Alex Greene

I'm going to take a hiatus this week. Next week, I's like to take a look at a setting which needs a setting book. Mythras Modern. I'm going to work on looking at adapting Mythras to a bunch of other settings, too, over the next few weeks. One thing I intend to do, during this time, will be to review Mythras Modern and Mythras Firearms, to showcase how to use these two documents to adapt Mythras to the modern game.

So we've been looking at M-Space for so long now, I'd almost forgotten that the core of this blog has been to look at Mythras. I'll get back to the fantasy stuff soon enough. But for right now, let's look at what we've been reviewing these past two months, and see what we can do with it beyond creating more clones of Traveller settings. After all, this is a setting for science fiction. As is The Twilight Zone. Let's open the door, then, to another dimension ... a place of the senses, the emotions, the imagination. Let's open ... the doors of your mind. Let me in. I'm a hypnotist. Playing M-Space, Not Traveller Playing M-Space as if it were a clone of Traveller is probably a huge sin against Frostbyte Books' game. M-Space is not Traveller. The expectations of Traveller do not apply here. Or not always. Traveller is explicitly a space opera setting. Lyndsie Manusos, in an article on Bookriot, listed some other subgenres of science fiction. These include:- Hard Science Fiction Science and technology predominate. Heavy concept stuff. The Expanse, more than The Orville. Soft Science Fiction Characters take the focus away from technology and science. Military Science Fiction Characters are likely to be military or ex-military; the main plot has to do with glorifying war and/or military life, or if the characters are in civilian life, the military is never far away. Space Opera Space-based soap opera. The technology is virtually ignored; the focus is on people, and the relationships between them. A lot of personal fight scenes, and plenty of chrome - silver lame suits, robots, rayguns, green alien princesses. Space Western Lawless and gritty adventures, desert and prairie planets, frontier towns, life on the fringes of society, both physical and social. Honour, duelling, even ditching vehicles in favour of riding on horseback like bloody savages. This is the world of Outland, some of the worlds and settings of Judge Dredd, and 2000 AD's Strontium Dog. Steampunk A subgenre created by WIlliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Steampunk posited a what-if: what if the Information Age had its genesis in the Victorian era, with cogs and valves replacing computer circuitry? Later, it developed into "mad scientist fashion," and the original ethos was lost. Apocalyptic This is end-of-the-world science fiction. Things go wrong, and the world we know it comes to an end. This is the story of the lead up to the end, as the characters can only look on in horror at the unfolding devastation all around them. Depressing as hell. Post-Apocalyptic This is set after the Apocalypse. Humanity has been reduced to a state of savagery. It's dog-eat-dog, and the setting emphasises nothing but the ugliest, most savage sides of humanity - brutality, scheming, murder, depravity. Boring as hell. Dystopian This is set in some alternate world where everything works, but it's crap, frankly. We're talking about fascism winning, and we're stuck in a right-wing world where you see nothing but more brutality, scheming, murder, depravity. How people can get hot for Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Equilibrium, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Man In The High Castle, is beyond me. They were meant as warnings, not instructional manuals. Depressing as hell. Horror This is an interesting subgenre. The best horror science fiction setting is, IMO, HOSTILE from Zozer Games. They have captured the feel of movies such as Saturn 3, Outland again, and most of all Alien and the Alien franchise. However, and this is the fun part, this subgenre doesn't confine itself to the boundaries - it is quite happy to reach out and discolour virtually every other kind of science fiction in grim tones. Comedy This can be the world of Red Dwarf, or a setting which regularly lampshades the tropes of other science fiction franchises. A prized and well-loved example is Galaxy Quest. Silkpunk The youngest subgenre, coined by Ken Liu to describe a future world where art and magic and poetry predominate over technology and science. A graceful, positive setting, and a fresh aesthetic which seems to draw from its older sister ... Solarpunk A post-scarcity genre, Solarpunk is a world where technology and Nature come together to create a universe where life flourishes, greenery and animal life are abundant, and humans and other species dwell amid an abundance of resources; where conflicts arise when humans need things which society cannot supply. Episodic Each story is its own, self-contained unit. The characters may be the same; their vehicles, their devices, may be the same; but each episode has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Often an anthology, sometimes each story can involve different characters with absolutely no connection to other episodes whatsoever, where each episode is a different setting completely, with a different tale to tell, somewhat like the different incarnations of The Outer Limits, Tharg's Future Shocks and Terror Tales from 2000 AD, or ... The Twilight Zone. Example Settings The default setting of M-Space might well be the far future, and everybody could well be happy to run it as a space opera, but the game can be used to branch out into different genres so very easily. They Walk Among Us The setting is the modern world. Humans are living out their lives, little realising that some of their number are extraterrestrials. There could be one species, slowly infiltrating humanity one person at a time (Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Captain Scarlet), or the invaders could have planted their species instead, sometimes even using humans to gestate their alien offspring (The Midwich Cuckoos) or just have them arrive on Earth and try to adjust (Skizz, Third Rock From The Sun, ALF). Humans could work for some government department to investigate sightings of vehicles and individuals (The X-Files). Rescuers The most famous example of this subgenre is, of course, Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. A secretive group sends forth technologically-advanced craft to rescue beings from danger zones. They face dangers themselves, but ultimately courage and an attitude of "never say die" prevails. Adventures In Time Journey to the past, the future, or face down monsters in the present day. The crown of this subgenre is worn by Doctor Who, of course - but your characters could play some sort of Timebusters, heading into the past to stop miscreant time travellers from rewriting the present and destroying the future. Examples: Doctor Who, The Time Tunnel. Adventures In Space Say hello to Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. This is a game which has already been covered in a Mythras title, but nothing says you can't just steal great big chunks of that book and port them to your M-Space story. Vibro beamers, psionic synaptic puppetry, parallel universes ... go for it. Terra Quadrant Part solarpunk, part silkpunk, the universe of Terra Quadrant is set towards the end of humanity. Influenced by Luther Arkwright, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Odd John, and Peter J Carroll's Liber Null and Psychonaut and Liber Kaos, this is the last era where humans are recognisable in their appearance and behaviours. The species is on the verge of becoming a Type II civilisation before they have adjusted to life as a Type I civilisation. Humans are meeting other species which are themselves evolving past being Type I civilisations; together, they are heading rapidly towards becoming a single, united Type II civilisation, or even Type III. In the meantime, individuals are capable of some incredible feats, such as Spacejaunting within the galaxy and beyond, dimensional travel to different universes, and even time travel. Alternatives Alternative Starship Drives Many space opera settings are themed around Starships, the vehicles of choice for the settings. Traveller gave us a standard, the Jump Drive, which confines the Travellers to the local area - they can only advance a few parsecs each week, and explore the next few systems next door, which can be pretty confining if all the planets in the sector are desert planets with fery low populations and few facilities to repair or maintain their ships. High Guard, however, gave examples of alternative drives - the Space Folding Drive, whose jumps are instantaneous, but which require 24 hours to recharge; and Warp Drive, which allows for FTL travel through Einsteinian space (like the Destiny in Stargate Universe). Hyperdrive and Warp Drive are two different animals, in that they work in different ways: hyperdrive opens a hyperspace conduit through which the ship travels, and warp drive just circumvents the limitations of relativity by distorting space into a warp bubble, capable of travelling faster than light. However, these drives involve the ship travelling throught he void, and the rating of the ship (factor 1 through factor 9) is the relative velocity of the vessel through space, which can be measured in parsecs per week (like Traveller), or a lot faster - such as the Long Jump Hyperspace II engine from Larry Niven's Known Space setting, which negotiated the parsecs at a rate of one light year per 1.25 minutes. But what if your characters did not need to travel in ships at all? Alternative Modes of Travel Frank Herbert's Dune series gave us "travelling without moving," another form of space folding drive. "Travelling without moving" sounds rather like Teleportation, a psionic power. Imagine taking the concept of Dune's Spice Melange, and applying it to a setting where some people who took that drug could teleport between star systems, rendering the need for most space travel obsolete. If those people happened to be natural psions, gifted with Teleportation, and the Spice Melange merely amplified their range to allow them interstellar travel, such beings would become integral to the story as the characters would be depending on their teleporting friend to get them to the next system. Unless they were all capable of Spacejaunting ... The twist ending of Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination was not the telekinetically-active PyrE which was the great secret that humans were willing to go to war for, but rather Gully Foyle's Spacejaunting, which allowed characters to teleport to worlds thousands of light years apart. Spacejaunting also allowed for time travel to the past and the future. Yet another form of space travel is Stargates, both small and large. Stargate, and the series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe also had gate travel, where artificial portals allowed characters to visit different worlds in this, and later other, galaxies. The Glen A Larson show Buck Rogers In The 25th Century had Stargates which were set up for Starships - a concept also used extensively in Babylon 5. In the latter series, only large vessels (Capital ship size) could house the massive hyperspace engines to allow them to open their own Jump points, and ships needed to open Jump points at the point of origin and destination, and navigate through hyperspace by following subspace beacons. Alternative Technologies You aren't restricted to following the Tech Level tables from Traveller. Your tech level development could embrace psionics once it reaches the point where humans would be reaching for the stars in Traveller. Your TL 13 characters might be able to Spacejaunte, or communicate telepathically over light years, or your tech level development could reach the point where you develop the first bioships, organic vessels which turn out to be the only vessels able to travel FTL since they are psionically active, and use telekinesis and teleportation for their modes of travel. Mundane Science Fiction This setting eschews all the fancy technologies altogether. Your characters are just ordinary people in the modern world. It's about them using their technologies of the day - mobile phones, spirals, the internet, modern scientific equipment - to resolve conflicts such as alien invasions, and so on. Your characters can be military, or spies, or even left field occupations such as journalists, entertainers, or ordinary people off the street, facing off against aliens, cloning, strange new tech, and so on. Imagination In the end, imagination is the key to your stories. Use M-Space as the basic rules, but remember that M-Space does not create the settings; nor does the CRB bring them to life. You do. You and the players.

And so we come to it at last. The final chapter of Frostbyte Books' M-Space, and the Appendices. I'm not going to review the index, merely point out that the index is bookmarked, so if you want to get to a particular place in the PDF in a hurry, go right to the back of the book, locate your bookmark, and click. So the final chapter of M-Space is devoted to Life Forms - the equivalent of Traveller's Animal Encounters, and Mythras' Bestiary / Creatures / Monsters. You know, once I'm done with reviewing Frostbyte Books' material, I am going to miss these delightful illustrations. The Life Forms chapter is only six pages long, and it covers some non-sentient beasties and one sentient alien species, the Grept. The Reptore are illustrated on page 146. To save you going back sixty pages, here it is. These fearsome predators are used for "Stay out of the long grass!" scenarios. They do seem very nasty. Next are Deep-Sea Gobblers, primitive aquatic life forms the size of orca, who are on the verge of developing a sentient civilisation. So they could be classified as a sentient species, maybe. They are followed by the Woog, a species of literal scroungers, foragers basically, with a talent for hiding. They can be found on several worlds, and the speculation is that they find their way into Starships which then spread them about on the worlds where they touch down. This is an illustration of a Woog (page 187). Next are the Lava Swamp Morac, and these creatures and occasional riding beasts are illustrated on page 84. I don't think I poached the pic from 84, so here it is. Lastly, there are the psionic Grept. And we've already seen a picture of one. Grept politics is based around psionic ability. They have a strict caste system, and there's a story hook to get characters involved in Grept politics. And that's the last chapter of the M-Space Core Rulebook. Appendices There are five Appendices, labelled A through E. Each is short, and covers something related to some earlier chapter in the core rulebook. Appendix A is a useful Starship design walkthrough, to help the readers who might find the whole process daunting. The Appendix guides you through the procedure of creating a small Starship called an Explorer, for around 4 people - a small player character party. The narrator uses the rules on page 101 to add quirks and features to the slightly old Explorer ship, called the Aajege (Gesundheit!). Would you like me to create a few future blog posts devoted to creating a bunch of Starships and/or alien species? Please send feedback. I could do with the walkthroughs myself. And so to Appendix B, which is an example of Starship combat, supplied by Colin Brett, with a handy link to his website. The protagonists are the Gamma Star, the generic space fuzz, and the Speeding Blade, the poirates arrr. Right. The stage s set, so FIIIIGHT! Enter Captain Kurt Intolerance, and dashing swashbuckler Sasha Reeves. You might be wondering whom I have put my money on ... The action is both narrative and crunchy. The Appendix includes Bridge dialogues on both ships. Though I don't think you need to say "Aye aye" when "Aye" will do. I'll have to dig up one of my old contacts to confirm the protocol. Ex-Navy. Sweet. Keen sense of humour. The action pans out over several admittedly tense pages. Who wins? Who ends up screaming in fury and vowing vengeance? Read on. I'm not going to spoil it for you ... So Appendix C is one page long, and it's got some additional Careers for you to look at. These are Assassin, Entertainer, Law Enforcement, Noble, Scientist, and Soldier. Appendix D introduces the Skills Pyramid and Expert Characters. These also expand the character generation options. Finally, Appendix E expands upon the Extended Conflicts section with some sample Extended Conflicts - Quicksand, Asteroid Field, and Rickety Bridge. Fin And then that's it. Page 229 has some Acknowledgements, and a fine bunch of people they are too - they're you, basically. BRP Central are given top billing. Without you, M-Space 1.2 would not have come about, and Frostbyte Books might not have survived much past M-Space v 1.0. There are adverts for The Triton Incident (and, by extension, Elevation) and M-Space Companion, and then the Index. And with that, my review of M-Space Core Rulebook ... is done. Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me to this point. I want to come back to M-Space, starting with the next post, called Speculations, about the kinds of settings and scenarios M-Space can support, while also looking at supplements already on the market. And so, before bowing out of the core rulebook, one last look at the full M-Space wraparound book cover. Let's go ... out there.

When TDM moved to their new online shop site, they took the time to update the Luther Arkwright core rulebook, retooling it for Mythras rather than RQ6. New logo bottom left, and Mythras has replaced RQ6 and RuneQuest in the interior, afaict. If there is a new Luther Arkwright, it's probably going to have to include more Heart of Empire and Legend of Luther Arkwright material, including rules for creating Homo novus and Homo eximia characters, and so on. As well as, possibly, setting stories hundreds, even thousands, of years into the future. I'm keeping an eye out on this title.

