Capsule Reviews #10: Kala Mandala Zines

I grabbed the set of Kala Mandala zines after the Hey Centaur shop went online. These are great zines of the old school OSR glory days - easily earning their shelf space beside any of the greats. We get a great setting in the Playbook and two Art Research zines, further expanded by three juicy adventures - all site exploration with a twist for each.

Six books existing in the core set at time of writing:
Kala Mandala Playbook - 42 pages, system
Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya - 26 pages, adventure
Deluge at Drizzle Distillery - 42 pages, adventure
Tragedy at Zaya's Theatre - 26 pages, adventure
Earthly Beings - 38 pages, gazetteer
Heavenly Bodies - 38 pages, gazetteer

Plus the Paper Minis set. As a whole this is the character generation and system in the playbook, three adventures (Het Thamsya, Drizzle Distillery and Zaya's Theatre) and two world-books/gazetteers (Earthly Beings and Heavenly Bodies)

I did have a minor logistics issue in that I ordered the stickers collection and got a second playbook - strictly this has worked in my benefit because the playbook is a touch more expensive than the stickers. From a point of view of trying to get Kala Mandala to table, having a second playbook might end up being more helpful. So I am going to call it a wash, all to the good.

Review: Fly Me To The Moon

tl;dr: old school hex crawl on the dream-like moon, lots to dip into for inspiration.

Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.

Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.

I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.

So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits

Going through this in chunks:

Review: The Monster Overhaul

tl;dr: its great, if you are in any way generating your own games, get it.

If you are in any way generating your own games, don't even bother reading this review. Go get the Monster Overhaul. It is so useful.

I backed the Monster Overhaul quite some time ago but I write this now, very late to the game, because I finally got it to my own tables so have earned the right to speak. Since then I have been staring at it for a while trying to properly express what it is that makes this just great.

This is an operating manual for a school, a style of gaming. There are terse instructions about how this is all supposed to work but this is a practitioners guide, not an instruction manual. You get the fruits of a movement of gamers and bloggers trying to figure out what is the most useful tool they could have and then creating it.

Noted as a practical bestiary, it says it is "designed for at-table utility." In place of a standard bestiary with a page per critter with all its stats, you get concepts to support running that critter. These entries do not have hundreds of words of detailed, repetitive stat blocks but something more of the old school with stat lines of maybe two sentences. The rest of the space is then given to tons of context - everything you need in the run up to ever drawing steel on this monster. Less stat block, less of the fight-focus and more 'how it turns up in the session'. You are given the hints and clues to bring it to the table - "the space for you to think" as it says in the introduction.

This book is great for pulling off the shelf when you are thinking of using any given critter and looking up some ideas about how to spruce that critter up and make it interesting. Absolutely tons of ideas in here, the distilled wisdom of some people who have gamed hard and thought about how to support that gaming for others. The monster entries are more streamlined so you will need that notch extra of understanding to interpret them but once you are past the point of just wanting to use a critter as-written every single time, then this is your advanced text.

The whole thing feels almost fractal - the contents page doubles up as a random table - d20 categories of monsters, roll on that, then roll on the next thing - lower dice for less weird possibilities. Parts interlock, one monster serving as the reference for the treasures of others or for behaviours etc. There is a level of layout and depth of design that I think is simply a quantum leap beyond anything else. I imagine this was also a heartbreaking amount of effort so we should treasure this example that we have.

The book itself is lovely too. You get standard book paper in here with black and white printing and good margins because this is a book to be written on, annotated and used at table. Multiple artists keep things interesting - the different sections get a different artist each. Inside of the covers, we get a whole bunch of random tables for things like generic creature upgrades, where to find useful sidebars, how your reaction rules are going to go, reasons for an encounter, where the encounter happens indoors and outdoors. These are mirrored inside front and back covers to make it useful from cover to cover. A beautiful artefact of a book - chunky, heavy, distinct. I will be loathe to actually scribble on my copy but it is going to end up festooned with page-markers and post-its.

So what have you actually got in here?

Review: Kala Mandala Playbook

tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art.

I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.

Cover art by Munkao

This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.

So what is all this stuff you get in this book?

Review: The Long Road Home

tl;dr: card-draw based storyteller, potential for great pre-campaign party cohesion or post-campaign epilogues.

