Into the Odd

In my view, Chris McDowall's Into the Odd is the spiritual successor to Molday's Basic D&D. 

As a set of rules, Into the Odd has a laser-fine focus on exploration. The aim of the character creation section of the book is to get you a character quickly and efficiently, so you can begin playing immediately. The rules give you just enough mechanics to adjudicate any risky action that might be needful while exploring, and no more. Space--whether given over to text or illustration-- is treated like the rarest of treasure in the book itself; if it isn't essential, it got left on the cutting room floor.

Shockingly, Into the Odd actually manages to improve on Basic D&D's framework in places. Character generation couldn't be simpler: roll 3d6 for Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, swap two of those scores if you want, roll 1d6 for Hit Points, cross-reference your Hit Points with your highest ability score on a table to see what you have for starting equipment. Six ability scores? Nah, why waste time dithering about the metaphysical difference between Intelligence and Wisdom. Picking a character class? Nah, you're all adventurers, why pretend otherwise. Shop for gear? Get out there and seek death or glory already.

The resolution mechanics are similarly streamlined: you roll a d20 and hope to equal or roll under one of your ability scores when you take a risky action. Combat works a little differently: if you want to hit something, you hit it automatically; roll damage (modified by any armor the target may have) and subtract what remains from their Hit Points. When all the Hit Points are gone, subtract damage from your Strength score and hope you don't take critical damage or run out of Strength and die.

(If auto-hitting bothers you, here's an add-on from yours truly: each attack is a Strength save. Succeed on the save and proceed to rolling damage; fail and miss.)

The player-facing rules all fit on a single small page. All the information on character advancement fit on a single page. All the principles of running the game fit on one page. The book also comes with a sampler of monsters, treasure, traps, some terse setting information, a sample dungeon to explore, a small hexcrawl to explore, And an "Oddpendium" of random tables. There are descriptions of the various Arcanum--weird technological/magical items that make exploring forsaken areas worth the obvious danger. The only thing that feels like a throwaway is the page on enterprises and detachments, which feels vague and poorly-defined. The art is okay, but nothing really stands out there. Keep in mind, though, that the book is tiny. It does one thing, and does it exceedingly well. The pdf is available here; the third printing of the hardcopy edition is currently available for pre-order.

If I were going to run a fast-and-loose game of dungeon exploration, Into the Odd would be my first choice.

Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft: Tapestry of Dark Souls I

The Mists gather around us once more, leading us into the darkened confusion that is a Ravenloft tie-in novel! If you're unfamiliar with my Psycho-Sexual Ravenloft series, here's the deal: I read a Ravenloft novel and post an earnestly-hamfisted literary analysis of it to mine-out all the odd bits of unconscious sexual weirdness that inevitably creeps into these things. 

This October's victim novel is Elaine Bergstrom's Tapestry of Dark Souls, a book that seems to be somewhat reviled by Ravenloft aficionados for being a bit too visceral and morally bleak--which is odd because those qualities put it more in line with the Gothic literary tradition than any other books in the series.

The unstated theme of the first part of Tapestry of Souls is that a woman trapped in unhappy marriages might look to sapphic comfort as a nice alternative to stifling hetero-matrimony. Such is the case with Leith, who has an antagonistic relationship with her husband Vhar. It's only when she meets the adventurer Maeve that we see Leith actually react with interest to another person; their initial meeting is portrayed in tones of love at first sight: "The woman had a vitality that was impossible to ignore," Leith notes (28). 

Indeed, as soon as her husband is gone, Leith begins to think of Maeve as a surrogate for him: "But, without Vhar, I needed another protector. This woman had come with no one, her presence challenging every male in the room" (31). It is Maeve's combination of feminine and masculine qualities--that curious admixture that defines lesbian figures in the popular imagination--that form the basis of Leith's attraction to her; she takes note of Maeve's feminine beauty, but also prizes her ability to intimidate men on an even playing field.

