Wrath & Glory Review

As I've mentioned a few times here on the blog and on my Discord, I've been interested in running an Inquisition-focused game inspired by Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn and Ravenor books. On the official front, the options are the old Dark Heresy rpg, the newer Wrath & Glory, and the brand-new Imperium Maledictum. This post is a review of Wrath & Glory and why I'm not using it for my current 40k campaign.

First, a Positive: High Action

I want to start by praising something I like about Wrath & Glory: the game is meant for high action 40k adventures where the characters are larger than life figures that overshadow the common citizens of the Imperium. This is an aspect of the game that makes it a good fit for Abnett's books. The characters in the Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are all outstanding individuals with skills and abilities far beyond average. 

In contrast, Dark Heresy, which is ostensibly a game about playing characters in an Inquisitor's retinue, tends to produce characters that feel like greenhorn Imperial failsons. The fetish for "You are playing an incompetent loser" strikes again in its design, in my opinion. I've figured out ways to hack Dark Heresy to get the kind of characters I want to see in my game (namely by starting at Rank 5 and giving a bunch of free stat boosts, which is admittedly a lot of extra work in character creation), but this is something Wrath & Glory manages straight out of the gate.

All Things to All People: A Losing Proposition

The earlier 40k rpgs, Dark Heresy, Only War, Deathwatch, Rogue Trader, are all hyper-focused on portraying a specific aspect of the Warhammer 40k universe. (They are focused on Inquisition agents, soldiers of the Imperial Guard, space marines, and err rogue traders, respectively.) In contrast, the Wrath & Glory core book offers a wide variety of possibilities as its baseline. You can play as Battle Sisters, Astartes, Orks, Aeldari, Imperial agents, gangers, etc. Unfortunately, a focus that wide means that the game is ill-equipped to handle any of them with detail and depth. There's just too many possibilities competing for space, so most of them have yet to be fleshed-out.

The Imperium of Man gets the most focus in Wrath & Glory, but even that feels under-developed. Of course, there is an element of unfairness in this critique. To use Dark Heresy again as a point of reference, that game had an expansive line of supplements covering almost every possible element of being a member of an Inquisitorial retinue. Nearly everything I've gone looking for in Dark Heresy is tucked away in one sourcebook or another. In contrast, Wrath & Glory just doesn't have the backlog of material to draw from, and I honestly don't think it will exist long enough to get to that point. 

While it's true I could homebrew any missing content I need for Wrath & Glory, I prefer having that work done for me in Dark Heresy.

Sloppy Sloppy Sloppy

The last thing I want to focus on is the seeming lack of care that has gone into Wrath & Glory. This isn't something you immediately notice; it reveals itself over time the deeper you delve into the books. As an example of this, consider the Telekinesis psychic discipline. According to the book, "A mind practised in telekinesis can bend physics to their will, moving, crushing, or blocking objects using raw mental power." Sounds good, except there are no abilities for moving things with your mind. There are plenty of powers for throwing objects at an enemy or crushing them with telekinetic force, but I didn't find one that does what you probably think of when you hear the word "telekinesis." 

(There are a few minor psychic powers that let you manipulate objects, but nothing I could find would let you move a heavy object with your brain, catch a falling ally mid-air, etc.)

To stay in the psychic powers chapter for a second, here's another instance of the sloppiness I'm talking about: the Flame Breath power fails to note how much damage the fire actually deals. It's been years and this had not had any errata.

This sloppiness isn't confined to the core book. For example, in the Forsaken System Player's Guide, both the Astartes Chaplain and Astartes Librarian archetypes have an ability called Chapter Cult, but the abilities are completely different. This is clearly a copy & paste error that never got fixed prior to publication. These issues are small, but they add up to contribute to the game being an unappealing option to me.

Deadlands: Grim Prairie Tales

Savage Worlds has never been a game with a dedicated series of "monster manuals" meant for general use with the system; rather, bestiaries are largely setting-specific or exist as chapters in the various Savage Worlds genre companions. Grim Prairie Trails (whose name is surely an allusion to the classic horror western anthology film Grim Prairie Tales) is a hybrid book for Deadlands: Reloaded that presents a heapin' helping of monster stats within the context of short adventures that showcase how a GM might use the new adversaries found within its pages.

Included within the book are "generic" monsters and unique, named villains. General monsters include:

• Bloat: an animate, waterlogged corpse
• Clockwork Demoler: a robotic vermin-hunter
• Death Cloud: a sentient mist created by the fallout from experimental weapons
• Doomsower: blood roses that spread disease
• Fever Phantom: a specter of someone who succumbed to ghost rock fever
• Gluttonous Ogre: Asian-flavored ogre
• Hodag: a demon-possessed, undead ox
• Javeraha: a tusked beast
• Lyncher: the animate corpse of an innocent who met their end at the hands of mob justice
• Minikin: a murderous porcelain doll
• Raven Mocker: a vampiric being with avian talons
• Swarm Man: man-shaped thing formed from masses of beetles
• Terrormental: a corrupt elemental
• Weaver: a giant spider who can control people like puppets with its webs

Among the unique named villains are: 

• Agatha Leeds: a black magician of the Whateley family
• Jebediah Nightlinger: the proprietor of a supernatural carnival
• Redcap Morris: an undead bounty hunter
• The Squatpump Gang: inbred hillbillies
• Wilton’s Head: a head in a jar with malicious powers

The book is rounded-out by a selection of useful "regular folk" and animal stats. Excepting the regular folk and generic critters, each of the above monsters is accompanied with a briefly-sketched adventure. This has become one of my favored ways to present monsters; by giving you both the stats for a new monster and an example of what you could do with those stats you get an incredible amount of utility from the book. 

Overall, the variety of foes presented in Grim Prairie Trails is wide, ranging from undead, beasts, and even weirder tangents. The art is nice throughout, and having a varied selection of one-shot adventures with monsters the players aren't expecting is never a bad thing. This is a great little book for people running Deadlands: Reloaded, and the conversion work to bring it in-line with the current edition of Deadlands: The Weird West is minimal. The conversion work for other "weird west" games, such as Owl Hoot Trail or Haunted West, will be more arduous the further the system ranges from Savage Worlds' baseline assumptions, but it still might be worth picking up on the cheap as a source of ideas and adventure sketches.