In this post, we'll be reviewing the chapters on vehicles and technology. Vehicle Design The Vehicle Design chapter, on page 178, follows the same general modular system as the Starship design chapter. You create enough Modules to fit your vehicle's crew, you determine what other Modules you need (weapons, a mobile lab, etc), and from those you can determine the vehicle's Size, Speed, and Handling. Whatever you need, from a zippy little motorcycle to a walker tank or ATV; this is the chapter for you. The system is designed to be as simple as possible to use. If you're mathphobic, sadly you're going to hate the minimal amount of arithmetic which you'll inevitably encounter. There really needs to be an online Notes from Pavis online ship and vehicle table, similar to their character generator and sorcery spell apps. One which can work out Size, Thrust, Handling, and costs. Lists of common vehicles and Starship types begin from page 194. The vehicles listed are three hover (grav) vehicles (Speeder Bike, Land Speeder (Standard), Land Speeder (Fast)), two All Terrain Vehicles (Small and Medium), and a small quadbike. The space vessels listed are three kinds of Starfighter - Allround, Fast and Fragile, Slow and Sturdy - a Free Trader, followed by a Very Fast Starfighter on the page; the sequel to Starfighter, The Fast and The Fragile 2; a small bomber; a shuttle; Starfighter, The Fast and The Fragile 3; and then a bunch of Capital Ships, designed with the Capital Ships part of the Starship Design rules. The Capital Ships section has a feature not found in the Starship Design chapter - turbolasers, weapons specific to capital ships. The listed Capital Ships include a Corvette, a Destroyer, a Frigate, and that's it. You'll need to find Carriers, Cruisers, Dreadnoughts, Escorts and so on elsewhere. Hopefully they won't be as ugly as Traveller's Donosev class Scout or Tigress planetbuster. Technology This chapter starts on page 188. Characters need access to technology in M-Space. Bear in mind that tech toys are little more than props to further, or complicate, the telling of the story. The devices themselves do not resolve the scenarios: the characters do. The chapter begins with rules for laboratory research, and using laboratory modules in vehicles and Starships to conduct that research. The good news is, you don't need to attach those lab modules to vehicles or ships - these rules apply to stationary laboratories, planetside and orbital alike. The next page delivers pointers for trade and cargo, "for characters that wants to make good use of their cargo holds." M-Space has its own version of Traveller's trade game. It's on page 189 of the Technology chapter. And then, weapons and armour on pages 190 and 191. We're talking about fancy science fiction weapons here, blasters, ionisation rifles, particle grenadesm force swords, with some archaic melee weapons thrown in for good measure. If you want more modern slug throwers, there is a supplement called Mythras Firearms available. This chapter doesn't cover exotic slugthrowers such as gauss rifles (mini-railguns) or gyrojets (guns which launch tiny guided missiles). The chapter moves on to Strangeness and Technology, where the Strangeness of an alien species can be applied to tech built for that species, and a list of personal equipment for the following two pages, ending on page 193. All the basic stuff any character might need in a typical science fiction scenario, presented as no-frills one-paragraph descriptions and costs in credits. Sidebars in the two chapters include rules for partial Modules, Stunts (like psionic vehicles, vehicle Luck Points and so on), researching (inventing) new objects, and rules for MacGyvering one-shot objects, with a section on page 195 covering information access levels - an invaluable guide for scenarios leaning heavily into Tradecraft (spy scenarios) or Cyberpunk. By the way, there are no rules for cybernetics here in this core rulebook - they are covered in M-Space Companion, and rules for robotic and cyborg Circles given in Circles of Steel. And that's it. It's nowhere near as flash as anything presented in Traveller, but practically everything listed in the Traveller books can be ported into M-Space with minimal reworking. In fact, it is encouraged. Tech Levels and M-Space Which brings us to the technology levels of M-Space. The Tech Level table is on page 135, and it looks roughly the same as the familiar system of TL development from Traveller. I'm afraid there's no getting away from the old 2D6 science fiction tabletop roleplaying game, any more than it's possible to get far away from Star Trek or Doctor Who when crafting a new SF TV show or movie. There's a paragraph explaining this. These tables are taken from the original 1977 Traveller RPG by Marc Miller (now under a Creative Commons license). This is as close to canon as you can come. For me, sticking with it is a small homage to one of the first sci-fi RPGs ever. These tech levels are more or less familiar to people moving over to M-Space, but - as we'll reveal in a future blog post, M-Space Speculations, it can be tweaked or even rewritten to suit your campaign setting, along with such things as the psionics rules. Next Week We're at the end of the core rulebook next week, covering Life Forms, then the Appendices. Once we get to the index, that's it. Make use of your vehicle sheet on page 185, draw up a couple of fun vehicles, and we'll meet you here next week.

Greetings, Cosmonauts, and welcome to the next part of my look at M-Space by Frostbyte Books. This week, we take a look at two disparate chapters - Circles, and Psionics. Circles Circles are the M-Space equivalent of the factions of Mythras- its Guilds, Orders, Sodalities, Cults, and so on. Circles can take on the form of extended family, political pressure groups, terrorist organisations, political parties, corporations, and so on. Circles are defined here by characteristics - their Ideas (ideologies, etc); their types (Organization, Ideology, Corporation, Location), their Influence (INF), Size (SIZ), and Resources (RES), which are measured on a non-linear scale of 1-20; and Attributes, which determine how the Circles get things done, such as Ahimsa (non-violence), Black Ops, Functional Stupidity, Memes, and so on. Traits for the Circles include Ranks, Benefits )such as tech, psionics etc). The chapter continues with a look at further traits such as the Circle's age, entry and exit conditions, and so on. These few pages, which include a Circle stat sheet, are everything you need to create a Circle as small as a found family of misfit explorers, a ship's crew from a random passing freighter, or a globe-spanning organised crime ring. Circles and Odd Soot The Circles presented here are universally considered to be positive. Membership in those Circles means that the Circle accepts the character, and the character accepts the Circle's ethos and ideologies. Odd Soot, also from Frostbyte Books, looks at the concept of negative Circles - Circles whose presence is a detriment to the character, and which shaped the character's outlook with dark memories and painful events in their past. Circles in Odd Soot are structured differently to those featured here - for one thing, they are rated 1% - 100% just like Skills and Passions - and they influence the character as much as they influence third parties. Example Circle The Polidori Society Ideas: A collective of psychic (energy) vampires, exploring their identity and culture. Type: Organisation (Occult) Characteristics: INF (9, Counterculture, Vampyre Identity, LGBTQIA+), SIZ (6), RES (17) Attributes: Ahimsa, Cellular, Connected, Dedicated Followers, Secrecy, Spread, Welfare. Traits: Shelter, Library, Psionic Training, Healing Psionics Every science fiction roleplating game since Traveller has included rules for psionics in their core rulebooks. M-Space is no exception. From telepaths to telekinetics, clairvoyants to teleporters, science fiction has included the occasional psychic mutant to throw the scientists a curve ball. Psychic powers are frequently held as a thorn in the side of the more rational, logical breed of science fiction writers who prefer their stories to revolve around real science, rather than the "rules" of psionics and what they term "woo." But this is science fiction, and for every Expanse there is a Star Trek; for every rationalist Asimov character, there is a Deanna Troi or Telzey Amberdon. For every Han Solo, there is an Obi-Wan or baby Yoda. And this is the last time I will ever refer to Star Wars in this blog. How do the M-Space rules approach psionics, then? The rules are pretty basic. Your psion has access to three streams of psi - Sense, Mind, and Matter. Sense is your ESP, clairvoyance type strand, with other applications such as Meditation and Battle Meditation. Mind covers empathy, telepathy, mind control, and so on. And Matter covers the interaction of psi with the physical world - telekinesis, but also physical healing, illusions, martial flow, and ultimately Life Giver - which restores the very recently dead to life. For the most part, these abilities require a check against Sense, Mind, or Matter - which are independently rated from 1% - 100% like Skills and Passions - and success draws upon Power Points, which are like Magic Points from Mythras or Prana Points from Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. All Power Points are restored with a good night's sleep or, with the use of the Meditation power, one hour. Curiously enough, this iteration of the psionics rules does not include teleportation, translocation (jumping between parallels) or other powers found in the pages of, for instance, Worlds United, After The Vampire Wars or, indeed, Luther Arkwright: Roleplaying Across The Parallels. To give yourself a richer psionic experience, consider poaching some of the powers from those books. Consider how your space-based compaign would be affected if one of your characters could Spacejaunt - teleport over vast distances, even between solar systems thousands of light years apart (as Gully Foyle did in the final chapter of Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination) or between universes (such as Luther Arkwright (from The Adventures of Luther Arkwright), Princess Victoria (from Heart of Empire), and Proteus (from The Legend of Luther Arkwright)). Some psions' abilities break the rules listed in M-Space. Break those rules, if you have to. Create a psion character who can use all of the Mind Talents, ignoring the requirements for "first, second, and third arc." Drop the need for power points. Replace them with fatigue points, and only accumulate them the same way one accumulated fatigue in physical combat. Low POW, low-skill psions might be able to send and receive psychic messages over short distances and even touch range only, whereas high-POW, highly-skilled or even alien psions might be able to reach with their minds and senses to connect with other minds in solar systems sectors away. And some wanderers might skip from one M-Class, Terra-Prime garden world to another, not needing a ship to take them anywhere - just teleporting from world to world, as you and I might change channels on the TV. And that's the review of Circles and Psionics in M-Space. Next week, it's the turn of Vehicles and Technology.

Saturday, the post continues its look at M-Space with a review of its rules for Circles and Psionics. Also, would anyone like a complete post detailing the Pelacur species from my previous post? They are turning up, along with some favourites from Castrobancla, in a setting called Terra Quadrant. I'm working on that setting to submit to Frostbyte Books for a possible future sourcebook either for M-Space or for a new project Clarence Redd has been working on, which I can't wait to review for you when it eventually comes out.

This week, we will be looking at the aliens of M-Space. I'm not going to lie; you're going to have to take notes. This chapter deals with the basic biological blueprints for creating real, strange aliens, rather than the bumpy-headed humanoids you know and love from TV and movie science fiction (or fantasy, for that matter). There's a lot to take in. What is your world's biosphere like? How and where did your alien species evolve, and why did they evolve? What makes your designed species unique? And how do these rules translate into being able to use the alien creation rules as chargen rules, the same way as Mythras just presents you with the tweaks for how to chargen an individual from a creature template? Strangeness The first universal factor is Strangeness. This imposes a penalty to interactions with members of that species. The higher the Strangeness, the harder it gets to interact with the aliens meaningfully. Strangeness: 1-100, where 1 represents Earth-like, 50 Alien and 100 Really strange. The Strangeness parameter adds a good overall picture when interpreting the dice rolls in the creation process. A low Strangeness value will indicate small variations on concepts well-known on Ear th (physiology, behaviour, culture). A high value means you should interpret many of the results as differing wildly from what’s common here. A later sidebar points out that it also affects First Aid and Medicine rolls, using alien technology and so on. Biosphere The next part of this chapter can appear daunting to the first time GM or player. Some might wonder whether it is necessary to generate the alien species' homeworld's biosphere, biodiversity, and other details. The greater the Strangeness, however, the weirder the biosphere. "My ancestors spawned in another ocean than yours," and so on. An example of Strangeness acting as a barrier to communication is Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Gethen. Another example of high Strangeness was Ted Chiang's "Story Of Your Life" which became the movie Arrival (2016). Strangeness, and the overcoming of it, was the theme of the story. Yet other authors such as N K Jemisin and Octavia Butler have approached alien contact in their own stories. The section details things such as the rough size of mature alien individuals, their Frame (endoskeleton, exoskeleton, or squidgy), their Symmetry, Limbs, Segmentation, and classifications such as Grazer, Pouncer or Trapper. Next are Habitat, Advantages, Disadvantages, Life Span, Communications, Natural Weapons, and then on to Characteristics. There's a section on how the aliens appear, and the difference between low-powered and high-powered aliens. Tech levels can be determined by average species INT. It takes a minimum level of INT to sustain a species' average Tech Level. Next to follow is Cultures, and the range of cultures available to the species; Law Level, Tech Level, cultural values, such as beliefs, taboos and so on; conflicts; population density; and a host of other details. This chapter is, at the very least, exhaustive. Seriously, it covers so much - right down to little things such as the aliens' foreign policy, and individual alien characters' Passions. It doesn't go as far as asking what cutlery they use and whether they pass the port to the left or the right, but the alien creation chapter leaves very little else out. My recommendation is to go to the part which describes the aliens' physical forms first - size, shape, behaviours - then characteristic ranges, INT range, corresponding TL. Leave much of the rest to later episodes, where you can run the equivalent of Amok TIme and Journey To Babel or similar Star Trek episodes. Or something out of Stargate SG-1, Farscape and so on. TL;DR: You don't need all of this if you just want the basics, like creating a psionic species which looks like sea urchins on pointy little legs, or a species of generic bumpy headed humanoids who speak perfect English but who are green skinned or have cybernetics and so on. Worldbuilding Here's where a lot of attention tends to focus, next to the ships and starship combat, and the physical combat between characters. Anyone who played Traveller will know how much fun it is to create solar systems. It's almost as much fun as designing starships, or playing the trade game, or designing alien species, or wait ... Okay, alien species building is a subgame in and of itself. Use the Worldbuilding chapter first to design your systems, and then conjure your biospheres and dominant sentient species. You do need your imagination. A lot of imagination. And perhaps a lot of borrowing from your library of SF books. Do you want a planet of all Odd Johns? A world which was successfully taken over by the species which chose Earth in John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos? Do you want a planet which is tearing itself apart because they have discovered a lichen which yields an immortality serum which only works on one marginalised segment of society, but which kills the affluent? Here's where you come in. If you're familiar with Traveller worldbuilding, you will find the process familiar. You begin with the star or stars in the system, then a number of planets. One of those worlds really should be in the habitable zone if it is to be suitable for native life, and for humanoid characters to be able to live on the surface of the world. Again, you can design your worlds' size, atmosphere, hydrographic percentage, and so on, just as if you were going through this process with Traveller. The next part is mapping out the star systems. You can use the Traveller system of subsector and sector hex grids, or find your own system. Hex grid maps are given in this core rulebook (as well as Odd Soot), and the short chapter ends with blank sheets for hex grids and systems, as well as a filled example. Wow The information in both these chapters is pretty dense. First timers might find it difficult to get through. M-Space really needs some examples of species creation to show the readers how it's all done. Let's start with the Pelacur, who are a humanoid species. Strangeness: Let's make this 20%. They are a little bit weird, but generally they look and act kind of like humans. Biosphere: Their world is a garden world, with a broad range of biomes, as diverse as old Terra. Maybe a little more so. More exotic jungles, not so many deserts. Mountains, rainforests, temperate inhabited regions. A great diversity of different Pelacur physical types. Frame and Symmetry: Endoskeletal, bipedal, bilateral symmetry. Classification: Omnivore Gatherer. Habitat: Like humans, these can be found everywhere. Advantages: Enhanced Senses (smell, taste, touch), Psionic, Poison (see below), Enhanced Charisma (see below) Disadvantages: Eggs, Hibernation Poison: Pelacur secrete a pheromone which befuddles most other species, increasing oxytocin, dopamine, and phenylethylamine levels. It makes most humanoid aliens become dopey in love with them. Enhanced Charisma: As for 95-00, Intelligence or High Intelligence, but for CHA. Appearance: They look roughly like this. These are the clearest pics I could get of Proteus, the Homo eximia antagonist of Bryan Talbot's graphic novel The Legend of Luther Arkwright. The Pelacur looked like this before The Legend of Luther Arkwright ever came to being. Sexes: Pelacur only really have the one gender. Binary genders confuse them, but they have adapted to the binary species from other worlds in the centuries they have been starfaring. Arts: Pelacur appreciation for art is as profound as that of humans. They adopt human styles and art, though they retain their own music and poetry. Behaviour: In Harmony, Social (small groups). Communication: Scent, Body Language, Language, Telepathy. Characteristics: Physically, slightly higher than human average CON; high POW; very high CHA. Appearance: Naturally hairless except for eyebrows, eyelashes. Slightly translucent skin; when irritated, you can see blood in individual capillaries in the face and body. Larger eyes in proportion to the head. Large irises, smaller pupils but more room for expansion (can see better in low light conditions). Tech Level: Actually higher than you would imagine. Pelacur do not have ships of their own. They travel on other species' ships, humans in particular. What is generally not known is that they invented their own FTL drives independently, but abandoned their own FTL in favour of becoming travellers and wanderers in other species' vessels. If pressed, they could resume shipbuilding - and their vessels would exceed the best TL humans could ever offer. Their homeworld is a TL 17 paradise, but no humans have ever been permitted to learn of its location, let alone visit. Technology Areas include Chemistry, Communication, Economics, Medicine, and an Unusual Technology (advanced teleportation capable of operating over thousands of light years). Details of their homeworld remain unknown, but Pelacur colonies are terraformed paradises, with vast green spaces growing between elegant, labyrinthine arcologies. Food: They can eat what humans eat, but once in a while they require a dietary supplement - a pill, taken monthly. Any human who takes that pill dies. Lifespan: Nobody has ever seen a Pelacur die of old age. Nobody even knows if Pelacur age at all. Perhaps it's those damned pills they take ... So that's it for the Alien Creation and Worldbuilding chapters. Next week, we look at Circles and Psionics - oh, and I'll be taking a sneak peek at the Circles rules for Odd Soot, with a promise to give them a much greater, in depth look when I get to that rulebook (hopefully, about the time of the release of the first Odd Soot campaign book, due out soon ...)

