When You're In the Mood for "D&D," Just Not Specifically D&D - Mythras Classic Fantasy, Fantasy AGE, Cypher System And Other Weird Variants

 I've had lengthy times where I grew tired of D&D and wanted a break from fantasy, which then led to me running other game systems in different genres such as Mothership, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds and so forth. More recently I have been facing a stranger issue: a desire to run something D&D-like, just NOT actual D&D. I mean, I am running and enjoying D&D....but I know it is less because of the current edition rules at this point than it is because of the campaign I am running, and the sundry plots and characters; the game is succeeding despite itself, not because of itself. Indeed, I realize that my main problem with D&D 5.5 (2024 edition) is that it's frankly just more of the same....lots of noteworthy changes, but none of them shake it up mechanically beyond being a horde of slight iterations. It is like they patched D&D 5E, and you notice the improvements, but ultimately also notice its still just the same game. To run with a video game analogy: they added in ray tracing an patched a loot exploit so it looks cooler and plays more smoothly, but its still the same game you've already played to death.

This has gotten me looking in to other options for a fantasy fix which mix up the mechanics sufficiently that I can feel a breath of fresh air even if I am still running some archetypal adventuring campaigns. I've explored Tales of the Valiant and while I am eager to test it out as a GM, it's still got the same problem D&D 5.5 does; it's just a variant on the thing we've been playing for the last ten years already. Pathfinder 2E Remastered is also good at "D&D like" so it's a bit closer to what I want....but in many ways it is the closest direct competitor to D&D, and has its own unique range of issues when it comes to applying it to classic D&D-ish fantasy without being D&D. 

This leads me to a few other systems I've considered, as follows:

Mythras Classic Fantasy - this just recently received a huge upgrade with the new Mythras Classic Fantasy Unearthed expansion. If you don't know what this is, it's a hack of the Mythras Fantasy RPG (which is itself a valid alternate to D&D) in which it retools the game's chassis to accomodate classes and a very "D&D like" level structure, along with a D&D-derived magic system and plenty of monsters and magic items. It is Mythras at core, but reframes everything to feel like D&D. Specifically it feels like an emulation of AD&D 1st edition, just now powered by a BRP-derived game engine with lots of skills, D100 mechanics and an extra heap of lethality. Cool stuff. 

Pros: Classic Fantasy is a very robust reimagining of D&D style play in a more gritty chassis powered by Mythras; it is well supported with a bunch of modules, main books, the Classic Fantasy Imperative (a ORC-license restatement of the rules as a stand along product, though note you will still want the original Classic Fantasy book for Mythras as it holds all the monsters and more goodies), and the new CF Unearthed book. Plus, you can use all the other Mythras material with it, it's fully compatible.

Cons: I always run into a stumbling block with Classic Fantasy, which evokes for me two things: AD&D and Mythras. I then leave myself wondering if this mix of chocolate and peanut butter really work, or if it makes more sense for me to simply play straight Mythras or straight AD&D. I also prefer BRP Itself, over Mythras, another issue entirely. Also, the special attack rules for Mythras can lead to player decision paralysis, a very common issue I encounter when running Mythras.

Fantasy Age 2E: Green Ronin quietly released Fantasy Age 2nd Edition last year and I am not sure anyone noticed. It's since released a Cthulhu Mythos and Technofantasy expansion on Drivethrurpg, and the 2nd edition is largely backwards compatible with prior books. Fantasy Age, if you did not know, is derived from the Adventure Game Engine (AGE), originally created for the Dragon Age RPG, and this is a full-on iteration designed for use in whatever setting you want. It is class and skill based (though they use focus and talent terms), and is in many ways similar in structural design to D&D with leveling up, escalating hit points and lots of fast paced, hard hitting magic. The latest edition is more robust than the 1st edition Basic Book, too.

Pros: You get a similar experience to D&D but will find Fantasy AGE allows for a lot of design flexibility; its a great system to make unique looking characters, and is pretty easy to GM as well. It has ample support material and the core book is pretty robust.

Cons: Some people find the high starting hit points take getting used to; combats will last longer, sometimes when you don't expect them to. The stunt system unique to Fantasy AGE can lead to a bit of decision paralysis for players, but I find that a few sessions will get them very used to it. Also, because its core design was meant to emulate a video game, it can sometimes feel a tad video-gamish.