Of course, the underlying impetus for that attraction is Leith's realization that fitting into the preordained heteronormative relationship of husband and wife has left her unfulfilled as a person and especially as a woman: "I thought of how poorly I knew my husband and much I resented him. He didn't love me. I was a useful possession like the knives in his crates, like this treasure in my lap" (37). Leith's resentments are portrayed in surprisingly sympathetic tones. Even when her indignation boils over into violence it actually reads as understandable, if not murderously empowering. As they struggle over possession of the novel's accursed tapestry, Leith thinks, "all the resentments I had buried for so many years exploded into rage, giving me a strength I didn't know I had. I swung the heavy skillet up and sideways against his head. He fell. I hit him again, and again. Then, dropping the skillet, I pounded him with my fists, stopping only when I was too exhausted to continue" (39). Leith is woman, hear her roar!

But what of the titular tapestry? It too has a symbolic function in Bergstrom's novel. This cursed, billowing, enveloping fabric functions as a chora-like figuration that promises feminine self-actualization, freedom from patriarchal constraint, and erotic liberty. The tapestry is the devouring maternal vagina that all men fear due to primordial prejudice: "Whipped by some internal wind, it broke free of its linen cover and billowed out into the storage room. I held tight to one edge, but the rest flapped out, covering Vhar. He cried my name as the cloth fell, and suddenly his voice grew sad and faraway, as though he were plummeting down a bottomless shaft. I pulled the cloth away too late. Worn planks lay beneath it, but Vhar--husband, adversary, friend--was gone" (40-41). 

Although the tapestry seems inimical to male life, for Leith it comes to represent the promise of recognition, shared sorrow, and liberation: "The shapes took on a shadowy life separate from the fabric, spinning away from it one by one, beating at the door like dry winter leaves in a gale. ... Real voices howled with fury at the chanting captors outside. I howled with them--first with fear and later with the terrible certainty that I belonged with them" (48). 

Compare that description of the damned souls trapped within the tapestry with this description of the women trapped within the walls in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper": "Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern DOES move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" As much as those trapped figures are dreadful of aspect, they are symbols of just rage that is beginning to seek its own freedom; indeed, as the narrator of Gilman's story becomes addicted to watching the wallpaper expectantly, the tapestry--with all that it promises--becomes Leith's obsession. 

The tapestry also serves to blur the lines between different kind of female assignations. The categories of lover, beloved, mother, daughter, sister all become threads wrapped inseparably together in the tapestry's polymorphously perverse weave. For Leith, the tapestry promises not only the solidarity of sisterhood, but the long-withheld dream of motherhood: "I had suspected that I was pregnant before that terrible night in the shrine. Even so, I couldn't be certain that I had conceived before then" (53). Things become even more tangled as the relationship between Leith and Maeve begins to take on maternal and erotic aspects as well; "I see my mother in you," Maeve tells Leith in a rare moment of emotional intimacy--which is interesting as it is Maeve who has assumed a maternal role in caring for Leith. Again and again in the novel the boundaries of what separates one woman from another are transgressed or erased.

The metaphors and images of feminine malleability are given further strength when it is revealed that Leith has been infected with lycanthropy. Resonantly, Maeve refers to lycanthropy as "the change"; "Nothing can stop the change," she tells Leith (71). "The change" from woman to beast, of course, stands in for a variety of life-cycles through which women progress, most notably menstruation and menopause. 

Here, the notion of womanly change also stands in for potential freedom from men if women have the guts to seize it. Maeve describes her mother's failure to embrace the change and the liberty is brings: "My father used to speak longingly of her wit and beauty before the change. I think she could have reclaimed it any time if she wished, but she was too cowardly to leave him. Instead, she allowed herself to be trapped by him, then by my uncle, and then the town" (74). The change, then, is an escape from patriarchal control within the novel's narrative logic. Maeve herself is a vixen (a eyebrow-raising term term for a werefox) who displays her own change while simultaneously reminding Leith of her own agency as a woman, "'Change, but don't forget who you are. Remember before you make your choice,' she whispered and shifted form again. In moments, a large silver fox stood before me, its head tilted, its expression expectant" (75). Note that both women shed their clothes, inhibitions, human forms, and the shackles of normative society in this scene, all because the change frees them from constraint.

