With Maiden Voyage, Penumbra continues to establish itself as the Best of the Best when it comes to D20 products.

Review Originally Published October 1st, 2001

Penumbra, in my opinion, has been setting standards for quality in the D20 marketplace since their release of Three Days to Kill back in August of 2000. The high quality of Three Days to Kill, In the Belly of the Beast, and The Tide of Years established the line as a premiere source for high quality adventures. As a result, I rushed out to purchase a copy of Maiden Voyage almost as soon as it hit the shelves of my local gameshop.

It doesn’t disappoint.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Maiden Voyage. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

In Maiden Voyage the PCs are hired on as guards for the Albers – a ship which is transporting a murderous sorcerer back to the city in which his crimes were committed (so that he can be tried, convicted, and executed).

But the sorcerer is not the most serious concern which will face the PCs on the voyage: A ghost ship manned by an undead crew sails the waters through which they will be passing. Placed under a terrible curse, the crew of the black-sailed vessel are forced to seek out other helpless victims, dragging them beneath the waves. Only when the curse has been passed on in this fashion will the former victims be free of their earthly damnation.

Over the course of four days at sea, the PCs must deal with murder, mutiny, and undead – each in turn, and often all at once.

STRENGTHS

Chad Brouillard, the author of Maiden Voyage, has built his adventure off of the structure created by Mike Mearls for In the Belly of the Beast. (See my review here.)

First, he provides a richly developed cast of NPCs – each with their own desires, goals, and personalities. Then he places them in a self-contained space (thus necessitating prolonged interaction). Finally, he introduces a number of significant threats and/or sources of tension – which are handled through a series of progressive, flexible “Events.”

Add your PCs and let simmer for six to eight hours of gameplay.

In my opinion, Brouillard is not quite as successful in the roleplaying aspects of Maiden Voyage as Mearls was with the roleplaying aspects of In the Belly of the Beast: The dramatic situations are not as crisply defined; the overall flow of events is not as smoothly handled; the lines of tension and competition in the cast of characters are not as clearly developed.

But if the jewel lacks some slight polish there, it makes up for it through superior action: A potential crew mutiny; a conniving, sorcerous murderer; a murder to solve; a foundering ship to explore; and undead to fight all combine to make this a highly memorable adventure.

WEAKNESSES

I have nothing to comment on, really, beyond a few minor nitpicks:

1. The text of the OGL boxed text is printed on a background which is slightly too dark. (I have been lead to understand that this was an unfortunate printer’s error. It is not a serious problem unless you’re playing the module in dim lighting. And, even then, you shouldn’t have too many problems.)

2. I would have liked to see a slightly more complex ship design – both for the Albers (the ship the PCs are on) and the Sea Maiden (the ghost ship). Having more rooms, nooks, and crannies on the Albers would have allowed for a greater sense of “people meeting in dark corners”, IMO. Similarly, having a more complicated exploration of the Sea Maiden would afforded opportunities for far horror and suspense in that section of the module.

3. The adventure is advertised for 1st to 3rd level characters. The nature of this adventure actually lends itself very easily to scaling for higher character levels, but this is only dealt with in a perfunctory manner within the module. I would have liked to see more specific guidelines laid out (a la Dungeon Magazine).

CONCLUSION

Maiden Voyage is excellent, and its extremely portable nature makes it an excellent filler adventure: If your PCs need to get from Point A to Point B via ship, then Maiden Voyage is perfect.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Chad Brouillard
Publisher: Atlas Games
Line: Penumbra
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 1-58978-003-5
Product Code: AG3206
Pages: 42

After the last 20+ reviews — which were all published in May 2001 as part of Justin Bacon Review Week at RPGNet — we have now skipped forward to October 2001. There might be a lesson in there about burn out and necessary refractory periods after pushing yourself to a climax, although I think what actually happened was I had a bunch of theater shows that were distracting me from RPG stuff for a while. As is often the case with my reviews, what motivated me was a book that truly got me EXCITED. I like sharing that excitement.

As far as I can tell, Chad Brouillard, the author of Maiden Voyage,  only wrote two adventures — both for Atlas Games — and then never published anything else. Which is really too bad, because Maiden Voyage is great. (I’ve somehow never read Chad’s other adventure. I should go and do that.)

In truth, Maiden Voyage is one of the most important adventures I’ve ever run. This is for entirely idiosyncratic reasons, but it was exactly the right module that I ran at exactly the right time to have a really outsized impact on how I prepped and ran adventures for many years. Truth be told, if you’ve read So You Want to Be a Game Master, then you’ve already been touched, albeit indirectly, by this lovely adventure.

