First Impressions of some free stuff I found on Itch.io today
Tools, Tables, Mechanics, and Mosaics
Lines and Circles
So this is a Mosaic Strict procedure that provides a structure for players to model a romantic relationship. In a lot of ways Lines and Circles strikes me as a lyric game. It’s interesting to read, beautiful in a way, esoteric, and only kind of a game.
But then I think about how it might be more than that. The mechanics themselves aren’t much. You pick a type of relationship (line or circle) and progress through some scenes, negotiating what happens, and gaining and losing bond points as you go. Normally I avoid romantic relationships in games both as a player and as GM. Part of that, I think, is due to the potential uncomfortableness that could be caused in pay. Having a clear procedure that mechanizes collaboration and consent might make me a bit more likely to consider romance play. But, like, only a bit.
And I also can’t help but think about what might happen if you dropped this procedure into a game that also has a mechanic called “bonds” …and then just don’t tell your players that they are different things. All of a sudden your Dungeon World PCs are leveling up from smootching and your Ironsworn characters have momentum in battle because they had a nice date.
Hell Yeah!
This goes in the folder of rarely used but important emergency game tools.
Ancient Weapon Generator
Ancient Weapon Generator is a modular tool for generating ancient weapons. Not an evocative title, but you certainly get what it says on the can.
Weapon generating is accomplished by rolling on a series of d20 tables. I just gave it a shot and got an extra long pike that existed before time and was imbued with sorcery. It enhances your senses so that you can make attacks extra fast and detect ghosts and demons, can be thrown with high accuracy but is also unlucky and critically fails twice as often.
That’s pretty badass… Maybe too badass. But I had to do a lot of work to get there. I ended up making a total of 10 d20 rolls and had to piece together and interpret some of the vague prompts such as “detects something or someone.” This means that this is probably more of a prep tool for GMs than it is something to roll on at the table. It’s certainly not something I would hand a player to roll on (as is my preference).
There are also some odd design choices such as instructing you to always roll on tables A, B, and C and then every result on table A tells you to roll on table D and never to roll on any other tables. It seems like it would be easier to say that you always roll on tables A, B, C, and D.
Ultimately I might use this for prep and I might cut and paste some of the better tables into my binder of random tables but I’m unlikely to use this as written.
Empty Chambers
This randomized prompt sets a scene for tragic revisionist western action. Once again I think this is primarily a lyric game. And it’s a nice read.
I typed up my cowboy’s story but I’m now deleting it because I don’t want to spoil anything. You should go check this one out if you like short little solo experiences. This could also probably be used as an aide to western themed solo or duet play.
I don’t have any more use for this right now, but that’s okay, I enjoyed it. It can live in my google drive until I forget about it and rediscover it again.
Adventures, Locations, and Settings
Feathertop
Feathertop is a location based adventure themed around solving a mystery in a cute but also kinda grimy little backwood hobbit settlement. It’s written for Under Hill by Water which is a cool system for doing hobbit things but not, like, The Hobbit things.
All the stuff I have been reading for UHBW has been cool and this is no exception. The town itself is evocative and has a functional hexmap. I’m digging the little details such as “most Feathertop families will send some younger family members to help stack turf to dry during the Summer or load baskets to be transported by donkeys during the Autumn. Occasionally artefacts of considerable antiquity are uncovered during turf cutting.” Unfortunately the layout leaves a bit to be desired. I could probably run this with prep... but I run sandboxes and don't prep locations much in advance.
The adventure itself is quite story-gamey lifting mechanics from Brindlewood Bay (which I have not read or played but feel like I know a bunch about from listening to Gauntlet podcasts). If stuff like “ask the player characters how they can tell that they’re definitely in the boonies in Feathertop” is going to be immersion breaking it might be too story game for you. It also does the narrativist thing where there is no one “right” answer to the mystery but instead it is decided through procedure. Part of me says this is cool but my OSR side balks at the idea. I have yet to run or play a game that takes this approach so I’m not going to pass judgment at this time.
The hexmap is hexshaped so I will probably print this out and drop it into a hex in my hexcrawl somewhere.
Alone in the Deep
Alone in the Deep is a submarine horror adventure for Mothership. I had to double check the author because the layout and design work has such strong Ian Yusem vibes. (That’s a compliment by the way)
The adventure details a submarine infested with body-horror-claustrophobia-slugs. To do this it utilizes some neat procedures to determine how the infestation spreads and includes an alternate infested description of each room. This scenario would easily be different each time you run it and that is super cool, it’s got a “powderkeg” thing going that reminds me a bit of Waking of WIllowby Hall in a very nice way.
Would it be too weird to drop this into my nautical fantasy campaign? What if I say “blah, blah, blah, interplanar travel” first? Or should I save it for my upcoming Mothership campaign?
In any case this is getting printed and folded up into the physical pamphlet that it deserves to be. I WILL be running this at some point.
Gravestone Deep
Is there a “deep jam” going on that I don’t know about? Gravestone Deep is an adventure for OSR-ish systems that details a tower that moves in the ocean and contains lizardman-vikings.
That’s cool, and I could easily use this in my ocean campaign!
But it’s not perfect. This gives me strong “old OSR” vibes in both good and bad ways. It’s a bit overwritten, especially in the many random tables, and could do with a good bullet-pointing. The organization is also a bit unintuitive with the random encounters and graffiti generator only coming at the end when I really would need them up front. If I’m running this in the middle of a sandbox campaign I won’t have time to reread the whole thing before running it and could easily miss these tools.
The adventure itself is amazing enough that I can overlook these flaws and will print this one and add it as a random event and potential front in my campaign. I might even do a bit of reorganizing and highlighting myself, and I usually reserve that treatment for only the best of old TSR stuff.
Games and Systems
Northwest Passage
Northwest Passage is a tunnel Goons hack about an arctic expedition. Like all good Tunnel Goons hacks it’s light and seems highly functional.
Personally I’m not shopping for a game right now but this one I want to play. When I was in the 5th grade we did a unit on arctic exploration and I became obsessed with the brutality of these expeditions. I read all of Jack London’s frigid novels, researched the Shackleton expedition tirelessly, and daydreamed about starving in frozen wastelands. (Now that I think about it I was a weird kid and it’s no wonder I was drawn away from 5e to the OSR.)
I’m catching whiffs of Longwinter, Knave, and Fellowship, of all things in this one. (With how the GM also plays the crazed captain) That’s a good sign if you ask me.
So, yeah, I feel like this game was made for me. I’m printing it out, stapling it together, and throwing it into my collection so that I can try to talk my buddies into a miserable “let's go die in the arctic” mini-campaign.
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