Welcome to part 4 of this look through Frostbyte Books' M-Space. Today, it's all about the transport. Specifically, starships. Transport The default mode of transport in M-Space is by ship. Nothing is stopping you from creating a setting which has your guys traipsing between star systems or even universes via a network of portals a la Stargate or the Glen Larson TV series Buck Rogers - or indeed like the original Trippy Stargate sequence from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could even borrow the whole Spice deal from Dune and have a Guild of Navigators ferry ships from world to world, "travelling without moving" and similar druggy, trippy stuff: or Spacejaunting from Bester's The Stars, My Destination. But that's something for another blog post. I might call that one M-Space: Speculations and hold that after my review of the core rulebook. Back to the ships. M-Space Ships versus Traveller Ships Go and look up Starships on DriveThruRPG, and you will come back with a bewildering choice of sublight boats and ships. Scouts, Traders, Freighters, Liners, troop transports, Corvettes, Frigates, Escorts, Cruisers, Dreadnoughts and some seriously ugly "planet cracker" ships, including the Traveller answer to the Death Star, the Tigress-class Christmas Tree Decoration:- Honestly, I can't imagine an uglier ship. Oh, wait ... Seriously, Traveller starships leave so much to be desired, aesthetically speaking. So, then, straight over to M-Space, which presents Starship design rules. These are so different. First of all, everything is about how many Modules your ship has, not its displacement tonnage. Your ship can be some tiny scout singleship or some vast cityship - the rules cover the construction of ships of any size, based on Modules, not tonnage. The items which consume Modules are very simple. Crew space, Bridge / cockpit, engines, maneuvering, hyperspace, galley, sickbay, weapons, lab. Stuff like that. There is a list of components and their Module costs. Not everything requires a Module cost. The following things are always included in a starship: Hull, power plant, airlock (not for small ships), vacuum suits for complete crew, computer, life support system, communications system, sensors, repair kit and a gravity generator. There is no need to buy specific Modules for these functions. Okay ... so add hyperdrive, fuel storage, and manoeuvre drive to that, and your Starship design can become so incredibly simple. Just pluck numbers for your ship's performance out of a hat. Throw away your copy of High Guard. This is not Traveller. You don't have to follow the Traveller rules to calculate your Starship's performance. High Guard has a bunch of high tech alternatives to Jump. The Hop Drive. The Skip Drive. The Spacefolding Drive. Hyperdrive. Exotic particle collectors like the Traveller Double Adventure Annic Nova. Okay, bring back your copy of High Guard and borrow those technologies if you like - just include them in the list of things which do not require a Module calculation. How do your M-Space Starships travel from star to star? M-Space has one or two mentions of your ship needing refuelling after every jump, but honestly these rules are optional. All of them. There's a section which allows you to compare the SIZ of the ship (based on the number of Modules) and the TR of the drives - you can just pick the TR, it won't hurt to pluck a suitable number out of a hat if you like, or use the Modules times a multiplier like 1.2 (cutting edge) or 0.8 (cheap commercial) and so on. Costs, likewise, can be glossed over if you like: you do not have to scrabble for every single Credit to pay for your ship's mortgage plus interest for forty stinking years. Once again, M-Space is not Traveller. You can design your ships to look like some freaky designs with M-Space. Examples from Space: 1999:- Or The Infernal Machine ... And you could be inspired by from Star Trek, and come up with a ship like this ... It's up to you. Move over, Annic Nova. I mean, seriously, you don't have to do Traveller with M-Space ships. Do you want your characters to face off against a vampire ship like the one from Lifeforce above, with its near-immortal occupants? Go for it. Nothing says your vampire ship has to use refined hydrogen guel costing Cr 500 per ton, and have to work out how many tons of fuel it's supposed to store and how much it consumes per jump. Why not have this ship become a real menace because (a) it's sentient, (b) it's fuelled by living souls, (c) its primary weapon can suck the life force out of every living being on a small planetoid to fuel its jump, (d) whoops, I've given away one of the terrifying enemy ships of my M-Space book Terra Quadrant, still a WIP? Have I whetted your appetites enough yet? Okay, next section, Starship Combat. Starship Combat M-Space treats your characters' Starship as a character. Your enemy ships or boats are likewise treated as characters. Your Sections are like locational Hit Points; your crew's Skills are your ship's Skills; your ship's Armour works like AP on your Hit Locations; and your ship has all the combat attributes you'd expect from Combat, with your ship's Crews adding Action Points, your ships having Initiative, combat differential rolls, Special Effects, the works. If you know how M-Space Extended Conflicts and Combat work on a scale of player characters, you can easily adapt to starship combat. There are two examples of ship combat on pages 110 and 216. You can look them up. The same way that there is a section for simplified combat in M-Space next to the regular Combat chapter, there is a simplified starship combat section on Page 112, for quick and dirty ship combats on the fly. Want more? Page 116 goes into detail on Advanced Starship Combat. Yes, M-Space is a gift that keeps on giving. Here, you will find some advanced options for starship combat, including the effects of exotic weapons, armour, and weapon options. This section gives you as many rules as you wish to engage in starship combat, whether it's an Eagle transporter facing off against fighter craft or two Stargate Atlantis Wraith Hive ships firing broadsides at one another for feeding rights to the planet they are orbiting. That's it for the Starships section of M-Space. We're about halfway through the book. The rest of the book is Alien Creation, World Building, Circles, Psionics, Vehicle Design, Technology, Life Forms and five Appendices. Next week, we're covering Alien Creation and World Building. I'll go through the rules for both, using the rules to generate an alien species I created for Castrobancla, The City of Aliens - the Pelacur. Get ready for First Contact and prepare for landing next week.

Imagine a compelling game involving your character and a strange, motley crew of ragtag colonists, aliens, criminals on the run, psychics who are trying to kick the habit, and even a cyborg and an android. Maybe even a hologram character ... Your ship is massive. It's organic, like Tin Man or the Lexx. Its fuel is exotic particles absorbed from the local star. And the occasional asteroid and comet or small planetoid. Your adventures have you dropping in on some solar system, and you remain there for a week while your ship charges up for its next FTL transit. You're explorers, but you're not working for some paramilitary; nor are you some commercial endeavour, grubbing for money, negotiating with brokers for freight cargos and passengers. This is not Traveller. This is Frostbyte Books' M-Space. The stars you touch here are very different. Your ship sings to them. And some of them answer back. Welcome to part 3 of our look at M-Space. And in a packed blog post tonight, we will be looking further at the basic game systems, expanding upon the cursory scrutiny we gave the Game Systems chapter last week with a look at Extended Conflicts and Spot Rules. Game Systems Redux So you basically roll the target number or less on a d100. 01-05 is an automatic success; 96-00 is an automatic fail. That's basically it. You don't need criticals and fumbles, though the mechanics are described here for use only when the results are to be entertaining. The game can be very simple to play. The next part is the rules section for opposed rules, but hold that thought till you get to Extended Conflicts below. And differential rolls are used mainly in various kinds of combat - physical combat, psychic combat, social combat, danceoffs. You know the drill. Again, though, check out page 42, to which we will be coming shortly. Luck Points are contentious. Does science fiction need luck? SF really needs to be run on logic. Your characters should not rely on some deus ex machina dropping a pocket franistan on the road right in front of the characters. However, Luck Points are useful in mitigating poor player choices or lousy dice rolls, if the GM does not understand the fine art of fudging. And again, if a fumble is more entertaining, save the Luck Points, and go with the consequences of either a complete calamity or a win with a cost. The next two parts cover game time - see the sidebar on page 37 for examples - and a section on injuries and healing. I'm wondering whether or not there should be new sections here on social injuries and healing, and Tenacity injuries and healing, among other rules. Something to think on. Or just leave it to the Extended Conflicts. We're almost there. The section on character improvement rounds off this section. Here is where M-Space shines compared to Traveller - the latter game does not really reward characters with a lot of improvement. Your characters must spend weeks of in-Jump training to build themselves up; and there is a strict limit to how many skill levels they can have. M-Space uses the Mythras model for skill improvement, relying on Experience Rolls to build skills by increments. Since the increments are measured in percentiles, progression feels less granular, and one gets a sense of accomplishment with each adventure. So now you've familiarised yourself with the basic system rules, time to move on to the next section. Yaay, it's Extended Conflicts. Extended Conflicts This is the most versatile conflict resolution engine I have seen. This is something you can use for an extended haggling session with some store vendor (Commerce versus Commerce), for fast talking through red tape (Deceit versus Bureaucracy), for SERE (Track versus Evade), or for any kind of social conflict. There is an example of an extended conflict given - Nedra in a heated argument with Egil. But let's make things more interesting - Joanne and Alexandra in a conflict of mind versus mind, where Alexandra is attempting to hypnotise Joanne. Joanne has a Willpower of 67% and Alexandra's Influence skill is 76%. Joanne's INT is 13; Alexandra's CHA is 16. That gives them Conflict Pools of 13 and 16 respectively. Joanne is resisting Alexandra's hypnotic skills by sheer Willpower and intellect. So the basic rule is that both protagonist and antagonist roll their skills. If both succeed, the highest rolled success wins that round. Round 1, Joanne wins easily, rolling a 66 to Alexandra's 40. Joanne can take a bite out of Alexandra's magnetic charisma. Joanne's player rolls 3. Ouch. Alexandra's pool is now the same as Joanne's. Alexandra is outwardly unaffected, however, and presses on with her attempt to hypnotise Joanne. Round 2, both succeed again. Joanne's roll is 23, and Alexandra's 70. As the winner of the round, Alexandra carves 5 points off Joanne's pool, reducing it to 8 to her 13. Round 3, Joanne fails her roll, and so does Alexandra. Neither make any headway that round. Round 4, Joanne fails her roll, and Alexandra succeeds. Alexandra slices off a full 6 points from Joanne's pool, reducing it to 2. Since this is less than half of Joanne's full pool, her next Willpower check is at Hard - 47%. Round 5, both parties succeed again - but while Joanne's 37 roll is a healthy success, Alexandra wins the round with a 52 roll. Her attack yields 3 damage, which reduces Joanne's conflict pool to zero. With a blissful sigh, Joanne gives up and slumps into a hypnotic trance before the gloating Alexandra. Joanne will now carry out her new mistress' commands without question ... Example Extended Conflicts There are some really fun extended conflict examples given - cheating at poker, chase scenes, dinner party, persuading someone. I recommend you look at this whole section. It even gives an example of quick and dirty physical combat if you don't want to go mucking about with the whole combat section. Which, by the way, is coming up. Combat Ah, yes, the combat section. Pages 54 - 74. It should look, sound, and feel familiar to you. The rules can be found in Mythras Core Rulebook, after all. I'm not sure what percentage of gamers head straight to the combat sections of any game book nowadays. I guess it's still significant, because this chapter takes up two whole sections, between this bit and the Simplified Combat section following from pages 75 - 77. I must confess, I tend to gloss over the combat sections of every single roleplaying game I ever buy. There are plenty of ways to create conflict in a game other than deadly combat. Battles can have outcomes other than slaughtering or being slaughtered. I would love to see a combat section which focuses on objectives and Combat Styles other than maximising physical damage with the sole intention of killing the recipient of the character's hostilities. Between the Extended Conflicts section, the main combat section, and the Simplified Combat section, though, M-Space delivers on its promise to offer at least three different forms of combat in its pages. More, if you count Starship Combat (next week). Spot Rules This section covers everything else which is trying to kill your characters, such as falling, fatigue, fires, and Legal section: DO NOT complete that word! - inanimate objects. This last section's brief. It cannot cover everything - poisons, diseases, conditions, radiation, and so on. Basically, if it causes damage, work out the Intensity, which might as well be divided into Standard, Difficult, Formidable and so on, and have your characters make Endurance checks at that level of difficulty to avoid symptoms, fatigue, points of damage, or just plain old dropping dead. And that is it. All your personal combat needs are covered here, and a lot of other sources of damage. The rules cover an incredible diversity of situations, and it is well worth getting acquainted with them, in particular Extended Conflicts. Next week, we focus on the M-Space rules for starships: design, combat, and advanced combat. You know where to come. Hatches reopen in seven.

Welcome to Part 2 of this review of Frostbyte Books' M-Space. Last week's blog introduced you to the game, and specifically to the core rulebook. Let's take our first look at the contents, starting with Characters and Game Systems. Characters M-SPACE characters can be everything from starship pilots and bounty hunters, to journalists and librarians! All depending on what type of scenarios you want to play. -- the core rulebook That's always promising. Characters in science fiction are so diverse. They can range from just ordinary, unskilled people (Gully Foyle from Bester's The Stars, My Destination) to diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers (Babylon 5). Do we really need to play more paramilitary types in army boots? That's a sad thing that Traveller is all about - its legendary character generation subgame was heavily skewed towards your characters coming from some sort of pseudomilitary or paramilitary, or plain old boots and ribbons military, force. This reflected game legend Marc Miller's (praise be unto him) life, but not all of us can claim to have gone through such regimented mills. The Characters chapter goes through the system, explaining calmly to newcomers about the crunch. This is a great way of bringing in the less experienced gamers, as well as anyone whose first roleplaying game is M-Space. Which would be so neat. Why do so many of these figures seem to have no faces? You're meant to imagine your face inside those helmets. So think of a character, one who's living a life that is so different to you. And here's the thing. They are living a life. Tabletop games always present your characters to be played like game pieces - but here, as you're going through the chargen process outlined from page 9, let your minds imagine who your character is, and what life they are living, and realise what their life is like, beyond the numbers. Character generation is fairly standardised from Mythras. You start with a character concept, roll your Characteristics, derive your Attributes, choose Standard SKills (including Combat Styles), Culture and Career, spread bonus skill points around, select your gear and equipment, and you can be good to go from there. The portraits put faces to your imaginations. They are reminiscent of the output from the Artflow website. Skills are clearly explained, pages 15 - 22. Go and pick out your character's favourite skills - the ones they are best at. They are based on your Culture and Career, and these are listed from page 23. Traveller players, please notice the huge difference between Traveller and M-Space chargen. No Lifepath. You don't start at age bupkhes and work your way up through the ranks while avoidng mishaps and praying for promotions, commissions, and Life Event 34 where you can go and roll your psionic talents. Here, if you want your characters to start off as a Rural farmboy on a desert planet and turn into the Galaxy's super psion saviour of the galaxy, be my guest, but be notified I find your lack of imagination ... disappointing ... Please check out those three Cultures, and all the Careers. You can choose a Career whose name is not on the list, but select the Skills spread from a Career which is - for instance, "Teacher" can use the Scientist skills set from page 225, emphasis on Teach; and your Assassin character from page 225 could replace Track with Demolitions and be more of a Terrorist type. Page 28 is where you can have fun. Passions have been described in this blog here. But you know how science fiction has traditionally steered well away from passions. Characters fight to save worlds, galaxies, entire universes - but they never struggle to find the right emotions to feel when something weird or disappointing happens. The Luther Arkwright series dealt with passions - Luther's despair, Anne's agony, Victoria's pain in the second book Heart of Empire, the fear of the natives of the Perfidious Albion parallel in The Legend of Luther Arkwright - and every character felt some sort of passion, from the huge libidos of the protagonists to the hatred of the antagonists, from Cromwell in Book 1 to Proteus in Book 3. Give your characters Passions. Give them a setting where they can express those Passions. Because these are how your characters can bring the setting, and the adventure, to vivid life at the table. Game Systems This next section covers the basic stuff - dice rolls, opposed dice rolls, differential rolls, injuries, game time, character improvement and development, and that's it for this chapter. Basically, everything you need to create a character and play an M-Space game are here, if all you want to do is to play a game where all you want to do is crunch some numbers. There is no Gamesmaster section in this book to describe how to roleplay, rather than rollplay - perhaps this is a weakness in the book, because Gamesmasters really should read the Gamesmastering chapter of Mythras Core Rulebook for that - but these two chapters are all that you need to create and run the characters you will be using in this game. Next week, we're looking at Extended Conflicts, Combat (including Simplified Combat), and the Spot Rules. The week after that, we'll be looking at everything that makes this a science fiction game - pages 86 to 155, covering Starship Design and Combat, Alien Creation, and World Building. Thought Of The Week M-Space is a game which presents you with the opportunity to create characters who are people, not just former soldiers and combat drones. Just after completing my look through of M-Space, I'll be looking at M-Space Companion with its expanded options for player characters - options which really open out options for your characters - but this game, as it is, presents you with a great opportunity to create characters whom you can look at as persons, rather than as collections of numbers on a sheet. Your characters are more than just "that schmoe running around shooting things with a big gun." This game allows you to create that schmoe who runs with a gang of people, putting on plays or running heists or solving scientific problems or debunking local ghosts as bad guys in rubber masks, getting into scrapes with the law, hopping from galaxy to galaxy, avoiding crooked cops and honourable crims, and carving out legends at every star they touch. Stay tuned. See you here next week.