And it really is the perfect adventure for dropping into literally any D&D sea voyage.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Shards of the Stone is a veritable tome – weighing in at 400 for the bargain price of $25. Every page is full of information, its production values are high, its premise interesting, and its potential seemingly limitless.

Review Originally Published in Games Unplugged (December 2000)
Reprinted at RPGNet – May 22nd, 2001

Before time and space existed, there were the Progenitors. These Progenitors gave to their Progeny – the fabled avatars of the five and twenty elements – the Stone. The Progeny were to imprint their values into the Stone, creating a mirror of perfection. But something went wrong – whether by design or accident is unknown – and the Progeny began to squabble. The Stone shattered into countless Shards, ruining the perfection of the world which had existed. The true world was smashed into splinters.

Shards of the Stone is a veritable tome – weighing in at 400 for the bargain price of $25. Every page is full of information, its production values are high, its premise interesting, and its potential seemingly limitless. Despite all this, though, I find myself with nagging doubts as far as this game is concerned. Too many errors of execution seem to flaw what would otherwise be a beautiful gem.

First the good stuff: The first fifty pages of Shards details a rich cosmology and world structure, setting firm foundations for future world design. The intention is that various “Realms” (created by the titular Shards of the Stone) will be detailed in subsequent world books over the course of the future, and eventually all of these Realms will be brought together – creating a dynamic atmosphere for adventure in the mixture of various fantasy archetypes. The rulebook as a whole – which uses the previously established FUZION system – is exceptional: Proving itself useful to both beginners and experienced players through a wealth of guidelines and campaign tools.

Although at first glance, the book looks really great, as you begin to take a closer look problems begin to appear: The overall structure of the book is well structured, but the page-by-page organization of the material leaves much to be desired – important rules are located in sidebars, which are placed with no seeming relation to the surrounding text; important charts are referenced as being in one place, but actually appear in a different location entirely; and so forth.

The FUZION system itself – which grew out of a synthesis of Hero and R. Talsorian’s Interlock System – has never proven itself to be as robust as its forefathers. A great deal of sound and fury is spent to accomplish very little – as if, whenever the designers realized they could do something in one step, they always chose to do it in two.

Far more worrisome, however, is the absence of setting material. Although the general cosmology of the universe is explained in copious and fascinating detail, the FUZION engine chews up so much space that even in a 400 page book like this you’re still left with no practical information for actually running a game.

Which wouldn’t be quite so large a problem if the promised support material were available. Unfortunately – despite hyping the “future of gaming in the 21^st century” through their “advanced” use of their website to foster a community around the game – two months have passed since GenCon and the website still hasn’t been updated. Nor has a single supplement been released.

Shards of the Stone shows a lot of promise, and is probably worth the cover price if the concept interests you at all. Unfortunately, it simply breaks too many of its own promises to receive the ringing endorsement it should have earned.

Grade: B

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Writers: Sean Patrick Fannon, Matt Forbeck, Dan McGirt
Publisher: Obsidian Studios
Price: $25.00
Page Count: 384
ISBN: 0-9674429-1-5
Product Code: OBS1000

It turned out that Shards of the Stone would not, in fact, fulfill its promises. They had an all-star line-up of designers ready to go, but as far as I know, no Realm books were ever produced, leaving the handsome Core book as, basically, a handsome paperweight. I suspect that they were hoping the core rulebook would sell like gangbusters, giving them enough money to produce more books. (A rather common tragedy in the RPG industry.) It probably would have done rather well in the era of crowdfunding, where they might have funded a whole line of books from the get-go.

A version of the book is available on DriveThruRPG, but reputedly the FUZION system has been ripped out and crudely replaced with some other set of mechanics. InterStrike, the current publisher, has also failed to produce any of the necessary supplements.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Review Originally Published in Games Unplugged (August 2000)
Republished at RPGNet – May 22nd, 2001

Robin D. Laws is the esteemed designer of Feng Shui and Hero Wars, among sundry other games of high quality. Hogshead Publishing’s New Style line of games has included games such as Baron Munchausen and Puppetland, which have met with great critical acclaim. What happens when the two of them come together?

Pantheon. Five roleplaying games, under a single cover, of a curiously different sort.

The five games in question are Grave and Watery, Boardroom Blitz, The Big Hole, Destroy All Buildings, and Pantheon itself – each of which is based on the Narrative Cage Match (NCM) system.

