In Liberty’s Shadow: Taking the Rivers Across the Sea

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, Rivers of London, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

In Liberty’s Shadow is really the first truly chunky supplement for Rivers of London, Chaosium’s RPG based on the urban fantasy series created by Ben Aaronovitch; the game’s had a few scenarios come out for it as well, but other than that players and referees have had to make do with the core book, their imaginations, and the admittedly fairly thick stack of Rivers novels when it comes to material for the game prior to this supplement coming out.

The default assumption of the core Rivers of London rulebook book is that PCs will be members of the Folly – a group that’s one half secret society, one half obscure Metropolitan Police department, which focuses its efforts on providing community policing to London’s “demi-monde”, the local occult subculture whose nature is subtly shaped by the esoteric geography of the city. That’s a very specific focus, both in terms of what player characters are likely to be getting up to and the geographic scope of their exploits, but that also tracks with the focus of the series. The full-length Rivers of London novels which form the backbone of the series are very much focused on Peter Grant and his work, which almost entirely takes place in the UK and only occasionally strays outside London. Things get more diffuse in the penumbra of expanded media around the series, which includes short stories, novellas, an upcoming TV show (assuming it doesn’t die somewhere in development hell as TV shows often do), and a graphic novel series co-written with Aaronovitch’s old Doctor Who buddy Andrew Cartmel; some of the expanded media stories have touched on other parts of the world, focused on characters other than Grant, or explored periods prior to the present day. Even then, these are very much occasional exceptions.

Given the core book’s strong focus on the Folly and London, one might think the natural first significant supplement to do would be a “rest of Britain” book. Although the Met doesn’t have UK-wide jurisdiction, it’s still well-placed to lend help to other forces, and Folly PCs aren’t necessarily Met officers in the RPG since the Folly does have civilian consultants. As a result, you’d expect to be able to set Rivers of London scenarios elsewhere in Britain with reasonable ease – the consultant PCs aren’t really disadvantaged by being outside London, and any police officer PCs can be “on secondment” to a local force (the Folly perhaps pulling a few esoteric strings to help this along) for the duration of a scenario. Aaronovitch has done entire novels in the series set in other areas of the UK – I believe the latest one takes place in Aberdeen – so he’s probably got a deep bench of notes on the wider occult geography of Britain, and the rest can be cooked up from urban legend, weird bits of true history, and a sprinkling of folk horror.

As such, In Liberty’s Shadow is a bit more of a departure than I expected, focused as it is on fleshing out the demi-monde of the USA and the various groups that interact with it. This isn’t entirely untouched territory for the series; Aaronovitch has done an entire novella set in 1920s New York, and in the present day of the series there’s an FBI agent who helps out Peter Grant sometimes. Even then, it still feels like a supplement which falls mostly outside the scope of both the default assumptions of the core rulebook and the usual scope of the novel series.

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Is the Doctor Who RPG Fading Away Into the Vortex?

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Cubicle 7, Doctor Who, Edition Warrior Bullshit, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Vortex System2 Comments

A few weeks back I was browsing the Cubicle 7 website and saw that they had a big sale ongoing for their hardcopy books for their Doctor Who RPG – as in the second edition core rulebook was going for £16, with the PDF bundled in, which is £6.33 less than they’re selling the PDF of the core rulebook (first or second edition) for on DriveThruRPG. In fact, there’s really steep discounts on physical product across the entire line – including the Doctors & Daleks books which adapt the game to the D&D 5E system – which makes me strongly suspect that Cubicle 7 are expecting to lose the licence and are trying to get rid of their old stock.

It would not be enormously shocking if this were the case. The second edition – heavily branded around the Thirteenth Doctor era – came out in 2021 and after that has had a fairly desultory amount of support compared to the extensive releases that were put out for the first edition, which emerged in 2009, went through three distinct printings (for the Tenth, Eleventh. and Twelfth Doctors), and had a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks put out for it, including a multi-volume series covering each of the first twelve Doctors’ eras respectively and guides for running campaigns based around UNIT or the Paternoster Gang. Oh, sure, there’s also been the Doctors & Daleks product line, but taking a big-name licence of theirs and repackaging it for 5E D&D seems to be Cubicle 7’s standard move if the licence in question of theirs allows it and they don’t expect to have enormous amounts of time left on it – see how they put out Adventures In Middle-Earth towards the end of their custodianship of The One Ring, and those books have largely been quick repackaging of second edition materials.