In the beginning was Traveller. Traveller was not the first science fiction roleplaying game, and it wasn't the last. It's just that Traveller eclipsed practically every other science fiction tabletop roleplaying game on the market; and in terms of its market share, it still does. I mean, Chaosium wanted to give us a d100 science fiction roleplaying game. It started so well. And we got RIngworld, and the mission failed at takeoff. Look at some of those names. Ralph McQuarrie was responsible for the look of Star Wars. Lawrence "Larry" DiTillio worked in the first two seasons of Babylon 5. We're not talking small potatoes here. This game could have taken off, but for the licensing issues at the time. A pity; it was enjoyable, if a little clunky in places. Speed things up. Let's have one of those calendar montages to indicate the passage of time. What we needed was a science fiction roleplaying game which comes without a setting. A game which allows you to pretty much create any science fiction style setting you like. Welcome to Frostbyte Books' M-Space. First of all, look at the cover illustration. A lone figure, on foot, walking along a snowy footpath, beyond which is an iced-over river, a couple of bridges, and some futuristic-looking buildings capped with landing pad shelves like fungus brackets, and smallish vehicles taking off and landing. M-Space is the brainchild of writer Clarence Redd, whose alternate history game Odd Soot will be reviewed in due course. M-Space is a game for those space opera aficionados who like their landscapes Cyclopean and looming, their cyberpunk streets rainy, shady, neon-lit and narrow, and their adventures operatic and thought-provoking. The following quote from the late Ursula K LeGuin more or less captures a feel which runs through M-Space. “I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.” Ursula K Le Guin This roleplaying setting allows you to explore worlds of science fiction. You can capture the worlds of John Wyndham (The Day of The Triffids), Ursula K LeGuin (The Dispossessed), or modern writers such as Ted Chiang ("Story of Your Life" / Arrival) or N K Jemisin (the Broken Earth trilogy). M-Space allows for deep and soulful stories of alien first contact, exploration, and light-hearted adventure. The Introduction explains the ethos behind M-Space. This book is a modular toolkit for sci-fi. Use whichever parts you need and leave the rest – the game system will not break down because of this. I have also taken great care to write the rules to help you create your own universe; no ready-made setting is holding back your creativity. Just like roleplaying games were meant to be when invented in the 1970s. The stories are all yours here, and you can explore them in any way you want. You can create unique alien species, complex cultures and worlds. Let a planet orbit a binary star and put the star on a map. Chart ancient courses for traders and explorers; find out who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. And you have already started to play. I have not seen a more literally hypnotic intro in a roleplaying game. Core Rulebook The 240-page core rulebook is a square coffee table book. The cover is lavish, but the interior illustrations are both surreal and soulful, evoking lonely cityscapes or interplanetary romance. Images are almost dreamlike, drawing you into one surreal landscape after another. Images of the denizens of these worlds can range from the serene to the nightmarish. I've mentioned how hypnotic the contents of this book are. The whole book, from its magnificent art, which ranges from the near-abstract to the almost-photorealistic, to its plain, minimalist font which is used throughout, mesmerises the reader. An average reader can open a page and just let the illustrations draw you in, and you can experience the adventure yourself as if you're in the story, just from reading the pages and absorbing the words. You really should turn to page 85 and look at the pic, and you notice how you feel as you look at the lone figure in silhouette looking up at the floating behemoth overhead - and you can practically experience that as if you are inside the frame. Overview The book contains the following modular sections: Introduction, Characters, Game System, Extended Conflicts, Combat, Simplified Combat, Spot Rules, Starship Design, Starship Combat, Advanced Starship Combat, Alien Creation, World Building, Circles, Psionics, Vehicle Design, Technology, Life forms, and Appendices A – E. There is a lot to process in this book, and not all of it need be used in your games. After all, Clarence did design this book to reflect a modular approach. Beginning next week, this blog will take in a few of these chapters at a time, starting with Characters and the Game System.

This blog post is best read in the dark. Alone. I'm going to take you to a calmer, cosier world, where people could walk for miles across lonely moors, down country roads, and along beaches, without meeting a single living soul. A world where the pace of life is slower, but the heart rate is through the roof. A cool world, where your brow occasionally prickles with sweat for no reason. A cold sweat, to accompany the chills down your spine. Welcome, reader, to the world of Montague Rhodes "Monty" James, and his beloved stories of horror and the supernatural. Welcome ... to The Design Mechanism's Casting The Runes. M R James M R James was a profoundly thorough and meticulous mediaevalist scholar. His works can still be cited as definitive in his field. However, James is most famous for his collection of ghost stories, all set in a charming, pastoral realm; an England which was beginning to disappear in the real world even during Monty's lifetime, as the 20th century reeled from one world war and lurched towards a second one a decade later. The world of horror literature was changing. Ghost stories were more and more being seen as passé, and the world was lapping up the weird fiction of HPL and his acolytes. Stories of science fiction were beginning to fill the pages of magazines, displacing the dreaming country lanes and haunted fens with harder stories of American derring do among the stars. But during the traditional Christmas Eve story telling sessions when the world outside was dark and still after the Solstice, and the wind rattled the windows and made the candles in the room flicker and cast dancing shadows to fuel the imagination, M R James' world of deeper shadows lived on to this day. Casting The Runes And Other Stories James' work is regarded as unmatchable in his field. Evocative; conversational, like a written transcript of a story narrated verbally (you can practically hear Monty lean forwards from his spectral chair in the afterlife to speak to you); and, most of all, terrifying; his stories have inspired homages, imitations and downright parodies. "Casting The Runes" is one of James' most famous horror stories, where Karswell, a man of poor and vulgar character, casts a dangerous spell over Dunning, the story's protagonist. Dunning discovers that Karswell had cast the runes, slipped him a sheet of paper inscribed with runes of summoning. Other famous James ghost stories include Lost Hearts, a suspense story involving a young orphan and haunting visions of two Traveller children with missing hearts; Count Magnus, a vampire story of an obnoxious man whose ill character lead to a Faustian deal, and an evil which lived on long after his death; and O Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad, one of his most famous stories, which centres around the discovery of an odd whistle on a beach ... and the slow, building terror which follows when the protagonist blows it. You can read the stories here; but for best effect, you can either buy his books as hardcopies, to hold in your hands, feeling the paper beneath your fingertips as you turn the pages and read out the words under a solitary lamp in the dark ... ... or you can set a roleplaying game in M R James country, and play a character. This is the setting for The Design Mechanism's Casting The Runes. The Tabletop Roleplaying Game This project of The Design Mechanism was announced with a little mystery - "What is Project Rose Garden?" Aficionados of M R James immediately caught the reference to "The Rose Garden," one of James' short stories, and immediately drew the conclusion that they would be looking at a new horror game. First of all, just so you know ... the engine for this game is not based on Mythras. There have been plans to release Casting as a Mythras game, with the familiar d100 engine; but this is not that day. Casting The Runes' engine is based on Pelgrane Press' GUMSHOE engine, devised by Robin D Laws and Kenneth Hite. It begins with a preface by Ramsey Campbell. RAMSEY BLOODY CAMPBELL. The quality that makes [James'] best tales – which is to say most of them – unforgettable is his wit in communicating horror. -- the Preface The Book Moving from the Preface, the rest of the book presents the usual sections - an introduction to roleplaying games, an intro to the world of M R James (I refuse to give it the umbrella term Monty Country in the same vein as "Lovecraft Country"), the character generation rules, and chapters devoted to gameplay, acquiring clues, creatures, magic, the historic period and locales, campaigns, and sample scenarios, along with an Appendix which is, basically, the "Appendix N" of ghost stories and tales of strangeness. But really, those are mere technical details. What really matters is what this game is about, what it does, and what makes it unique, not only from the other games I am looking at in this blog, but also from other Gumshoe products such as Fear Itself, Night's Black Agents and The Esoterrorists. It even differs in play from The Design Mechanism's other horror roleplaying games, After The Vampire Wars and Weird of Hali, both of which I have already covered in this blog. Using GUMSHOE GUMSHOE is an investigative game. Your characters, known as Investigators, are presented with a mystery. You explore the mystery, gathering Clues, until it leads you to a place of unremitting horror (or "pleasing terror" if you like) from which you recover ... or maybe not. Presenting Jamesian Horror The elements which make a Casting game unique are the tools by which M R James himself presented his stories. Casting really is best run in a semi-darkened room, preferably with inhospitable weather pounding on the outside of the glass. Far from being cosy, James’s stories frequently present a reassuringly ordinary setting that is invaded by the malevolent and terrible. Sometimes everyday objects take on or harbour hideous life, and at times the juxtaposition of these elements borders on surrealism. -- the Preface Gaming Casting is about setting a style. Your investigations are not in the style of Delta Green, all kicking down doors and taking names at gunpoint. Casting is about a methodical gathering of facts, even as the darkness gathers about the Investigators. The atmosphere of a Casting adventure should always start with an almost cosy mundanity - your Investigator wants to write a travelogue about Sweden, or they come into possession of some weird, ugly mezzotint, or they stumble across a rusty whistle on some beach. As the game progresses, your characters invariably sense that something is amiss. A sense of unease begins to fill the air. If your Investigators are alone, they sense things out of the corner of their eyes. Odd synchronicities catch their attention. A sense that they are not alone, and that they are somehow being watched from afar. If your characters are Investigators, along the lines of Hodgson's Carnacki, they can become accustomed to these feelings; but your Investigators can be hapless members of the general public drawn into this terrifying world. Retired postal workers, school teachers on holiday, formidable bustling women in tweeds rampaging about the village on bicycles - the appeal of the game is to land them in a situation where they find that they have bitten off far more than they can chew. So much more fun to have their body hairs prickling in response to dark terrors far beyond their little circle of experiences. GUMSHOE Investigators are based around certain key elements - Abilities, Health, Stability, and the Sources of Stability which keep them on this side of the sanity membrane. The usual characteristic rolls and skill percentages do not appear in this game. Rather, your Investigators are good at some things, and they are healthy and mentally sound at the start of the game, though both can get eroded as the game progresses. If you are not used to GUMSHOE, please read page 13, the section on Investigative Abilities. It's that important. Amateur Hour Many of your Investigators are likely to come from a unique background: gentle beings of leisure, people of independent means who can come and go as they please. Investigations in M R James' worlds are delightfully free of the scent of luchre, and Investigators can board a train or hail a cab and visit anywhere, without a hint of screaming poverty, running short of money to pay for a meal or a few nights' stay at some village inn. Their independence is a heady brew which can draw your Players in to their Investigators' short lives. Casting paints a golden age for people who were able to go anywhere, do anything, and come back with warnings for the curious not to go there. Each Investigative Career (Authors, Antiquarians, Collectors, Physicists, Doctors, Secretaries, Historians, and so on) is prefaced with a monochrome thumbnail portrait and a brief quote relevant to that career from either a James story or from some other source. You are encouraged to have your Investigator come from one of those investigative careers and to settle into that role. Creature Feature The game would not be the same without a healthy bestiary of strange entities to haunt and terrify your Investigators. The creatures are drawn from a variety of sources, not just from James' stories. The creature entering via the window in the pic below comes from The Mezzotint:- You can tell it was a creature of uncouth mien, because it refused to use the door like a civilised person. Shocking, its lack of standards. There is a section for Gamesmasters on how to create such mythic or folklorish creatures, from Little People to vampires, from Black Dogs to Cornish Piskies and Nockers. It should be obvious that most supernatural beings are lethally dangerous, and that any reckless Investigator, however strong, who dares grapple with one will soon meet a horrible end. That’s as it should be. Supernatural terror lies in the physical helplessness of puny mortals before the unknown. This is also a chance for GMs so disposed to cunningly undermine and critique the brute-force-and-sheerbloody- ignorance attitude rampant in Edwardian England. Any victory or banishment of the unearthly enemy should come from more than just a straight bat and a strong right arm. Knowledge, and more than a bit of luck, will be required. -- Casting The Runes, The Design Mechanism The list of creatures begins with a vampiric, ghostly creature from the mind and pen of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, the Aeiirii Manifestation, and follows up with elementals, familiars, Arthur Machen's Children of Pan, Ghosts and Ghouls (with lists of Stability costs associated with ghostly manifestations), Demons (from Casting The Runes), Mummies, Night-Ravens, and the Sheeted Ghosts from "O Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad." The chapter moves on from the lesser creatures to actual gods - the two examples given being Odin and Sweet Mama Hecate, below. This is then followed by a list of game stats for mundane creatures - bears, boars, bulls. Dogs, cats, tories. "Do not cross this field unless you can run a hundred metres in nine seconds, because the bull can run it in ten." -- famous sign on a farm gate Abracadabra, Alakazam The next chapter is all about magic, and its effects on the setting. Magic, in this book, is not really for the Investigators, unless it is somehow defensive - magic circles and amulets to ward off evil, nazars to be worn and carried and so on. This chapter captures the essence of the sorceries of Casting The Runes, Count Magnus, O Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad, and the dark forces controlled by Mocata in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out. Magic is something to be warded against, more than it is a tool for the Investigators to use. The price to pay is heavy - Health, Stability and so on - and it is best wielded by the kinds of barbaric NPC Gamesmaster vulgarians who never had much in the way of Stability to start with. The workings listed in this chapter are delightfully thematic, and some horrific, to be enacted only at great cost. The book does not encourage Investigators to learn them - with sone exceptions, such as Protective Circlle and Warding. What follows next is a list of dreaded tomes, along with their contents and costs for reading them. Fairly standard fare, something you'll have seen in Call of Cthulhu and other games. After this is a section on extraordinary items - vampire hunters' crossbows of rowan or hawthorn wood, protective amulets, Carnacki's "Electric Pentacle" (basically, a force field), the Hand of Glory (anyone want to enact scenes from The Wicker Man?) and witch bottles. The Period The next chapter covers the period of James' life - Edwardian England. The chapter delves into incomes, social class, and similar. The section on money is actually dressing - no matter the social class of the Investigators, they should never lack for money to get them to where they want to go, or to buy replacement items for what they need, whether it be a new umbrella or Derby hat, or shot for a Purdey shotgun. This chapter is more about giving you a taste of what people did, and what was available to them: telegrams, rather than emails; libraries of heavy books, rather than a bunch of PDFs on a tablet; clothing, weaponry, investigative equipment - a Kodak Brownie can potentially be more dangerous than a twelve-bore shotgun, for instance. The history of this chapter is staggering, evocative, and worth reading all on its own. This, along with the Appendix with its sources, is the biggest love letter to the Edwardian era, both real and imagined, that anyone not born in that time could ever hope to write. Campaigning You are not restricted to the horror stories of M R James. The same period gave such delights as John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, and your characters could become embroiled in spy scandals against various political groups at the time, even as the forces of more supernatural darkness gather on the horizon ... Think of a famous author whose stories defined that era in ways which still take the breath away. You're invited to set your stories in the Edwardian era, and in Monty Country damn, that one slipped out but you can be inspired by other authors, if you like. Proust. Joyce. Kafka. Anais Nin. W Somerset Maugham. Maybe not Edgar Rice Burroughs - too pulpy, and maybe more than a bit colonial. Rainer Marie Rilke. D H Lawrence. George Bernard Shaw. You can extract elements from these books and bring them in to add flavour to your Investigators' delvings, turning them into bright, strange, convoluted dramas where they only occasionally veer into Gothic darkness. The mundanity of their everyday dramas contrasts with the bitter, weird darkness of the supernatural. And sometimes, the mundanity can present the Investigators with threats more immediate than any centuried corpse rising from its crypt. The Last Word Casting The Runes is a departure from The Design Mechanism's d100 fare, but it is a delightful addition to their library. Being a standalone horror game based on GUMSHOE, Casting is mechanically compatible with Fear Itself, Night's Black Agents, The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Republic, and any other game based on Pelgrane Press' GUMSHOE engine. Yes, it stands alongside its GUMSHOE siblings as a game in its own right, well worth opening and looking into as an introduction to GUMSHOE games. This is the brainchild of Paul StJohn Mackintosh, and it is one of the best roleplaying supplements I have had the privilege to come across. Additionally, it doesn't take much effort to convert the non-crunchy materials for use in a wide variety of alternate settings. Consider taking the game engine from Weird of Hali or After The Vampire Wars in the setting, if you must insist on playing the game with Mythras rules. Even the Circles and Extended Conflict rules from Frostbyte Books' Odd Soot are useful and can be ported to this setting, if you would like to set your Casting game in a more esoteric 1920s of Difference Engines and interstellar travel in Comae Space. Pick up this book. It is easy to lose yourself in a time period just over a century ago, such is the powerful writing in this book. Just remember, when you come back into this world, to check to make sure that you're not bringing Something back with you from the depths of the book. And whatever else you do, do not blow that damn whistle. Here you have a story written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader; and as I think, that is the true aim of the ghost story. - M.R. James

