Fan Club “Blog” #28: Summer Reading 🏖️ pt 1

Alright, let me get out in front of this.

Any rumours you may have heard that I have "totally lost control" of my incoming stack of review copies are, to speak frankly, "B.S." I'd encourage you to understand that such breathtaking asperity can only come from my enemies. You know the type. Bumbling proles who'd like to see me taken down a peg.

Well, I've got a few words for THEM, let me tell you. I've got pegs for days. I am firmly ensconced amongst my pegs. I am, in a word, bepegged.

Now, is it true that while I was working on season 2 of Quinns Quest I built up a pile of 67 review copies (pictured above)? Yes. Is it also true that I have another 35 games to read on my computer as .pdf files? Also yes.

But is it true that this is too many games? That I'm "snowed under", somehow? Of course not. Why, a professional like me could dig my way out from under a stack thrice this size and see no ill-effect. Why, I've been reading solidly for the last two days and as you can see, I'm absolutely fine. Why, if you were to ignore the twitch in my eye, the whiff of my pits and the constellation of scabrous mugs next to my sofa, you'd hardly know anything was amiss at all.

Now if you lot have it in you to SHUT UP for just ONE SECOND I'd like to begin part 1 of a feature I'm calling my "Summer Reading Recommendations 🏖️☀️😜"! As I read (and read, and read, and read) I'll be hand-picking some of the best games in this stack to tell you all about. These are games that I probably can't justify investigating further with a full campaign, but that nonetheless deserve some glowing coverage.

To be crystal clear, I had infinite time, I'd play campaigns of all of these, but I don't, so I can't. Instead, I'll at least be placing them onto the bookshelf opposite my desk so they can benefit me with their powerful auras.

PLASMODICS

I came away from PAX Unplugged last year having acquired a bunch of games from designer Will Jobst, a supreme talent who is now fixed permanently on my radar. I'm really keen to get their game Black Mass to the table, but squelchy mutant future RPG Plasmodics is what I want to tell you about today.

Plasmodics is fucking mint. I can't bring myself to rule out a full review for Quinns Quest season 3, even though that would mean dropping a different game from the schedule.

To understand this game, take the vibrant, surprising and altogether gross post-apocalypse of Gamma World, strip out the rules and replace them with the hyper-lightweight framework of Into the Odd, and then give the game the tone of freaks living day-to-day found in excellent game Cybermetal 2012.

Practically speaking, players in Plasmodics are bizarre mutants in a bizarre future who delve into bizarre bunkers and offices to recover bizarre artifacts and take them back to their bizarre society. The core book makes you extremely excited about this premise with lovely layout, tight editing and absolutely beautiful writing that takes big, fantastic swings.

It's also very, very funny. There are definitely pages that might remind you of Triangle Agency.

Unlike Triangle Agency, though, what stands out to me is that Plasmodics reads like it's sunny. I mean that very literally. The cover is the colour of ice cream sorbet, the hub city presented in the core book is a floating metropolis known as KING TIDE, and the art of the NPCs shows lots of them smiling as if at an inside joke. The Wildsea had this too- it's a game world where you can see the fun side of living here. It makes it attractive to escape to.

Like, there's a d66 table in the game as to how the player characters know each other, which includes "Solving a cryptic city-wide riddle to unlock Perdigon, the sarcastic puzzlebot", "Stuck in a high-stakes game of truth or dare" or "It's a very long and complicated bachelor party."

I fucking love it. It all just walks a tightrope of being profoundly silly, without ever being so goofy it loses coherence. The faction stuff in the city of KING TIDE in particular has real meat on its bones. ...Do I need to review this? Urgh.

The finished book should be available for purchase any second now, but until then you can pay what you want on Itch for the preview edition.

FRONTIER SCUM

This is a super simple pitch. You know how MÖRK BORG reads like a parody of fantasy roleplaying, roasting the whole genre down into blackened char, but ends up being quite an appealing game? Frontier Scum is a similar thing for Wild West roleplaying.

There are actually some free downloads through the above link if you want to check out the vibe of Frontier Scum, but said vibe is basically "quite violent and very funny, but funny in the type of very specific way that you can only be if you love the genre you're skewering"

I find this book extremely impressive. The starting items table has an entire sub table of cans of beans you might roll ("Big bean in bean juice", "Rat's beans in brandy sauce"), and everyone gets a starting horse with a randomly-rolled thing it likes ("sugar cubes", "staying indoors", "PC-on-PC violence", "changing owners"), and yet all of the laugh-out-loud stuff is never at the expense of the game's core concept of adventuring in the Wild West.

The game actually points out that even though it describes itself as an "Acid Western" with adventures that always go in trippy directions, "if everything is weird, nothing is weird," and so it takes pains to draw a lot of its colour and humour from real history, which can be stranger than fiction after all.

Like Mörk Borg, Frontier Scum it's also just such a gorgeous book that you want to play with it. The cardboard covers are wonderful, as is the rustic stitching on the spine that allows you to open the book and lay it flat. The interior advertisements with illustrations taken from the 19th century are a continually elegant (and cost-effective) layout trick. And like Plasmodics, the copywriting is just so tight. With less competent team behind these books they probably would have been twice as long and half as good.

SPINE

Ever since I first played Thousand Year Old Vampire I've been looking for another solo TTRPG (meaning, a game designed to be played by just 1 player sat alone) that I could recommend as strongly.

Today, I still haven't found such a game. For a few years I thought that was because no other solo TTRPG was in the same league. These days, I've softened a bit- I do think Thousand Year Old Vampire is best-in-class, but I also think part of the reason why it lanced into my imagination so strongly was because I played it deep in the pandemic, and I'm willing to recommend a few other games.