Between this and the lack of any content playing on the 60th Anniversary specials or the Ncuti Gatwa era, it certainly seems like the Doctor Who RPG simply isn’t that much of a priority for Cubicle 7 any more – particularly when they’re also quite busy with a range of Warhammer RPGs (two Old World-based ones, one Age of Sigmar-themed one, and two Warhammer 40,000 ones), and are also gearing up to put out a new edition of their The Laundry RPG based on Charles Stross’ eldritch espionage series.

This seems to be the curious doom of official Doctor Who RPGs – despite in principle being a choice bit of IP to build a game around, the franchise seems to have struggled to find a licensee who’ll actually make a major priority of making a success of an RPG based on the show. FASA basically treated it like the neglected, unwanted step-sibling of its Star Trek RPG, to the point where they basically used a reskinned version of their Star Trek system for it despite it being a poor fit. Virgin Books put out Time Lord at around the same time they kicked off the New Adventures novels, but it’s pretty obvious that that was a little self-indulgent treat Peter Darvill-Evans let himself have rather than something they were going to seriously support. And now the Cubicle 7 line seems to have spent the last few years in a state of managed decline.

But there was that brief little window when Cubicle 7 were going all-put to support it – an era when the line genuinely seemed to be doing well, had plenty of material coming out for it, and was getting critical plaudits, which has all come crashing down. It might be tempting to blame Chris Chibnall for this – goodness knows you can blame him for an awful lot of other stuff, given the absolute and total hash he made of the Thirteenth Doctor era. (And no, I’m not one of those people who think Chibnall botched the era from the start by casting a woman – in fact, I think his strongest season as showrunner was his first, the one when he was most overtly and consciously trying to follow a progressive agenda and showcase diversity, and part of the downfall of his era was the way all of that started to bleed away in favour of nostalgic bilge.) Having the core rulebook of the game be quite so heavily branded around an era which was so heavily rejected by many audience members (those who were still watching, at any rate) can hardly have helped.

However, I think Cubicle 7 made some unforced errors of their own with this edition of the game which can’t be attributed to Chibnall. Both editions of the game credit David F. Chapman as their lead writer, and both at least claim to be powered by the Vortex System, a bespoke game engine also designed by Chapman. However, the changes between the first edition (in its three distinct forms) and the second edition have taken what was a fairly solidly-designed if unexceptional little system and added some seriously wonky aspects to it – and on top of that, it’s flat-out changed the way action resolution rolls are interpreted, a change so fundamental that it’s really stretching the definition to claim that they both operate off the back of the same system. As it happens, I picked up a Humble Bundle package comprising PDFs of a large chunk of the first edition line a while back, so I’m in a position to compare here, and the results aren’t pretty.

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Sloppy New Year, RPG Fans!

On By ArthurIn D&D 5E, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Date Night, Gaming Community Drama, RPG Maps Forge, Tabletop RPGs, Urban Realms (formerly known as RPG Tools)1 Comment

So, it’s the last day of what has been a fairly slow 2025 on this blog – I’m expecting things to pick up in the New Year – but I just had to jump on to discuss something I discovered today and mildly infuriates me, in part because it’s evidence of some seriously grifty behaviour on the part of some RPG publishers and in part because it’s one example of a broader problem.

The Enigma

Every so often, Facebook’s advert engine will bombard folk with a bunch of adverts for the same particular thing – probably coinciding with someone bunging them some money to boost their ads. A friend was posting about this, and I decided to comment pointing out a group of adverts I’d been getting a lot of – these ones promoting the D&D “date night bundle” offered up by RPG Maps Forge (archived version), whose main business seems to be putting out tools for digital mapmaking.