And Leith has good reason to rage against the machine; when husbands, monks, and surly menfolk aren't getting in the way of her fulfillment, they're taking the form of strangers who ask for a night's lodging only to administer a date-rape drug: "I said he could sleep in our garden. It seemed natural that I would share supper with him, then share his wine. So sweet it was, so honey-thick, so full of power. I woke with him beside me" (78-79). That's pretty heavy stuff for a Ravenloft novel. Nevertheless, at a third of the way through the book I'm finding that those hot-blooded and horrifying elements put Tapestry of Dark Souls more in-line with the Gothic's source material than anything else written for the Ravenloft line. We're definitely in Matthew Lewis territory here. Can't wait to see what happens when Leith's child is born!

Monsters from British Folklore and Obscure Literature

Need some monster inspiration for your games? The Hammer House of Horror is here to help.

Still not enough? Check out this list of 31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters.

Because Halloween is coming, that's why.

The Undercroft

To be honest, I've avoided the 'zines coming out of the DIY RPG scene. Most of them seem to be focused on kinds of fantasy I'm not that interested in, such as Gygaxian-flavored D&Disms, mighty-thewed sword & sorcery, and "generic weird OSR." Furthermore, the quick proliferation of 'zines made them really difficult to keep up with; when everybody seems to be putting out a gaming 'zine, it's hard to sort through them all to find the ones that will appeal to you. We are definitely living in a game 'zine renaissance.

It wasn't on purpose that The Undercroft fell into my hands. I ordered Into the Odd from Paolo Greco at Lost Pages, and he and Daniel Sell (the editor and mastermind behind Undercroft) generously offered to send me the first four issues of the 'zine for review. Being unfamiliar with the 'zine in question, I didn't really have any expectations for it; worse yet, I started to get a sinking feeling when I read the first lines of the introduction to the first issue: "In Heaven Everything is Fine. But not here. Here, everything is awful. If you aren't losing your limbs to obscure diseases you're having them lopped off by solicitors and disgruntled historical figures. Life is hard and short." You see, the miserycrawl style of RPG play really doesn't appeal to me. I have no desire to play or run games in which the characters are syphilitic beggars armed only with shit-covered sticks as they explore a crapsack world of filth where every NPC they encounter is, at best, a shitlord, or, at worst, a cannibal. 

But that's not what Undercroft is. Not really.

Yes, there is vileness here, there is Ligottian weirdness here, there are creatures and men who would love to gut you and dance in your entrails. But there is also humor here that reminds me of David Lynch at his most knowing, Poe in his sardonic moments, or the comical madness of Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter." Everything might be awful in the Undercroft, but tongues are lodged squirming in cheek and the humor is as black as you should take your tea.

Tone now described, what treasures await within the pages? Since Undercroft is a 'zine with many contributors, the content is a mixed bag--but there is a lot to love or at least give you pause for thought. For example, the alternate rules for disease presented in Alex Clements's article in the first issue are a fresh and interesting take that gives disease a number of "Disease Hit Points" that must be winnowed away by casting of the Cure Disease spell. Similarly, Barry Blatt's "The Treason of the Guitar" sets-up a clever and goofy adventure scenario that mixes historical Puritanism with groan-worthy modern allusions. There are plenty of new monster ideas to play with throughout the issues I sampled. 

The first two issues have a "Compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess" blurb on the cover, but let's be honest: you can figure out how to use this stuff in whatever game you're playing if you've a mind to. Early on, the art is mostly historical illustrations, but original art is added to the mix as the issues progress. Like the content, it is a mixed bag, but the good pieces are really good and there's nothing truly eye-searing given that this is a small-press publication.

Over the course of the four issues of Undercroft that I've read, I went from having no prior opinion on the 'zine, to being wary of introduction's tone, to enjoying the thing thoroughly, to buying issues five and six to round out my collection. I wasn't looking for a 'zine to support, but I found one anyway.

Or did it find me? I shudder at the prospect.

Print copies of the 'zine are available here, and the last time I checked they were ON SALE. PDFs can be had here.

Master of the Hill Cantons: An Interview with Chris Kutalik

When I first joined Google+, everybody over there seemed to be talking about how cool Chris Kutalik's Hill Cantons campaign was. Haven't heard of it? Well, here's a quick primer on what you've been missing out on. Over the years, Chris has not only kept up with his blog, he's also put out quality gaming materials such as By This Axe, Slumbering Ursine Dunes, and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko -- he's truly a model of self-publishing efficiency without any of the crowd-funding goldrush flim-flam.

