Bastionjam Showcase: Cosmic Orrery - Odd Beings

Some of us from the Eclectic Bastionjam decided to do a "showcase", where we'd take a look at each others' works and present them on our blogs or elsewhere. As part of this showcase, I will be reviewing one of Cosmic Orrery's entries: Odd Beings

I really enjoyed this book. I am a sucker for good bestiaries, and this fits that bill. It is short and sweet, each entry feels evocative, and fitting to the setting, but not so specific that they couldn't be used in other settings, and each adds something interesting. These aren't just statblocks and reskinned goblins. Each entry has a unique hook; they are self-contained adventure seeds, unique ways for your players to interact with the game. I'll comment on a few of my favorites below:


Parasitic Shop
This is the second entry. It's basically a mimic, if instead of mimicking a single piece of equipment or a chest, it mimicked the entire shop! One could very easily turn this into an entire quest, baked into some kind of mystery or investigation, with the shop itself leading to a hidden, oozey dungeon (which Cosmic Orrery strongly implies in the text).

Ghost Parliament
Clearly, I am a fan of afterlife courts. The ghost parliament could be a fun way to have your cake and eat it too, in regards to character death. A character dying doesn't have to be the end of that character, but the beginning of a quest to rescue them from death. But making it a court, rather than just an evil dungeon, gives the party so many more ways to approach the conflict. Or, they can just get into a courtroom brawl.

Paperman/Matchstick Boy
These are two separate entries, and on their own they're each interesting in their own right, but they fit together in a way that is not stated explicitly, but to me seems as though it must have been intentional (they were placed back-to-back). You could imagine a story of a paperman, like a robot or AI, emerging from a wealthy manor, learning and growing alongside a sickly child with a cold and standoff-ish family, their only friends prior to the paperman being the characters in the novels they've read in their extensive library. Oppositely, a troubled child from the other side of the tracks meets a matchstick boy, who preys on their fear, anger, and hurt, leading them on a path towards evil. Somehow, someway, the two meet and bring some sort of fulfillment to each other's lives. In the meantime, hijinks ensue, the city drowning in compromising letters once thought lost, and of course, fires run rampant.

Gamma Knights Review

I am terrible at writing reviews, but even so, I think I'm going to try. This is my review for Gamma Knights, a supplement for Gamma World 4e. Gamma Knights includes new content for Power Armors in Gamma World 4e, in addition to being its own wargame. Below are a few caveats for the review (in addition to me being terrible at writing it).

• This review is just for the RPG supplement content, not the wargame content. It seems like it might be a fine wargame, that just doesn't interest me personally at the moment and I didn't read it thoroughly. 
• This review is of the pdf, purchased on drivethrurpg during the 2019 black friday / cyber monday sale.
• I have not read Gamma World 4e in a while, which I also purchased as a pdf on drivethrurpg at some point, but from what I vaguely remember it is more or less compatible with D&D 2e and by extension most OSR. 
• I have not played this supplement nor any version of Gamma World, although I have incorporated some elements of Gamma World into my campaigns at various points, most notably in my first Phantasmos campaign. In other words, this review is not from in-use experience, just of the book and my impressions of how it might play.

What is Gamma World?

For those of you who don't know what Gamma World is, it's a post-apocalyptic (arguably post-post-apocalyptic) science fantasy setting, arguably THE post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting. It's usually tongue in cheek, with plenty of references to the real world. You have mutants of all kinds, uplifted animals and plants, robots, and high-tech humanoids. It's Weird & Wonderful and it's a shame that it's never come close to the same level of popularity as it's sibling D&D (it was originally created by TSR and is currently owned by Wizards of the Coast). It's inspirations can be felt all over the OSR though, and even videogames like Fallout or Borderlands.

Visuals, layout, and pdf quality

Sometimes the pdfs of these older games are really low quality scans. Granted I read it on my brand new microsoft surface pro 7 which I also bought for black friday because I'm that guy, but it ran well and looked good. The text has been parsed from the page and can be searched and copied, not sure about bookmarks and stuff since I don't really bother with that anyway (I have a onenote file where I keep all my bookmarks anyway).