Cypher System - Godforsaken and Others: Cypher System has had a lot of expansion into the realm of fantasy gaming in the last several years. The Revised Cypher System rules have plenty of content, but if you add Godforsaken and the Cypher Bestiary you have all you need for a robust D&D-ish campaign but powered by the deceptively simple point-pool system of Cypher. They also have the Planebreaker setting, a new Diamond Throne update and the Ptolus City Setting out for Cypher, most of which were originally settings for D&D 3rd edition or later 5th edition, so its got support for D&D-like campaigns baked in.

Pros: Cypher System is a resource pool game system with player-facing die mechanics which is incredibly easy for the GM to run, and you can simultaneously make very archetypcal D&D-themed characters and also go as off the rails in PC design as the GM is willing to let you. It de-emphasizes a lot of the nitty gritty mechanical elements of D&D, but with the cost advantage of making story and collaborative engagement top priority.

Cons: Cypher System, despite being so cool, can be hard for classic RPG enthusiasts to wrap their heads around, as the pool resource mechanic is counterintuitive to more simulationist rules systems like D&D. Cypher System also works best for GMs (and players) who enjoy improvisation and ad hoc developments, and the game really shines when this is leaned into, but flounders badly if you rgroup does not embrace it.

There are some other ones to consider too! In brief:

Basic Roleplaying, Runequest and Magic World: BRP has a nice new edition update out, and it just got a GM's screen. It's plus is BRP is the best system ever, but its downside is they don't have a single unique modern resource for providing fantasy gaming content. The core book has some material, but its not robust enough. A few years ago before Chaosium changed ownership they published Magic World, which does do exactly that, but its only available in PDF and POD (and had a lot of errata). It's not a bad option, but it is a shame that BRP's latest edition does not have more setting/genre resources out for it, and it continues to get neglected in favor of Runequest. Runequest, in turn, is a great alternative to D&D if you want to really experience something different in the world of Glorantha, but a difficult setting for most to parse out and make their own. If you just want a system to power your own creation, Runequest will disappoint. 

Dragonbane: This is a hybrid reimagining of what the original BRP Magic World of the 80's (from the Worlds of Wonder Boxed Set) became in Sweden, also called Drakar och Demoner, and it was brought back with a Free League flourish, now based on a D20 mechanic instead of a D100 mechanic. It's actually a really neat alternative to OSR D&D gaming, but it needs a bit more support to serve as a broader tool set for enterprising gamers. It also has a problem of looking and feeling like a D&D alternative, but in fact being much closer to its BRP roots and therefore being rather deadly to any game group which plays it like a straight up D&D dungeon crawl. I'm keen on trying this one out eventually, but it's not going to scratch the "D&D but not D&D" itch for me.

Savage Worlds Fantasy and Savage Pathfinder: actually these would work pretty danged well for scratching the "totally D&D feel but not D&D at all" itch. Pathfinder for Savage Worlds brings in classes and themes modeled from Pathfinder 1st edition and is not so wed to Golarion that you can't hack it for your own thing. Add in the SW Fantasy Companion (revised for SWADE) and you have essentially all you need to do everything I've been talking about. The top reason it might not be as ideal is because Savage Worlds excels at being multigenre, and I have found that I enjoy it a lot more in a modern or SF setting than fantasy....though that said, Savage Pathfinder rocks hard. The other problem with Savage Worlds is if you associate hit point bloat and long, protracted combats with the D&D experience, then Savage Worlds may not work for you! It's too fast.

There are others I have not mentioned....GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the reissue of The Fantasy Trip both come to mind, for example. 

One of my game nights needs a change of system soon. I think it's probably going to be Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, but I might talk them in to a short campaign in Dragonbane just to see how it feels. I am super keen on Fantasy AGE at some point as well, but I really want to absorb the nuances of the system to feel comfortable with it, first....and that requires time I rarely have these days!

