campaign is far more player-led than Phandelver. I'd want to use both sets together though. 

Highly recommended.

Books in March 2020

Somehow, I've managed to go significantly ahead of the target I set myself for the year. I suspect that I'm using books as an escape from 2020. It'll be interesting to see if it continues.

Consider Phlebas (Iain M Banks)

I accidentally opened Consider Phlebas whilst reinstalling books on my Kindle which had decided to reset, and then I couldn't put it down. This is not the first time that this has happened.

I first read the book at whilst at University in Southampton. I was looking for a new SF book in WH Smiths (back when it was a proper bookshop) during a lunch break from my part-time job unsuccessfully selling computers at Silica Shop in Debenhams and stumbled across it. I couldn't put it down and over the next few weeks burned through everything Banks had written (both as Iain M. Banks and Iain Banks) at the time.

The book follows the story of a Changer, a modified human who can act as a doppelganger, taking the form of others whilst acting as a spy and secret agent. Horza works for the Idirians, a tri-legged hegemonistic alien race who have come into conflict with 'The Culture'. The Culture is a utopian society built on a lack of scarcity, with no need for money, run by benign AIs. The Changer is philosophically opposed to the Culture, disliking machine intelligences, and works for the intelligence services, part of the less fundamentalist supremacist Idirian elements.

His first mission starts of messily, and just as he is briefed on his next mission, the warship he is on is attacked by a Culture ship. He escapes and decides to try to complete the mission anyway. The story proceeds with Bank's trademark style of action-packed SF blended with gore, sex, violence and utopian visions. It's a rag-tag mission against impossible odds as Horza attempts to retrieve a lost Culture Mind (AI) which has landed on a planet held inviolate as a memorial by a powerful alien race.

Great book, and you've got to love the Culture ship names.

The Player of Games (Iain M Banks)

Re-reading Consider Phlebas made me decide to revisit some more of Iain M. Banks, so I headed for the second book in the Culture setting. Unlike the first, this isn't one that I've revisited since I initially read it.

The story follows one of the top game players in the Culture as he is drawn into the machinations of the Culture's Contact section when they arrange for him to represent them in a six-yearly formal game contest. The game is Azad, and it is the same name as the Empire where it is played. The Empire of Azad is a brutal, almost Nazi-like regime which conquers other races and humiliates and/or eliminates them. The game is used to determine the standings of the Establishment, from the Emperor down. It can build or break careers and lives and is taken very seriously. The climax of the games are held on a fire planet as a global firestorm passes over a fortress.

The Azadians assume that the protagonist will lose early as he doesn't know the game and is an alien. When he starts winning, it causes shockwaves and politics and machinations ensue. Besides the political schemes, the story is interesting because it explores why we play games. The protagonist's motivations change over time, becoming less and less abstract.

I should have re-read this before now.

To Die in Vienna (Kevin Wignall)

I bought this on impulse and read it as a counter-point to the SF that I've dived into this month. When it started, I was sceptical whether it would hold my interest or be much good, but it definitely delivers. Freddie is a surveillance contractor, based in Vienna, whose current assignment is a Chinese scientist working at the university. He doesn't know why he's monitoring Cheng, but it's an escape for him. He used to work for an American intelligence agency but quit after a mission went bad.

He's set in a routine, and then someone tries to kill him when he gets home. He finds his principal has disappeared and the surveillance set up he has in place has been dismantled. Realising that the people doing this are professionals, he has to find a way to survive and find out what is happening.

I liked this book and will look up the film when it's released.

Century Rain (Alastair Reynolds)

This was my second reading of Century Rain and I enjoyed it much more than the first, probably because I came to it bereft of the assumption that it was going to be like one of the Revelation Space series books.

The novel is a melange of noir, spy fiction, alternative history, and conflict between the transhuman Slashers and the advanced, but nanotech rejecting Threshers. The story moves between an Earth in 1959 where history has diverged from our own and a future where Earth has been rendered uninhabitable through the action of uncontrolled nanomachines.

The mix works, but it's very different. Sometimes there's an edge of info-dump, but it's a complicated and interesting read. Returning to the book, I've raised it to a four-star rating because I think its stronger than I gave it credit for when I first read it.

I enjoyed listening to "Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate"'s nine-minute prog-rock track of the same name as the novel inspired by the book whilst I was reading it.

The October Man (Ben Aaronovitch)

I enjoyed The October Man, which is a short novella set in Germany in the Rivers of London series. It reminded me how fresh the series felt when I started reading the books and was different yet familiar enough to catch the attention. This is standalone from the main sequence, so you could easily read it as a first introduction to the series without any real spoilers. The plot develops quickly and is entertaining. I'd happily read more in this branch of the setting.

Use of Weapons (Iain M Banks)

This was the first Iain M Banks book that completely floored me. The first time that I read it, I ended up immediately re-reading it because I didn't see the ending coming. Sadly, on re-reading the impact is lessened, as I know where it's going to. That said, the way it gets there is subtle and I enjoyed the book greatly.

Overtly, this is a story about the Culture meddling in the politics of a star cluster to try and avoid a war. A Special Circumstances agent, Cheradenine Zakalwe, one of their best operatives is pulled from retirement to carry out the mission. However, the story is really about Zakalwe; what motivates him and how has his background shaped him into the dangerous agent which he is now. He works for the Culture but is not of the Culture.

I enjoyed revisiting this greatly; it's not my favourite Culture novel, but it is one of the best.

Music Challenge 2020 - First Lines

Okay, for your entertainment, here is a list of 20 first lines from songs I go back to regularly. I've tried to keep them so they aren't too obscure, but there is a fair range. How many can you get?

Note that some of these are the actual first lines on the track, not the first lyrics on song services!

--

1. “Ice, your only rivers run cold”
2. “Don’t you look back on a brave lost world”
3. “The world’s gone mad and I’ve lost touch”
4. “How does it feel to treat me like you do?”
5. “Each morning after Sunblest, feel the benefit, mental arithmetic”
6. “We had a walk that night, but it wasn’t the same”
7. “Night falls and towns become circuit boards, we can beat the sun as long as we keep moving”
8. Standing on my own, it didn’t mean that much to me.”
9. “Into the distance, a ribbon of black”
10. “How can I change the world if I can't even change myself?”
11. “See a body and the dream of the dead days”
12. “Ooh life, it’s bigger, it’s bigger than you, and you are not me.”
13. “Apollo Control Houston, two minutes fifty seconds away from LOS now…”
14. “It’s still getting worse after everything you’ve tried”
15. “Fear and panic in the air, I want to be free, from desolation and despair”
16. “Starting something, thought it could be fun”
17. “You had something to hide; should have hidden it, shouldn’t you?”
18. “Was that somebody screaming? It wasn’t me for sure.”
19. “Sometimes I get to feelin', I was back in the old days, long ago”
20. “I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me”

Clue: Band list (not in order)
A-Ha
ABBA
Depeche Mode
Faithless
Goldfrapp
The Killers
Marillion
Maximo Park
Muse
New Order
Nine Inch Nails
Pet Shop Boys
Pink Floyd
Public Service Broadcasting
Queen
REM
Simple Minds
Sisters of Mercy
U2
Ultravox

Playlist on Spotify after the break.