The layout is nice. It's simple and a little dense, but that's pretty typical of books of its era, or so it seems to me. I was pleasantly impressed by the art. It's black and white and has that old school cartoony charm, but it's well done and the designs were more interesting than I expected. Even though Gamma World is in many ways the archetypal post-apocalyptic science fantasy, I do think it has a certain unique identity of its own, and it comes through in the Gamma Knights art.

Writing and Clarity

It's a bit dense and overwritten, sometimes obfuscating important information with needless detail or getting deep into minutia or blending discussion of mechanics and setting in ways that I personally dislike. That being said, I generally found it to be well written and relatively clear. Despite the mechanics being a bit more fiddly than I'd like, they do a good job of explaining how it all works and making it make intuitive sense. All of the parts of the power armors are explained, with light mechanical explanation, before really getting into the meat of things, which I think was smart. That being said, I would have preferred if they had included an even higher-level overview, very briefly explaining all the parts and how the power armors work in one concise section, maybe a few paragraphs at most.

Mechanics

The mechanics of the power armors are a little more fiddly than I'd like, but I'm intrigued. A lot of the faux-realism fiddlyness can be easily ignored, and most of the mechanical fiddlyness that is there seems logical and fun. While I generally prefer rules-light games that stay out of my way and don't pack all that my character can do in a tight build, I do like to "build" a mech, and it's a nice way to differentiate mechs / power armors from regular play.

They provide a reasonable number of pre-made power armors (Standard Armor Suits) which can be used as a good point of reference. They don't explicitly have a section for different power armor chassis which seems weird, but one can simple take the chassis of the pre-made power armors and re-spec the slots.

The power armors have a base AC and a number of slots, for head, left arm, right arm, front plate, back plate, left leg, and right leg. Certain mods (I don't think they ever provide a specific terminology for all gear so I'm calling them mods, but I could be misremembering) can only be placed in certain locations, and also any given mod must be able to fit within the entirety of that location (e.g. a mod that requires three slots can't be placed on the back plate if there are only two slots left). In addition, most mods require power, so the power armor must have quantum processing units (QPCs) to power those parts. A power armor doesn't need to have enough QPCs to power all their mods at once, they can switch them on and off. The slots system is exactly what I want from a mech supplement, and the power part at first seemed like the kind of thing I'd find annoying, but actually the impracticality of having all mods powered at once, and having to think about when to switch them on and off, actually seems like it could be fun and not just fiddlyness for the sake of fiddlyness.

Tables

While there are some useful tables in the back, and also for the mods for each section, there is annoyingly not a section where all the mods tables are collected together. Also, while the pre-made power armors include the location and power demand of each mod, they don't include the number of slots for each mod. Maybe it was a formatting thing that they couldn't fit it, but it's very annoying that it's not there. This issue with the tables is probably my single biggest issue with the book, but even so it's not too bad, it just could be better. Note that the tables at the front of the book are for the wargame, not the RPG (or at least, so I can tell...).

The "Mods"

The mods are broken into sensors, which generally provide sensory and attack bonuses, defensive options which provide defensive bonuses and healing/repair, weapons (melee, ranged, missile, grenade), locomative assist options which give movement bonuses, and strength enhancements which provide unarmed damage bonuses and increased carrying capacity.

The mods are all surprisingly interesting, both in terms of flavor and mechanics. The autosurgeon defensive option seems to predict research in neuroimmunology that I don't think existed yet when this book was written. There are multiple kinds of force fields and they have various benefits and flaws and counterbalances that all seem tactically interesting and evoke a sense of being in a power armor. As do the mechanics for computer systems and computer-assisted actions. The weapons are also surprisingly interesting; the flavor text for the Mark XII Blaster elevates it to something more than just a generic scifi gun.

All of that being said, this all seems like the kind of thing that could just... not work. Like, it reads well on the page and sounds interesting, but in practice I could see it being really difficult to plan for as a GM, difficult to keep track of as a player, and slow down combat or any tactical maneuvering to a boring crawl, like the grating of rusting metal plates against each other. I don't think I can say for sure without trying. If nothing else, it's all inspiring.

So What Do I Think About Gamma Knights?