The first is 2023's Project ECCO by Elliot Davis, which I find super thrilling and rewarding. I think it should be the first solo TTRPG you buy after Thousand Year Old Vampire. It's a time travel game you play in a DAY PLANNER! What a phenomenal idea.

But if you're still looking for something exciting after that, you could look at a new game called SPINE.

This is a solo game about receiving a book - the game book itself - from an estranged relative, and you play it by doodling in the margins and doing... other things,

I don't want to spoil it, nor do I think SPINE is entirely successful at what it does. It is, however, a marvellously surprising thing that you can play curled up on the sofa with just the book and a pen.

And speaking of solo RPGs I like...

HORSE GIRL

Horse Girl is a solo RPG by Samuel Mui. It isn't a new game, I've known about it for a while. I just happened to see it for sale at the UK Games Expo this May and bought it because it's powerful and I want it in my collection.

This is probably the most shocking RPG I own. In its own words, "HORSE GIRL is a body horror, solo journaling RPG where you undergo a surgical and mental transformation into a horse by the love of your life."

It's about control and abuse, it's about bodies and capitalism. It's about you suffering inconceivable torment involving saddles, mammary gland relocation and collar bone removal.

But there's fun to be had, too! Sometimes you'll have a perfect evening with the love of your life. Also, because this is a game based on the rules system of Chris Bissette's The Wretched, sometimes you, the player, get to pull a brick from a Jenga tower. (When the Jenga tower falls you lose your grip on the person you were before this relationship and the game ends.)

To state the atrociously obvious, this isn't a game for everyone. It's utterly horrific. But I also think Horse Girl contains a lesson for the wider TTRPG community- if you want a 1 player TTRPG to grip a reader as much as a multiplayer TTRPG, there's simply no room for half-measures. In one way or another, your game needs to take the player's breath away; it needs to be the most at what it is, and it needs to deliver that quickly.

Mui has another solo RPG with the same mechanics where you play a preacher diagnosed with terminal cancer trying to reconcile with their estranged family. I'm sad this author doesn't seem to be making RPGs anymore, I like their style a lot.

MOTHERSHIP: WAGES OF SIN

There are RPG books that I own because I want to play them. Then there are RPG books that I own because they inspire awe. Awe is great! It's actually an emotion that psychologists are starting to link with numerous beneficial effects, especially in the field of using psychedelic drugs to treat depression.

Mothership's new GIANT official sourcebook, Wages of Sin, is a book that inspires awe.

At 336 full-size pages (plus a double-sided foldout map), this book is sorted into two sections, CRIME and PUNISHMENT.

The "Crime" section offers nothing less than one hundred bounties. I'm talking about one hundred adventures between 1 and 3 pages long that are always about killing or capturing an individual, android, gang or - in one case - a horse. It is a nauseating amount of content. Interestingly, these bounties range from adventures that are ready to run right out of the book to loose high concepts that could serve as inspiration, but the reader would have to develop themselves. I don't hate this at all- it would let me put bounties in front of my players that are wholly related to how much creativity I feel like deploying as the GM.

Meanwhile, the PUNISHMENT half of the book offers consequences for what happens to PCs that end up on the wrong side of the law. You get 63 pages bringing a single prison to life in excruciating detail, as well as a list of ten nightmarish bounty hunters who might be sent after the players. These guys are classic Mothership, each one them a horror movie in their own right.

Sounds like a cool book, right? And it is! Despite its length I read this book cover to cover, my imagination gurgling away the entire time. If any of you folks fancied buying it, I'd say fancy away.

But at the same time... this is the first piece of official Mothership content that I can't see myself running.

Listen, the thing I love about Mothership is that until the release of this book, it's had this culture of adventure modules that have absolutely no filler at all. Each booklet has HUGE IDEAS and RIPS THROUGH THEM AT TOP SPEED. Start to finish they are just CHILLS and THRILLS and then the module is OVER and then you play ANOTHER MODULE ideally playing the SURVIVORS.

In today's TTRPG scene, the hardest thing any game has to do is claw it's way past all of the other games you could be playing or are playing. Mothership, with modules like Gradient Descent and Warped Beyond Recognition and Pound of Flesh and Road Work, could be relied upon to inject enough fun at a high enough pace that it was easy to justify giving it your time. It reminds me of those indie videogames which deliver impeccable, short experiences where you enjoy every moment.

Wages of Sin is not that at all. Wages of Sin - in a a completely new direction for this franchise - feels like an 80 hour videogame with all of the sacrifices that entails. This book is masterful writer Luke Gearing being employed by the Mothership team to produce... content. Hundreds of thousands of words of content. Enough content so people can play Mothership for years and years as a proper sandbox game. Which means that same density of fun and ideas and frights is gone. The fatty butter of Luke Gearing's marvellous imagination scraped over 336 pages/slices of bread.

To me, where this book succeeds is as a kind of beautiful, hardback window into an imaginary universe and, as I say, as an instrument of awe. I can also see how this book, which Tuesday Knight Games refer to as a "bounty hunting toolkit", is the first step into turning Mothership into a lifestyle RPG like Dungeons & Dragons or Cyberpunk or Call of Cthulhu. And that's cool! I wish this wonderful team all the success in the world.

But for me, it's honestly a bit grim seeing the author of Gradient Descent, my favourite dungeon ever, put to work writing - among other things - a prison that I'd be less likely to run than Dog Eat Dog, a new third party prison module that I read the other week and isn't even particularly amazing. But what Dog Eat Dog has is that early Mothership ethos of a fun idea delivered at top speed.

(But for what it's worth, the next big Mothership product, a boxed set fleshing out Prospero's Dream, looks like it'll be delivering more of the intensity and density that I first fell in love with. We'll just have to wait and see.)

Phew. Okay, folks! See you in a bit for my Summer Reading Recommendations 🏖️☀️😜 pt. 2!