Review: In the Mists of Manivarsha

When I was running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel last year, I jotted down my thoughts on them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, the last adventure we played through from the book: "In the Mists of Manivarsha." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

In the Mists of Manivarsha

Written by Mimi Mondal

"In the Mists of Manivarsha" has an unusual premise, which I always appreciate: during a kind of mini-Olympics, a contestant (and the trophy!) are swept away by a clearly magical wave from the nearby river. 

Beyond that initially premise, though, I think the set-up lacks bite. When I ran "In the Mists of Manivarsha," I added an element of potential violence to light a fire under the characters: the people of the towns invited to the competition are apt to blame the host town for the loss of the trophy, which could further inflame already existing factional differences between the townsfolk--if the sacred trophy isn't recovered, there very well could be mass violence and local warfare.

"In the Mists of Manivarsha" suffers from another problem common to the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: it's an extremely linear scenario. Any time an adventure calls for the characters to be ferried around on a boat by an NPC, you can bet that the players won't have much say over where they're going or how they investigate the situation. Also, this adventure suffers from a lack of site-based exploration; although there are places to go and things to do in this adventure, the layout of the sites the characters arrive at are very basic and feature few opportunities to make meaningful choices.

I will give "In the Mists of Manivarsha" credit for introducing a new monster: the riverine, a fey creature who is something like a dryad, but connected to a river instead. They really aren't meant to be fought in the context of the adventure, but I may have played up the idea of these creatures masquerading as gods a little too hard as my players picked a fight with one of them. Having played through the encounter, I can report that riverines are pretty bad-ass, with a good variety of legendary actions and lair actions. They'd make for a good villain if you wanted to use them that way.

Unfortunately, I also have to report that "In the Mists of Manivarsha" doesn't quite work right according to the rules of the game at the climax. The adventure's Big Bad is supposed to use their Hypnotic Gaze ability to turn two NPCs against the characters, but if you read what the villain's Hypnotic Gaze attack actually does on a mechanical level it only prevents the target from attacking the creature and stuns them. It doesn't "turn" them in any way; it doesn't allow the gazing creature to take over or impose their will on the target!

Although I have some pretty strong criticisms of this adventure, we did have a good time playing it. I'd rank it as a fairly middle of the road adventure for a WotC anthology.

Trail of Destruction Review

 

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, "Trail of Destruction." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

Trail of Destruction

Written by Alastor Guzman

Even though "Trail of Destruction" is a mid-level adventure, it has a pretty epic feel to it. Something is awakening volcanoes, so this is a scenario in which the characters can intervene and potentially save the world a significant number of imperiled people by thwarting a cataclysmic event. 

However, I also felt like the set-up of this adventure could use more dramatic tension. As written, the NPCs the characters can interact with are all a little too nice, which means they have a lack of texture and nuance. To remedy that, I had the priest NPCs be part of a colonizing religion that wasn't native to the land. That allowed me to work a more interesting angle about the creatures in the volcanoes being the former "gods" of the native populace and add some elements of usurpation where the new religion's dominance was causing something atavistic from the past to reawaken--a classic Gothic convention.

As written, the adventure is fairly linear, but I opened it up by having the characters obtain a map that showed the locations of the observatory, a town, and the shrine, which let the players choose where they went and how they investigated the underlying mystery. Thankfully, the shrine also allows for some decent site-based exploration and has a nice area for a climatic boss battle.

Speaking of the boss battle, this adventure adds the tlexolotl, a massive salamander-like elemental, as the Big Bad of the scenario. I don't know if it was intentionally on the part of the adventure's author, but the combination of this monster and the surrounding setting elements gave me strong "Mesoamerican Kaiju" vibes, what with the giant fire-spewing lizard-like monster that was worshiped as a god(zilla), the jungles and volcanoes, and the elements of natural cataclysm. If you don't lean into that vibe in this adventure, you are a fool! Overall, this one felt like a pretty fun romp. There are great ideas here, and although I think they greatly benefit from a few embellishments from the DM, this one was quite fun for my group.

Cryptworld Review

Cryptworld is a retroclone of the first edition of the 1980s horror roleplaying game Chill. As you read through the Cryptworld corebook, it is readily apparent that it has its basis in 1980s game design. For example, Cryptworld is dedicated to that peculiar "more stats is better" perspective, with eight basic ability scores plus a handful of derived stats--some of which feel unnecessary or extra fiddly. 

Most task resolution in Cryptworld is handed with simple roll-under percentile rolls made against your basic attributes. However, there are times--mostly combat, certain skills, and fear checks--where things get a little more complicated and cumbersome. These special checks are percentile rolls as normal, but then you need to find the margin of success by subtracting the number rolled from the ability score or skill in question; that result is then cross-referenced against the following extremely 80s chart:

Combat in Cryptworld deserves a few notes. Weapon damage is entirely dependent on skill and the result found on the chart above. A screwdriver is as handy a weapon as a Luger, more or less. (Though having more skill with a handgun will let you fire it more than once, but again that makes the damage dependent on skill and not the weapon in question.) In general, Cryptworld focuses far too much on detailed rules for combat and on specific edge-case combat skills. Again, this is likely the residue of the hobby's wargame roots.

One particularly egregious wargame-y aspect of the game is how it handles initiative. It looks simple at first; each "side" in a conflict rolls a d10 to see who goes first, but it's all uphill from there because once you've established the sides, they take their actions according to this absolutely bonkers "order of operations":

Side A uses their Paranormal Talents

Side A makes their Missile Attacks

Side A Moves

Side B makes their Missile Attacks

Side A makes their Melee Attacks

Side B uses their Paranormal talents

Side B makes their Missile Attacks

Side B Moves

Side A makes more Missile Attacks

Side B makes their Melee Attacks

At the start of a new round, you roll for initiative and do the above all over again. I find that practically unfeasible. 