If nothing else, it was an entertaining and inspiring read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in incorporating power armors into their OSR game. They suggest that power armors should be rare and limited within the Gamma World setting, but this begs to be at the center of a campaign. Given how powerful the power armors are, one could easily scale up these power armors into mechs, without even necessarily touching the mechanics, besides maybe just units of measurement for movements.

I am skeptical about whether or not some of the mechanics like the force fields or computers would actually be fun, but they're also some of the more interesting ideas. However, if nothing else, this book makes me want to play / run a Gamma Knights game, or at least make a power armor / mech OSR or TNT hack inspired by this, but stripped down. If you've played this or have read it and have thoughts of your own, please let me know! I hope this review inspires others to check it out and give it a shot, or make something like it.

Yellow Dawn: Dog Eat Dog Review

This is my second book review for the Yellow Dawn setting, the first being Black Lake. Yellow Dawn is a really cool setting that's sort of post-apocalypse, post-cyberpunk, and Lovecraftian but with many original mythos-style entities in addition to the pre-existing Lovecraftian lore. The game is designed for Call of Cthulhu / Basic Roleplaying, and the 3rd edition was going to be based on the current version of CoC. Unfortunately, the creator of the game and setting committed suicide several years ago, and the book was never published, despite being almost complete. I've been trying to see if the manuscript can be recovered and if this game can one day be published, so I've been reading the novels set within Yellow Dawn and reviewing them in order to bring awareness to this creator. I hope this will inspire others to make a push to get this book recovered / published.

Dog Eat Dog Review

This review may contain minor spoilers. It is intended as a broad-level discussion of the book and not a detailed plot synopsis.

    So, I liked Black Lake a fair bit. I felt like that book told a solid story in the vein of stories like At the Mountains of Madness or The Thing, but back-loaded too much of the setting and lore. Dog Eat Dog also feels rooted in a genre, in this case in the vein of gritty political thrillers such as the Bourne series or the grittier Bond stuff.
    Compared to Black Lake, this book feels much more deeply tied to the setting. The political factions that drive the plot of the book are all part of the lore of the setting, as are the Living Cities in this post-cyberpunk, post-apocalypse world. To me, this book confirmed some of what I felt Black Lake alluded to about the setting, which is that despite being a cyberpunk Lovecraftian post-apocalypse, it's surprisingly optimistic. The corporate conglomerate that had basically controlled the world in the cyberpunk era has been largely overtaken by a new global democratic government, and humanity seems on its way to stability and rebuilding in the wake of the disasters of the Yellow Dawn event. I really like this setting; for as familiar as it is in some ways, it has some interesting wrinkles, and I wish more cyberpunk or post-apocalypse settings were as thoughtful and well-realized.
    That being said, the book itself is... ok. It's written well enough, it follows two characters, one a government agent and the other an enforcer-type in the criminal underworld, and their reasonably likable characters, for being unlikable people. I think Carlos, the government agent / "good guy" comes off worse, in part because his motivations seem a little awkward (he's got major daddy issues), and in part because there were times where I couldn't tell if Rodger was making him intentionally unlikable, or if I was reading into something he hadn't consciously intended for the character. Mikhail, the criminal enforcer, is a bad dude, but as a result I'm more willing to accept when he says or does some really sexist or otherwise bad stuff. Both characters rely on being "clever", and I think mostly succeed (something easier said than done), but I definitely think Mikhail, despite being an enforcer-type, ultimately read like the more clever one.
    The plot involves labyrinthine political schemes that can be difficult to keep track of since there are so many acronyms for setting-specific organizations or events, but on the whole I found that even when I was losing track, it didn't really affect my enjoyment of the story either way. The writing is solid, but I think this book really suffered from a meandering plot. If it seems like I'm being vague, that's in part because I'm just not a detail-oriented person, but also because there really isn't anything cohesive to hang the hat on in trying to explain the plot of this book. It felt like the first 80% of the book was just spinning its wheels to get to the last 20%, and as with Black Lake, I would have preferred if the supernatural elements and lore and been more evenly distributed. It almost felt like the book was written to be a TV show, and I think it would have worked better if it had been written in a more explicitly episodic way, with a full narrative arc across each of the story arcs that ultimately get the book to that last 20%. To make it work as a single narrative, literally the majority of the book could have been cut, just going from the first 10% or so right to the last 20%, and then that could have been expanded upon. The book just tried to do too much without consideration for how it all comes together.
 