Tales of the Valiant and what it Needs Next to Get Adopted by My Group

 I really, really want to play Tales of the Valiant. I am annoyed that D&D 2024 is sufficiently interesting that it is hard not to also want to play it (and is the easier sell, of course); so Tales of the Valiant is mostly getting "behind the scenes" love from me as a GM while I wait for that tipping point when I think that it will also be an easy sell to my players. Really, it needs two things from my perspective to become the next ruleset we try out: more subclasses for players, and Roll20 support. We currently have neither!

Right now, the TotV Player's Guide has 2 subclasses per character class. This is in contrast with D&D 5.5 which manages 4 subclasses per class in the PHB, and also has a tome out on dmsguild.com right now which updates the remaining 69 subclasses out there. So D&D 5.5 has a clear advantage here. Kobold Press has been catching up with ancestry options (well, ancestry and lineages in the parlance of TotV), with two PDF resources out adding a plethora of previous species to the mix, but nothing yet for new subclasses. 

The other thing TotV needs to get adoption rates going (for my group, at least) is Roll20 support. I know they are committed to Shard Tabletop, but last I check Roll20 support was promised and it's for better or worse where many people staked out their VTT gaming ecosystems. I also happen to have TotV set up on Alchemy Tabletop, which is a really cool and weird alternative...and I find both Alchemy and Roll20 more intuitive for myself than Shard....Shard has a great player interface, but does not have the sort of resources I would need as a GM to run games; it seems like it is better designed for pre-published modules. I mean, you can probably run homebrew on it well enough, but honestly my old brain can't figure it out; Roll20's more broadly applicable interface has ruined me a bit.

Anyway, the point is.....Tales of the Valiant is really close to adoption in my group, but as seasoned old players they need more variety in choice than the core books currently offer, and most of my players are not in the habit of manually updating existing 5E stuff to match TotV's conversion requirements, so honestly if someone could just take the time to put out a new book of subclasses or even a conversion document that does the work it would be simply awesome. As GM I do not fret this stuff, I have all I need for the game now, and then some! But for my players? Yeah we need more stuff for them.

As GM though: there's Frog Gods' new Tome of Horrors update which is surprisingly good (it brings in a lot of unusual stuff to BFR/TotV not seen in a while), and Legendary Games has popped out some BFR compatible books as well, including Mythos Monsters, Sea Monsters and some modules. There are other books out already, though maybe not at the ideal pace....and a lot of scenarios, which is not (imo) what TotV needs right now half so much as new subclasses and stuff for players.

So! What I guess I am saying is: TotV can stand on its own two feet if it can ramp up content in a manner consistent with its Big Dog competition. It will forever be the niche game played by D&Ders who are no longer infatuated with WotC, but it can totally own that market....if it can give their largely older, veteran base more material to work with. Just my thoughts!

EDIT: One other thing Tales of the Valiant badly needs: A forum!!! If I want to look for useful Pathfinder 2E advice I can go to Paizo. However there is no unifying forum I am aware of for Tales of the Valiant (I believe they have some sort of Discord but....referring to my prior comments about being an old guy....I find Discord a rough place to have a standardized forum, ime). Right now, if you look for places to talk about TotV, good luck! You mostly get lengthy topics on other forms where people try to talk about TotV and then get trashed by people who dislike it for various petty reasons. So yeah....I really think the Kobolds would benefit from setting up some sort of forum for their product, where fans of the product can actually converse and exchange ideas and content. Just saying. 

....And if I am wrong, and there is a good place for this, can someone point me in the right direction?

D&D 2024 - Multiple Sessions In

 We're multiple game sessions in to using the D&D 2024 PHB and DMG, and I have to say: they work pretty well. We have encountered enough new changes in both rules and working parts to merit considering this a "D&D 5.5" (though of course any other RPG out there would consider this a 6th edition), and it holds its own so far against its immediate competition: Pathfinder 2E Remastered and Tales of the Valiant. Of the two main competitors, Tales of the Valiant has the biggest hurdle, as its selling point is now "modified classic 5E" and will appeal to people who dislike change for its own sake, I suppose? I don't know...I like TotV, but I gotta say....D&D 2024 holds its own just fine. 

Pathfinder 2E Remastered tried hard to divorce itself from the D&D OGLisms that previously defined it, so I suppose its merits as an alternative are that it is "D&D-styled fantasy gaming, without any of the D&D trappings." This is a selling point for some people (along with the more detailed mechanics), but that's destined to be its own niche, and Pathfinder's divorce from the OGL is ultimately going to keep it from having any real potential to grab market share from D&D again. 

