This was a Zinequest 2023 "A DnD supplement to fill your games with romance and romantic intrigue" by Evil Pigeon Games out of Nottingham, UK. At its core this is a supplement to give you more in the toolbox than 'roll Charisma to seduce the NPC'. No doubt some will roll their eyes and say 'play something other than D&D, I beg you' which is fair, but as the old story goes answering a question with "I wouldn't start from here" is not helpful. This is for when you have a campaign already spun up or you're running a published adventure that you don't want to convert to some other system but you still need some sort of framework for NPC relationships.
Best viewed as a relationships bolt-on for games that don't go deeply into that plus some mechanics and a whole bunch of pre-made NPCs to drop in and use. We have shelves of books of combat opponents and a fair selection of shop-keepers and other NPCs to populate the world with - it is useful to see a broad selection of NPCs worked through specifically with links, hooks and persistence in a campaign in mind - you may not use them exactly but seeing it all worked through it useful if you want to add it to a game that is not already set up for such things.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
2 pages on contents and intro
A page on Player Safety
3 pages on Styles of Relationship
3 pages on a Relationship Systems
2 pages of advice on Running Relationships
96 pages of The Partners - 16 in all
3 pages on managing PC travel in On the Road
3 pages on Creating Romances from scratch
A page on running Business Relationships
2 pages of potential Happy Endings
A page of Magic Items
2 pages outlining the Cult of Cupid
A page of Festivals of Fascination
A page of Locations of Love
A page on how to deploy relationship-blocking Spanners
3 pages of Spells and Backgrounds
6 pages of Monsters
Wrapping with 6 pages of backers, thanks and the OGL.
Running through this I think it makes more sense as four chunks; the meta, the mechanics, the personalities and places and gear.
We have the meta-game stuff - contents, intro and Player Safety which is worth revisiting to figure out exactly where folk want to fade to black and the likes.
The core to the zine are the Mechanics - the sections on Styles of Relationship, Relationship Systems, Running Relationships, On the Road, Business Relationships, Happy Endings and Spanners. This are split out throughout the zine but the core of it being Relationship Score which runs 1-20, blocked out in chunks of 4 to give the Relationship Statuses of Passing Interest, Intriguing Flirtations, Love Affair, Burning Adoration, Epic Romance. Ascending this statuses is done with your pick of three approaches - level, milestone or narrative systems - which are in order of mechanical crunch.
Level system works off a that can be increased based on successful checks, modified by various things, with the existing score as part of the DC so things get harder to improve as a relationship builds. Milestone system is coarser grained, improving or disimproving in broader stages based on what activities you do. Narrative system is included to say you can just go completely freeform and adjust based on roleplay at the table.
Wrapped around this in sections like On The Road, Spanners and Happy Endings we have advice on running all this, common pitfalls, variant approaches and what to do if it all works out.
Driving the mechanical engine are the Personalities. We get 16 in the zine - 70% of the page count - and a guide to Creating Romances from scratch. The flow given for creating your own goes 'basic concept', 'notable details', 'motivations', 'blend and expand previous bits', 'detail how they relate to people', 'in-game benefits and blockers'.
Each of the NPCs detailed have a portrait titled with their archetype, some background, their traits and personality along with roleplaying tips, related NPCs and plot hooks, their relationship status table, guidance on making them appear again, perks of everything going well, how to impress them and finally what could hinder the relationship.
For setting ideas we get the Cult of Cupid, Festivals of Fascination and Locations of Love - a faction and some places and occasions that fore-ground social interactions and relationships. These are good ideas, I think given the broad breadth of potential campaign worlds this might have been a more universal wrench by clipping it to a single example and getting down the authors experience of what makes a good location, occasion, etc. for this type of thing but this is my preference, hardly a flaw.
Lastly we have some crunch in six Monsters, four Magic Items, four Backgrounds, two Spells, all in the theme of relationships, social encounters and playing on the links between people. Some nice things in here and good to have as they feel a bit more faery story than most combat-only oriented stuff and threats.
To wrap up - this was a pretty easy read and fills in a gap left by the fact D&D is not originally designed to do this. Hireling morale or reaction roles are not really meeting the need if you are doing complex relationships and if you are juggling a bunch of things with relationships just getting revisited alongside main activities, this framework helps with that. While I might have some quibbles about what got put where in the book for easy pick-up of how it all works, those are just minor stuff. Like working up an encounter table, using this is a little prep between games but once you've got it done, it just works.
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