I cannot recall where/when I first heard of this - probably the kickstarter in 2024 - but when I spotted this in London (the mighty Orc's Nest or maybe The Arcanists Tavern?) I decided I had to go for it. I clawed the time to scuttle over there from the City on a long lunch and have a good rummage - this and Minions were two that particularly caught my eye. It felt like a good 'support your local games creators' opportunity so I did.

What you get is a card-based story telling game that all told reminded me of For The Queen with hints of Microscope, moderated by the card-draw. I slightly misunderstood what I was getting here in the 'what happens when the quest is over?' tagline - that made me think it was wholly focussed on the consequences side of things and not infact the telling the whole tale of the journey/quest.

Nicely laid out with clean, spare art. I ripped through reading this in a single-seating (admittedly on an airplane but still end-to-end in a go).

So what do you get in here?
8 pages covering 'how to operate the book'
22 pages on creating your story including genre and setting creation
20 pages on creating all the things in the setting - locations to threats and PCs
20 pages on running the scenes of the game including worked examples
14 pages of support material - references, character and story sheets and inspirational maps

Expanding on all that; what you have in here is the neat idea a campaign in retrospect. You start off with deciding genre and creating things to be encountered along the six-act journey. These can be locations, treasures and threats, and maybe you have some supporting characters that come with you.

There are lots of scene setting tables that you use to set up the locations and hazard, treasures and threats, NPC and atmosphere. These are great quick campaign generation tools and would be useful for lots of games or in a DM's toolkit in general. Each set of tables is split out by the different campaign flavours (grim, heroic, kids, horror) - though I imagine one could substitute in some other sparklist (such as from Worlds Without Number) to get sci-fi, western, etc.

To actually run the tale players get dealt a card per chapter plus three and then assign a card per chapter as they play. Each card suit dictates the tone of the players contribution which they start with "do you remember when..." and then tell a physically or emotionally enriching or disturbing/detrimental happening for that place. The overall tone for the chapter is determined by the majority suit played.

It is a more prescriptive, structured game to focus story-telling and shape the action into the set forms of the chapters. There is advice to chop out the second and fifth chapters for a short session, or loop through additional third-to-fifth chapters to extend the session.

What is in here is a cool potential game played within ~ 2-3 hour slot with a nice balance of rules & freeform to bridge out of classic TTRPGs and intro people to storygame type things. It follows a six act structure that could be customised or free form as well.

It could also be great for a shared backstory generator ~ session 0.5. Run a session of The Long Road Home and you've got a party with a true shared history to start a big campaign with.

You could also adapt it to be a post-finale tool for a standard campaign by doing a sweep up of campaign major events and running multiple "homecoming" scenes to see how things play out in the end.

Review: Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs

tl;dr: a good general primer on the details of medieval society; helps a DM better portray the ordinary folk of a game world.

"Fief - A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs" is one of those deep-cut recommendations you only get way down the message boards or after scrolling past lots of the same-old recommendations. Presented as 'ancient lore' propagated by hand in the early days - I did have a giggle when I realised that meant the mid 90s. Sure, ancient now but still contemporaneous with myself. Happily these days you can get it POD off Lulu and with the usual massive discount for Black Friday I grabbed it.

This is not specifically a game supplement per se but the author, Lisa J. Steele, has pulled all this together to make a hundred page primer that touches on all the topics that typically come up at the game table. What Fief talks to is the baseline - a quick run through of things as they were that a given DM or player can ground in before weaving through the fantastic. This is essentially a pure fluff book, but useful fluff that is probably going to be handy at any medieval or near-medieval table.

This feels like an old d20 supplement, oddly - which perhaps is an artefact of when the files got cleaned up into the format they are in now. On the one hand, it could be argued that all of the content within is accessible on the web now, with some googling and time you could run down the primary sources in contrast to when this was first published. On the other hand, this is that running around already done and compiled for you. I do not think this is going to be cited in anyones historical thesis but as a mid-weight reference for those who would like their portrayal of medieval times to have more heft at their game tables, this is a very good start.

Blogwagon: Xaosseed's Rule of Three

Sam Seer asks of us "Talk about three games that are important to you" and far be it from me to refuse the call.

Dungeons & Dragons - godzilla in my gaming lexicon. I was a trad AD&D DM, then leaned hard into Planescape then after hiatus came back as a follower of the OSR, even if most often the players were looking to run 5e characters. I got the 'run a good session' down way back on the first time around, but more recently I've gotten a grip on what it takes to get a campaign to run and how to run open tables.