I am especially interested in seeing how the next Monster Manual shakes things up now. I am, admittedly, more interested in seeing if D&D 5.5 can maintain this momentum next year. WotC is a monolith in the RPG industry, but people forget that its really Hasbro. Without their owners, WotC would probably be a lot closer in size and scope to Paizo or Kobold Press (well, except for MTG I suppose...)

So if you're wondering where things have shaken out for my groups: we're pretty well sold on D&D 5.5 and it looks like that's where will be at for the duration. I am playing in a TotV game, and I do have a very intermittent PF2E game online which I GM, but for my weekly regulars, we're hip deep in the new 2024 books and enjoying it. 

The Cost of a Hobby - Kickstarter Strategies for the Consuming Backer

 I had a brief exchange with a Kickstarter creator for a product I backed, then a few days later (well before it was ready to close) decided to back out on. He asked why I backed out and I explained the problem from a consumer/backer stance: the product was not overly expensive (about $70 for two books....specifically Dragonbane books for the Lone Wolf setting) and I am interested in it. But a couple issues prompted me to back out: the first being it was scheduled for November 2025, and I have learned, time and again, that backing a Kickstarter you are interested in today does not equate to it being a Kickstarter you will be excited for a year or more from now. That is, of course, assuming the project is not delayed; about 75% of the Kickstarters I have backed are usuallly delayed a few months or even a couple years. 

The second problem I pointed out to him is that when a Kickstarter has a big ask and a distant date, I know its not a project that has effectively started; its a project looking for money to get off the ground. This means there's no written text ready to go, no artist on board yet, no editor, no playtesting. The KS is effectively advertising a concept to backers willing to take a risk on it happening. Other Kickstarters I have backed, the most successful ones (imo) are the ones that have maybe only a couple months to completion after the Kickstarter is done. These are projects which are practically ready to go, and the publisher/author is using KS to build interest and sales before the release, or maybe the bulk of the work is near completion and they just need that last funding push to pay for art/printing or something. These Kickstarters are great - they reflect a commitment ahead of time, and get a product out within the window of interest for the prospective consumer/backer. Examples of this (with kudos) go to D101 Publishing (Newt Newport), Matt Finch with Mythmere and Steve Jackson Games (with their smaller KS's at least).

In any case, the point is that if I'm going to back something, years of backing other Kickstarters have taught me that I need to look for scenarios where the KS is just "the final push" and not "ground zero." Ground zero requires a lot of commitment way down the road, and in a twist, the few publishers I might consider backing are also very good at getting those products out to retail once released so backing the KS becomes more a matter of convenience or solidarity than anything else. Steve Jackson Games, Monte Cook Games and Pinnacle Entertainment are all examples of publishers using Kickstarter to start off products that I know will appear eventually, but the motivation to Kickstart them is low for me because I am confident their product will eventually arrive and be purchasable by me down the road, assuming I am still interested in it. And if it turns out they fail? By not backing I am not out of the product if it fails.

There are a couple other strategies to being a backer to consider. For example, I always look at what the creator has done before; if they have no prior Kickstarters? Unknown risk, don't back it. If they have lots of Kickstarters that seem to be incomplete? Bad sign. As an example....the creator of the Lone Wolf books for Dragonbane seems to have at least one Kickstarter that appears to be 7 years overdue (and people are very pissed about it). Even with my two prior items of logic, this alone is a huge red flag against backing another Kickstarter by the creator, when it is clear they can't finish the existing projects.

Another peeve I have about backing things is unrelated to Kickstarter, but rather its competitors,  Backerkit and other crowdfunding venues. Notice how it is atypical of a creator on those venues to even put a deadline in place? Yeah, that's a deal breaker right there. At least with Kickstarter it requires you to provide a month and year on when to expect project completion. 

Honestly....I'd love to back the Lone Wolf adaptation for Dragonbane for what it is. I just can't reconcile all the risks involved, and based on the creator's prior history, I now realize it is probably destined to be a 2031 release, to go by his other projects.

FIGHTING FANTASY RETURNS!