Amusingly, there is a "Penetration Bonus" derived attribute that only applies to melee attacks made against armored foes, which doesn't really feel like something that will come up all that often in a game that is either trying to emulate Hammer Horror or 80s slasher flicks. But it's there because the hobby hadn't really freed itself from the specificity required by the wargames of Chill's era. 

Cryptworld also has an extremely idiosyncratic approach to skills. Characters tend to have few skills, which differentiates the game from skill-focused percentile horror games such as Call of Cthulhu, but the skill list is quite strange. Some skills you expect, such as Investigation or Stealth, but most of the list feels oddly specific given what isn't there. There are no Persuasion or Deception skills, as those are basic rolls against the Personality attribute, but Mounted Melee and Bullwhip are detailed as skills your character might have--which seems far-fetched given the "modern horror investigators" theme of the game.

There is an option in Cryptworld to give your characters Paranormal Talents, the kind of psychic powers most often found in horror stories. These are all well chosen and seem fairly well defined. Using them successfully is never certain, and the attempt to do so temporarily costs a character some of their Willpower.

However, Cryptworld is also one of those retroclones that preserves both the system of an older game and its haphazard organization. Cryptworld is not an easy game to navigate, despite its short page count. As an example, there are three hit point-like attributes you need to track for every character: Current Stamina, Wounds, and Current Willpower. The rules for regaining Current Stamina and Wounds are both found in the combat chapter, but the rules for recovering Current Willpower is buried without a heading in the Paranormal Talents chapter. In a cleaner, better organized game, the rules for all three would be found in a "Recovery" section. An index would also be helpful here, but alas, we do not get one.

There is a good chance that most of the above critique sounds unrelentingly negative. I do think that by modern standards Cryptworld is clunky, overwritten, and often clumsy, but that doesn't preclude it from being fun. Take this with a grain of salt as I've only run it once, but my group had a great time with it because we leaned in to the creaky, olde timey feel of the game. Any roll that needs to reference the Action Table absolutely did slow the game down, but we treated these moments as an event. We absolutely rejected the game's proposed initiative system and just rolled a d10 to see which side got their turn first because refusing to use the rules as written is a tried and true part of the hobby's early days. 

And honestly, there is a special kind of symbiotic beauty in using a tottering, aged system for throwback genres like 80s-inspired slasher flicks. If you're feeling nostalgic or treat the game as a bit of schlocky kitsch, Cryptworld finds its niche.

Gold For Fools and Princes Review

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, "Gold for Fools and Princes." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

Gold for Fools and Princes

Written by Dominique Dickey

The premise for "Gold for Fools and Princes" feels a little tired: people are trapped in a mine and need to be rescued! To be fair, though, the premise is enlivened by the presence of two nobles who snipe at each other endlessly and are locked in mutual enmity, each of whom wants to be seen as the "savior" in this situation. Unfortunately, it's also one of the many adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel where an NPC immediately offers to hire the characters to help out as soon as they show up. No one checks resumes or calls references in DnDLand.

There are elements of this adventure I felt compelled to change in play. As written, the two noblemen don't feel as textured or even different as I'd like. To be honest, I struggled to differentiate them in my own head at first, which made presenting them as unique characters a bit of a struggle at the outset of the adventure. 

Additionally, although this adventure does some site-based exploration in the mines, the actual map is extremely linear and doesn't take into account that players will try to excavate blocked tunnels--which is a no-brainer in a scenario that asks the characters to descend into a mine to find trapped miners! 

I ended up altering the map on the fly as we played to account for player actions, but I shouldn't have had to do that--the adventure should have addressed that to start with because it's an obvious thing that players might try. In terms of adventure design, I believe that actions you can reasonably expect players to attempt should be taken into account in the overall design of an adventure. I suspect not including them as part of the scenario evidences a lack of DMing experience on the author's part, but that's just speculation. Space constraints in the adventure could also be a factor here.

Also, since the adventure focuses mostly on a single creature afflicting the mines. and even though it is an unusual creature, it doesn't lead to surprising encounters in the mines after the first combat. 

While I'm griping, it isn't clear why the mine overseer doesn't help with the expedition into the mines or why the other miners aren't involved in the rescue effort. They're miners; they should be better at that than the characters.

Overall, I thought this adventure fine, though it does have a few issues that could have been avoided. To be absolutely fair to the scenario, I do have to note that the player who I ran it for absolutely loved it. While I wonder how much my alterations kept it afloat, his praise for the adventure was glowing--which really has to be taken into account. In the end, this adventure led to a quite successful and memorable adventure.

Sins of Our Elders Review

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, "Sins of Our Elders." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

Sins of Our Elders

Written by Stephanie Yoon

"Sins of Our Elders" does a lot right. I love a ghost story, and having the heart of the haunting in this scenario be a spirit who is angry at how she has been erased from the historical record and not given her due is a strong motivation that feels unusual and unexpected. 

I also really appreciate that the characters are given a number of leads that they can tackle in any order they want; unlike some of the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, this gives the players the room to guide their own involvement in the adventure and gives them variable ways of piecing together what's going on with the ghost, its attacks, and the strange effect of the populace not remembering the ghost's assaults on them after the fact.

Speaking of that effect, here's how it works: the angry ghost has been attacking the populace, even leaving corpses behind, but the people cannot remember the attacks after they've occurred. There's a nice symmetry there; since the ghost is angry that her good deeds have been forgotten, she is afflicting the people with selective memory loss. I'm of two minds about it in practice, however. On one hand, it's clearly a contrivance to make the scenario work, but on the other it makes the characters special since they can remember the ghost's predations. It does give the players a good reason to get involved since they're one of the few parties who can effectually investigate the haunting.