I've gotten decades of good gaming, it broke me into new circles of friends in three different cities.

I bought in heavily two three editions so far - AD&D/Planescape, 3.5e and 5e. Alongside that I have ramped sideways to OSR content - zines like A Thousand Thousand Islands, Through Ultans Door and NOD Magazine, books like Stygian Library, Veins of the Earth and Petty Gods and the endless font of creativity that is the OSR blogosphere. Ultimately this is me very belatedly buying into my old Black Box I guess? That was a whole other realm of 'important' to my own personal gaming journey but all under "getting more out of D&D".

World of Darkness - one I have largely put down but I was once a big WoD player and fan. One of the earliest campaigns I played in was a crossover Werewolf/Vampire/Mage game which we got tons of fun out of. I understood very little of the implications of the setting at that point, ridiculous things were done but it was a blast. In college I played a Sabbat 1920s game that was a rollercoaster of chaos; tons more fun. There was also a Kindred of the East game where we got TPK'ed which was great just for the beautiful instance of a bunch of gwáilóu running into the unknown hard and getting shredded. There were some other legendary WoD games happening among the folk I played with, it was *the thing* at the time.

The huge setting lore, advancing with each new splat book was novel at the time and multiple long-haul train journeys was spent with a fellow gamer discussing The Implications as they landed. The singular, strongly rendered setting was energising, at the time it was *the* hotness. This is one I have almost completely left behind without much interest in going back to - very much a time and a place. I could only see a return for a 'long-haul' multi-century campaign or a brief stop in as a red-team player (essentially a systemless role). It was great then, chucking double-fistfuls of attack and soak dice on the table, but it does not call me back.

The League - bottled lightning - the kids these days would call it a forum LARP - it had an Over/Under-esque impact on our games group, with significant consipring, discussions, fiction writing, scheming and conspiracy theorising. I am so glad Over/Under was the huge obvious success it was because now there is a highly visible example that I can point to and go 'that, it was like that, but for us, back then'. The world that unfolded drove months of gameplay, fiction writing, and forum discussions.

The world it ignited in my mind has stuck there for decades, if I could ever pull off one such similar game to give others the same experience, I would consider my gaming career well spent.

Turning to the bonus questions from Sam Seer:

* What was your process for making your three choices?

Games that got me where I am today; I've held myself to games that I put significant time in at table; other that existed more conceptually or solo, see below. Those that made the grade were the games were I put in the hundreds of hours during my gaming apprenticeship that shaped how I game.

* Looking back over your three picks, do you see a connection between them?

As above - what I put the most hours on across formative years. The common factor with D&D and WoD is the relative main-stream-ness of them; different mechanics but we ran them in similar styles with different settings. The DM had an adventure in mind, the truth was revealed through players being clever or making good rolls with character abilities, combat was typical. I developed a preference for high-trust gaming, or playing with others who also ran games because they too know the struggle and are less likely to deliberately derail your game.

* Did you have any honorable mentions?

Lots here; things that mostly served as fodder for the types of D&D I like to run today.

Spelljammer - this was the setting that actually had me staring at the tiny pictures in the brochure - the pirates fighting on open decks beneath the stars - going 'how do I get this to table' though it was not until post-pandemic that I was actually able to run a Spelljammer campaign and then in 5e.

Fall from Heaven II - a fantasy mod for 4X game Civilization IV; actually built to bring the creators D&D campaign into being as a playable mod. I put many, many hours on this over most of my fallow TTRPG period including times where I was working and living very remotely indeed. The emergent narratives that sprang from unlikely remixes of the basic fantasy archetypes, terrains, religions and who ended up next too who were fascinating. A masterclass in geography driving destiny.

Magic: The Gathering - for the windows on worlds, particularly Mirage, that were incredibly inspiring. The first few decades of Magic were masterclasses in show-don't-tell worldbuilding; with card art and maybe a sentence or two of flavour text conveying a whole world. If they had dropped a 'Spelljammer: Skyship Weatherlight' module I would have been all over it - it was the 'Voyages of the Princess Ark' for the late 90s generation.