I didn't mean to type that in Caps, it just happened the cap lock was on at the moment so I went with it. So yeah! Steve Jackson Games (US) is teaming up with the Steve Jackson (UK) and Ian Livingston Fighting Fantasy gamebook properties to bring them back to print! Cool stuff. Read about it here.

My sincere hope is that this could also mean cool new stuff in the future for Advanced Fighting Fantasy, though admittedly it has been kept reasonably well by Arion Games, although the POD versions can at times feel very washed out. Imagine, though, a AFF treatment not unlike what SJG has done for Dungeon Fantasy or The Fantasy Trip....probably not in the works due to licensing issues, but hey, who knows!

The Monthly Blog Post!!! - Cypher System, Tales of the Valiant, Steam Deck OLED and Future Plans

 Wow, I have gone almost a month without bothering to post. In my defense I have had an enormous amount of work going on, and with that a lot of business travel, so time has a way of escaping under such circumstances. Still, I managed to have a bit of fun in the travel (which is all in-state, at least, so not horrible; New Mexico is if nothing else a very pretty region to drive through). 

My highlights this month include finally getting my hand on the Steam Deck OLED edition, which is noticeably an improvement over all the other prior handhelds I have gotten my hands on; enough so that I plan to sell my original Steal Deck and the Asus ROG Ally-- but not the Legion Go! That machine may have crappy battery life but all its other components make up for it. The Steam Deck OLED is not a maor leap, but its noticeably improved battery life (I took a trip from Albuquerque to Carlsbad and did not kill the battery the entire way, even playing games such as Crisis 2 on it), its screen improvement (I am a big fan of OLED screens), and its minor tweaks and improvements all led to the best handheld travel experience I have had so far with a PC handheld. 

This month is so crazy I have gotten almost no gaming in, and have so far had to postpone my live games until the end of the month. I managed to get one of the two campaigns to a decent pause point, where the PCs could rest, recuperate, scheme and also the players could decide what they want to do next. I am all for continuing the campaign which paused at level 14 (D&D 5E) and get them all to level 20 with a final glorious story arc, but I am also keen to try something different, such as Cypher System or Dragonbane. We'll see what happens when we resume gaming around Halloween.

On the Saturday group the story paused one session away from the big resolve, kinda annoying, but we'll get to it eventually. After the plot arc finishes (it[s D&D 5E in the fictitious not-Japan region of the Realms of Chirak setting), we'll see if the group wants to continue or we do something different. I am keen to try Tales of the Valiant, possibly on this night, as a focused campaign using only TotV books for a decently purist experience. My worry is that, since TotV is just a new iteration of D&D 5E, that my group will find that too restraining, as I notice some of them seem to go almost exclusively for weird 3PP stuff they find online these days to make characters, and a couple others in the group are really, really into D&D traditional, so TotV might be one step removed from their comfort zone, simply because it is not a WotC product. So I am unsure if this will really happen or not.

Saturdays have been rough for me as it is, as I've gotten older and had less overall time for things, it has made Saturdays harder for gaming. I have been more or less trying to regulate by doing every other week, but it is possible down the road I may consider other options. The thought crossed my mind that Sundays might be better for gaming....but traditionally I use Sunday as my "home maintenance day" so I'd have to switch that to Saturday if I tried gaming on Sunday. There is also the problem that I bought my house a roughly 30 minute drive from the city, where the group normally meets, and I often find myself a lot less interested in driving on the highway back to the city to run a game. Oh well...it will sort itself out eventually.

I may have my priorities backwards, too. I should consider Cypher System, a ruleset which is better for shortform campaigns of 10-20 sessions at the most, on Saturdays, and propose TotV for Wednesdays. I have a lot of really great Cypher books I have yet to use, as most of my original Cypher campaign time was with 1st edition and not the revised edition. I regret to say that, much as with several other games, the revision did not click as well with me as the original did, so I have only run a couple campaigns in the newer edition. I ran into this same problem with Unknown Armies, where I loved 1st edition but found that the subsequent revisions fell flat for me. Sometimes, that initial rough magic of the original game gets lost in the efforts of the designers to rethink/repackage/reimagine the system for later editions. In Cypher's case it's tolerable....I see why they changed character design the way they did to be cleaner and more generic, but in the process they lost the charm and suggestive flavor of the original's approach. This can be worked around, but it has forever left something behind with the original that made it a better overall evocative experience, in favor of a more organized and mechanically consistent experience....so a trade off, I guess. 