I do have a few minor criticisms of the adventure. The ghost has multiple ways of attacking the populace--appearing in its own form, manifesting gargoyles bearing the ghost's anguished face, and...giant blue tigers. The tigers feel thematically disconnected; it may not be immediately obvious how they connect to the ghost the way the gargoyles do. My solution was simple: give the tigers the ghostly woman's face too! That's both uncanny and connects all the imagery.

Additionally, I wish the "gwishin" (the name given to this particular kind of ghost) had its own original stats instead of just using the standard-issue ghost stats from the Monster Manual.

Overall, though, this was a strong adventure as written and it was a ton of fun to play. The cast of nonplayer characters is varied and interesting, and this is one of the adventures where negotiating with the villain, instead of slaying them in a climatic "boss fight," works particularly well. Because the players have to propose a solution to the ghost, rather than just talking it down from villainy, it feels more like they did something creative rather than simply succeeding at a well-timed Persuasion roll.

Wages of Vice Review

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, "Wages of Vice." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

Wages of Vice

Written by T.K. Johnson

The premise of this adventure is fine--someone is killing off the children of the most prosperous citizens of a city, that's nice and dramatic--but unfortunately it's badly let down by the execution. The central problem is that the adventure is far too linear; the characters move from point A to point B to point C, largely having the same encounter (someone innocuous attacks the child of someone of importance) until they get a big backstory loredump.

"Wages of Vice" would greatly benefit from a more open structure, and a little site-based exploration would have been appreciated too. Why not have the adventure's quest-giver point the characters in a number of investigative directions and let them choose how they tackle the leads they've been given? 

Speaking of the quest-giver, this adventure suffers from a problem common to the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel: it presumes that it doesn't strain credulity to have characters show up as strangers to a troubled location and get immediately hired by a quest-giver to sort things out. It's expedient, but as a start to an adventure it beggars belief if the residents of an imperiled site assume that the characters, who are as likely as not a motley crew, are both competent and altruistic enough to risk their lives on behalf of someone's else's issue.

The "hired on first meeting by the quest-giver" isn't the only aspect of "Wages of Sin" that feels repetitive. This adventure is the third in a row that takes place during a local festival. On one hand, I get it: on the surface, a festival is a good in-game event to express the flavor of a ficitonal place. On the other, it starts to feel like lazy shorthand when so many adventures in the book feature one.

Another repetition: The villain in "Wages of Sin" uses a poisonous substance to turn innocent townsfolk into mindless murderers...which is also more or less an idea that appeared in the earlier "Written in Blood" too. "Wages of Sin" suffers from these similarities, as they just make you think of adventures that did something equivalent, but better. 

As written, I think this is the weakest adventure in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel so far. We had a decent time with it, but the adventure didn't do itself, or us, any favors.

The Fiend of Hollow Mine Review

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. Next up, "The Fiend of Hollow Mine." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

The Fiend of Hollow Mine

Written by Mario Ortegon

The premise of "The Fiend of Hollow Mine" is good: a magical plague is spreading and the characters have the opportunity to intervene to stop it. Not super original, but no harm no foul as far as I'm concerned.

I appreciate the variety of encounters in this adventure; you've got an ambush by bounty hunters, an interesting cast of characters in a tavern to interact with, a bit of cave exploration in an "abandoned mine," some roleplay with a distraught mother, and a set piece battle in an iron works that even has an alternate roleplaying solution if the players eschew violence. 

(My players for this one did avoid violence, surprisingly! They leveraged the setting to their benefit to avoid fighting the monster at the end, which was interesting and unexpected.)

One thing worth noting: how on earth are players supposed to avoid the elevator trap in the mine? There's no other clear path through the mine, yet the elevator is an absolute deathtrap that could easily cause a Total Party Kill if they attempt to use it. And your players will likely try to use the elevator; if you put an elevator leading down into a mysterious mineshaft, your players will get on it! If my group hadn't had a barbarian with the Tough feat, and who therefore had a metric ton of hit points, I'm not sure they would have had anyone alive to revive the others.

One unexpected thing: the Day of the Dead-esque festival seems cool, but my players missed it by spending a night resting up in the mine! It feels like a shame that we didn't get to include that, but that's certainly no fault of the adventure--sometimes cool elements just get left on the cutting room floor due to the direction an adventure takes.

Also, like the previous adventures, I like that this one features an interesting, bespoke monster. A fiendish, disease-spreading owl creature is a pretty cool notion and can definitely be repurposed elsewhere. "The Fiend of Hollow Mine" is one of the stand-out adventures in the book, for me.

Review: Salted Legacy and Written in Blood

Now that I'm running the adventures in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I'm going to be writing reviews of them informed by my actual play experience, much as I did previously with Candlekeep Mysteries. First up, "Salted Legacy" and "Written in Blood." Warning for those who plan on playing these adventures: spoilers ahead!

Salted Legacy

Written by Surena Marie

One thing I really liked about "Salted Legacy" as an entry-level adventure is that it eschews the "fighting kobolds or goblins in a cave" convention and instead drops the characters in the middle of a contentious social situation. That's honestly a nice change of pace for what is to all intents and purposes and entry-level adventure.

 Although there are a few occasions for combat, mostly in the market games, as written the scenario doesn't necessarily have to be solved with violence. The premise, exploring a vibrant night market in search of clues as to what is going on with a burgeoning feud between two food vendors and interacting with the market's sellers to get a sense of the forces at play, is pretty solid and offers a backdrop I haven't really seen done before.

That said, the night market games do feel a little game-y, especially since it's explicit that taking part in them is the only way to raise your renown high enough for the market folk to actually tell you anything important. I didn't mind that, but people with fragile senses of "immersion" could well be bothered by how this aspect of the adventure gamifies the renown rules in a blatant way.

Additionally, the adventure might be a little too "soft" in terms of stakes. The two rival families in the market are antagonistic to each other, but the text makes it clear that they will stop short of "harming" each other. I think that's a mistake; when I ran the adventure, I had the threat of them becoming violent hang in the air as an impetus to spur the players to action and as a possible consequence of their failure. Painting the two families as the Montagues and Capulets of the local marketplace raised the stakes considerably from "these two families yell at each other in public sometimes."