All well and good – but when I clicked away from Facebook it reloaded the page and I lost the advert, requiring me to do a bit of googling based on aspects of it I remembered in order to find the RPG Maps Forge website. In the process I ended up finding the shopfront for Fantasy Date Night, an outfit putting out a curiously similar product bundle (archived version). Note how closely the marketing copy is on both pages – they even both have videos on the theme of “one partner passes a flower to the other across a gaming table”. (I’m actually quite amused by RPG Maps Forge’s version of that video, because it looks like continuous footage of an infinite numbers being passed across the table one by one).

We can dig deeper here. In both cases, the cover art for the adventure books on offer looks like it might be AI-generated – but let’s set that aside, because that’s just a hunch I have and I think there’s issues here going beyond whether there’s been cheesy tech-driven shortcuts in the production process. Both product lines have, through an astonishing coincidence, seem to have received the same number of reviews and the same average scores from those reviews. (Fantasy Date Night refers to them as “Verified Reviews”. Verified by who? Not me, that’s for sure, you can’t click through to see all of them.)

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Supplement Supplemental! (Cubicle 7 Catchup)

On By ArthurIn Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Referee's Bookshelf, Starter Sets, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP3 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series profiling RPG supplements I’ve been looking over. This time around, I’m finally getting around to giving a good look at some Cubicle 7-published stuff that’s been sat on my to-read pile for a while.

Starter Set (Imperium Maledictum)

As they pretty much do as standard for all their games, Cubicle 7 have made a Starter Set for Imperium Maledictum – that’s their “Dark Heresy by other means and with a broader range of potential patrons than the Inquisition” Warhammer 40,000 RPG, not Wrath & Glory, the somewhat newer Warhammer 40,000 RPG system oriented towards somewhat higher-powered, faster-paced action. It’s fine! There’s some nicely-presented sample characters, there’s a reasonably detailed and involved scenario which allows you to dip into various different types of play, there’s some useful play aids, and there’s a nice rundown of a hive-city offering lots of detail for future adventure.

It does, however, prompt in my mind the question of “who are starter sets for?” Should an RPG starter set pitch itself in such a way that participants who have never played a single RPG before can pick it up and get firm, careful guidance in setting up and running their first games? Or should tabletop RPG publishers in the English-speaking world simply assume that because Dungeons & Dragons is so dominant in the marketplace, nobody is ever going to start playing with any other RPG system ever and so there’s no point making your starter set beginner-friendly, and you are better off writing for customers who are basically RPG-savvy but might not be familiar with your system in particular?

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From Camelot To Whitechapel: Two Chaosium Referee Guides

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Core Rules, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs9 Comments

Time for a bit of a Chaosium special. Chaosium’s books have tended to get thicker and heavier over the years, particularly recently. That’s thanks in part to the glossier production values Chaosium have deployed ever since the Moon Design team took over as part of Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen’s emergency rescue operation, and in part to Chaosium’s long-standing drive for ever-deeper research and erudition on the part of their game designers (commercially necessary to justify putting out work based on not-exactly-copyrightable material like Arthurian myth or well-into-the-public-domain horror tales of yesteryear). Those factors will tend to drive up page count a tad, and whilst recent Chaosium material is certainly pleasant to read and navigate and tends to offer really excellent value for money in terms of the amount of material they pack into their books, sometimes concepts which previously were delivered in one volume can be deployed in two.

For instance, in some cases products which would have been sold in a single standalone package have been divided into a player-facing volume and a referee-facing one, both because packaging them as a single volume would be burdensome and because splitting them out like this is both commercially savvy (you tend to have more players than referees, so a player-facing book can sell several times as many copies as a referee-facing one) and in some respects quite useful. (Having several copies of the essential player-facing rules at one table can speed things up in actual play appreciably). A while back I reviewed the player-facing halves of Pendragon and Cthulhu By Gaslight‘s latest editions; now it’s time to look at what referees get in their books.

