Squatter's Rites

Hello there and happy Friday, I hope your week has involved considerably less time spent in a dentist's chair than mine has. Anyway, the weekend is here at last and at least in our case that will see the arrival of a beagle who's staying with us for a couple of days.

Right, straight down to business this week with a couple of crowdfunding campaigns we think you should definitely check out and it's getting late so we'll save what we've been up to here till next week when I guess around half of you will be recovering from a turkey overdose and more amenable to that nonsense.

In the meantime enjoy your weekend and I hope you get some games in, the new edition of the ALIEN RPG just arrived so we're going to crack the spine on that this weekend and put it through its paces, I'm especially intrigued to see how it now works with the addition of miniatures, I suspect it will probably end up making me visit eBay in search of copies of Space Hulk.

Anyway, till next week...

John x

Run From The Dark

Well known in this parish for his skirmish wargame hacks of MÖRK BORG such as Forbidden Psalm, Will RD is now crowdfunding his first role playing game, Run From the Dark. Billed as a folk horror game, and drawing upon the myths and legends of Wales, Run From The Dark is a rules light RPG set in some unspecified future period where the world has fallen into ruin and only isolated settlements provide a bulwark against The Dark, a malevolent force that blankets the land during the sunless winter months, killing or corrupting all who feel its tenebrael touch (for those who've played it think Forbidden Lands before the Blood Mist lifted).

In the game players take on the role of Walkers, those brave or foolish enough to travel the wilderness between the few communities that still exist and keep the flames, or at least embers, of civilisation glowing. Your walker may be a human or something altogether stranger and touched by the fae in some way such as a changeling or coblyn and there's eight classes to pick from such as hedge witch, scholar or light bearer, all of which determines your special abilities and starting equipment, the most important of which will be the lamp or light source you carry to ward off the dark.

Armed with that trusty light source your walkers will find themselves employed to deliver messages, rescue those who have gone missing or be called upon to settle disputes and maintain the fragile peace that exists within the settlements. Pitted against them is not just the dark itself but those creatures or men who have either been corrupted by it or are just so disgustingly horrible to start with that they can survive, and indeed thrive, in this tainted land.

Culled from Welsh folklore the bestiary includes a roll call of horrors such as Blaidd Diolwg (sightless wolves), the parasitic demon Cythraul Cynrhon or the Dynion Gwag, gigantic 'hollow men' who stalk the forests in search of prey. It's all rather horribly atmospheric and we must say good fun. Alongside these monstrosities the book also contains over a dozen towns to explore, several factions to work with and against and three sample adventures to help you explore the game's mechanics and world and wrap your head around it all.

Speaking of mechanics, it's all very much in the post-OSR mould. Walkers are generally speaking fairly fragile things who have six stats, with starting values between 1 and 5, and a selection of skills in which they're ranked untrained to expert in providing a modifier of -1 to +4 on any test. When they are required to roll the DM (Watcher) will set a Difficulty Rating that they'll need to overcome with a D20+relevant stats+relevant skill, in combat all rolls are player facing and so on and so forth. There's certainly nothing here that should spook anyone who's played games like MORK BORG, Into The Odd etc etc.

It's also worth us pointing out that remarkably for a Kickstarter in 2025 Will not only bothered to contact us himself about the campaign but also sent over a finished copy of the book. Yes, bar the stretch goals the game is ready and waiting so this isn't a campaign where you'll need to hopefully check back in every year or two to see what's happening but rather sit back and wait for its delivery early next spring. Whilst we've only so far had a chance to read through the book, roll up a few characters and simulate an encounter or two there's definitely enough here to ensure we'll dig deeper into this game over the coming weeks.

Find Run From The Dark on Kickstarter now until November 25

Röknauts

Those of you who have read our latest issue should already be well aware of Ontos Games' Röknauts range of ridiculously flavoursome old school space dwarfs. Perfectly capturing the feel of those squats of yore, their ranks have been slowly expanding over the past couple of years with those essential viking biker squads recently added to the stout infantry.