Also, I wanted to note one minor flaw that isn't impossible to rectify, but a DM might want to be aware of in advance: it's a little difficult to thread the needle on the third party being the real villain without either making it obvious who is inflaming the two families' mutual enmity or making the third party's influence too obscure to be picked up on during play.

Written in Blood

Written by Erin Roberts

There are a lot of great creepy details in this adventure that definitely fit the style of adventure I like to run. Additionally, crawling claws are often a generic "filler" monster in horror scenarios, but the way they take center stage here works well, particularly with the inclusion of the multi-armed soul shaker as the "evolved" or "greater" version of them.

I didn't really anticipate it, but the encounter where a pit opens beneath the wagon, creating a sinkhole that is then used as an ambush site by crawling claws, made for a pretty tense encounter. I don't think the characters were really in danger, but the set up made the players think that something catastrophic was possible, if not eminent.

Also, the abandoned farmhouses are given slight-but-creepy details that set them apart from one another, and the details are just enough to create an atmosphere of dread. My players wanted no part of those houses--which I take to be an element of successful design.

That said, the journey from the town to the farms at the frontier felt a bit linear. Things get better once they reach Kianna's farmhouse and begin exploring, but it would have been cool to see the possibility of picking alternate routes to get there. If you wanted to expand on this adventure, one obvious thing to do would be to create multiple approaches to the farmstead and let the players choose which way to go. Of course, you'd want to plan for different kinds of encounters along each of the pathways you devise. 

This may or may not be a negative aspect, depending on your preferences, but it's quite possible for the players to finish the adventure and still have only an inkling of what was going on with Kianna, Culley, the lake, and the monsters. Because so many npcs in the adventure "awaken" from their trances with no memories of their actions, there is a lack of material to piece together into a coherent picture for the players. 

In my opinion, this is actually fine for this particular adventure; as a horror-based scenario, it isn't out of line that they come away knowing that something awful was occurring, yet not completely assured that they understand the underlying cause of the terrors. In a horror-centric scenario, it's okay for uncertainty to linger--even after the adventure has been completed.

My Experience Running Blades in the Dark

I've played a good bit of Blades in the Dark, starting back when it was just the pre-release documents that were polished into the final game, but until recently I hadn't actually run it. For a long time, the game felt daunting, but I realized the other day I probably understood enough of it to make an honest attempt, so I put the call out on my Discord, got three players roped in, and went for it. You can read the write up for the first half of the session here and the second half here. Below are my thoughts on running the game and introducing it to a group of players who hadn't played before.

The Good

Blades in the Dark is a game that you can get going pretty quickly, even if a group has no prior experience with it. The playbooks are admittedly busy looking on a visual level, but you can make characters speedily by just focusing on the stuff that will come up in play. I had them pick backgrounds, vices, a special ability, and assign their "skill points," which was more than enough to start playing with. Frankly, we could have skipped backgrounds and left vices for the wrap up of the session. 

Everything else on the playbooks got worked out when we needed it. They picked friends and enemies during the "gathering information" part of the pre-heist action, for example. The core mechanic--roll dice equal to your dots, pick the single highest die to determine your result--is easy to explain and immediately graspable. Other mechanics, such as resistance rolls or the engagement roll, were easy enough to explain when they came up.

Blades in the Dark's specialized mechanics for emulating heists and other crime-related activity, such as taking stress to push yourself for more dice, Devil's bargains, and flashbacks, really go a long way toward pushing the genre as an integral part of play. As above, these mechanics were easy enough to bring into the game when the opportunity presented itself. 

One rule that my players especially seemed to like concerned loadout. In Blades, you start off a mission by deciding whether you're taking a light, average, or heavy load of equipment and gear with you. You don't have to pick exactly which items are in your loadout. You can check the items off on your playbook, asserting that you brought it with you, as play progresses. This is such a great way to do things, especially for the genre. Sure beats turning the game into "guess what would be useful ahead of time" or a minigame of managing your inventory like an accountant.

The session was also extremely easy to prep: I used a very basic premise, "there's these weird sisters who have a magical meteorite, and you've got to steal it," made a couple of notes about rooms in their house and the possible encounters therein, and left everything else up to improvisation. The brief details for the Dimmer Sisters and their allies Roslyn and Irelen were enough to slot into my idea for a heist without much work; there's a lot of utility in the book's brief setting descriptions. In a long-running game, you'd want to invent some of your own content, but there's more than enough in the book to play with for quite some time. 

Divergences of Style and Preference

It's important to note that I probably ran this session in a way that is not necessarily the intended play style. If the example of play in the Blades in the Dark book is anything to go by, and it should be since it is the example of play, the game is meant to be played in a more mechanistic, detached way. There's not a ton of talking in character, but there is a lot of discussion of what will be rolled. Similarly, I've found that livestreams with John Harper, the game's author, running the game feel more removed from the roles and setting than I'm used to. 

I suppose this is what people mean by "storygaming," as the focus is more on the wider scope of the narrative than the immediacy of the characters, but as a critique even that feels like it misses the mark for me as a way of describing the style. For a "fiction-first" game, as Blades proclaims to be, it often feels like more attention is paid toward filling in clocks and other mechanical elements rather than the drama of being part of a criminal enterprise.

I ran things differently. The back and forth of setting scenes by describing the environment and letting the players' decisions guide what happens wasn't that different from how I run D&D. I also kept some of the stuff going on mechanically entirely behind the scenes. I used progress clocks, but I kept them to myself instead of making them part of the "play space." I can see the benefit of sharing access to the progress clocks, but I didn't want the mechanics to be the focus. The play is the thing, in my opinion. Folk on the Blades in the Dark reddit will tell you this is absolutely the wrong way to play, but it worked for me without any issues.

Additionally, it felt more organic in that the players had to determine the magnitude of the threats and tasks in front of their characters by probing the fiction, instead of looking at the mechanical doodads. 

