Pirate Borg: Terror In Tortuga:  Folks have really pumped up Pirate Borg, and of the major Borg-inspired games, it’s the one that seems the most my speed.  The “art-punk” graphic design isn’t so extreme that it makes my eyes bleed.  So, I was curious to check out this adventure.  I’m a sucker for nautical stuff, and figured I could at least toss it into any nautical game I might run.  I know I’ve ranted at length about my distrust of much of the discussion around the OSR, as it seems as grounded in the reality of “how the game used to be played” as any given 1940s Hollywood historic epic was grounded in the reality of its subject.  There is a spectrum of adventure writing that ranges from the massively overwritten to so sparse I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with it.  Terror in Tortuga is on the sparse side, though I don’t think so far that it’s totally useless.  If you’re a GM that likes to have just a few bullet-point locations and NPCs, and you’re quick on your feet with improv, this is probably fine.  It does seem tied to the specifics of the setting enough that its utility for me is fairly low.  That’s not a fault, just an observation.  If you’ve got Pirate Borg, it should be very useful.  The quickstart rules in the back seem pretty playable.  There are also a bunch of QR codes for various resources, including a random PC generator.  I’m not really a fan of QR codes, as I do most of my online activity through my laptop.  Still, it’s better than not including any directions at all.  

Dolmenwood: The Weaver & the Redcaps:  I’ve heard a lot of good about Dolmenwood, and I have to admit, I enjoy the sort of pre-Victorian fairy haunted European forests vibes of this adventure.  From what I understand, it uses a slightly modified version of the very popular D&D clone Old School Essentials.  I’ve generally heard a lot of positive stuff about OSE and especially about adventures for it.  It’s very much not my bag, having never enjoyed classic (or contemporary) D&D, but to each their own.  And of course, I can always lift good adventures for other games that I do like.  I don’t want to keep harping on the Free RPG Day adventure for Starfinder that I recently reviewed, but it serves as such a good example to point at.  Where that adventure had a complicated premise and fleshed out characters, but an adventure that was just three combat encounters, this Dolmenwood booklet, in a similar amount of pages, has what seem like workable quickstart rules, and an extremely short (5 & ½ pages) adventure that packs in much more player choice and variety of encounters.  Sure, you’re likely to fight the Redcaps, but maybe not.  And how you go about dealing with them can very easily be more than just a series of stand-up slug-fests.  Anyway.  This hasn’t sold me on picking up Dolmenwood, as I really have no interest in playing a retro-D&D clone, nor is this really my preferred style of Fantasy.  That said, i see the appeal, and I think this does a good job of presenting the game to potential players/GMs.  

The Witcher: Easy Mode:  This one is from several years back, being a Free RPG Day 2019 giveaway.  R. Talsorian and CD Projekt Red have, I assume, a strong relationship, what with the long gestating and finally released Cyberpunk 2077, based on Mike Pondsmith’s classic Cyberpunk RPG.  So, I guess it’s no surprise they’d end up doing an RPG adaptation of CD Projekt Red’s big game series, The Witcher.  The video games are based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, but my only experience with the world is through the NetFlix series, the first season of which I found tedious and was never tempted to continue.  So, I’m not really the target audience, as the whole time I was watching the show, I was just annoyed that we never got a film adaptation of Elric.  And now if it ever did happen, people would just call it a “rip-off” of The Witcher (misanthropic albino with weird eyes, adventuring in a multiverse, dealing with a conjunction of spheres, swilling magic potions to keep him going, and being called the White Wolf…).  All that aside, what is this booklet?  It’s a stripped down “quick-start” set of rules, some pre-generated characters, and a brief adventure.  Really more of a set of related encounters than an adventure, but designed to show off some of the system in use.  It seems to use a variation of the Cyberpunk RPG’s mechanics, which as far as I know work just fine.  I imagine if you enjoy the world of The Witcher and want to play a tabletop RPG within it, this will probably do the trick.  However, it did not win me over.  Would I play in a game if a friend were really driven to run it?  Absolutely.  Am I going to pick it up or suggest it?  Absolutely not.  