Q: The Hill Cantons is one of the best-regarded and long-running campaigns to come out of the old-school blog scene. One thing I've always wondered about the setting: how to you balance the folkloric inspirations in it (Slavic myth) with the more humorous aspects (pantsless barbarians, Church of the Blood Jesus, etc.)?

It's funny and a bit sad, I suppose. When I launched the Hill Cantons campaign in 2008 it was like just most any leisure thing you do as an adult: something I thought this would be fun distraction for a few months as I get through some big life changes. The blog started as something totally modest, a player-info clearinghouse for house rules, play reports and the like.

I don't think I had any pretensions other than I want the game to be a radically-plotless West Marches-like sandbox and the setting background to be a fantasy mirror of Bohemia during the insanity of the Hussite Wars mixed in with heavy dollops of Jack Vance absurdity and tone, Moorcock Eternal Champion-era fever dreaminess and J. Eric Holmes's anarchic gonzo. Which of course is a totally pretentious and contradictory, unsustainable trainwreck of an idea.

The West Marches “no town adventures and no overarching plots” was the first casualty to actual play and years of playing just starting growing more and more layers over the tiny 30-by-30 mile sandbox that was the starting core. One of the first of those layers was adding pre-Christian Slavic mythic elements (which filled in a lot more as the play groups hit mythic wilderness areas like the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Feral Shore). It just hits some satisfying nerve in me.

Leaving aside the balls-out gonzo, elfgame elements, much of the comedy comes straight out of the two strands in Czech humor/culture that are lodged some deep, cracked place in my own psyche: a dark, dry gallows humor (the kind of culture that produces one-liners like “an optimist is someone who thinks things can't get worse”) and the slightly absurd and satirical school that produced such things as Hasek's Good Corporal Svejk or Capek's War with the Newts. (Not that I claim to be doing anything like their work when running or writing about D&D ferchrissakes, just nodding at their influence.)

Q: In what ways has the Hill Cantons setting changed over the course of the campaign due to the players' actions? Is there any advice you'd give to a fellow DM about how to make their world responsive to the characters over the long haul?

It was completely transformed by their actions as I kind of hint at above.

As a kid or teen I just played with the people around me: my brother, close friends and camp mates. These days I have been super lucky (and intentional) about getting players into the game who are pretty dynamic and thoughtful people. It's a waste to not try and build an environment that gives them free rein.

At one point the players decided to just up and leave the campaign area in the Hill Cantons proper and really never came back. They moved their center of activity to a half-ruined city a couple hundred miles away and I had to scramble to build almost build a whole other campaign--and they did another big move to a colony-building effort in the Feral Shore two years back. I love that kind of player-driven surprise and challenge.

That last part is a big question and I have to admit that I am kind of stumped for a concise answer. One of the pillars to a long-running campaign with high player buy-in is being very deliberate and regular in soliciting honest feedback (and actively listening to that feedback). A second I believe is finding a sweet spot in between having enough material fleshed out to give players options but not so much detail that you waste material. Practice just-in-time production.

Also learn to let go of your own precious ideas, NPCs, sites whatever that just don't get picked up by the players. While I think it's more than fine to recycle/reskin unused material, don't oversweat it if something doesn't stick. Like say a big underwater ruined city, cough, cough. Not that I am bitter.

Q: Aside from Hill Cantons, I think of you as a guy who makes time for the occasional game of Traveller. Is there something about Traveller that scratches a gaming itch that your usual D&D can't reach, aside from the obvious change of genre?

Traveller has always been my “second game.” Technically, it's the first rpg product I ever picked up. I remember buying a model kit for a tank around 1979 and reading through 1001 Characters which is just this collection of hexametric numbers for character stats, strange skill notations and military rank. It seemed so esoteric, so otherworldly. I played an ungodly amount of it starting a few months after playing rpgs (good old Holmes Basic).

It's funny sticking with it now as an adult because most of the Campbellian hard-SF buzzcut books that influenced it I am just not a big fan of. I do however still love the shit out of the lifepath character generation, tramp steamer/heist mode of play and the softer, aesthetic overtones of say the Terran Trade Authority books and other 1970s SF art which filled in the gaps of those art-free little black books back in the day. So it stays in my rotation. 