A Few Critiques

Although the basic mechanics are easy to grasp on the player side, the intricacies of position and effect are not immediately easy to implement on the GM side of the table. I'm sure the "handling time" of position and effect would become easier with practice, but because those tools are meant to be loose and able to accommodate a wide range of situations in play, they can feel vague and a little shapeless in terms of concrete rules advice.

Also, I think that Blades sometimes feels a little more like a toolkit for a game than than a laser-focused game in its own right. It gives you a lot of tools, but you can't (and shouldn't try to) use them all in one session. There is enough going on with actions, resistance rolls, engagement rolls, flashbacks, taking stress, resisting harm, Devil's bargains, etc. that it can feel like juggling chainsaws. (I definitely messed up a few instances of resisting harm in the swing of things, for example.) I tried to work in as much of the mechanical options as I could to give the players a sense of what the game is about, but there were still mechanics we didn't touch, such as assisted actions, project clocks, leading an action, etc. 

The mechanics are pretty intricately tied together, but avoiding a few of them won't make the game fall apart. In addition, the end of session rules for indulging in vices, healing harm, gaining heat as your gang's activities affect the criminal underworld, etc. are all very cool, but keep in mind that they also bulk up the amount of rules that need to be checked and mechanics that need to be referenced. Again, I'm sure it becomes smooth with practice, but there are a lot of moving pieces to negotiate that definitely do not fit the "universal mechanic" way of doing things, if that matters to you.

In Closing

I really do think Blades in the Dark is a great game. I had a blast and I'm pretty sure my players had fun too. I own too many games that have a premise I enjoy, but the idea of introducing them at the table just doesn't appeal to me. Not so with Blades. I would definitely run this again.

We Played the Whole Thing

 

In early November, my online group finished playing through the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries as a campaign. A grand time was had, and it genuinely feels like an accomplishment to have completed it. It's not every day that you managed to take characters from level 1 to level 16 and it's certainly not every day that a campaign establishes a true ending instead of petering out.

Really, that was all down to the players. So, thank you Michael, Anne, Steve, Dennis, Heather, and Ridgely! I literally could not have done it without you.

Of course, some concessions helped make this accomplishment possible too. Setting the game up as an open table of sorts, in which whoever was free to play in a given week was welcome to join, definitely helped, as did the episodic nature of the campaign established by stringing the Candlekeep Mysteries adventures together into a series. 

I managed to document it all--in two ways, no less. I wrote an actual play report for each adventure and managed to jot down a review of every scenario in the book. If a more comprehensive overview of Candlekeep Mysteries exists, I haven't seen it.

Links below, if you want the full monte.

Actual Play Reports

The Joys of Extradimensional Spaces (part 1)

The Joys of Extradimensional Spaces (part 2)

Mazworth's Mighty Digressions

Book of the Raven

A Deep and Creeping Darkness (part 1)

A Deep and Creeping Darkness (part 2)

Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme

The Price of Beauty

Book of Cylinders

Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor

Lore of Lurue

Creedhall Dekonstruktion

Zikran's Zephyrean Tome

The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale

The Book of Inner Alchemy

The Canopic Being

The Scrivener's Tale

Alkazaar's Appendix

Xanthoria

Candlekeep Mysteries Reviews

The First Five Adventures

The Price of Beauty and Book of Cylinders

Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor and Lore of Lurue

Kandlekeep Dekonstruction and Zikran's Zephyrean Tome

The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale and The Book of Inner Alchemy

The Canopic Being and The Scrivener's Tale

Alkazaar's Appendix and Xanthoria

Candlekeep Mysteries Review: Alkazaar's Appendix and Xanthoria

I've been running the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries, a book of seventeen scenarios based around the legendary library of Candlekeep and the strange tomes kept within. The adventures in the book aren't necessarily meant to be played one after another; they're more geared toward being dropped in between adventures of your own devise, but playing them back to back hasn't been much of an imposition. 

But is Candlekeep Mysteries good? I reviewed the first five adventures here, The Price of Beauty and Book of Cylinders here, Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor and Lore of Lurue here, Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion and Zikran's Zyphrean Tome here, The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale and The Book of Inner Alchemy here, and The Canopic Being and The Scrivener's Tale here. In this review I'm going to give my impressions of the last two adventures in the book, so you can better decide for yourself whether this is a sound purchase for you and your group.

Alkazaar's Appendix

Written by Adam Lee

Developed by Michele Carter & Christopher Perkins

Edited by Michele Carter

"Alkazaar's Appendix" has a good premise: a search in the desert with a stone automaton for a lost scroll. However, the execution of that premise ultimately results in an average adventure because its strong points are counterbalanced by a few poor design decisions. The stone golem that the party teams up with has great potential to be endearing, but the shape of the adventure does have a bit of a "follow this NPC around" feel to it that the scenario could have done more to mitigate.

Another issue with the adventure is that each of the mapped locations are incredibly linear with few opportunities for exploration. The cave sequence, for example, is really just a straight tunnel with one blockage that needs to be moved out of the way. Since the tunnel leads to single chamber with six murals you need to describe so that the players get the gist of what's going on in the adventure, there is an obvious solution here: turn this tunnel into a branching cave complex with each mural located in a different chamber surrounded by additional points of interest. The necropolis at the end of the adventure is similarly linear: fight the guys at the top of it, go down the stairs, fight the monster down there, wrap things up.

This problem doesn't just appear in the adventure locations, it shapes the adventure itself. The overall plan of the scenario is a straight line: meet the automaton, go to the cave, go to the necropolis, finish the adventure. There are some optional encounters presented that could stretch the adventure into at least a two-session affair if you wanted, but unfortunately they don't really alter the direct course it sets the characters on.

Additionally, I don't really love the conclusion to this adventure as written, which seems to offer a choice between getting the scroll (which means opening a sarcophagus, which causes the prince held in stasis inside to rot away) and letting your new stone golem pal carry his beloved master into heaven. This is especially an issue because I don't think the content of the adventure really telegraphs the gravity of that choice well enough. I changed this in our playthrough; it absolutely wouldn't have fit the mood we had going on at all.

