As is thankfully usually the case with these things a dark lord, in this case The Nameless Emperor, has been defeated, dethroned and cast down by a ragtag coalition of the fair and free just as he was poised to achieve dominion over all. High fives all round, quick chuck his body on a pyre, light some fireworks and let’s get the party started.

Of course, victories are rarely ever as neat as that and more often than not come loaded with as many consequences as defeat. The scars of war on both people and land run deep and the process of rebuilding can be a long and painful one. All of which explains why many stories, and indeed games, gloss over it.

The Scouring of the Shire, the penultimate chapter of the The Lord of the Rings, is perhaps the most famous, fantasy example of ‘what happens next’, and was duly excised from Peter Jackson’s films, branded something of an anti-climax after all that business with volcanos, pitched battles and Aragorn going full Leeroy Jenkins on the massed ranks of Sauron's minions.

Still, the Scouring of the Shire is effectively where Paul Mitchener starts us off in his new RPG, Out of the Ashes. The great war has been waged and won and now the peace, an ever so fragile peace, must be too as the survivors rebuild their communities, fight both for resources and against the remnants of The Nameless Emperor’s forces and maybe begin the process of healing the land of his taint and corruption.

Importantly that idea of community and rebuilding isn’t just a nice bit of stage scenery but central to the game’s play. When you start the game and create your characters -all flavours of human by the way- you also need to create your home as a collective endeavour, establishing its history and present circumstances, its people and culture and importantly some of its existing relationships with other communities.

Protecting your community from threats then drives the game, whether that’s actually manning the ramparts to defend it from marauding forces or providing the players with the motivation to head out into the dangerous hinterlands, whether to forge new alliances or go looking for magical trinkets, to make your community stronger. It’s a solid hook for a game, one that naturally generates interesting developments and storylines over the course of play, whilst also keeping the game focused and taking some degree of pressure off the GM in any long running campaign. 

Mechanically the system is an evolution of the one Mitchener devised for his urban-fantasy RPG Liminal, and is definitely on the lighter end of the rules spectrum. When something needs to be done and the outcome is in doubt you’ll generally find yourself rolling 2d10 adding a relevant skill stat and hoping to hit a target of 15. Combat has a few extra moves thrown in and there’s a relatively low-level magic system -which whilst you can be a ‘wizard’ of sorts, everyone can engage with in some way- but this is certainly the kind of game you can easily pick up during your first session of play.

Whilst there’s nothing revolutionary about either setting or system here, Out of the Ashes unashamedly ransacks the rubble of classic fantasy, myths and legends for its building blocks, there is still a lot to enjoy. Its vaguely Northern Europe meets Celtic fantasy setting is one that we’ve all seen a lot of before, but Mitchener has put a fair bit of legwork into giving it some depth and by putting the concept of community rather than personal heroics central to the game given it a subtly different, and interesting, flavour to many of the other fantasy RPGs that it otherwise shares so much with.

Writing: Paul Mitchener
Art: John Hodgson
Published by Modiphius

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)

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