What’s the NCM like? Think of it as a splicing of Once Upon a Time and Baron Munchausen, with a dash of Amber and Puppetland thrown into the mix. Like many of the other New Style games, the NCM is a storytelling game in the truest sense of the word – a system which doesn’t just talk about using traditional systems in order to create a story, but a set of rules which actually serves to focus the game session on the joint creation of such.

Basically it works like this: Each NCM game takes the form of a storytelling scenario – complete with plot seeds, goals, and characters. The degree of detail given varies depending on the particular game. For example, Boardroom Blitz has a Set-Up (detailing the fight to inherit the fortune of Dash MacMillan) and a Cast of Characters (from which the players can select their characters and gain insight into the supporting cast). The Big Hold, on the other hand, gives you a Set-Up and an Opening Scene (where the action starts), but doesn’t detail a specific Cast of Characters (leaving character creation up to the players).

Now here’s where it takes a turn off the beaten path: There is no GM in Pantheon. Instead gameplay begins when the first player submits a sentence. Play then proceeds to the second player, who submits another sentence, and so forth. This basic device is then complicated by a challenge system in which a combination of bidding counters and dice rolling will allow one player to rewrite the sentence submitted by another player. Eventually the story comes to an end (either because all the characters except one are dead, or because only one player has any bidding counters left) – at which point players score points based on the actions their characters accomplished (or failed to accomplish) during the course of the story. The winner, of course, is the player who has scored the most points.

Conceptually this is a really powerful system – not only can an endless variety of scenarios be plugged into it, but almost any given scenario can be played either humorously or seriously depending on which direction the players decide to take it. It is also a very different type of roleplaying game, which may leave open the question in the minds of some whether it is a roleplaying game or not.

The answer to that is an emphatic yes. On the one hand the game is clearly designed so that you assume and play a specific role. The methods by which that role is presented are very different from those used in a “traditional” RPG, but that merely means that a different set of creative skills are being used (with all the resultant changes in the types of stories you can tell). On the other hand, this is clearly a game – complete with goal-oriented awards. The fact that Pantheon is a different breed is a definite strength, not some sort of hidden weakness.

Unfortunately, the system does have its share of flaws in practice. Games with small groups can easily be ruined by an obnoxious player – primarily because the rules can easily be stretched to absurdity without actually breaking (run-on sentences, for example). The challenge system provides some recourse for this, but in a small group it becomes very easy for a single player to end up with more bidding chips than everyone else combined – essentially making it a cakewalk for them to force their distorted gameplay into continuity. This is particularly true since the mechanics of the bidding system make it inevitable for a consistently obnoxious player to amass more chips than everyone else (since the only person who sacrifices their chips are those who win challenges, if a person is consistently obnoxious – and therefore other people are challenging him to keep him in line – he is eventually going to have more chips than the other players).

Larger groups, on the other hand, tend to be more stable – but at the cost of some flexibility in character interactions (if there are always four or five sentences between you and another player, it becomes difficult for your two characters to meaningfully interact when all of the PCs are together). I also felt that the rules should have specifically addressed dialogue. Specifically: Just how constricted is the dialogue of our characters by the “one sentence” rule? And if it is constricted, then doesn’t that end up distorting character presentation?

Although these seem, at first glance, to be glaring problems, in practice they ended up being fairly minor concerns. The complications of large group interactions, for example, were overcome with a little practice and cooperation. The ability for a single player to ruin a small group game, on the other hand, is more troubling – but when push comes to shove, this isn’t really a game you want to be playing with those type of people, anyway. On the other hand, if a little more forethought had gone into the design of the rules (for example, by taking run-on sentences and dialogue into account) this would be a less pressing issue.

At the end of the day, though, there can be only one conclusion: Hogshead and Robin D. Laws have struck gold again. Pantheon is a solid kick in the pants of the traditional RPG form, and is pure fun through and through. Whether you play it with your tongue in your cheek or in pursuit of high pathos, this one’s definitely worth taking the time to check out.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Designer: Robin D. Laws
Publisher: Hogshead Publishing, Ltd.
Price: $5.95
Page Count: 24
ISBN: 1-899749-25-X

The New Style games from Hogshead Publishing, although mostly forgotten today, are some of the most important narrative tabletop games every published. James Wallis, the founder of Hogshead, was a visionary and he deserves a lot more credit that he gets for laying the groundwork that the Forge and the indie RPG movement would start building on a few years later.