I've been quite critical of several components of this adventure, so to cap this review off I do want to note that we had a good time playing through it. The interactions with the stone golem were very fun to roleplay and actually lent themselves to an unexpectedly emotional session. Also, the addition of lair actions to the dracolich made that fight feel varied and interesting--it absolutely did not fall flat as a boss fight. Though there are some issues here, this was a decent adventure overall.

Xanthoria

Written by Toni Winslow-Brill

Developed by Bill Benham & Christopher Perkins

Edited by Kim Mohan

As the last adventure in Candlekeep Mysteries, "Xanthoria" has a suitably strong premise: a fungal disease has swept the world, and it's up to the players to stop it. One thing I was slightly concerned about is that the premise hits at an odd moment; an adventure about a plague takes on a new meaning for people who are still dealing with the fallout of a real-world pandemic. It's not something the people who worked on the adventure could account for, but it nonetheless remained a potential for resemblance I tried to mitigate in play.

I also altered the adventure to make it a suitable conclusion for my campaign; instead of largely taking place in cave of the Lykortha Expanse, our playthrough took place on the moon--which gave the players a reason to fly their rocket tower to their final adventure, which I know was something they were really looking forward to.

Exploring the cave complex was the bulk of the session, and I think it works pretty well as a dungeon. There's interesting stuff that happens in there, unusual encounters (though I did pare some away to fit our time slot), and a good deal of atmosphere. You can get a good bit of mileage out of describing gross fungus and mold. In general, I'd say that the small- and mid-sized dungeons in Candlekeep Mysteries are frequently successful at providing site-based adventure. 

The lichen lich's stats, which are bespoke to this adventure, evidence a solid understanding of what an upper-level threat should be able to do. This is especially obvious if you compare its stats against those of a regular lich from the Monster Manual. The lichen lich is easier to run, has more interesting options, and also feels appropriately dangerous. 

The moral quandary posed at the end of the adventure is also fairly well done. Used as the conclusion of a campaign, "Xanthoria" gave me all the tools I needed to end the game in a way that I was really happy with.

Candlekeep Mysteries Review: The Canopic Being and The Scrivener's Tale

I've been running the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries, a book of seventeen scenarios based around the legendary library of Candlekeep and the strange tomes kept within. The adventures in the book aren't necessarily meant to be played one after another; they're more geared toward being dropped in between adventures of your own devise, but playing them back to back hasn't been much of an imposition. 

But is Candlekeep Mysteries good? I reviewed the first five adventures here, The Price of Beauty and Book of Cylinders here, Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor and Lore of Lurue here, Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion and Zikran's Zyphrean Tome here, and The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale and The Book of Inner Alchemy here. In this review I'm going to give my impressions of the next two adventures in the book, so you can better decide for yourself whether this is a sound purchase for you and your group.

The Canopic Being

Written by Jennifer Kretchmer

Developed & Edited by Scott Fitzgerald Gray & Christopher Perkins

"The Canoptic Being" has a great, and pretty creepy, premise: a mummy lord has been inserting its organs into folks to make them into "golems" under its control. That's a sick-nasty idea, in a good way, no question about it.

I did make some changes to the opening bits of the adventure, but they were the kind of alterations I think you absolutely should make to every published adventure where possible: I used every opportunity to personalize the adventure for my players. As written, the adventure gives you a list of the mummy lord's victims. I swapped out these characters for beloved NPCs and the characters of players who couldn't make it to the session for additional impact; I rightly figured that the players would care a whole lot more about rescuing their characters' friends from the mummy's scheme than they would about new NPCs they had never encountered before.

The dungeon portion of the adventure worked well. There are some "funhouse" elements to the dungeon, such as antigravity rooms, that don't really serve much purpose other than adding some flavor, but that's par for the course. 

"The Canopic Being" does reveal some issues with the "monster math" at high levels, however. The mummy lord is positioned as the big villain of the adventure, but if you use the standard stats from the Monster Manual he will be a complete pushover, especially in comparison to the golems under his control. The golems clearly use newer monster math that takes the amount of damage that characters can dish out into better account. That said, this is more of a systemic problem than an adventure problem, so I don't hold it against the adventure's author at all.

The Scrivener's Tale

Written by Brandes Stoddard

Developed by Christopher Perkins

Edited by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

I'm not sure whether to place the blame on my general level of fatigue or the convolutions of the adventure's backstory, but I had some trouble understanding the premise of "The Scrivener's Tale" and how all the pieces of the adventure fit together. This one took a couple read-throughs to fully grasp. On a basic level, it's simple: an evil archfey wants to be released from the book they're trapped in and they put a curse on the characters to maneuver them into setting them free.

I will say that I don't think the intro as written is very good. The suggested start is that a bumbling librarian gives the players the wrong book--which inadvertently curses them. Instead of going that route, I started things in media res by having someone else trying to get the book stage an assault on the library while the characters happen to be there to stop it. The curse came about at the close of this encounter and left me a nice bit of ambiguity about whether the curse was the work of the Princess of the Shadow Glass or the Queen of Air and Darkness.

I also cut some of the adventure for either reasons of time or simply because they just weren't needed. There was an entire segment devoted to going to a noblewoman's estate to get information about the titular book's provenance, but my players were on the trail of resolving things without that side trek. The NPC in that part of the adventure seems interesting enough, but this was an easy omission.

I also cut out the waves of golems and mummies that can be encountered in the dungeon portion of the adventure. I made that cut for time, mostly. If I had been more willing to stretch this adventure over two sessions, I would have left that fight in, but I do have some reservations about whether the multi-part war of attrition it posits would be fun. Also, its a little weird that the enemies in the last batch of adventures is a bit repetitive: the previous adventure in the book also featured a mummy and golems, so on some level this feels like more of the same. Of course, you aren't really meant to play the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries in sequence, so part of the issue is something I am bringing to the table that the book isn't meant to address.