Gamemaster’s Handbook (Pendragon)

The 6th Edition Pendragon core rulebook may be the nicest-looking the core rules for the game have ever looked, but they did come in for a bit of flak when they first emerged due to a perception that they were incomplete. This, I suspect, comes from a misperception of how much you absolutely need to get a Pendragon campaign going and a mild lack of perspective. (That’s what I think on a kind day, at any rate; if I’m in a grumpy mood I’d say that too many people in the RPG sphere have become too accustomed to certain walled garden design approaches to the point where they feel lost if a product doesn’t provide the guardrails they have become used to.) Sure, the core book doesn’t offer a whole lot beyond generating knights and the basic procedures of having them go off, adventure, gain Glory, and use Passions and Traits, but that’s kind of all you need for a very basic Pendragon game.

Of course, all the complaints were in part based on an incomplete overview of the line anyway. Now Chaosium have brought out the next major entry in the line, the Gamemaster’s Handbook – and I defy anyone looking over this to suggest the core game is incomplete now. Along with the full procedures for running large-scale battles, this includes an extensive toolkit covering everything from guidelines for depicting magic (it basically comes down to “NPCs can do magic as and how the narrative requires it”, but you get a lot of pointers on how to make sure this actually pans out in an Arthurian-feeling manner), stats for major NPCs, a bestiary, setting details for Salisbury (the assumed start point of The Great Pendragon Campaign), some sample adventures, a good look at the major religions of the setting and how they are structured and interact, a couple of scenarios, and so on and so forth.

Two things stand out to me in particular; the first is the Running the Game chapter, which provides an important breakdown on different modes of running Pendragon and how you should shift gear depending on whether you want to do the full Great Pendragon Campaign or a more short-term campaign or anything in between, and the second is the chapter on Arthurian Acts, which covers all manner of common situations to being taken captive in battle (or taking others captive) to the cut and thrust of courtly love to tournaments to feasts, all of which have robust systems in place to support.

It is here that Stafford’s intentions for this edition – to draw on the absolute best of the 5th Edition support line and fold the strongest and most useful aspects of it into the core book – start to really come to fruition. There’s more to come yet – namely a supplement on playing the higher nobility, where I suspect a lot of the estate management stuff from prior editions has ended up, and of course an update to The Great Pendragon Campaign itself – but any referee that has this book to hand who doesn’t feel supported in homebrewing their own Pendragon sessions is in need, perhaps, of more assistance honing their skills than any published book can reasonably offer.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Cthulhu Quickies, Delta Green Dangers, and a BRP Starter Pack)

On By ArthurIn Arc Dream Publishing, Basic Roleplaying, BRUGE, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Delta Green, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Time for another entry in my regular series of articles on game supplements which have caught my eye and inspired some brief thoughts. This time around, it’s a Basic Roleplaying special; with spooky season closing in, the emphasis is going to be on the more eldritch end of that particular family of games, with two Call of Cthulhu releases as well as a visit to Delta Green (not technically under the BRP brand umbrella, but unquestionably a fork from the wider family tree – and come to think of it, it may be advantageous for them to consider shifting over to the ORC licence under which BRP has been made widely available for use, to provide the legal coverage the used to get under the OGL before Wizards shat the bed), but there’s also something more genre-neutral to look at.

No Time To Scream (Call of Cthulhu)

In terms of its format, this is another release in the same general vein as Gateways To Terror. Like that book, No Time To Scream is a collection of three mini-scenarios which are designed to be playable in an hour or two if you’re brisk about it but can be elaborated upon or expanded as desired, and are equally suited to being one-off pick-up games or slotting into appropriate points on an ongoing campaign.

A Lonely Thread offers a classic horror setting – a cabin in the woods! – and packs in a bit of roleplayed conversation, a bit of exploration, and a bit of peril, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in how the scenario might unfold. Bits & Pieces confesses to having a pulpier tone – and the concept, whilst fun, may risk descending into farce unless groups do a really bang-up job of maintaining a horror atmosphere; there’s just something a tad slapstick about the spectacle of investigators running after a bunch of dismembered body parts.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lower Deck Larks and Paranoia Farces)

On By ArthurIn 2D20 System, Games Workshop, Modiphius Entertainment, Mongoose Publishing, Paranoia, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Star Trek Adventures, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series of mini-reviews on game supplements I have thoughts substantial enough to write about, but lean enough that I don’t want to dedicate a whole article to them. For this go-around, it’s sci-fi comedy time, with one supplement taking its parent game in a funnier direction and a couple of adventure releases for a classic comedy-based game.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide (Star Trek Adventures)