So, where were we? Ah, yes, here we go. We were exploring the first 100 or so pages of Weird of Hali. So far, the game has felt pretty much like any other Mythos game, with one exception - the player characters are on the other side, working with the Great Old Ones and possibly calling some of them family, displaying odd traits which become more pronounced as the alien side of the family gradually wins out over the human blood. And let me point out that, in Weird of Hali, this is a good thing. We had just come to the end of the magic chapter, but I feel obliged to bring you back up to speed here. Sorcery is a way of manipulating the universal life force, known as voor, to produce mostly mental and perceptual effects, with some physical effects. Characters spend Voorish points rather than Magic Points to cast spells. And there are three main branches of magic, which every character can eventually access (nobody knows any magic at the start) - Witchcraft (Folk Magic), Initiation (Mysticism), and Conjuration (summoning / binding / commanding / banishing Mythos entities). Characters may learn from Mythos tomes, Greater and Lesser, and buy do those tomes shake their Sanity - and this is also a good thing, because this game is about discovering that the rational, mundane world is just a veneer over something far deeper, richer, and more rewarding than you can imagine. Right. Page 103. Forbidden Sciences. Gamesmasters of Odd Soot - this chapter is perfect for that game from Frostbyte Books. I kid you not. The chapter presents a series of tables, which effectively describe the scientist's chosen field of study, along with the blasphemous and obscene tools and methods by which they pursue their field of study. Think of Dee, Gabriel Shelley, and Professor Lang in Bryan Talbot's Heart of Empire (aka Luther Arkwright Book 2). Dee dabbled is Kabbalah, alchemy, and haruspicy (divination by entrails); Gabriel Shelley experimented with hallucinogenic fungi; and Lang built a nuke to use in a fireworks display in the middle of one of the Londons. Now back from the worlds of Luther Arkwright and Odd Soot to Weird of Hali. The rest of this chapter lists, along other things, random sorcerous objects, secret devices, forbidden devices, consumables (I am tired of the use of the term "potions" to describe anything liquid which your Adventurers drink; call them what they are - poisons and/or drugs) and dangerous named occult artefacts, namedropping characters like Herbert West. The "reanimation serum" is basically the glowy green serum from the movie Herbert West: Reanimator featuring Jeffrey Combs in his breakout role before he went on to play every single alien in Star Trek. The Tillinghast Resonator is a shocking device used by the Radiance bad guys, which basically hits the targets like a sort of weaponised LSD field - it creates an EM field which triggers what look like hallucinations, but which are in fact glimpses beyond the veneer of mundanity into the real world beyond. This chapter is an exciting, often terrifying, read. All the things listed could be just dropped into the game to be either discovered by, invented by, coveted by, or used to destroy, the Adventurers. Not one part of this chapter is dull. Your inner fiend may well cackle like a Bond villain, if it is anything like mine. What follows next are the bread and butter of Mythos games. All the creatures. "All the single creatures All the single creatures All the single creatures All the single creatures ..." The chapter starts with the Great Old Ones - the heavy hitters like Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub-Ne'Hurrath, and the lesser (yet still potent) beings such as Nodens, Yig, and Phauz / Bastet. If you've run Mythos-based games from Sandy Petersen's iconic Call of Cthulhu, you'll be closely familiar with these Great Old Ones, and greet them here like old friends. To many of the Characters in this game, they probably are - and to some, they could even be referred to as family. There then follow the Elder Races, starting with the Deep Ones. The chapter moves on to describe flying polyps, ghouls, Mi-Go, night-gaunts, serpentfolk (my favourite species), shoggoths, and voormis. The book has left out some Mythos creatures such as Brian Lumley's Chthonians and Ramsey Campbell's Y'Golonac, and the Elder Things themselves are not statted up here since they have long been rendered extinct by the time of Weird of Hali, along with the Great Race of Yith which sent their minds forwards in time hundreds of millions of years to avoid the flying polyps. The chapter moves on to Eldritch Beings - Behinders, Nyarlathotep's Black Dogs, Coloured Gases, Culverins, Dark Young, Flats, Floating Globes, Formless Spawn, Generic Tentacle Monsters to trot out when running a Mad Scientist's Laboratory scenario, and no, stop that, you're not bringing the H word in here. Those who know tentacle monsters respond instead to the probing tentacle by patting it, talking to the monster in a soothing voice, and perhaps giving it something to eat, upon which it will usually crawl back into its lair. ... Moving on! Gnophkehs, check. Hounds of TIndalos, check. Krakens, check. Kyrrmis ... am I pronouncing the name right because I sound like Miss Piggy calling for her green batrachian ex-husband ... moving on, Lake Monsters and Sea Serpents - cool, I am so stealing these for Fioracitta ... Mammoths ... okay, who reanimated these hairy buggers? ... Dancers With The Stars, no sorry, misread that, Shamblers From The Stars ... er, Shantaks, Skims ... oh, that's what happened to the Yith ... Giant Spiders, Tollers, Xin, and the mysterious Yag-Kothaun. Next, a bunch of ordinary animals, such as alligators, bears, boars, big cats, domestic cats, dogs, swarming critters, and dogs. This is followed by the worst, most dangerous, most rapacious and hostile life forms ever to be encountered within the setting. Humans. The most common sentient species on the lesser Earth at present, humans are not as intelligent or as magically talented as most other races, but make up for those limitations with the brashness and energy of a young species. Curious, clever, and prone to sudden violence, they baffle most of the elder races, though serpent folk find their simple-mindedness oddly endearing, Deep Ones think of them as children badly in need of instruction, and the smaller breeds of shoggoths (who are only about as intelligent as humans) get on with them surprisingly well. This is probably the most important section of the creatures chapter, because of all the monsters your characters are likely to encounter, these are by far the commonest, most numerous, and most hostile of all of them. Initiates, Fellowship of The Yellow Sign, Mad Scientists, Offspring of Great Old Ones, Poseidonian Families, Revenants, Shonokins, Tcho-Tchos, Turanians, Witches, and Yithian Hosts round off the section on humans and, indeed, the entire Creatures chapter. There then follows the section devoted to the Big Bad - The Radiance, basically supremacists, bent on imposing their fascistic view of reality on the human race, and exterminating deviancy. Think of the Puritans, and White Wolf's Order of Reason and Technocratic Union. You get the gist. The Radiance are Delta Green and Charles Stross' The Laundry Files, with perhaps a callout to the human protagonists of The Esoterrorists, misguided into thinking that the Player Characters are the bad guys from that game. Negation Teams are ... well, I called it. Delta Green. These chumps are Delta Green. They are cops. They are the bad guys. Hells, if you're braiding in Luther Arkwright, these are Disruptors, and if you eventually find yourselves running Department M, the Radiance will have swallowed up that Agency - and their Agents and Operatives would be working against your Characters. Remember - the baddies in the above pic are the yotzes in fatigues. The dead Thing in the middle could well have been your Dad. Human scum. *spits* Remember, folks - variable number of Hit Locations good, two legs bad. Don't play humans, kids. Just Say No. So now we're coming to the end of the book. The next section is for Gamesmasters, and it's about how to run Weird of Hali. I recommend you track down John Michael Greer's books and just devour them. Well, not literally, mind you. Just steep yourself in their lore. Then, for contrast, track down Charlie Stross' Laundry FIles, all twelve books, to get a read on The Radiance. Know Thy Enemy. These are UNIT and Torchwood as baddies. Human scum. *spits again* This part of Weird of Hali covers how to run entities, combat, magic, the Radiance, and narrative hooks in your game. Investigations get given the Mythras treatment - clues, infodumping, the role of criticals and fumbles, and so on. Next is where everything gets thrown into the mixer. Weird of Hali can be combined with Mythras core, and in particular with Luther Arkwright. This particular game is called out here, because what we all want to see is Bryan Talbot working with John Michael Greer to produce something awesome. And you, as Gamesmaster, get to run the crossover. Might I also recommend a possible crossover between Weird of Hali ... and Odd Soot? What's next? Page 159, The Tablet of Sarkomand, a mini adventure for Weird of Hali which runs to page 176. No spoilers. Have fun playing this adventure. That brings the book to an end. The next page is the Index, and one final blank page in the PDF. And that's it. My last thoughts, as I put away Weird of Hali, are that this book is really enjoyable. It's a look at the Mythos, from the point of view of the entities and those who dwell within the murky shadow world beneath the veneer of mundanity. Your characters can be diverse, intelligent, compassionate, strange, and humane. In contrast, the Radiance is everything that is wrong with humanity. They may be fighting the entities and targeting the Characters - but trust me, these fascist putzes should not be considered to be the good guys by any stretch. The world of Weird of Hali is highly recommended. It can be genteel, beautiful, intense, intimate, warming, or harrowing - often all in one session, rather like British weather. It's a game which allows you to explore what it means to be people, and to stretch your definition of whom you include under the word "family" and the pronoun "we."

Okay, this blog entry takes a look at a book which comes with a bit of a back story. Sit down. I'll begin. Way back in 2021, Aeon Games set up a Kickstarter for one of their books. An author, John Michael Greer, had created a roleplaying game based around the seven book series he'd published, Weird if Hali. Bad news - it failed to reach the funding goal, so the hardback was scrapped. Good news, though - the publishers released the roleplaying game anyway. So, let's take the plunge. John Michael Greer Greer has his own Wikipedia entry. John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American author and druid who writes on ecology, politics, appropriate technology, oil depletion and the occult. Greer has written a seven-book series, Weird of Hali, which has a unique take on the Cthulhu Mythos. The seven books are titled after landmark locations in Lovecraft's stories. Here are the blurbs to his seven books. The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth: There Are Two Sides To Every Story Like every other grad student at Miskatonic University, Owen Merrill knows about the Great Old Ones, the nightmare beings out of ancient legend that H.P. Lovecraft unearthed from archaic texts and turned into icons of modern fantasy fiction. Then a chance discovery—a lost letter written by Lovecraft to fellow Weird Tales author Robert Blake—offers a glimpse into the frightful reality behind the legends, and sends Owen on a desperate quest for answers that shatters his familiar world forever. As he flees across the witch-haunted Massachusetts landscape toward the mysterious seaside town of Innsmouth, Owen finds himself caught up in a secret war between the servants of the Great Old Ones and their ancient enemies, a war in which yesterday’s friend may be tomorrow’s foe and nothing is as it seems. The history of the world is not what he has been taught—and the tentacles reaching out for him from the shadows of a forbidden past may hold not only his one chance of escape from the terrifying forces closing around him, but the last hope of life on Earth ... The Weird of Hali: Kingsport: As The Old Gods Awakem ... Like other students at Miskatonic University, Jenny Parrish worries mostly about passing her finals and getting a graduate assistantship. Then an unexpected letter arrives from her great-aunt Sylvia, inviting her to spend the holidays and celebrate a mysterious Festival at the family mansion in the old port city of Kingsport, where Jenny has never been—the home her mother fled at the age of eighteen, never to return.Once she reaches the ancient mansion, Jenny finds herself in the midst of a tangled web of archaic secrets, eldritch lore, and hidden struggles that pit the servants of the Great Old Ones, the ancient gods and goddesses of Earth, against a terrifying and relentless foe. At the center the web stands the treasure Jenny's family has guarded for centuries, a talisman of supreme power forged in the lost land of Hyperborea: the Ring of Ebon. But the Ring is lost—and the quest to find it and keep it out of the hands of the enemies of the Great Old Ones will send Jenny on a journey beyond the borders of the world to dread Carcosa, the city of the King in Yellow ... The Weird of Hali: Chorazin: Something Sleeps Within The Hill... A last desperate hope brings Justin Martense to the little town of Dunwich in the Massachusetts hills. Justin’s family lies under an ancient curse brought down on them by an ancestor’s terrible deed. Once in each generation, one of the descendants of Gerrit Martense is summoned in dreams to Elk Hill, near the town of Chorazin in western New York, never to return. Now Justin has received the summons; a cryptic message from Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Great Old Ones, sends him to Owen Merrill, who might be able to solve the riddle of the Martense curse soon enough to save Justin’s life.As the two of them travel to Chorazin and begin to trace tangled clues reaching deep into the region’s colonial past, strange forces gather, and so do the enemies of the Great Old Ones. Far below the brooding stone circle that crowns Elk Hill, one of the forgotten powers of the ancient world turns in restless sleep—and before they can unravel the secret of Chorazin, Owen and Justin will have to face archaic sorceries, monstrous beings, and the supreme nightmare chronicled centuries before in Ludvig Prinn’s The Mysteries of the Worm ... The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands To a Country of Dreams...For five and a half years, since the mysterious disappearance of two of her graduate students, Professor Miriam Akeley of Miskatonic University has pursued her own covert researches into the forbidden lore underlying the seemingly fantastic tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The clues she has gathered all point to the shocking reality behind those tales, but it takes an unexpected encounter with a creature out of ancient legend and the discovery of a cryptic letter by Lovecraft’s cousin and fellow author Randolph Carter to lead her to the answers she hoped and feared to find—and thrust her out of the reality she knows into the impossible world that Lovecraft and Carter called the Dreamlands.She is not the only one to pass through that forgotten portal, however. The ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their enemies has spilled over into the lands of Dream, and an agent of the Radiance now seeks the Temple of the Singing Flame in the far west. Guided by the oracle of Nodens, Lord of the Great Deep, Miriam and Randolph Carter must stop him—for he carries the Blade of Uoht, one of the three sorcerous treasures of drowned Poseidonis, and if he reaches the Temple and extinguishes the Flame, the Dreamlands and all within them will cease to exist forever... The Weird of Hali: Providence In a Handful of Dust... As the ancient war between the old gods of Earth and their bitter enemies rises toward a final confrontation, Owen Merrill sets out from his new home in Arkham to Rhode Island, seeking the ultimate weapon in that war—the spells that might succeed in calling Great Cthulhu from his temple-tomb in drowned R’lyeh to fulfill the terrible prophecy of the Weird of Hali. The threads of evidence he and Jenny Chaudronnier have traced through years of hard work all lead to a young man named Charles Dexter Ward, who lived in Providence a century earlier and may have received copies of the rituals from the elderly scholar George Gammell Angell. As he plunges into the mysteries surrounding Ward and the rituals, he finds himself entangled in a web of peril reaching far beyond the urban landscape of Providence. The Starry Wisdom Church there is racked by rivalries no member will discuss, and the Radiance and the Fellowship of the Yellow Sign are closing in. Owen’s one hope lies with a young woman named Hannah Ward—Charles Dexter Ward’s great-granddaughter—who is in Providence on a mission of her own. She has learned the same terrible secrets of alchemy her great-grandfather mastered, and plans on using them to revive the one person on Earth who might know the location of the rituals Owen needs so badly: Charles Dexter Ward himself... The Weird of Hali: Red Hook Beneath Brooklyn’s Sidewalks... The last thing Justin Martense wants to do is fling himself back into the ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their relentless enemies. Now that his family’s inherited illness has shown up, he wants nothing more than to wrap up eleven years of farming in the Catskill town of Lefferts Corners and figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Suddenly a letter from his old friend Owen Merrill shatters those plans—for Owen is in terrible danger in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and the letter carries a cryptic call for help. With his friends Arthur and Rose Wheeler, he hurries south through a half-ruined landscape to try to answer the call. But more waits beneath the crumbling sidewalks of the decaying Red Hook neighborhood than Justin can imagine: a half-human sorceress with strange powers, shapeless horrors from the deeps of time, and a colossal device left buried in the living rock by the serpent folk of ancient Valusia, which may hold the key to the fulfillment of the Weird of Hali. The enemies of the Great Old Ones are in Red Hook as well, searching for the device, for Owen—and for Justin. Before he can overcome the dangers that surround him, Justin must gather the clues from a century-old mystery, journey through time into the forgotten past of New York City, obtain a key of silver from a long-dead witch, bring that back to his own time, and then take it into the deep places under Brooklyn—down a stair that no living person can descend ... The Weird of Hali: Arkham The Stars Are Right At Last ... Twenty years have passed since the ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their bitter enemies swept Owen Merrill away from the world he thought he inhabited. As a seventh-degree initiate in the Starry Wisdom Church, he knows that the time is close when Great Cthulhu will awaken in his temple-tomb in drowned R’lyeh and end that war once and for all. Neither he nor any of the servants of the Great Old Ones is prepared, however, for the last desperate counterstroke of the Radiance—the unleashing of the Color out of Space, an alien form of matter that can end all life on Earth. As the final conflict looms, Owen flings himself on a last desperate quest to stop the descent of the Color out of Space. His journey will take him from the ruins of a New Jersey college town to a long-forgotten stair descending into a Virginia graveyard, and then to the Dreamlands and beyond. Helping him are a renegade Radiance negation team commander, a sorcerer out of archaic legend, the youngest of the Great Old Ones, and his own witch-daughter Asenath, but against him stands the massed might of the Radiance, a being of the outer voids summoned by the enemies of the Great Old Ones, and the Color out of Space itself ... The Roleplaying Game Weird of Hali is a slender 193-page book, packed with useful rules and details on Greer's setting. The book makes this note on the meaning of the word eldritch:- El•dritch /’el-drich/ adj. [perh. fr. (assumed) ME elfriche fairyland, fr. ME elf + riche kingdom, fr. OE ríce—more at rich] (1508): weird, eerie —from Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1986 Here's what the introduction has to say. The Cthulhu mythos—the sprawling universe he and his fellow Weird Tales authors created, full of bizarre gods, strange creatures, and books full of secrets humanity was not meant to know—was one of the first great shared worlds of modern imaginative fiction, a cosmos so vivid that it has been an inspiration to writers ever since his day ... In the world of The Weird of Hali, the Great Old Ones—Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Nyarlathotep, and the rest of the pantheon Lovecraft and his friends created—are not powers of evil, though propaganda incessantly spread through every human society paints them in that role. The secretive, multiracial cults that still revere the Great Old Ones despite bitter centuries of prejudice and persecution are innocent of the charges of human sacrifice leveled against them, as those same charges have been leveled against so many other religious dissidents down through the years. In the novels, as in this game, the Great Old Ones are the gods of nature, their worshipers preserve a wisdom older than the human race, and those who stumble across long-suppressed clues dealing with that ancient wisdom may find themselves drawn into a larger and stranger world, full of mysterious powers and dreadful dangers. That is, in a nutshell, what this game book is about. Your characters can come from all corners of the world. You worship Nature and the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. The bad guys are Greyfaces. So, then, what do the rules look like? Vital Differences Weird of Hali uses a modified version of the Mythras core rules. The main differences are ... - The universal life force is called Voor here, and characters use Voorish points when using sorcery. - There are three sets of skills - Standard Skills, Professional Skills ... and Eldritch Skills, used with sorcery. - Characters have Rationality Points to represent personal commitment to conventional wisdom of modern culture. - Sorcery, as a general rule, does not affect physical matter directly, only the minds and nervous systems of living creatures. - The sorcerous disciplines available in Weird of Hali are Witchcraft, Initiation, and Conjuration. Access to magic is unthinkably rare. Characters don't start with any Eldritch skills or access to magic. A Glimpse From The Other Side The history of the world is not what you have been taught ... There were human civilizations long before the ones named in the history books ... You need to know about that, now that you’ve glimpsed a few of the things hidden behind what you were taught. You need to know it, if you want to survive. The basic story behind this game is that characters begin play knowing very little about the rteal world. It's prosaic and ordinary to them, until they realise that the world is far stranger and occult than they could have imagined, and hello isn't there a game called Hunter: the Reckoning which is all about ordinary Joes and Janes who have the scales ripped off their eyes? And some other game called Call of Cthulhu? There are some basic premises behind this game. We are not alone. We have bever been alone. Nor is this the only universe: there are myriads of parallels out there, in all eight directions. up, dow, East, West, North, South, Ulth and Anth. Pages 1 through 7 are a must-read. They cover the geography and history of our Earth, the Greater Earths and Lesser Earths. There is a guide to pronunciation, and some familiar names and terms. Page 12 covers the topic of hybrids of human and eldritch stock - human / Deep One, human / Voormi. Even human / Great Old One. There's an origin table which lists the strange possibilities for a character's inhuman ancestry. Your character's weird ancestry gives you certain bonuses, and some disadvantages - if your character is descended from some entity types, or is possessed by a Yithian being, or you're a Serpent Person in human guise, your Rationality Points begin at 0, for instance. Backgrounds, Cultures, skill generation, all take directly from Mythras. You have four Backgrounds to choose from - Rural, Urban, Suburban, and Privileged. You can choose your character's concept, career, skills, Combat Styles and so on, more or less the same as the Mythras Core Rulebook. Professional SKills include Espionage, Forgery, Investigation, Mountaineering, Pilot, Politics, Research, and Spelunking - skills you won't find in Mythras. Eldritch Skills are also new. They are:- Awareness (INT+POW) - sense and shape voor, the life force; detect sorcery; sense tomes and sorcerous objects; identify and follow moon paths; and detect living things by their voorish aura when they are out of sight — for example, behind a closed door or in a room on the far side of a wall. Binding (POW+CHA) - exert your will over uncanny forces and beings, banish harmful energies and hostile entities, and control what has been summoned. Contemplation (POW+CON) - The voorush name for Mysticism skill. Enchantment (INT+CHA) - to bind voor into material objects and substances. Witchcraft practitioners use this on herbs, weapons, even machines. Meditation (INT+CON) - used to recover Voorish Points, and also with voorish Mysticism skill. Spellcasting (INT x2) - perform Witchcraft spells. Summoning (POW x2) - call upon the Eldritch powers, or in some cases call Mum over the phone for a quick intervention. Chapter 2 covers what are described as Spot Rules in Mythras - effects such as fatigue, blood loss, acid damage, fire damage, and so on. Page 42 covers a specific set of rules unique to Weird of Hali - where your character loses their physical humanity, and becomes a representative of their inhuman ancestry as their genes assert themselves. Sections on Science and Sorcery, and Sanity, are also covered. Chapter 3 is Combat. Chapter 4, page 65, covers Vehicles and Chases, for those times when your characters have to run from some mountainous Thing that's chasing them down the corridors like Doctor Who. Chapter 5 begins on page 77 and covers Sorcery - the three basic methods, namely Conjuration, Initiation, and Witchcraft. This chapter also covers Moon Paths, aka ley lines. Greer's vocation comes through here: he is an accomplished Druid and geomancer in real life (I have one of his books, a brilliant tome on real world geomancy). This is powerful sorcery which draws upon the land's mobile voor currents, standing stones, and so on. The book next describes the Tomes - some old favourites, if you're a long time fan of the Mythos. Everything from the Necronomicon and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and so on, to the lesser tomes such as Thaumaturgical Prodigies in The New-English Canaan. What then follows are the three main Disciplines of Witchcraft, Initiation, and Conjuration, in that order. Witchcraft is, in effect, Folk Magic. Initiation is essentially Mysticism, with a heavy emphasis on initiation degrees, and a long list of different initiatory cults from around the world. FInally, Conjuration covers the art of summoning and binding Great Old Ones, making pacts with them, and receiving benefits which extend to permament changes and advantages, as well as to benefits to invoke certain powerful spells. The review continues from page 103 next week.