To give this adventure some shine, I will say that the fight against the Princess of the Shadow Glass is very fun. Whoever made her stat block did a great job: she has a lot of flavorful attacks that lend themselves to cool description and keep the players on their toes. She's a great example of what a higher-level foe should look like.

As an aside, there is one thing I want to comment on about the higher-level adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries: many of them feature a sidebar about how to address certain spells that can "ruin" the mystery of the scenario. Luckily, no one I've been playing with is playing a caster with access to these spells, but I think this points to a potential design issue with the game as a whole. If there are known spells that can mess with the fun of players solving a mystery, those spells might need to be addressed in a way other than "here's how to make sure the spell doesn't work as written in this adventure."

Candlekeep Mysteries Review: The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale and The Book of Inner Alchemy

I've been running the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries, a book of seventeen scenarios based around the legendary library of Candlekeep and the strange tomes kept within. The adventures in the book aren't necessarily meant to be played one after another; they're more geared toward being dropped in between adventures of your own devise, but playing them back to back hasn't been much of an imposition. 

But is Candlekeep Mysteries good? I reviewed the first five adventures here, The Price of Beauty and Book of Cylinders here, Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor and Lore of Lurue here, and Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion and Zikran's Zyphrean Tome here. In this review I'm going to give my impressions of the next two adventures in the book, so you can better decide for yourself whether this is a sound purchase for you and your group.

The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale

Written by Kienna Shaw

Developed & Edited by Christopher Perkins & Hannah Rose

"The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale" is a decent adventure, but things become a little too convoluted over the course of the scenario. The characters enter a self-contained demiplane where the main events of the adventure are located, but while they're there they also have to navigate multiple extradimensional spaces within paintings inside the demiplane itself. These paintings have random destinations, with multiple routes leading to the same places without any graspable internal logic to figure out. That's a bit much because it basically leads to a situation where players have to try things at random, hoping to get lucky by picking the right portal that will lead them to something helpful. And woe unto you if your players split up to explore multiple avenues. That way lies a massive potential headache. It is pretty cool that this adventure lets the players face off against a beholder; that's iconic and feels right for the adventure's level.

The Book of Inner Alchemy

Written by Daniel Kwan

Developed & Edited by Hannah Rose

There's no way around it: "The Book of Inner Alchemy" is an extremely linear adventure. Pages have been stolen from an ancient tome about ki, clues point to an evil monastic order hiding out in a forest, so the adventurers go there, beat some evil monks, and retrieve the pages. More interesting investigation options or a more complicated layout of the monks' headquarters would have gone a long way toward making this more than a point A to point B adventure. Also, I would have liked to have seen fewer clues gated off behind skill checks; it's potentially possible that the players end up directionless if they flub the rolls as written, which strikes me as bad design.

This might be an unpopular and unwanted opinion, but it's a little wild to me that a guy best known for his involvement with Asians Represent, a group that is pushing back against Asian themes being relegated to stereotypes and cultural misconceptions, turned in an adventure where the premise is "Fight kung-fu guys, and then fight even more kung-fu guys." I was hoping for something a little less stereotypical, though I do think the premise is fine on its own. My issue is that this was a prime opportunity to show the world that there is more to Asian themes and aesthetics than martial arts, but I feel that opportunity was missed. 

That said, my group had a good time with the adventure precisely because we leaned into the over-the-top aesthetics of Sunday matinee Kung-Fu Theater, which, while it provided some outrageous moments of high-flying action, probably didn't do anything to play against reductive conventions or overused tropes. We had to lean into something to counteract the linear "go here, get into a fight with monks, fight more monks, fight more monks, fight the boss monk" nature of the adventure as written. Still, on a final positive note, I do like the stats for Steel Crane, Jade Tigress, and Bak Mei; although they're all evil monks, the slight variations in their statblocks made them feel different in play. 

Candlekeep Mysteries Review: Kandlekeep Dekonstruction and Zikran's Zephyrean Tome

 

I've been running the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries, a book of seventeen scenarios based around the legendary library of Candlekeep and the strange tomes kept within. The adventures in the book aren't necessarily meant to be played one after another; they're more geared toward being dropped in between adventures of your own devise, but playing them back to back hasn't been much of an imposition. 

But is Candlekeep Mysteries good? I reviewed the first five adventures here, The Price of Beauty and Book of Cylinders here, and Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor and Lore of Lurue here. In this review I'm going to give my impressions of the next two adventures in the book, so you can better decide for yourself whether this is a sound purchase for you and your group.

Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion

Written by Amy Vorpahl

Developed by Christopher Perkins

Edited by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion has an exciting premise: an old tower is actually a rocket about to be launched into space by a tech cult. Unfortunately, that premise is let down by one of the banes of D&D: gamer humor. Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion is supposed to be funny, with the members of the cult using names like Alpaca Macadamia Nuts and Donkey Biscuits, but like Monty Python jokes, that kind of thing wears on me quickly. When we played this I omitted all the "humorous" content because there is no way my players would have enjoyed it. I was able to make something decent out of the skeleton that remained, but I should also note that my players got their teeth kicked in trying to enter the dungeon under the rocket-tower, so we didn't get to play through a big chunk of what was on offer in the adventure.

Zikran's Zephyrean Tome

Written by Taymoor Rehman

Developed & Edited by Christopher Perkins

This one was a surprise hit. On paper, it looks pretty standard, but the variety this one offers really gave my players a good time. I like that the adventure includes an actual dragon, which is something for a rarity for a game called Dungeons & Dragons. My players figured out a solid way to get the dragon on their side without fighting it, which made for a cool moment. The fortress of the spectral giants was also fun. The giants gave the place an aura of eerie menace, and my players quickly discovered that fighting the giants was a losing proposition, so them scurrying around the rest of the giants made for some nice cat-and-mouse moments. The final battle with the genasi was great. They loved that he had a magical elemental cannon and definitely enjoyed usurping control of the cannon to turn it on their enemy. Everyone seemed pretty stoked by the end of this adventure, so this one is definitely a sleeper hit.