As the title implies, this hardcover supplement offers a range of material drawn from Lower Decks, the Star Trek animated sitcom which turned out to be far better than anyone dared expect. Obviously, the main thrust is all about running scenarios inspired by Lower Decks – funny examinations of the sillier foibles of the Star Trek setting, focused on lower-ranking characters. Hell, even the front cover is a parody of the (dreadful) cover art for the first edition Star Trek Adventures core rulebook. That joke, however, will become a little dated now that the 2nd Edition core book has come out with much better cover art. So too will some of the system concepts in this need a little amendment, due to the shift in the system away from using D6s for some rolls.

Nonetheless, this book can work for both editions rather well. With character species being built on essentially the same scale between the editions, for instance, you can use the new character options here in either edition more or less as-is, and whilst some of them are a bit niche, others could absolutely be used with a more serious spin. Heck, even the niche ones can have their uses – there’s rules for Cetacean characters, for instance, which admittedly may have limited use in most scenarios but does open up the scope for unusual away team missions to water worlds where the players play their main characters whilst aboard ship and play a Cetacean away team exploring the ocean depths.

That’s kind of the genius of this book – you can absolutely use it for the sort of comedic tone Lower Decks goes for, but a lot of the ideas in it can also be used for more serious Star Trek scenarios, something which is possibly largely because Lower Decks pulls off a clever trick of laughing along with Star Trek but also taking it somewhat seriously at the same time. For instance, the concept of a “second contact” visit to a world which has previously experienced first contact but is now expecting the Federation to follow through on its initial promises can absolutely be played straight, and the refereeing advice here also includes a breakdown of major Star Trek tropes and how Lower Decks uses those to derive comedy, but at the same time the recurring tropes are also a rich source of ideas for more straight-down-the-line missions.

With baseline Star Trek Adventures already providing scope for throwing in lower-ranking supporting characters mid-mission (something turned on its head here with the guidance for throwing in higher-ranking supervising characters for much the same purpose), a supplement expanding on that is decidedly worthwhile – Lower Decks provides the perfect excuse to do that, and to offer a glimpse of the state of play in the galaxy after Voyager wraps up but comfortably before Picard season 1 fucks everything up.

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Star Trek: The FASA Frontier (and Philosophical Theories On Spiritual Successors)

On By ArthurIn 2D20 System, Core Rules, FASA Corporation, FASA Star Trek, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Star Trek Adventures, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Though Star Trek Adventures, particularly in its tightened-up second edition, is my current gold standard when it comes to Trek-based tabletop RPGs, it’s hardly the first game in that sphere. As I outlined in my review of Star Trek Adventures‘ first edition, there were a fair few officially licensed Trek RPGs that preceded it – along with Prime Directive, the RPG line associated with the Star Fleet Battles wargame that uses its own weird version of the setting as a result of an overly-favourable licensing deal that Paramount have been unable to wriggle out of, and profoundly unofficial attempts to do Trek with the serial numbers filed off (sometimes not with much filing-off going on) going at least as far back as Starships & Spacemen from the 1970s.

Some of those have more of a legacy than others. Arguably the most successful Trek RPG prior to Star Trek Adventures was the version originally published by FASA in 1983. It wasn’t the first one, and there were several attempts in between FASA losing the licence in 1989 due to Paramount abruptly deciding they weren’t respecting the canon and principles of the show enough and Modiphius making their own stab at it, but FASA Trek and Star Trek Adventures are the two Trek RPGs with the most longevity, and so have had more of a chance to make their mark and hone their approach; in other instances the licence was either roughly yanked away mere years after a core book being published or simply left on the shelf for years at a time.