I'm taking a hiatus this week. I really want to take a look at two books which slightly deviate from Mythras products, but which have strong ties to Mythras. One is The Weird of Hali; the other is Casting The Runes. The next book review will be next week.

The timing of this blog turned out to be prescient. Perceforest has been listed on DriveThruRPG for the first time, this week. For anyone who's just picked up their copy from DriveThruRPG, and want to know what is between the covers, here's Part 1 for you to start with. We'll be here when you're ready. On that happy note, let's get on with the rest of the book. We left the book with a tantalising glimpse of what was to follow on page 69. Aside from the College of Arms, there is a box text with some new magical Gifts. These are Cantrip, a new way of casting Folk Magic; Forest Pact, a trick which allows the character to be ignored by any creatures of The Forest; and Luiton Servant, which made me marvel at the thought that wizards in this setting can get free designer handbags, at least till I found out what a Luiton was. See below. Then there is the material on the College of Arms, and these are the civilising force which keeps humans from degenerating into barbarism by upholding the ideals of chivalry. The College acts as the Courts Major and Minor. It is a place of learning. And it is also the major force coordinating the attack against The Forest. The Heralds are held to the highest possible standard of propriety. In contrast, the next factions described are sorcerers; Les Lignaiges Sorcieres - the Faee or Fairies, the Mauvaise Lignaige, and the House of Glat. These are often broken into minor groupings, cults mainly, and there are Lignaiges outside of the Twin Kingdoms left for the Gamesmaster to develop ... so you could bring in a Sahajiya, an Order of Hermes mage from House Bjornaer, a Chakravanti, a lost Shek-Pvar travelling betwen P-worlds, or an artificer from the Order of Reason if you wish. Nothing's stopping you bringing in the properties of Harnworld, Ars Magica, Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade, or even After The Vampire Wars. Theism follows, with the various churches of the Seven Gods being given their turn to shine under the spotlights. Each group has its unique rites, restrictions, customs, and of course Gifts. These churches wrap up Chapter Four. Chapter Five covers Rules; all the basic crunchy stuff. The first table covers the rough competency levels of NPCs. It is the Perceforest version of The Most Important Table In Mythras. That is followed immediately by Reputation tules. Reputations are measured as a percentage, and the character has two of them - Gallant, and Knavish. Reputation is gained through deeds which reinforce one quality or another, a process known as Renown rolls, which are somewhat like Experience rolls. Next, Nameless characters are described, along with the special rules which apply to characters whose Reputations are, by definition, unknown. These are heroes hidden behind masks and secret identities, and hello ... Rules follow covering Jousting, Hunting, and Magic, allowing you to run sessions based around jousts at tourneys, the challenge of hunting, and of course the unique rules for magic use in Perceforest - magic point recovery, Divine Intervention, a new Folk Magic spell (Stain), and Wonders, a new kind of Shaping component for sorcery. The Wonders shaping component allows sorcerers to do things with their spells which are above and beyond the rules from the Core Rulebook such as giving Intuition the power to read surface thoughts as well as emotions and motives. The next sections focus on Enchantments, then Magic Items - which use modified Mysticism rules from Mythras. The list of Magic Items brings Chapter Five to a close. Chapter Six opens on The Vill, which contains rules for creating and running settlements for Perceforest. There aren't that many games which have subgames like this incorporated into a core rulebook or core sourcebook. HarnManor for Harnworld is a full sized supplement, but not a core set of rules. In Perceforest, the Vill represents the characters' home base and shelter. This chapter sets up creating and running a vill with rules akin to character generation. The vill is a kind of player character, in its way. It has characteristics like player characters (STR, CON, SIZ, DEX, INT, POW, and CHA). Vills also have Attributes, Features, Passions, Reputations, Advantages, Disadvantages, even Hit Locations. There is also vill-level combat, when two neighbouring vills have at it with one another. After the section on vill-level combat, attention shifts to Forest Spirits, the entitites dwelling within The Forest which cause so much consternation to the human characters. Spirits are listed in order of Intensity, and each Intensity has one Nature Spirit and one pernicious Regional Spirit. Spirits are meant to be engaged in vill-level combat, the whole vill participating in driving out the malign influence from within its bounds. And here endeth the sixth chapter. Chapter Seven, Perilous Stories, is all about the Gamesmaster's role here, which is about setting the scene and telling the stories, while letting the players surprise themselves and each other, and the Gamesmaster. The five main themes of Perceforest are reinforced here - High Chivalry, Wonder, the Menace of The Forest, Colonialism, and Sacred Kingship. Each theme is outlined in greater detail in this chapter, and the whole chapter begins with a page full of adventure hooks. Adventure hooks are listed for each virtue, along with a mini-adventure for each. The terrifying Forest feature Taint (chaos features) is described under the Forest section. There is a box text on mediaeval woodland terminology which is a must-read. Come on, Mark did some research here. Every author puts little bits into their books to show off what they heav learned, and this is among the many little Easter eggs in this book. The adventure included for the Sacred Kingship section ties in with the main story of Perceforest, as it describes events taking place in the mediaeval tome. After the Themes, the book moves on to Creatures. These are period specific and thematic. Plant-based creatures such as Charduns (which spread thistles everywhere), Charlocks (which are created by Briarlords and sent into human settlements like living gas bombs spreading Taint), and Briarlords (manifestations of The Forest, not even remotely humanin appearance) as well as warped fauns from boars to dwarfs and giants, to luiton (it turns out, they aren't designer handbags after all, but a type of spirit. Who knew?) to spikenards, all the way to The Yelp ReviewerYelping Beast, which is a chimerical animal of sundry animal parts, with a neck that glows and entrances those who look at it. Oh, and it sounds like a hundred hounds. And before you know it, you're near the end of the book, in the Appendices. The first Appendix is the TImeline of Perceforest condensing a million words into about 2.15 pages total, sparing you having to spend fifteen years of your life to go through the Cliffs Notes version of the original book. Honestly, you can thank The Design Mechanism later. The final Appendix has character sheets for vills and horses. And then you're at the index, and closing the book. Perceforest is a perfect setting for High Fantasy and Epic Fantasy. It comes into its element with its portrayal of a pseudo-mediaeval setting populated by knights in shining armour, jousting, questing, and days of high adventure, a generation before the time of King Arthur and Merlin. The ancestors of the protagonists of The Once and Future King, La Morte D'Arthur, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, Prince Valiant (and even Robin Hood if you like) live in the pages of the novel Perceforest; and Perceforest brings that setting to life in a packed sourcebook full of memorable encounters, adventures, and storytelling.