Heroquest - foundational dungeon crawler - treasures, lethal combat, claustrophobic tangles of spaces, the running against the clock of monsters closing in on you, great stuff. Also provided a hook out to Games Workshop which was the slippery slope to White Dwarf magazine, thence to Dragon and onwards to Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Rogue Trader ('87) - the classic 'important game I rarely played' - with the meaty book of skirmish combat wargaming - but it had a bestiary, equipment lists, fat wedges of lore, amazing art - this was a hugely inspiring sci-fi universe to encounter. I deflected away towards Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine (6mm) for yet more windows on the setting but when Dark Heresy finally dropped I snapped it up. After a few years slogging around in the OSR I finally came to the realisation that Rogue Trader could function fairly well as an RPG system - high lethality, sure but so are many others.

Review: Green Corridor

tl;dr: an eco-restoration-themed map-crawler pamphlet game with some interesting resouce balancing mechanics.

I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.

GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.

A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?

Review: Chapter Serf

tl;dr: delightful game to play the lowliest of servants of the grimdarks mightiest warriors.

This dropped on tumblr and I snatched it up, both expecting great things but also in fear that the scouring eye of Games Workshop might not be far behind.

This is a system light game of being one of the myriad servants who toil in the background, that the Space Marines might fight for the Emperor. After all, someone must ensure all the candles we see in every piece of art stay lit.

Zedeck wrote their thoughts in a neat blog on the genesis of the game, well worth the read. The game itself is 75 landscape pages, bright text on dark background, very much in keeping with what we have seen for in-universe technical read-outs.

Opening cinematic of the Space Marine game by Relic Entertainment

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
4 pages of lead in - where, who, why - in general
5 pages of 'system' - split around the roles
31 pages making a d66 table of roles
14 pages of major NPCs
37 pages of setting - the Warmask of Gloriana
2 pages of thanks and 'why play this'

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Review: A Home Reforged

tl:dr; a game of dwarves delving the dark to restablish outposts; tight old-school style with some nice mechanical twists.

Where did this come from? Zinequest 2024. I had it on my shelf but recently managed to get bits to table thus a review.

Art by Michail Papanchuk

Nice little book, focuses on a theme and while first impression might be 'oh, dwarves, have we not done this' - this is actually a neat compilation of all the things you would need for a dwarven delving campaign that are often scattered across lots of books and need legwork from the DM. Here we have everything you need in a single package.

The book itself is a fat zine or a small book - 92 pages - with about ~ 1/4 of the book made up of 'ready made scenarios' that make this ready to go out of the box. I am more of a fan of the 'adventure that showcases the system' as time goes on and these are good examples of that.

Review: Beyond Dread Portals

tl:dr; self-contained RPG of world-hopping fantasy, old-school system, great, concise setting.

My 'support your local gaming houses' campaign - this is from d101 games in the UK; I saw this pop up as a kickstarter, pitching a "tabletop roleplaying game of multidimensional world-travelling fantasy" which speaks to my plane-hopping interests and the pitch also noted that the "easy-to-learn rules are built from a core loosely based on the world's first fantasy roleplaying game, tailored to fit the setting" so I was interested in something that was setting-forward, with less focus on classes and sub-classes, more on the portal-hopping.

Cover art by Jon Hodgson

First impression was of a nice self contained book, fatter than I was expecting at ~320 A5 pages and with a nice ribbon. Within we have clean lay-out, no columns, black-and-white art by Dan Barker, Jeshields and Paul Tomes. The vibe is very much a cleaned-up old-school book, self-contained with everything needed in here.


So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Review: Hyena Child

tl:dr; a city sandbox with a grounded feel, packed full of hooks, sites and factions to sustain a good chunk of play.

I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.

Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.

So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Review: Hello // Goodbye

tl:dr; an arty zine with a range of articles, likely something inspirational for any gamer.

The founder of the local DM Supergroup, also founder of Swan and Raven Studio, a pal, set this up as a fund-raiser for legal aid in Virginia. Folk getting snatched off the streets and disappeared is some bullshit. I have been detained by unaccountable national security forces on a fair few occasions so I am perfectly happy to support someone who shines a light and fishes for people who get vanished in the hope that noone cares enough to see due process done.

The zine itself - Hello/Goodbye is 'An Ekphrastic Collage Tabletop Roleplaying Anthology Zine' - and to answer the immediate question I have gotten by folk I have shown it to - "Ekphrasis is a Greek term meaning "description", and ekphrastic writing is a vivid, creative, written description and response to a work of visual art" to quote the introduction.