So when I had the opportunity to get a job lot of FASA Trek material – the core set, some supplements, some adventures – I decided to give it a shot, just to see what it was like and to see what could be harvested for Star Trek Adventures purposes. Surprisingly enough, it felt simultaneously like a very different take on the Trek universe – inevitably so, given that the material I received was all written before The Next Generation graced our screens – and one which feels like a really solid precedent for Star Trek Adventures, leading me into some speculation as to why sometimes when a game comes out with a new version with a radically different system I feel like it’s a whole different game, and sometimes I feel like it’s either a continuation of the original or at the very least a spiritual successor.

The version I got was the second edition, in the UK printing put out by Games Workshop. This is divided into three brief booklets; the Star Fleet Officer’s Manual covers character generation and basic gameplay, the Cadet’s Orientation Sourcebook is a setting guide, and the Game Operations Manual gives refereeing guidance and advice. What is notably missing is any sort of detailed system for ship-to-ship combat; there’s brief guidance on adapting the existing system to tasks during starship combat in a very low-tactics, theatre of the mind-oriented fashion, but if you want more meat you are directed to either get the Star Trek III Starship Combat Game for a wargame-style simulation or Enemy Contact: Bridge Alert, a supplement designed to handle starship combat through a less wargamey, more character-oriented approach (so in effect a more elaborate version of the suggestions provided here).

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Age of Vikings – A New Game With Deep Roots

On By ArthurIn Age of Vikings, Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Core Rules, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Age of Vikings is a brand-new RPG from Chaosium… or rather, it is and it isn’t. Age of Vikings is certainly a new brand for them – but its author, Pedro Ziviani, had previously written the Mythic Iceland supplement for use with the Big Yellow Book version of Basic Roleplaying, which has recently been revised and rereleased as the Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine. Both Age of Vikings and Mythic Iceland have essentially the same concept: your characters live in the unique society of 10th Century Iceland, whose inhabitants spurn the rulership of a King like their European peers in favour of the sovereignty of the Althing, their assembly which is arguably the oldest surviving Parliament in the world, with the “mythic” side of the equation coming in because the game depicts a world in which the myths and legends believed in by the Icelanders are essentially real, but enough historical detail that if you wanted to use the material to run a more purely history-based game (with some departures for playability) that’s absolutely something you can do.

Given the circumstances, you might be forgiven for thinking that Age of Vikings is just Mythic Iceland given a new title and with all the required system bits from Basic Roleplaying folded into it. You might even be sold on that idea; Mythic Iceland was one of the more acclaimed supplements that came out for the Big Yellow Book under Charlie Krank’s stewardship of Chaosium, and an update of that tweaked to stand alone to avoid flipping about between two books feels like a worthwhile endeaovur in its own right. However, Age of Vikings is a significant development of and embellishment of the concept, drawing on a deeper bench of material than just Mythic Iceland.

Arguably, both Mythic Iceland and Age of Vikings are in their own right descendants of RuneQuest Vikings – a supplement for the game’s third edition that is, alongside Land of Ninja, regarded as the high water mark of the “Mythic Earth” concept that edition explored before pivoting back to focusing on Glorantha (giving rise to the short-lived “RuneQuest Renaissance“). As a result, it makes sense that Age of Vikings has looked to how the latest edition of RuneQuest has folded in concepts from Pendragon to update its presentation, and proceed accordingly.

In particular, Age of Vikings adds in rules for Passions and a method of exploring your character’s family history during character generation, both of which are Pendragon innovations which have become more widely embraced across the Basic Roleplaying line. As with the original RuneQuest-style hit locations and skill categories are used, both of which seem suited to the material, whilst bespoke systems for reputation and status better-targeted towards Icelandic society, along with magic systems tailored towards the folklore, allow the material to work better than attempts to crowbar the standard RuneQuest magic systems into the setting. Whereas Mythic Iceland used the “Allegiance” concept from the Big Yellow Book – derived from Stormbringer – to model characters’ dedication to their patron gods, this utilises the idea of Devotions, which is similar in concept except better-integrated with the Passions rules and with somewhat different game mechanical effects.