And so it's time to crack open Perceforest and take a look at this book which has been sitting on my bookshelf, unopened, gathering dust since 2020. Seriously, this is the first time I have actually opened this book, so this will be charting unknown territory for me. Perceforest The original Perceforest is one of the great fantasy epics, a million-word story over six volumes. Which Hollywood has not yet touched, or reduced to three feature-length movies. Catch up with the Wikipedia entry on the story Perceforest, The Game Book Perceforest is an Aeon Games book - not available from DriveThruRPG. As such, when you buy Perceforest from Aeon Games, you are buying a hardcover book with a free PDF. From this point forward, any reference to Perceforest in italics refers to the game. Perceforest in bold type refers to the 1340 romance. Aeon Games Perceforest is set in "a Land of High Chivalry and Wonder." Penned by Mark Shirley, Perceforest allows Players to create knightly, noble characters from an early feudal age. The setting is "fictional world of high chivalry set against the forces of the primal wild." The themes are High Chivalry, Wonder, Existential Menace, Colonialism, and Sacred Kingship. The Characters are meant to be chivalrous Knights, defending Civilisation - the Twin Kingdoms - against the evil that is The Forest. Civilisation in Perceforest is Early Feudal. A generation before the setting, Bretaigné was in the thrall of the native enchanter-knights, until the two Brother Kings invaded and and either drove them out or exterminated them. The gentle culture now permeating much a Bretaigne society was brought to the land, marked by a massive land clearance which removed The Forest from the face of the land, and confined it to small enclaves of primal wild. Sources include Perceforest: the Prehistory of King Arthur’s Britain by Nigel Bryant (trans.), 2011, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, the only modern English translation of the complete Perceforest corpus; A Perceforest Reader by Nigel Bryant, The Romance of Reynard the Fox, The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, The Dictionary of Medieval Knighthood and Chivalry, The Hunting Book, Boutell’s Heraldry, Uprooted by Naomi Novic, Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, and The Red Knight by Miles Cameron. Chapter Two, The World, features the history of Bretaigné, daily life In Bretaigné, the Kings’ Law, politics, heraldry, The Forest, and mythology. Alexander The Great is namedropped here as Alexaunder - could this make Perceforest the first crossover title? - and it describes the formation of the Twin Kingdoms and the anointing of the Brother Kings to drive back the Mauvaise Lignaige and hem in The Forest. The Kings, Betis and Gadifer, fought many battles, but it was the Battle against Darnant deep in The Forest which earned Betis the title of "Perceforest" due to his having pierced the Forest to slay the most evil of the Mauvaise Lignaige. This chapter describes how civilisation is centered around vills (the progenitor term for "village," "ville," and "villain"), spread out in concentric circles of settlement, with cities and other centres dotting the terrain. The days of the week have names such as Crone's Day, Kings' Day, and so on - something to get used to in this setting - and similarly, the year is divided into seasons. Page 8 has the Agricultural Year as a table. So far, so Ars Magica. The chapter describes the lives of the simplefolk (peasantry) - their foods, clothing, and pastimes. Similarly, the gentlefolk are also described, along with their clothing, foodstuffs, drink, and pastimes - mostly jousting and hunting, by the looks of it. Gentlefolk titles and terms of address are listed, along with the polytheistic religion, the cashless feudal economy, and life stages from birth, reception, and marriage, through to death and funerals. The Law follows. Both Kings have agreed to a single body of law, applying across both the Twin Kingdoms. Read The Court of Arms on page 14. It describes how the gentlefolk are punished by admonishments, abatements (a visible punishment applied to a coat of arms) and debasement for the seven Crown Crimes of "rape, treason, refusing succour, breaking an oath, murder of innocents, brigandage, and swearing a false oath." This is taking chivalry seriously. Characters are expected to give their word and honour it. Incidentally, the table on page 15 gives a possible explanation of where the term "Poindexter" comes from. What follows next is a look at the politics of the Houses Major and Minor - the alliances, petty bickering, outright rivalries and bitter enemies which make up the million factions of gentlefolk in the Twin Kingdoms. So far, so Harnworld. There is a brief, but tantalising introduction to Heraldry. All that "per fesse bendy argent" stuff you might have seen, and wanted to know about. It really barely scratches the surface, but it does allow you to understand what they are on about when describing someone's Emblazon. The Forest is described next. If you haven't read Mythago Wood or its sequels, go and find a copy and read it. This is about how the humans look upon Nature as a wild, bewildering force, which must be beaten back constantly. The Mythology section is Perceforest's mythos, with The Forest standing in for Chaos. Chapter Three, The Twin Kingdoms, is the geography chapter. It begins with The Kingdom of Loegria, comprising Belerion, The Black Island, Borre, Cambenic, Hurtemer, Listinoise, and Norgales; then The Kingdom Of Albanie, comprising Basgorre, Garloth, Hautgorre, Orcanie, Pedrac, Royalville, Sorelois, The Wild Lands, and Coriney; and other places. Locations are listed with a paragraph describing each place (Castle Darnant is literally carved out of a vast oak tree, for instance, with two boughs shaped like a ram's horn). There are some box texts describing adventures taking place at Castle Darnant and within Darnant Forest, and other box texts in this chapter describing adventures taking place at other selected locations. The major characters of Loegria are then listed, including King Perceforest - who has been afflicted with a curse, a backlash bit of revenge from The Forest. Each county or Duchy is listed, with principal towns or locations, followed by key people living there. Important magical locations have a Magical Strength % rating: Darnant's Forest and the Forest of Wonders have ratings as high as 100%. Locations with a Magical Strength contain weird stuff. And these feel like Regio from Ars Magica. Chapter Four brings in the chargen rules. Here, you have rules for cultures, careers, Passions, Reputations, Paths, and the factions available to join. Options include Gentlefolk, Simplefolk, and Talking Animals. The rest is what you expect from chargen: Characteristics, Attributes, Skills, Passions. The various species from Fioracitta - Bestia, Longane, Ophidians, and even Monacielli - would fit in nicely. Just a hint, folks. Oh, another nice piece of terminology. You know the old phrase "Have at ye, varlet!" ... well, you get to find out that it isn't a domesticated animal that hunts rabbits, after all. Those are ferrets. Varlets are scumbags in your own Kingdom, but useful spies when they're lurking on some other person's land. Good to know. Passions are not to be overlooked. Nor are Reputations. You get three Passions. One must be you at your best; one, you at your worst. Talking Beasts get a free Passion, The Call of The Beast. Tied to them, yet separate, are Reputation. You get two: Gallant, and Knavish. You decide which of those two Reputations scores higher. The next part is about naming your characters. There's a table. Have fun with this. It is just crying out to be turned into an Excel spreadsheet to allow random generation of useful passwords. The next bit is Equipment, and this goes into detail about what your characters can expect to wear, carry, and drag around. Paths are next. Your character chooses a Path to follow, such as the Path of Franchise, or the Path of Justice, or the Path of Mercy. Each Path has oaths to swear. Paths more or less replace Cults and Brotherhoods. We're picking up from page 69, the College of Arms, next time.

And once again, I have to take another hiatus. I do apologise for this. I'll be finishing A Look At ... Perceforest next week.

There are two supplements for Monster Island - the Monster Island Companion and the adventure, A Bird In The Hand. Monster Island Companion The biggest feature of this book is the A2-scaled map of The Island. The PDF comes with layers, so you can turn different aspects of the map on or off. The second part is a list of statistics for the non-player characters who feature in Monster Island. And the third section covers the Encounter Tables from the main sourcebook. And that's it. It's a handy book to have for the map, the encounter charts and of course the Non Player Character stats. All the essentials you need to refer to during play, really. A Bird In The Hand A Bird In The Hand (ABITH) is an adventure set on The Island. There is a bonus for players and Gamesmasters towards the end of the book, but we'll come to that in a minute. The premise of the story is simple. The plot revolves around an unusually smart bird. The Adventure begins with the Adventurers being hired to alleviate a merchant of the burden of ownership of a particularly unusual bird. This is a heist story, basically - they have to boost this bird somehow, using misdirection, deceit, breaking & entering, every skill but swordplay, really. There is a cast of Non Player Characters, who will interact with the Playsrs in various ways - from friendship to hostility. There is some digging around, and nobody's ever seen or heard of a bird with the abilities this creature has. The adventure addresses the heist itself. What results turn up if the Adventurers are canny enough to actually ask questions / do the research / conduct surveillance, and so on. A map of the heist venue and surrounding businesses. Local Non Player Characters, and so on. There are stats on page 11 for shops and shopkeepers, followed by lists of stats for various kinds of body armour, and some shopkeepers. There is a section outlining the patterns and routines of the mark, including a cameo by The Chuckle Brothers as night soil collectors ... if you're British, you'll get the reference ... Some of the hazards include drawing down the attention of the guards, nosy neighbours, bad weather, and the local equivalent of organised crime. There's a box text on page 15, listing various things people are doing in the town, ranging from offering tarot readings to selling their bodies, or begging. Real slice of life stuff. Next Phase And then they get the bird, and everything gets turned over. Okay, spoilers here - the bird is really smart, and it tries to get the Adventurers to take it out into the jungle. Assuming they do, they trek through the jungle to a village called An Dai Ai, where a remarkable transformation ensues. This story shifts from being a heist to being an expedition. They must travel to the Oodaki village, possibly being pursued by one or more miscreants from the previous heist story. When they get there, the secret of this smart bird becomes clear. It turns out that The Adventurers are roped into bringing down a corrupting entity. This leads to part 3, Ruin By The Falls, which takes place at the end of Gushing Crack. Legal team, I did not name this geographic feature. Do not ride me. Thank you. The Adventurers have to help the locals to penetrate the ruins, and to fight off Iz's minions and guards, until it can be bound into a crystal geode forever. On this quest, the Adventurers must contend with the dreams of the corrupting being known as Iz, which afflict their sanity - effects which grow worse, the lower they go, until they are faced with a direct confrontation with Iz itself. This whole section feels like a somewhat standard dungeon crawl, to be honest. An inverted Wizard's Tower where, instead of going up, the characters playing Bruce Lee travel down through the levels to play the Game of Death, and yes I just went there. At each turn, they face twisted and corrupted forms of beings, ranging from insects to the warped body of the person who sent them off on their first quest, a bird collector called Coynrad who ends up a physical birdman himself. There's an opportunity to gather treasures, including items which can be of use in the final level ... and then they face Iz on the next level. So confronting Iz is the boss level fight scene of the whole adventure. The Adventurers must confront Iz morally and philosophically as much as physically. I've got some bad news for anyone who hates the Social Conflict rules on page 14 of Mythras Companion ... this part of the adventure requires use of those rules. Don't shoot the messenger. A mighty boss level fight ensues. What happens is ultimately up to the Players, but regardless of whether or not they succeed in helping the Kahuna Mele to bind Iz, the Ruins begin to fall into the sea, forcing the Adventurers to have to flee back up towards the surface. You know, the usual self-destructing villain hideout schtick. Anyhoo, the adventure is then pretty much over at that point. They will have carved a new legend onto the cliff faces of The Island, they will have made lifelong friends and enemies, they will be the talk of the town, and the story might even keep them in hot dinners and a soft bed for a few weeks. After The Adventure The next few pages offer stats for the major Non-Player Characters of this adventure, from Coynrad Lorrnz - the Patron who gets them involved - and Fat Boyd, the first chapter's Big Bad, through to Iz and the Guardian Spirit at the end. Personal note ... I don't like the term used for Fat Boyd's retinue of muscle, "Guys and Gals." That used to be one of the catchphrases used by that loathesome reptile Jimmy Savile in real life. Inspector Ludstrud is a combination of Inspectors Lestrade and Japp, and Lieutenant Columbo with his "One more thing ...". Iz looks like this. Lastly, the adventure lists stats for the monster corrupted bugs which are encountered first, and the Guardian Serpent which is native to this ruin, but has been dominated by Iz. If it can be released from Iz' dominance, it can become a powerful ally in the fight against the extraplanar spirit. Bonus Material The last bit in this book is a section devoted to hexcrawl rules. Players and Gamesmasters can make use of these rules to go exploring the face of The Island, and enjoy the various encounters along the way. Here is where the encounter tables from Monster Island or from the Companion can come into their own. Everything is considered here. Fatigue, supplies, even good and bad luck and the minor annoyances or blessings which might happen along the way. Finally, the book ends with a map of Monster Island. One last, loving look at this land which has been the backdrop for so much adventure. Final Words This is the last blog post to visit Monster Island, at least unless someone produces another adventure for the place. The Island is one of the richest fantasy island settings on the market, only rivalled by Harnworld. All you really need is Mythras, Monster Island, the Companion and the hexcrawl rules from ABITH, and you can be running Mythras adventures just on this island for years. It is true to say that you can never run out of adventures on Monster Island. Thanks for following this long series focusing on Monster Island. Next week it's the turn of Perceforest, and after that I think I'll start looking at the few Mythic Earth books which I currently own.

Right, so we're back on Monster Island this week, and we're going to finish off the book by going through the final chapters, beginning with Magic. The characteristics of magic on The Island are:- Workings take time and great effort. Magic is ritualised, so you can't exactly do a powerful sorcery spell of the wrist. Magic is culturally demarcated - some tribes do one type of magic, and other tribes do another type, and so on; and magical energies replenish very slowly, forcing magicians to use their spells only reluctantly, and never frivolously. Not only is magic also jealously guarded; there are only two Disciplines of magic, namely Animism and Sorcery. Animism is practiced by the lowland Savages, and I'm using the term here as a collective noun rather than as an epithet. The High Folk exclusively practice Sorcery. And Theism is kind of extinct, though temple ruins (bearing ancient blood stains) indicate that it was once practiced fairly vigorously. Until, presumably, the gods they summoned actually showed up. More about that later. Magic is actually risky and time consuming. Page 129 has a table which shows the increased risks of Something Going Bad if a working is rushed. This slows down casting. A sorcerer is unlikely to want to be in the thick of a pitched melee battle, unless they happen to have formidable natural fighting skills and all their exits blocked. There are no modifications to Animism - use the Trance Preparation Table on page 131 of Mythras. The next thing to note about magic on The Island is that Animism and Sorcery are orchestrated. Mass gatherings are common for large scale effects, and for bindings of powerful spirits into their colossal fetishes. Each participant, who must be at least at Follower rank, contributes +1% to the Invocation, Trance, or Binding skills of the kahuna. Nobody knows how to do this for Theism. The colonials of Grimsand certainly have no idea, and it's only the sleeping gods of Kapala who might have a clue. Though, seriously, it's not worth waking them up to ask. See below. Bad Things Happen The Casting Miscarriage Table on page 130 presents a list of the horrible things which could happen if a working of any sort is rushed, botched - or even works perfectly. Sources of Magic The Island has a variety of sources of magical energies. Internal Magic Points recover slowly. Characters can also commit acts of sacrifice to release Magic Points from the spilling of blood - including their own. There is the, er, "self medicating" route which involves consuming psychoactive / poisonous plants Legal Department here. Don't Try This At Home, Kids - Just Say No! and then there is the process of Veneration, which involves sacrificing Devotional Magic Points to ancestral spirits and deities in the form of ancestral tikis. Then, of course, there are the Geomantic Nodes, locations on or in the earth where these magical energies gather and pool. Here is where you are likely to encounter some of those plants mentioned above, as well as dangerous guardian spirits, magically-active plants and mutated beasts, and even a slumbering deity, all depending on the whims of your Gamesmaster. Cultural Aspects Magic is an essential part of Island culture. Members of Savage tribes belong to individual animist cults. Their kahunas venerate (and bind) their deities, conduct politics and diplomacy, and act as judges and priests. Ancestor worship is a deep vein of power among the tribes, and everyone deep down desires to become an Ancestor Spirit to the next generation and generations to come, so culturally they uphold their tribes' values in their behaviour, hoping to become a revered Kahuna and eventually Ancestor Spirit themselves. Spirit Fetishes are as jealously-hoarded as workings. Dowager-Matriarchs hold on to Fetishes, and distribute them only as needed. A character with a Fetish may only have it for as long as required to fulfil the task; then they must return the spirit and Fetish to the Dowager who gave it to them. On The Island, progression in an animist cult involves a trial by ordeal. The candidate Shaman must find their Fetch, and that requires them to gad about The Island learning what they can, until they pass out from starvation. There, they discorporate into the Spirit World and meet Aata, the Ancestor Spirit which introduced animism to the Savages. The candidate must answer three ethical questions relating to the past, present, and future - and then they must face their final foe, which turns out to be ... well, spoilers, but if you ever watched the second Star Wars movie or read Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, you may already have an inkling. There are higher ranks - High Shamans, who overlook their tribes, and the Spirit Lord - of which there can only be one at any one time on The Island. The next section covers the tribes, the beings they venerate and bind, their friendly and neutral spirits, and of course each tribe's secret Gift. The list of tribes begins on page 138. Pay attention to each tribe's totem god. See below. The last bit describes random spirit encounters. And then we move on to the sorcery of the High Folk. Politically, High Folk sorcerers are the dominant caste, hoarding their knowledge. There are over a dozen sorcery schools, each with their individual spell lists, ordeals, rank progressions, Gifts, and so on. The list of colleges begins on page 142. Fancy Names In what could be described as a deep nod to the late Jack Vance, the sorcery spells listed in this chapter have been given pompous, fancy names. "Defy Eidolon" for Spirit Resistance, Obliterate Conjury for Neutralise Magic, and so on. Page 147 covers unique new sorcery spells, as well as listing sorcery spells whose effects have been modified from the original sorcery spells listed in Mythras. Here's where there seems to be an omission. The Cache Might spell is not listed. It's Store Manna by another name, and so I can only presume that its effects are exactly as listed in the Core Rulebook, without changes. There is a Dedicate Might spell, which is a slightly modified version of Enchant - which allows the sorcerer to attach the enchantment to a Geomantic Node to draw upon the enchantment indefinitely. There are new Gifts following the sorcery spell list. These Gifts are immensely powerful - look at the example given by Horde, where a necromancer can raise an unlimited number of corpses within a given radius, effectively setting the Targets factor at infinity. Many of these Gifts require weeks of study to activate them (to claim them) and they include Aggrandize (create a monstrous illusion), Change Reality (turn an illusion into a real thing), Horde (Targets factor set to infinity within the Range of the spell), Dimensional Portal (you can imagine what Project VALHALLA would give to learn this Gift), Lichdom (does what it says on the tin), Matrix (creating another power source for an enchantment other than binding the Magic Points of the caster into the item - oh, and enchanters can learn this Gift multiple times to create different types of magic item, as well as create blueprints for their items), and many others. After the Sorcery Gifts comes the Theism of the Colonists. And here come the humans. Theism has been modified here. Most Theism is propitiation, either through the devotion of Magic Points by the faithful to keep their dark gods hungry, or offering to leave the people alone. The Extension Miracle is unknown. There is no Divine Intervention. There is no pantheon - everyone brings their own gods with them, and when they leave, so too do their gods. There then follows a list of the different deities one may encounter, or believe in. This begins on page 155. Each religion is listed along with a short epithet (e.g. Judge of dooms, bringer of catastrophe), a brief description of the deity, and then sections listing the cult's Organisation, Cult Membership, Superstitions, Taboos, Skills, Miracles, and the benefits of Propitiation. And Then There Are Those Deities Oh yeah. There are some real gods lying about in, or under, The Island. I did mention I'd come to them. You might find Ubbozathla and Tzathogghua familiar if you ever read any Mythos fiction written by Clark Ashton Smith, whose works are frequently referenced within the book on the first pages of each of the chapters. FInally, and wrapping up the Chapter, there is a list of new Theist Miracles, some of which are incredibly potent, such as a Miracle that transforms a person permanently into a glyph on a wall. Seriously, a spell which turns your target into living graffiti. So, then, moving on to Chapter 7, Items and Substances. This is all about the things. Produce, Narcotics, Perfumes, Poisons, Diseases, Weapons, Treasures, and Artefacts. You name it, it's listed here, along with costs for trade, and so on. Poisons, Diseases, Weapons, Treasures, and Artefacts are all given their own sections. Many of the poisons and diseases are horrific. Some are truly obnoxious and horrifying. Kahuna's Bane, for instance, is feared and loathed by the lowland Savages, because it is a drug which blocks access to the Spirit World. Eidolonosis is basically zombie disease - once you are bitten, this is what turns your character into a zombie. Better hope you get infected by Fire Scale first, and spontaneously combust into ashes before that happens. Weapons follow, and this is just a list of the items commonly used by the inhabitants of The Island. Treasures just lists shiny, valuable things, and allows the Gamesmaster to randomly generate desirable trinkets and baubles to be found by Adventurers who stumble across such caches while raiding tombs. There then follows Enchanted Artefacts - Fetishes, Matrices (a lot of Matrices), and a short text box explaining that iron is a cursed metal and rusts easily. I wonder if someone brought along pure iron, forged without carbon, like that imperishable iron pillar in India IRL which has stood untouched by the passage of time for centuries ... Flora and Fauna This is the thing most people come to see when they open Monster Island. Players want to see the stats of the monsters they are there to hunt; and Gamesmasters want to see what they can bedevil the Adventurers with. First is a list of new creature abilities. Next, the creatures themselves, starting with the Shark People (the Adaro) and followed by a host of insanely lethal creatures, including the Alan ... okay, are there creatures called Steve or Henry? ... and including some dinosaurs. Yes, you too can enjoy riding into battle on the back of some tamed dinosaur. Aw hells, there are Aswang here. And bouda, bunyips, wendigo ... yeah, a whole lot of creepy horrors. Giant clams to trap the ankles of unwary divers - there's a trope I haven't seen for years - and horros plants ranging from the carnivorous plant from Little Shop of Horrors - "FEED ME!" to actual triffids. Yes, triffids. Those Smoking Mirrors have been busy. Page 218 is very handy for the Gamesmaster, since it lists a bunch of different kinds of critters one would expect to attack in swarms or shoals, from bats to piranhas. Oh, there's a box text on jellyfish venom on page 219. Can you imagine the looks on the faces of waiters and customers if they catch you reading this book in a cafe? Oh, look. Girl Genius' Slaver Wasps. They're called Jempulex, but these are The Other's slaver wasps all right. This whole chapter is just chock full of all the beasties and dangerous plants which they didn't have space for in the Creatures chapter of Mythras, really. You can use these critters to plague your Adventurers in any setting you like, really. Your Luther Arkwright Agents could stumble across a parallel where dinosaurs still live; or your modern story can turn into an enactment of The Day of The Triffids. This chapter is extensive. This article cannot do it justice - it's a long list and honestly you could spend hours just browsing them. Imagine your Adventurers being tasked with bringing back a live Ankylosaurus, or looking for Yeti in the high mountains. And after that, the Appendices list generic encounters, as well as provide examples of pregenerated Lizardfolk non-player characters for your Adventurers to encounter and interact with. By the way, there are descriptions of Lizardfolk and Ophidians within the previous creatures chapter, on pages 240 and 269. Now turn to page 288 for the stars of the show. The Gods That Walk. The kaiju. This shows you the stats of the kaiju. You can play as a kaiju. You can enjoy looking at the list of these behemoths, and identify their movie counterparts. They saved Gojira for last. Godzilla's right at the end. After this, the index seems anticlimactic. But there it is, and it wraps up the book. Conclusions Practically every Gamesmaster will eventually need to get Monster Island, if only for the lists of creatures and deadly flora, diseases and exotic poisons. There really is something for everyone here - Players and Gamesmasters alike. You could delve into Monster Island for years and never run out of stories, or monsters and hazards to transplant into your own settings and adventures. At the very least, it's an expansion of Mythras Core Rulebook's Magic and Creatures Chapters. At most, it can be the setting for some of the most exciting and bizarre adventures you can find in any fantasy roleplaying game or venue. Next time, this blog wraps up its coverage of Monster Island with a look at the two main supplements - Monster Island Companion, and A Bird In The Hand.