This zine is an interesting beast because it has a different 'recruiting angle' that what I typically see out there - the closest I guess would be an itch.io charity jam aligned to disaster relief or the like where you get a grab bag of absolutely all sorts. Typically when things get bound within covers there is a tighter systems restriction - all old school D&D or Mork Borg or Troika! or what have you. The common thread here are the art pieces provided by the organiser and that personal connection - which gives a much broader range of contributions within than you might otherwise typically find.

descriptor, artist

First impression - hot pink and yellow makes it stand out on your shelf! The art within is mostly collage work by the author and as per the concept of the zine, the various articles are responses to or inspired by those pieces.

So what is all this stuff you get in this zine?

Capsule Reviews #8: Recent Old School Adventures

Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classic and thought I would run them against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - I also had Waking of Willoughby Hall on my shelves so threw that in too.

The three adventures run through so far are:
Waking of Willoughby Hall (for Knave)
Winters Daughter (for OSE)
The Hole in the Oak (for OSE)

Overall, all of these were pretty easy to use at table and supported a good session.

So what do you actually get in these?

Review: Scarlet Heroes

tl:dr; a cool system for running old school modules with not many players, with useful mechanics worth stealing for any game of yours.

I was vaguely aware of Scarlet Heroes for a bit but got a chance to play it when an old comrade decided to give some classic dungeons a go in a schedule-friendly format. The key concept beyind Scarlet Heroes is to provide an engine that allows solo-play or duet-play (GM+1) for old school modules which might have been written with a significant party of PCs plus hirelings in mind. "Sword and Sorcery Adventures for the Lone Hero" as it says on the front.

I grabbed my copy to play in that campaign, mainly for better character generation insight and to get a better grip on the rules than the quickstart provided and was pleasantly surprised by the 'creating adventures' chapter - another Kevin Crawford masterwork of tags and tables to aid DMs. Lots of the different components of this book have proved unexpectedly useful to me - for a game I sort of stumbled upon it has been one I have referred back to and pulled up for use far more often than I expected. A sleeper hit that keeps on giving.

First impression - arresting cover art; the kind of piece that speaks to the book having a vision that is both clear and distinct. Not your mushy generic fantasy, but something unusual like Tekumel or Earthdawn. It is unusual for a setting designed to host old school modules to be strongly east-asian flavoured since most of those old adventures were generic fantasy western europe but it works.

Review: Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck

I was given this over the holiday season by family - a nice gift in the sense of it was never something I was going to buy myself but has found its place at table.

As per the front of the box "150 cards for sparking in-game conversation" in a chunky box, with an X-card and a pamphlet with guidance.

The instructions are maybe ~A5 equivalent on a fold out card; the back is title, legalese and a bit about the author so all the actual guidance is 1//3 'how to play' and 2/3 describing the categories of cards and the process flow.

The cards themselves are in six categories - Past, Present, Companions, Dreams, World and Hypotheticals - each a 25 card block. You are supposed to check in with the table about which categories to include then shuffle them all up and draw randomly.

The strict pattern from the guidance is to draw two, one to answer yourself and one to ask another person at the table. We ended up having everyone present draw a card and lay them face up in the centre then going around the table with everyone picking which of the face-up topics they wanted to answer.

At 150 cards the deck is huge, you wil be cycling through it for a long time before it gets to feel repetitive.

I tried it out with my hexcrawl campaign and it has gone down surprisingly well - people were fine to give it a first shot and then were happy to come back again in later sessions which was the real test to me.

It works well with this campaign that has journeys and a travel focus to it - other campaigns I have run have tended towards travel being less of a focus and 'downtime' feel like a waste of time rather than something to devote time to. Whether or not this deck fits with your table is going to depend on which of those is true for you.

It is a nice tool for what it does, particularly for 'warming up' new groups who might not know each other so well. For very old and established groups I could see it either being helpful to jog folk out of their rut or being an impediment by forcing a direction of conversation when the group/campaign organically discusses things anyway. Again; judge where your table is at - if they already make their own campfire or tavern conversation, wedging this in may not be for your table.

So I see this being useful for campaigns which are not time-pressure - I would be wary of using this when you were trying to get an adventurers league one-shot game done or when you have a table that already plots, plans and RPs given time to do it. For everyone else, which I think will be many tables, if you are looking to encourage more

It is a bit heavy; I definitely notice it thrown in on top of my slimmed down gaming bag - but the table seems to like it so it continues to earn its space.