Adventures in Rokugan: Storm Eel’s Rest:  This 2023 offer from Edge Studios is for Adventures in Rokugan, which is, I believe, the 5e version of Legend of the Five Rings.  Am I right that Legend of the Five Rings was essentially supposed to be an update (with new system) for the old TSR Oriental Adventures?  I think I heard that somewhere, but don’t know if it’s true.  Anyway.  I knew a lot of people who were really into Legend of the Five Rings when it was still in production.  I’ve heard the system was pretty good.  I have to admit, I’ve never been super interested in Japan, Fantasy Japan, or Japanese inspired RPGs/settings.  Sure, I grew up in the 80s, and thought ninja were going to be a real problem in adulthood, like quicksand.  And I’ve enjoyed a bunch of samurai films just fine.  Honestly, I’m much more interested in Chinese mythology and Fantasy, and I’m not even all that keen there.  I’ve just watched a crap-ton of Hong Kong cinema, including a whole pile of Wuxia type films.  So, I’m not the target audience.  Still, this looks fairly solid.  There is an absolute crap-ton of information, which I imagine might be overwhelming for a first-time GM.  The background for the adventure is, perhaps, a bit overblown.  I suppose if you were hoping to plug this into a larger campaign and were hoping to maybe build on this adventure after, that would be helpful.  But if you were hoping to grab this and run it on Free RPG Day, I’m afraid it would be way too much.  It comes with pregenerated characters, and I like that each character is given some goals that they’ll want to aim for.  The adventure itself is, keeping with the theme of many D&D adventures, largely a series of probable combat encounters.  However, this does provide ways for PCs to perhaps avoid constant combat.  There’s even some room for *gasp* roleplaying.  Ultimately, this isn’t for me.  And it doesn’t seem beginner friendly at all.  But it looks like a solid adventure, if you’re already primed for Adventures in Rokugan.  

13th Age: Assault on the Dungeon of the Pogonomancer & The Yellow King: The Doors to Heaven:  For Free RPG Day 2019, Pelgrane Press gave with both hands.  Two adventures for the…price?…of one. 

The first is for 13th Age, a game I have absolutely no interest in from a mechanical standpoint, as I’ve heard it owes a lot to D&D and specifically to 4th Ed, the only major incarnation of the game I’ve never tried, but the one that seems the absolute opposite of anything that would bring me joy.  That said, Assault on the Dungeon of the Pogonomancer does awaken some curiosity about 13th Age adventures.  It’s got a bit of a Dungeon Crawl Classics vibe, with how…odd it all is.  Beyond the overall concept of going up against a Dwarven wizard who’s learned beard magic, which is actually taken completely seriously, there are a lot of extremely strange ideas.  Honestly, it’s a fairly involved adventure for only about twelve pages if you leave off the title page and pregenerated characters.  There were several things, including a couple magic items, that I can see myself lifting from this scenario.  Nice.

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The Yellow King: The Doors to Heaven: The second adventure in this booklet is for The Yellow King, a game I supported back when I still did crowdfunding.  The Yellow King is an odd beast in a lot of ways.  I’m a sucker for the King in Yellow mythology in its many forms, but especially as captured by the folks from Pangan Publishing back in the 90s, some of whom went on to create this RPG.  That said, I’m not really sold on the Gumshoe system, especially as presented in Trail of Cthulhu, and The Yellow King uses a variation of that.  I’ve only read the Paris book for this game so far, but I remember being very disappointed by the adventure.  The Doors to Heaven would have been a MUCH better choice.  This is, I think, a great starting adventure for a campaign in the Belle Époque.  It gives a reason for the PCs to get together, gives them a chance to see some bits of Paris and possibly make some contacts.  And while it touches on something famous (Notre-Dame), it doesn’t rely on a more pop cultural subject, like the adventure in the core book did.  I came away from this one being very, very tempted to try to run it.  And it’s reawakened my interest generally in the ideas The Yellow King presents. Though honest, I’d likely just transfer it over to Call of Cthulhu.  I’m curious if there are more scenarios like this out there.  Maybe in issues of Bait Al Azif?  What else has Sarah Saltiel written?  I’ll have to do some digging.  

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