Pantheon is devilishly difficult to get your hands on today. Which is unfortunate, it lay the groundwork for a lot of Robin D. Laws’ later work with storytelling games, including the DramaSystem. Some time after writing this review, I had the chance to play in a session moderated by Laws at Gen Con, and that was really special for me as a young fan and creator.

See the note on my 1999 review of Baron Munchausen for how my thoughts on roleplaying games, storytelling games, and narrative tabletop games were being challenged here, eventually evolving into a much more robust understanding of the medium(s). You might also enjoy checking out my near-contemporary article “Hog Wild – The New Style of Hogshead Publishing.”

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

You need this book in order to play Lejendary Adventures. You have my sympathies.

Review Originally Published in Games Unplugged Webzine – July 14th, 2000
Republished at RPGNet – May 22nd, 2001

Gygax, who you can always count on to deliver by the bushel, has crammed a ton of material between the covers of this book – over two hundred densely-packed pages give you details on over 500 creatures. Unfortunately almost all of this material can be characterized by a blandness that is truly depressing to behold, compounded with poor execution, sloppy design, and a host of inconsistencies.

The creatures themselves combine both an astounding lack of originality with an incredibly shallow depth of coverage. For example, centaurs are expanded into a family of three different creatures – with the bucentaur and stacentaur replacing the equine portions of their anatomy with other animals. Unfortunately, the book neglects to tell us what animals the bucentaur and stacentaur are derived from, instead opting to throw at us a plethora of numbers.

Opening the book to any given page will leave you instantly confused: Dense text is made nearly unparseable thanks to the fact that nearly identical fonts were used for both headings and sub-headings. Pictures of the creatures are strewn haphazardly, sometimes appearing on entirely different pages from the descriptions of the creatures themselves (and some creatures, usually the ones most in need of them, seem to be lacking pictures entirely). The listing practices for information are inconsistent – sometimes with information appearing only in the chart at the beginning of a section; sometimes only in the creature’s description; and sometimes in both. Some entries refer to other entries which, as far as I can tell, simply don’t exist.

Adding to this confusion, Gygax has repeated his old trick of pulling mythological names out of a hat and then randomly creating new creatures with little or no connection to the original entities that bore those names. To this bag of tricks he has also added some new ones: For example, there is the Gryf, and then there is the Gryffon. Both are creatures created by mixing up the parts of lions and giant birds, but the former is used to describe the mixture that every other fantasy game in existence describes as a “griffon”.

Mixed in amongst this chaos of chaff are some genuinely worthy bits and interesting concepts: The section on Dragons and the section on Living Dead, in particular, are first-rate idea mines.

But don’t be fooled: This one just ain’t gonna fly. Pass it by.

As with Lejend Master’s Lore, Hekaforge Productions has expertly kept the price of this book a deeply concealed secret. The Illuminati itself is not privileged to know this information.

Grade: C

Writer: Gary Gygax
Publisher: Hekaforge Productions
Page Count: 202
ISBN: 1-930377-06-1

Bucentaurs have the hindquarters of an ox. They’re a “real” creature from medieval literature. Stacentaurs? Your guess is as good as mine. (I’m guessing the hindquarters of a deer; i.e., a stag-centaur.) 

The bit at the end about pricing was due to the complete lack of MSRP. The price wasn’t listed on the book. It also wasn’t listed on the publisher’s website. Neither I nor Games Unplugged could get an intended price from the publisher. I believe Games Unplugged eventually got a “cover” price ($24.95) when the book appeared in distribution catalogs.

Over the years I’ve sampled many of Gygax’s post-D&D games. Describing them as “unplayable drek” would, frankly, be doing them a kindness. Some of their faults can be laid at the feet of the increasingly byzantine measures Gygax would take in an effort not to be sued by TSR, who were apparently terrified that the cult of personality around Gygax could pose a meaningful threat to D&D’s popularity. But for the most part they were just fundamentally bad.

When I was younger, I would wonder, “How could he possibly be running this stuff?”

When I got older, I realized that the ultimate root of the problem was that he wasn’t.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Brindlewood Bay is a delightful Powered by the Apocalypse mystery storytelling game where no one knows the solution until somebody makes it up. It combines classic mystery TV shows like Murder She Wrote, Twin Peaks, Remington Steele, Columbo, and Magnum PI with Lovecraftian Mythos. Solve Agatha Christie-like cozy mysteries while the the Midwives of the Fragrant Void slowly unravel your reality.

Featuring Kristina Fjellman as super sleuth Amanda Delacourt. Visit Kristina at kristinafjellman.com.

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