Review: Star Trek Adventures: The Klingon Empire

tl:dr; all you need for evocative, self-contained Klingon adventures using the 2d20 system

I have long, long thought to myself what a fantastic show it would be to track the crew of a Klingon ship taking on the kinds of problems that crop up in the Star Trek universe - I was not aware that this book had been created when I saw it on a shelf in my FLGS so I grabbed it up gleefully.

descriptor, artist

The 2d20 system was one I had heard of - seen that it had Conan, Star Trek, John Carter and a few other well known settings released - but I had not read into it or figured it out. Another member of my local game group raves about 2d20 Star Trek so I figued there was something to it. The 2d20 system takes a little getting used to with its to-and-fro trading of the threat/momentum meta-currency but it is a good vehicle for facilitating games that strongly resemble Star Trek episodes.

Setting wise, this was a slam dunk, I'm a 'Next Generation' kid, Picard is my captain, and we got some great Klingon episodes from that and DS9 - I knew enough going in that I was coming to this with 'tell me how to run the setting' not looking for much on the setting itself.

First impression of the look and feel, it is a chunky book, good cover, nice colour-scheme through-out, two ribbons which makes it feel really ritzy. Inside front cover is a Klingon language map of the Empire, inside the back cover is a map with readable names and a zoom out to include the Romulans and Federation. Reading through it a bit more and it is pretty good - I have some quibbles with how things are ogranised, I had some confused flipping about trying to figure some stuff out, but pretty darn good for all the stuff packed in here.

I managed to even get this to table as part of my 'forever DM support group' and it was a good time even with it being my first time running the system and the first time many of them were encountering the setting and system.

Review: Roguelike Megadungeon

tl:dr; a neat dungeon creation toolbox driven by a fun buckets-of-dice-drop method

I got an early access copy of this grace of the author and I liked what I saw. At time of writing it is now live for itchfunding during Zine Month '25.

Art by Roque Romero

This is a really neat toolkit for creating dungeons rapidly - I have always been a fan of dice drop methods but giving that and an alternative? *chefs kiss* I had no idea what to expect cracking the pdf but then as I scrolled through each section it was 'oh, thats a good idea', 'oh I like that' and each new section was a further 'ah-ha!' As soon as I finished my quick skim, I was keen to carve out time, chew through it and give the methods within it a shot.

Review: Tome of Adventure Design

tl:dr; a creativity boosting tool for the long-haul DM.

Tome of Adventure Design arrived over the Christmas, something that had been on my radar for quite a bit. I had been keeping an eye out for it on this side of the Atlantic in vain so finally it needed to be ordered in. Minor ding in the cover but it got here.

What we get is about 500 pages, a tome as advertised of all sorts of inspirational ideas for setting up adventures. This is very much a DM's tool for long haul DM's.

It hast a nice clean style double column throughout any of the text bits and the rest, the vast majority of the book, is tables. Sometimes these are single column where the prompts expand a little, sometimes they are up to four plus the index columns on the page for where it's just single words.

Review: Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel

tl;dr: some pretty good adventures, standard 5e structures better for a tour-the-world than plane-hopping.

I got to put a handful of these adventures to the test so I feel fit to review this one now. Originally picked up with some keeness in anticipation of a planar adventure anthology - something that was going to deliver adventures in places that felt different. The premise was we get a bunch of adventures that happen in different cultures. In-world these are different realms that are connected to the central Radiant Citadel but the adventures and their settings could be accessed in other ways.

I like that this anthology gave us some interesting new options - both places and stand alone adventures that can be dropped into a planehopping campaign. I like the potential in the book for these adventures to break up other adventure arcs or to offer settings to arrive in that feel a bit different. General reception from among the games group I play at has been positive enough; it does not have the gold star reputation of Candlekeep but there are good adventures in here.

We get good variety of different places that could be encountered in one book - the next nearest alternative that I can think of would be to scour a whole bunch of different settings and pull an adventure out for them. If your players are embarking on an old school Sliders-style world-a-week campaign then this is a great resource to meet that 'what is different about this place' demand without killing yourself assimilating setting books.

I grabbed it when it came out because I was really pepped for cool, transplanar travel to places that are genuinely different and a breath of fresh air. I liked the pitch WotC gave of "we've tapped a bunch of people who are coming from different cultural backgrounds, to give you something different" - I thought, cool something unusual, I'm here for that.