So with all that being said, if I'm being honest it's hard for me to strongly recommend this book, but if nothing else, it not only did not diminish my interest in the setting, but actually has me even more interested. I would feel really bad if somebody read this review and as a result were less interested in Yellow Dawn as a setting. The plot was a bit of a mess, but the world was not. I would have liked to have met David J. Rodger and talked to him about the setting and about the characters in this book. I have very... complex and conflicted feelings about this, but if you're reading this and have any thoughts of suicide or depression, please at least call a hotline, or seek professional help. I imagine Rodger had so much more to say, but unfortunately what he's given the world is all we're going to get, so even though I didn't love this book, I still appreciate it for the rare insight into the mind of an interesting person, someone who maybe could have been my friend, someone who is no longer with us. 

Yellow Dawn: Black Lake Review

 

    Yellow Dawn is a Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic near future scifi tabletop RPG campaign setting. Black Lake is one of several novels David J Rodger wrote within his Yellow Dawn setting. I should preface this by saying that I have not played the game or read the setting book.
    In 2015, David J Rodger was working on a 3rd edition of the game, and had supposedly completed a first draft of it, but soon after committed suicide. The 3rd edition was never released.
    2015 was around the time I was first starting to explore the greater RPG scene online and expose myself to new games, and this came on my radar. It was scifi, it was Lovecraftian, but most interesting to me was that other than Hastur (the Yellow in Yellow Dawn) and  few others, most of the Lovecraftian entities were original creations. I can appreciate the classics as much as anyone, but I've already read Lovecraft; when I see an original campaign setting, I want it to be something actually new.
    It intrigued me, but I wanted to wait for the 3rd edition, which never came, and then it just fell off my radar. Every once in a while I would post around reddit or elsewhere asking about it, to no avail. Even the 2.5 edition is not available on drivethrurpg or digitally elsewhere. It's available on lulu for print on demand, and I may end up buying it eventually, even though I generally prefer digital, but anyway all of his novels are available on kindle, so I bought his three books set in the world of Yellow Dawn. Apparently all of his novels are set in a shared universe and it's just a matter of whether they're pre- or post-Yellow Dawn, so I'll probably pick up the others eventually.
    If I'm being honest, there's more to this than just that it intrigued me. He wrote several novels, he wrote 3 (if you count 2.5) or 4 (if you count the unfinished 3rd edition) RPG books, as well as several blog articles and free online supplements, and he also wrote professionally on other projects. He is a more accomplished creator than I will likely ever be, both in terms of the quantity of creative output and in its commercial success and cultural impact. I don't know why he committed suicide, maybe it had nothing to do with his writing or career, but he killed himself, and nobody bothered to publish his apparently mostly finished 3rd Edition game. I don't mean to blame anyone, there may be logistical reasons why this couldn't have been published or would be exorbitantly difficult to publish, but all the same, he's dead, and it's like his creative vision immediately died with him, and that makes me sad.
    So despite the fact that I have absolutely no memory for details, I'm going to try to write a brief review of his novel Black Lake. I hope this brings attention to him and his world. I hope this can get a conversation going, and maybe his materials can be made available digitally (and by extension more affordably) and maybe his 3rd Edition can finally get published in some capacity or another.
    I've never played Call of Cthulhu or the Basic Roleplaying System, and generally don't like to GM pre-existing settings (my favorite part about RPGs is worldbuilding after all), but I would be willing to learn CoC/BRP to run or play in a game, even if it wasn't entirely set in Yellow Dawn per se, that incorporated elements of Rodger's world. To be honest, I don't really have much faith in my ability to impact the RPG culture on my own, and maybe it's selfish or childish or unrealistic to even want that, but in any case, if I can't do it for myself, I would at least like to do it for someone else, and I guess maybe I'm hoping we can all be champions of each other. If I suddenly fell off a cliff, I'd like to think maybe someone would do this for me.