Well the good news for those wanting more is that reinforcements have arrived in the perfectly rotund form of Hurtzr Wârnug and his Exö-Squad, all decked out in the chunkiest of armours designed to withstand the "lethal vacuum of space, solar radiation fields and the psycho-voids of the Krowntaker System." Still no sign of a Land Train but we can live in hope...

Find the new Röknauts now over on GameFound until November 28

Previously in The Gazetteer...

Designers & Dragons: Origins - Shannon Appelcline's new 4 volume work digs into the stories behind every Dungeons & Dragons product TSR released from Chainmail right the way through to 1995 - on Backerkit until November 21

Loin du Feu - A gorgeous looking FATE based RPG set in a fairy tale France, that sees 4 artist-writer teams combine to each tackle a different region and period - On Kickstarter until Dec 2

Islands of Weirdhope - It's the end of the world as we know and I feel fine. Set sail with David Blandy and Daniel Locke as they return to the world of their ECO MOFOS RPG, where the apocalypse happened and things got weird but not necessarily any worse, and explore its oceans in search of plunder and peace - on Backerkit now until Dec 3

All the gaming stuff that's kept us staring into the black mirror this week...

Roleplaying Games

A fun post from Clayton on playing it straight and resisting the siren call of the genre mashup.

If you partook in or just watched on in amazement at the shenanigans that Sam Sorensen's Over/Under unleashed over the last few weeks then you might want to extend the experience through the magic of reading about other people's experiences...

Or indeed try to recreate that experience yourself, in which case have a read here.

Zedeck Siew's Chapter Serf, an RPG about being one of those put upon minions that must keep a Space Marine's armour all nice and shiny dropped this week and is free to download. Do check it out.

Another plug for Dr Malcolm Craig's excellent essay "When You Say, “Thermonuclear War,” I Think You Mean “the Call to Adventure”! The Twilight: 2000 Tabletop Role-Playing Game and the Postapocalyptic World’s Imaginary Spaces", and just to say that if you have read it, or indeed his essay in our latest issue, then it would be incredibly awesome if you could take a minute to fill out this survey which will help him in his research and hopefully convince those controlling budgets to fund more of this sort of thing...

Less combat, more obstacles. A solid post on OSR dungeon design.

Osprey Games winter sale is on featuring quite a few games that regular readers of our magazine should be familiar with. Well worth rooting around here and treating yourself to something.

Wargames

We've been quacking on about this since our second issue but indie wargames are in an interesting space right now, BUT we could always do with more people striking a blow against big plastic and adding to the scene, with that in mind do have a read of this and maybe start working on something new this weekend...

Boardgames

Charlie Theel seems enamoured with this new Superhero origins game, have to agree about the art, it's very nice but doesn't look like it fits the game, anyway apart from that this tableau builder x trick taker sounds interesting.

Speaking of trick taking...

Art, music, books, films, tv, weird shit, just all the other stuff we like...

Ahead of the release of Avatar:Fire & Ash, the BFI in London are hosting a James Cameron season, which will provide a chance to see some of his classic films such as The Terminator and Aliens on an IMAX screen. All the details are now on their website.

A wonderfully excoriating essay/plaintive scream into the void from Marie. A must read I'd say.

Over at Certified Forgotten game designer Colin Le Sueur talks all things cosmic horror and his love of Nick Szostakiwskyj's film Black Mountain Side.

Jason Pargin woke up from his cryosleep and chose violence.

Over at Mythical Britain Michael Smith explores the 'haunting literary landscape of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'

Have to say this looks rather fabulous.

It's just gone 4pm here in Bruxelles, it's dark and gloomy and with about 6 months to go until we'll next see the sun again I can already feel winter's black dog starting to breath down my neck. Still at least that's a good excuse to listen to impossibly sad and beautiful music.

Well, you made it this far, you obviously like something that we do. Why not buy a magazine and enjoy tens of thousands more words, many in the right order, from us...