Q: One thing you're known for is asking your Google+ circles what they've been reading lately, and if it is good. Turnabout is fair play: what have you been reading lately, and is it good?

I am mostly fishing for new things to read. Right now I am reading Bathhouse at Midnight by W.F. Ryan which is really not about half-ogre handjobs but a thorough (and credible) exploration of folk magic in Russia. Holy shit is it good.

One of may favorite chapters is about zagovory (“false prayers”) which are these lyrical invocations. Take this actual Russian 17th century folk magic spell against erectile dysfunction; "I, servant of God N. shall arise, blessing myself and I shall go crossing myself into the open field under the beautiful sun, under the bright moon, under the crowding stars, past the grave of the bones of the giants, and just as the bones of the giants do not bend or break so may my member not bend or break against woman's flesh and parts and memorial bones. And I servant of God N. shall take my red elm stick and go into the open field, tossing up its head and looking into the sky and moon and Great Bear...and strike the three-year-old bull on its horn.”

Predictably I have been trying to figure out ways to shoehorn that beautiful, unintentionally hilarious weirdness into gameable form for the campaign.

Q: What is the Hydra Cooperative and what is the benefit of producing game materials as part of a group as opposed to working as an auteur?

I am hesitant to universalize the experience. There are any number of highly creative people—most of whom are putting out all of their work free or at-cost—with intensely personal visions about how to design games or adventures who just work better as one-man operations. And there are any number more of people in hobby publishing who just plain don't play well with others.

I come out of a couple of decades (journalism, labor organizing) of working with small, tight-knit groups of intense, passionate people focused on common projects. Personally I thrive in that kind of work environment and tend to find cross-inspiration working alongside creative or driven people. I know you are required to politely say things like I really love working with folks like Trey Causey, Robert Parker, Anthony Picaro, Mike Davison, Humza K, Luka Rejec, Jeremy Duncan, David Lewis Johnson and Jason Sholtis. But I really do. It's like a dream team of my DIY gaming soul. 

Q: I consider the Kickstarter you did for Slumbering Ursine Dunes to be a mega-success in that it funded, people love the gaming content that came out of it, and you managed to deliver the product without squandering the backers' money. What tips would you give a new game publisher about to embark on their first foray into crowd-funding?

I was fairly critical as a hobby blogger of the first wave of gaming Kickstarters. It seemed a bit too close to the unchecked insanity of the pre-crisis financial industry of last decade where you had too much easy money floating around with little to no consumer accountability. No wonder it produced so many trainwrecks.

But inside of all that you had people like Kevin Crawford creating great, responsible and ethical counter-examples. The lessons as I see them are first and foremost to treat backers not as wallet-things or pre-order buyers, but as people who are taking a risk and supporting you. Secondly to have something written and ideally ready to go when the Kickstarter ends (expecting the reward first and then the writing to follow is really kind of foolish). And the third is work like hell and don't quit. (A big hats off to Robert Parker who faced some real world grief and who still pushed through to not just edit but to add sections of his own to Marlinko.)

Well we are still a year later working on the stretch goal adventures, but we are intentionally over-fulfiling them, having turned them from was supposed to be sketchy “further adventures” outlines of 15-20 pages each to fully-realized products (Fever-Dreaming Marlinko was 6,000 words longer than the Dunes even). I feel pretty proud of how we handled the Kickstarter, in the main getting the main adventure out right before the December 2014 deadline as we promised.

Q: What's next for Chris Kutalik?

I am going to drink a lot and stay up all night!

Seriously though, I see a full docket ahead. We have Jason Sholtis's Operation Unfathomable coming down the line and I look forward to switching out of writer/designer hotseat mode. We also may have a Big Fucking Surprise coming down the pike in early 2016. And of course there's still all kinds of things I want to write or design from undercities to microgames.

Demons, Devils, and Death Drives

I've been revisiting some Edgar Allan Poe stories I haven't read in a while, which has got me thinking about Freud's theory of the death drive. And somehow that has filtered into thinking about Krevborna's demons and devils.

One of the grand things about making your own campaign setting for D&D is that you can choose to exclude as much of the inherited D&Disms into your world as you want or bend those D&Disms in a way that wouldn't necessarily work in an already established setting; you can pick and choose from the "canon," or discard it entirely.