Black Lake Review

This review may contain minor spoilers. It is intended as a broad-level discussion of the book and not a detailed plot synopsis.

    Black Lake follows a team of scientists/explorers hired to investigate an unusual meteorological phenomenon on an Arctic Island north of Scotland. On the island, eldritch forces slowly drive them mad. It falls in line with Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, or the film The Thing. The book is written entirely from the perspective of one of the scientists. Given the isolated nature of the island, much of the Yellow Dawn setting is merely in the background. Rodger does a good job of realizing the setting through the plot and through the technologies available to the team, with relatively minimal (or at least minimally obtrusive) exposition.
    On the one hand, I was a little disappointed that the book was so removed from what I imagine is the core of the setting, but on the other hand, what we do learn about the setting from this book succeeded in making me interested to learn more. I appreciate the fact that while it is post-apocalyptic, it doesn't revel in the escapist fantasy of "reverting to a simpler time". The zombie genre was originally intended as a critique of mindless consumerism, which makes it so ironic and gross that much of the post-apocalyptic zombie literature today is itself so lacking in self-awareness. In fact, the world as it is presented in this book almost feels optimistic, more like an equivalent to the early industrial era.
    They have all sorts of near-future technologies, but with such a relatively low population and poor global infrastructure, there is a sense of the unknown, and wonder, and even danger, although by and large people must still deal with the realities of civilization and day-to-day life. While it's not impossible to do truly post-apocalyptic horror (existential or otherwise), I think juxtaposing a world of promise with existential horror makes the horror more salient. I was worried that Yellow Dawn was going to be just another zombie setting by another name, but that does not seem to be the case.
    The writing itself was solid. It didn't blow me away, but it was rare that the writing got in its own way. It felt similar to Laird Barron. I can't honestly say it's as strong as Laird Barron, but that's a high bar and this should be taken as praise. He also describes the technologies and scenes well, without over-writing. I could tell that he was interested in the hard scifi / near-future technological aspect of the setting, but whereas many writers get fetishistic about it or overly detailed, he provides just the right amount of detail to enrich the world without dragging on about it.
    Considering the limited scope of the island setting and the small handful of characters, he manages to keep the plot moving and keep things interesting. It starts off a bit slow, but basically everything after they get to the island is entertaining and engaging, even when not much is happening. He plays well with tension, building and releasing and re-building it in organic ways. I rarely feel a sense of dread or horror when I read horror stories, but this book got me as close to that feeling as I've felt from a novel in quite a while.
    If I had one major complaint, it's that he provides a (comparatively) major exposition / lore-dump towards the end of the book. It certainly whet my appetite for the setting, but I wish that lore had been spread out over the course of the book, more like At the Mountains of Madness. Likewise, none of that lore meaningfully contributed to the plot or the eldritch threat, making the exposition dump feel even more out of place. I think he would have been better off either leaving the lore out entirely and letting the eldritch threat be vague and mysterious, or connected the eldritch threat and the lore in a way that felt more substantive.
    So with all that, I would say that on the whole, if you like Lovecraftian horror or stories about isolation, I would recommend this book. If you're interested in learning more about the Yellow Dawn setting, it'll give you some details but it's not the most efficient way to go about it. It doesn't do anything new, but it does what it intends to do well. Being a part of an interesting setting, even if only tangentially, I think works to its benefit. I've already started reading one of his other novels, Dog Eat Dog, so I suppose that alone speaks to my enjoyment of this book.

So with all that said, I would encourage others to read his books and to talk about their experiences with the game. Please, if you know anyone or know anyone who may know someone who could maybe get this published, please let me know! I'd love to see Yellow Dawn 2.5 on drivethrurpg at least, or Yellow Dawn 3e released in some capacity. I'd even be open to trying to put together some kind of indiegogo or kickstarter if money is a problem, assuming it at least exists somewhere. I've also downloaded most of the pdf game supplements on his website and even converted the raw HTML of some of his game supplement blog posts into text files, just in case his website ever gets pulled, or just to make it easier to compile everything later. If this is something you would like to see happen, please speak out!