I have to take another hiatus for this week. Catching up with The Spiral Room. Part 3 of my look at Monster Island is going to be next week.

Last week, we began a look at Monster Island. Part 1 covered Chapters 1 through 4, covering the geography and geology of the island, its cultures, its hot nightclub scene, the hotel swimming pools and spas, the tourist spots, the bronze, four-armed, animated, female, Ray Harryhausen statues (you think I'm kidding? Check out page 112) and all the fun athletic activities you can get up to (climbing, running, more running, self-defence classes, Zumba, even more running ...). The Rough Guide to Monster Island does not hold back. Lots of fun for everyone. So now, this part covers the second half of the book, beginning with Campaigns, and specifically how to handle sandbox campaigns. Playing In The Sandbox Monster Island is designed for sandbox play. The chapter highlights elements of sandbox play:- Not Everything Is Meant To Be Killed - The Adventurers can engage in diplomacy, trade, espionage, and so on/ There Is No Game Balance - Not everything on The Island can be beaten, or is meant to be beaten. Your use of Wrack against Gojira will do you about as much good as a barrage of US Army artillery - IOW, it will have no effect on it at all. Take what prizes you can gather and run. Every Action Has A Consequence - It's a small island, not a continent. There is no place on The Island where the Adventurers can hide, if they have committed a crime. Some Places Are Deliberately Left Blank - They are provided for you to create your own myths and legends, your own horrors and monsters. Also, the Players won't know what's there, so you can horrifysurprise them. Yes, I just watched that episode of the new Star Trek series where they had that awful twist ending. Yes, you can put Ursula K LeGuin's City of Omelas here if you likeHi. Legal team here. You can drop this paragraph. Thanks. Provide Options and Objectives - Give the Players goals to achieve, and let them roam around until you decide to place suitable resources in their path to allow them to achieve those objectives. Until then, let them enjoy wandering around in floral print shirts and shorts, taking selfies on cliff edges, collecting souvenirs and hitting the clubs. Genre Aspects of Sword & Sorcery The book lists the elements of what makes the seords & sorcery genre what it is. Living for the Day - No grand schemes here. No long term plans. Your Adventurers are likely to be in it for the loot. In other words, just like every regular character most of them have ever played. No Black and White Morality - This was the first genre to introduce the concept of the flawed antihero. Healing is Hard - This is deliberate, to stop Players from just trying to have their characters scythe through all the opposition with impunity. Corrupting Power of Magic - Magic is viewed through an early Twentieth Century lens. Outsiders view magic as something dark, grim, corrupting and tempting. To be clear, it is the innate malice of its practitioners which drives the darkness and corruption - magic is just their servant, not their master. Horror of the Unknown - The Island just teems with cosmic horrors. Anthropocentric and Xenophobic - This book makes no bones about it: the Adventurers (and a lot of the protagonists) are meant to be drawn from Human stock. The local cultures are not meant to be playable - not without a lot of modification. Having said that, you can try to run Adventurers who are Lizard Folk and/or Ophidians, as beings who have lived apart from their High Folk or Savage families for too long and have found their own way through life. Xenophobia is another term for racism and bigotry, so this is one time when I'm inviting you to ignore the book here, tread lightly, play responsibly, and don't be a griefer. Gamesmasters - you're calling the shots here. The same notation applies to you. If aspects of the game are a bit too early Twentieth Century, too reminiscent of the hideous cultural biases of Lovecraft, Gernsback, Jack Williamson, and Robert E Howard for your liking, and if the term Savage gets your hackles up, too, feel free to go through the book with a sharpie. Remember: Healing Is Hard. Chapter Five continues with Scenario Seeds, little story hooks to get the Adventurers involved. They can range from Search and Rescue missions to mapping parties, jungle clearance, patrols, and Specimen Gathering. That last one is the theme of A Bird In The Hand, an Adventure for Mythras which will be described in a later blog post. Unique Tasks include the hunt for some warlord who's been tormenting the locals. Name begins with T, ends with Zan. Lord Greystokne wants the Adventurers to investigate. There's an adventure called ******************** Legal team here. The title is "Bridge Over The Little Piddle." Stop it. I have to point out that one of the Adventures involves a one-eyed T-Rex. Pete, you've read 2000 AD. That one came right out of Pat Mills' Flesh, by way of Judge Dredd. I see what you've done there. There are other Adventures there. Gamesmasters, check them out. They are fun. And now, pointcrawls and hexcrawls. Pages 119 through 127, the entire rest of this chapter, are devoted to various encounter types, tables, and listings of Special Events. Again, this entire section is just one rich, deep vein of adventures, thrills and fun for all the Adventurers, taking them to and through some of the most dangerous places on their world. That's Chapter Five, with enough material for Gamesmasters to set adventures on Monster Island for years. I still haven't got to the rest of this book, let alone the Companion and the Adventure. You'll have to wait to see the Magic Chapter, then. Tune in next week.

This blog post takes a look at Monster Island (MI). Monster Island Companion (MIC), and A Bird In The Hand (ABITH) will be covered in a separate post. First things first. There is a beautiful, loving dedication on the title page, which sets the tone for this document, and provides the biggest reason for you to buy this much-loved supplement. There are some things you can read, but you can't really point to specific words or phrases. How can you pojnt to a turn of phrase which shows fear, or anger ... or love? In this case, MI is a labour of love, and you can see it in every word. Monster Island is a sandbox setting. You can place the island in any maritime setting in your fantasy world, though it is recommended that the Island should be located in a subtropical or tropical setting. The map is reproduced below. Monster Island is a tribute to every kind of Lost World, Kaiju, or "jungle lord" comic and movie ever made. If you want to run an adventure based on Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, or a fantasy equivalent of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, or Edgar Rice Burroughs' (or William S Burroughs') Tarzan or similar (e..g Sheena, Queen of The Jungle), then this setting is great. If you want kaiju in your setting, this island is the place where you will find them. The Introduction makes useful suggestions. They are pretty inspirational, to be honest - Lemuria, Mu, Nehwon, Skull Island. Lost temples overrun by jungle, atavistic civilisations, non-human cultures, MI can stand in for any of these. Monster Island The main book introduces the Island: its environments, its cultures, and its dangers. MI is a huge bestiary for creatures and plants not found in the Mythras Core Rulebook. Poisons and diseases are also covered, along with expansions to the Core Rulebook's magic systems, and powerful new antagonists to pit your Adventurers against. Contents Monster Island was written by Pete Nash, with additional material supplied by Lawrence Whitaker and John Hutchinson. The art, by Pablo Castilla, Jon Hodgson, Russ Nicholson, and Outland Entertainments' Tim Hibbetts and Giovanni Valletta, is richly evocative. Each chapter of MI describes an aspect of the Island in detail: The Island (Chapter 1) describes its geography and topology, weather, mountains, coastline, jungles, ecology and hazards, from heat stroke and dehydration to diseases and poisons, not to mention the risk of being stomped into a stain. Here's what you'll find in the pages of Monster Island. Chapter 1 is titled The Island. Chapter 2 is titled History and Cultures. Chapter 3 is Settlements. Chapter 4 is about Places of Interest. Chapter 5 focuses on Campaigns. Chapter 6 is the Magic chapter. Chapter 7 looks at Items and Substances. Lastly, Chapter 8 lists Flora and Fauna. Chapter 1 strives to cram in as much geology, biology, and culture into a small island with a tiny volcanic isle just off its southern cape. As monster islands go, it has a little more intensity than Columbia Games' equally famous island of Harn - but Monster Island does have something Harn does not. Kaiju. The island rises over three kilometres between the Southern coast and the rugged Northern peaks. Black volcanic sand predominates, and the fertile volcanic soil is rich in nutrients. As a result, jungles sprawl across most of the island, only terminated by altitude and decreasing temperatures. The terrain types are coastal (black volcanic sand), cliffs, jungles, cloud forests, a plateau, and high mountains.This ia an island of steep ravines, towering peaks, and dense, primal forests and jungles, and stark contrasts between the highlands and lowlands. Chapter 2 highlights and describes the cultures and tribes present on The Island. Magic is integral to life here. Sorcery just ruled this island, and visitors can come from anywhere, stepping through the Smoking Mirrors - interdimensional portals, which VALHALLA would kill for. This is a place where histories have come and gone. By definition, since ruins abound here and ruins are the skeletons of dead empires. Reptilians: Although the default species of High Folk and Savages are Reptilians - Ophidians versus Lizard Folk - you can make the base civilisations Human, or Bestia, or Acephali, or even Monacielli if you like. However, the default beings living on Monster Island are themselves reptile folk. The hierarchy of the tribes of the lower reaches of The Island is ... complicated.There are clear demarcations of tasks. Who is in charge depends on location - whether one is inside the villages, as compared who outside or between the villages. This whole section needs to be studied. Societies on Montser Island are complicated, fluid, and often vicious. Two neighbouring villages might conduct amicable trade with one another one day, and savage warfare the next, seemingly on a whim or a change of wind direction. Chapter 3 moves on to describe the major settlements and notable personalities. Locations such as the Savage capital, Puuiki, and a High Folk citadel called Akakor - all basalt, obsidian, and brass - are described in vivid detail. The Avenue of Delights is a sculpted, landscapred garden in Akakor, where strange plants emit soporific and narcotic scents which induce various weird, druglike effects such as amnesia, euphoria, or synaesthesia. Animism rules in the Savage lowlands, but sorcery rules among the High Folk. And then there is Port Grimsand, the human enclave. It has all of the charm of a typical human fantasy settlement, but the feel is definitely Colonial. They may have much to offer the Adventurers, but they are definitely unwelcome among the lizard folk, who probably keep a wary eye out for the primates' antics. By the way ... Lord Greystone. Yes, it is one letter away from the ER Burroughs character. His son could be all grown up and swinging on vines in the jungle to this day, clad only in a loincloth and bellowing into the woods to summon his animal friends. Chapter 4 moves on to Places of Interest on The Island - locations where adventures take place. The Causeway of The Nightmarchers is a literally haunted road. Warrior ghosts decapitate the unwary and the foolish. The Cliff Face Dancers are immense bas reliefs carved into the Western cliff face in ancient times. Each of these figures is a representative of a Savage tribe, and they move. They are fetishes for gnomes (Earth elementals) and they are venerated by the lizard folk tribes. The Fane of The Black God introduces a little bit of cosmic horror, and another species dwelling on The Island - ghouls. Other locations include The Hanging VIllage, Harojama's Tower (yes, it is an evil wizard's tower), and The Heads of Anak Krakatau, and oh gods they're all Vaal from the Star Trek TOS episode "The Apple." The Obsidian Rift is next, and adventures set in this location involve stories about plundering the riches of the Earth, and how the Earth strikes back. There is a particularly insidious curse attached to the gold mined here. The Petrified Forest is reminiscent of a somewhat grim J G Ballard story, The Crystal World, which posits a world where Nature can catch a disease like humans' Hansen's Disease (leprosy), draining away the life force from a region of The Island and leaving behind a glittering, crystallised, barren, silent forest. Of course, in addition to the back story, there is also a gorgon somewhere in this region. Then there is Screeching Mountain ... and the Iqari, of course. And why not throw in harpies just for fun? No harpies. But they do have ancient battle armour ... apparently designed by Tony Stark. Next is The Sepulchre of Soleks ... and it looks like someone's created the Mythras answer to Tomb of Horrors. Straightforward dungeon delve, avoiding traps and fighting off monsters. There are more locations - Smoking Mirrors, The Temple of Yhounkehd, the Valley of Ivory Doom, and many others. This entire chapter is just chock full of them. This, then, is the first half of Monster Island. It is a whole campaign setting, a land of treachery and brutality, a land of mystery and intrigue, and a place of wonders and horrors. This whole article has focused on the who, what, and where. Next week's part will look at the rest of the sourcebook, beginning with Campaigns - ideas for Gamesmasters on how to use Monster Island.

There's a holdup in tonight's blog. It'll be coming out tomorrow.