Since Krevborna was my first "5e setting," I wanted to play around in D&D's sandbox without feeling beholden to the way D&D tends to do things. For the purposes of illustrating what I'm getting at here, I'm going to talk about what differentiates demons and devils in Krevborna.(1)

According to the 5e Monster Manual, demons are "the embodiment of chaos and evil--engines of destruction barely contained in monstrous form" and devils "live to conquer, enslave, and oppress." Looking at those two basic building blocks of differentiation reminded me of Freud's theory of the death drive. According to Freud, the instinct toward death, destruction, and dissolution can take a myriad of instinctual forms. As he states in "The Economic Problem of Masochism," "The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Demons, then, with their "embodiment of chaos" and function as "engines of destruction," are clearly manifestations of the death drive as a pure destructive instinct.(2) Devils, on the other hand, as beings who "live to conquer, enslave, and oppress," are manifestations of the death drive as the instinct for mastery and the will to power writ monstrously large.(3)

Sure, that's a neat theoretical congruence, but what does it mean in terms of world building? First, it helps explain the "Blood War" between demons and devils that was a big part of 2e's canon. As manifestations of a cosmic death drive, you might expect that devils and demons should be allies against the life-loving races of the world, but although they are manifestations of the same force each group is so focused on their particular flavor of the death drive that it excludes the methods and schemes of the other. The will to power of the tyrannical devils is simply incompatible with the demons' chaotic urge for obliteration, and vice versa. A libido divided against itself cannot stand.

Second, this strife between two supernatural forces out to either enslave or destroy mankind gives mankind a profound weapon against both: as more and more of the nature of these beings is revealed in play, it gives the characters a natural tactic that can aid them in the struggle against cosmic darkness: either side could be carefully leveraged against the other to keep both of these death instincts in check--a kind of libidinal stalemate. Even if the total defeat of demons and devils is impossible for mere mortal agents--and can the death drive ever truly be banished entirely?--the way in which they can be pitted against each other keeps things in necessary stasis. It isn't so much that the Moorcockian struggle between law and chaos is a substitute for good and evil, it's the notion that destruction and tyranny must be maneuvered into a stable state for the greater good of the continued existence of all.(4)

NOTES

(1) - The general populace in Krevborna would recognize no practical difference or theological distinction between demons and devils, of course. Superstition and inherited belief masks the real cosmological truths that govern the universe.

(2) - Since Orcus is a a demon lord associated with the undead, this also colors the setting's view of what undeath is: it isn't an orderly process, it's life inverted into deathless chaos and always already an impulse toward decay. 

A tangent: liches, then, wrest the power of undeath from its chaotic roots and transform it into a kind of perverse order to defeat the natural entropy of mortal existence. The results of this, however, ripple outwards in a fractalized, chaotic pattern, once more serving the ends of destruction.

To keep the "D&D canon" a little distant, instead of referring to demon lords by their more familiar names I think cults devoted to them in Krevborna will call them by their more obscure epithets. Blood Lord for Orcus, the Sibilant Beast for Demogorgon, etc.

(3) - Asmodeus, chief of devils, is simply referred to as the Devil by the Church of Saintly Blood.

Also, it is interesting that the Monster Manual gives a genesis point for demons (they are spontaneously generated by the Abyss) but there isn't an origin attached to the devils. For now, I'm going with the fallen angels archetype.

(4) - Of course, this doesn't have to come into play just in the late game of high levels; it can also be something that texturizes the more obvious intrigues and power struggles in the setting as well. The vampires of the von Karlok family are essentially demonic; the Graymalk witches are essentially diabolic.

Shadows of Esteren - Prologue

Shadows of Esteren: Book 0 - Prologue exists in the liminal space between a quickstart and a starter set. It aims to introduce the game's setting and basic mechanics, offers a selection of pre-made characters in lieu of character creation rules, and concludes with a trio of adventures.