As a result of the work necessary to incorporate these ideas, there’s major differences between this and Mythic Iceland, though a good amount of text from the original survives (with revisions for readability and the like). The “History of Mythic Iceland” chapters from the original all get largely reproduced here, for instance, though not necessarily in the same order (and history post-977, the assumed start date for Age of Vikings campaigns, is glossed over). The main excision is the rather terse notes on using Iceland in Cthulhu Dark Ages – in fact, Mythic Iceland rather bizarrely included a Cthulhu Dark Ages sample scenario instead of a Mythic Iceland one!

That mistake isn’t repeated here; as well as a fully worked-out scenario depicting a visit to the Althing – which nicely means that it’s repeatable, since the Althing is a regular, structured event that can be visited again and again to do different business and get different results each time – there’s also a rather neat system for throwing together a Viking raid on the fly. All this, plus seiðr magic too in parallel with the rune magic? It’s a great deal; on the whole, Age of Vikings is a substantial improvement on Mythic Iceland by any metric, more than justifying its rather long gestation period. Norse myth and the Dark Ages are subjects which RPGs have drawn on extensively over the years, but Age of Vikings raises the bar appreciably, making it a highly useful release for anyone running a game touching on this era or its myths.

The World Is Your Setting Guide 7: Medieval Women Special

On By ArthurIn Referee's Bookshelf, The World Is Your Setting Guide2 Comments

A while back I went to the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Worlds exhibition. As well as being absolutely fascinating in its own right, it was a decidedly worthwhile visit from the perspective of this ongoing article series – because whilst a lot of RPGs draw on the medieval era for inspiration, the sources they look to are often highly dominated by male narratives. After touring the exhibits I picked up a clutch of books which each in their own way seem to offer a route to redressing that balance, offering a broader insight into the period for those who want “realism” in the sense of actual authenticity rather than “realism” in the form of grimdark Game of Thrones-esque nastiness.

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress – a practictioner of a particularly extreme form of religious withdrawal from the secular world which entails being permanently confined to a single room or set of rooms, often to the extent of being bricked in there. Dependent on food and drink being passed to them through a window to survive, cut off from regular life so completely that it was not uncommon for the Office for the Dead to be recited as an anchorite or anchoress entered their cell to represent them being “dead to the world”, those who took on this demanding lifestyle were often revered as the closest thing to a living saint, with people seeking their advice on matters of faith.

Julian was something of a local celebrity in Norwich as a result, but the thing which she is most known more these days appears to have occurred before she became an anchoress, and may well have been the motivating incident which prompted her to do that. In 1373, when she was in her early 30s, she suffered a severe illness and was on the point of death; as she gazed at a crucifix held before her by her priest, she experienced a powerful mystical experience, in which she perceived ecstatic visions and believed she was also vouchsafed with important spiritual information by God, which he wanted her to report to the wider world. It would take years – decades, even – for her to sift through the experience and set it down, and when she did, she did it in Middle English, not the Latin a more educated person of her era would use. This account, usually known as Revelations of Divine Love, now comes to us in a short text and a long text, the latter providing substantially more commentary on and interpretation of the visions than the short text.

Released in Oxford World’s Classics in a new translation to modern English by Barry Windeatt, Revelations of Divine Love is an intriguing and accessible look at what the mystical, contemplative life prized by certain sections of the medieval Church actually entailed. It’s common for us to depict the medieval Church as an entirely doctrinally ossified place where there’s basically no room for anyone to say anything original or interesting, especially if they were women or writing in the vernacular, let alone both – but Julian’s text was part of a flowering of vernacular mystical texts of the era and presents a distinctly novel view of God, sin, and humanity. Though she’s quick to emphasise that she believes everything the Church believes and isn’t trying to challenge any of that, she also develops a theological position where God has no intention of punishing us, sin is nothing, the Devil is defeated, and “all will be well”.

The text by itself is largely interesting for getting a look at the sort of philosophical contemplation mystics of the period would get into; where the translation is useful is in the extensive notes assisting interpretation of the text and the expansive introduction, giving a discussion of Julian’s life (what little we know of it), the anchorite tradition, and so on. And far from being persecuted as some kind of heretic simply for saying something new, Julian was honoured in her life, an example of a woman who became famed for her faith despite her seclusion.

Continue reading “The World Is Your Setting Guide 7: Medieval Women Special” →