Shadows of Esteren bills itself as "a medieval role-playing game with a horrific and gothic influence." The game's setting is a peninsula called Tri-Kazel that is comprised of three kingdoms. The overall feel of the kingdoms is Celtic medievalism. The lands are feudal and isolated, but they're also experiencing a time of anxious flux; the ancient Demorthen religion (akin to fantasy druidicism) is being contested by missionaries from a Christian analog and by Magience (a kind of proto-Enlightenment scientific revolution). These themes map pretty nicely to Gothic tropes; it sets up a tension between reason (Magience) and faith (the Temple and Demortehn), as well as between tradition (Demorthen) and more modern ideologies (the Temple and Magience). The people of Tri-Kazel also live with the threat of the Feondas--unfathomable monsters who have preyed upon them since time immemorial. The information on the setting in this section of the book is presented in broad strokes, but combined with the more specific information that comes with the scenarios in the back of the book it should be enough to convey enough of the setting's feel to get by for a number of sessions.

The book's explanation of the game system is more akin to a brief summary than a full tutorial; the purpose of this chapter is to give you enough to play the included scenarios. As the text notes, some more complicated areas of the full rules (such as the game's combat and sanity systems) are presented here in a stripped-down form, while other rule systems (such as magic) are omitted entirely. Characters in Shadows of Esteren aren't defined by the usual mental and physical ability scores; extraordinary strength or intelligence, for example, are handled as Advantages and Disadvantages. Characters are instead defined by traits called Ways that determine their personalities and psychological makeup: Combativeness, Creativity, Empathy, Reason, and Conviction. Characters also have a number of broadly-defined skills called Domains. The names of these skills are sometimes a bit opaque; the applications of "Close Combat" and "Erudition" are clear enough, but you might want to have a cheat-sheet handy for what "Relation" and "Natural Environment" cover. Disciplines function like skill specializations, allowing characters to transcend the cap on skill ratings in narrower areas of expertise. What Domains and Ways can be used for is open to interpretation at the table. The task resolution mechanic is similarly loose: players roll a d10 and add the ratings in a Domain and Way that seem applicable to the situation and hope to beat a target number based on the task's difficulty.

Interestingly, the game seems a bit ambivalent about being a game. For example, an aside notes that it's more important for players to role-play well than to game the rules, and that they should "limit the use of the game system to a minimum" (17). Clearly, the system has been kept simple so that it can remain "off-stage" until needed to resolve some bit of narrative tension that can't be decided based on role-playing alone.

The six pre-made characters are far more than just filled-out character sheets. Each characters gets a full-page portrait, a hefty block or two of background text, and a description of the character's personality, along with all the pertinent stats. The characters' back-stories help fill in the broad setting overview given at the start of the book; through those backstories we learn of the Varigals (professional news-bringers that travel the Tri-Kazel), the order of Hilderins (a knightly organization), and the religion of the Temple.

The three scenarios in the book are tied together but can be played in any order. The book suggests two different sequences to chain them into a short campaign. All three scenarios are largely investigative: "Loch Varn" involves navigating a series of flashbacks to figure out how the characters got to the place they awaken at, "Poison" casts the characters as detectives looking for the cause of a poisoned river, and "Red Fall" has an amnesiac adventurer waking up with a bloody sword and a half-eaten corpse beside them. Each adventure is heavy on text and will likely take some time to prepare, but the use of helpful icons to guide the GM's way are a nice touch. 

As an entryway into the Shadows of Esteren series, I really don't see Prologue working for new or inexperienced players. There is simply too much in the book that relies on already knowing some of the ins and outs of role-playing games. Similarly, some of the scenarios in the book would be an absolute nightmare for new GMs to run for their group; "Loch Varn," in particular, has a complicated timeline that is central to pulling the adventure off successfully.

Players and GMs who have already cut their teeth on other games might have a better experience with Prologue. As a physical object, the book is a gorgeous hardback with fantastically moody art. The setting's blend of Celtic, Gothic, and almost steampunk-ish weird science is unique, and the world certainly carries and conveys its own flavor. It's also worth noting that the English version of Shadows of Esteren was translated from the French edition of the game, and frankly it sometimes shows. While the game's often baroque verbiage could be an attempt to capture the Gothic's purple prose, it feels like something is frequently being lost in translation. This is particularly vexing when the language barrier gets in the way of a clear explanation regarding the finer points of the rules. Nevertheless, although some lines might require multiple readings to parse, it is possible to put all the pieces together.

However, Prologue is something of a tease--while there is enough to play a handful of sessions with, you'll definitely need Book 1 - Universe to get the full Shadows of Esteren experience.

Book 0 - Prologue is available as a free pdf here.