Anyway, this post has served mainly to remind myself that I should be blogging more often. More to come!

Tales of the Valiant Vs. D&D 2024

 Amidst an endless array of personal family turmoil (ranging from family health issues to cat problems to dying cars) I thought I'd take a few minutes to decompress with an innocuous blog post. Specifically, to call out a fine post over on the Kobold Press Blog! This one, in fact.

The Kobolds provide a bit of an overview on why one might consider Tales of the Valiant even in the face of the new D&D 2024. I have heard a lot of interesting feedback on D&D 2024, and one thing I've noticed is that the new rulebook is much likelier to cause consternation and conflict if you are a newer gamer. No one I've talked to who takes umbrage at any level with the new repackaging of the rules has been through the various prior edition changes, notable in particular being 1E to 2E, 2E to 3E, 3E to 3.5E, and the most egregious of all: 3.5E to 4E. That last one was, on a certain level, not a change of editions but a change of game systems, draped in the corpse skin of the game the mimic replaced.

I like to frame it like this: from my jaded ancient gamer perspective, there are about as many notable changes in D&D 2024 to the regular 5E D&D as there were between Call of Cthulhu 5th and 6th edition. Were there changes? Yes. Can you still use everything that came before with what is coming next? Totally. Is the new rules mainly just incentivizing you to buy it by being cooler, offering more options, and packaging everything in a very clean and organized package? Totally.

Tales of the Valiant comes in to this discussion with the idea that it offers what amounts to 90% of the same game, with the last 10% looking darned similar and just being a mess of tweaks and mods for a particular feel and style. It has its own merits, but I really do think I could run a campaign with mixed 5E PHB, 2024 PHB and TotV characters all at the same table, so long as I am clear on which underlying variant of the rules we are all agreeing to abide by. They are that close.

What Tales of the Valiant offers that is different from the new 2024 D&D however is style and character: it's presenting a distinctly Kobold-Pressian representation of adventuring that looks and feels a lot like the D&D I thematically have enjoyed for many years now. It's got a traditional vibe to it that makes it feel different from the newer 2024 D&D, which is so far totally fine but also feels like it is trying too hard to be too many things to too many people at once.

What this all gets down to is that while I rather like the new 2024 PHB, I think I can hold off using it until its two complimentary volumes are out, so I plan to convince my playing group we should give Tales of the Valiant a spin for a few months so we can really grokk the subtleties here. I want to see if the promise that monsters hit harder and the game is a bit tougher is true, because I like that concept space. I also like how TotV does the lineages and heritages, it provides more versatility and flavor, something I feel is a bit weak in the 2024 PHB edition, where it feels like "least troublesome presentation" was the order of the day.

That said.....neither of these systems have half elves or half orcs, and that is just weird. It's one of those moments where you have to ask what curious logic was on display to invalidate the notion of people of mixed race, and what sort of madness percolates under the guise of good intentions to think that somehow such notions had to be expurgated from our fantasy tales?

Ah well.

If I manage to get this off the ground I shall report more soon. 

Post- Session: Player's Handbook 2024 is A Utility Driven 5.25E D&D

 Just a brief follow-up, and this is with the noted caveat that the devil is in the details, but my group last night agreed that the D&D 2025 Player's Handbook is basically a marvel in reorganization and a clear rewrite, but it also appears to be simultaneously far less invasive than we expected in terms of rules changes, and also somehow a bit more so in some very specific cases. The fact that it really does appear to be backwards compatible with no fuss (that is to say, you can run a 2014 character with a gang of 2024 characters and not miss a beat) is helpful. That makes it noteworthy as being less of a hassle than, say, using 3.0 products with 3.5 books back in the day, where there were a lot of discreet structural and design changes to improve mechanical problems. This book is far less about fixing mechanical issues then simply adding new content and revising stuff that will, while not invalidating the older PHB, make your players want the new PHB.

No one in my group had a copy yet, and as it turns out despite getting several boxes of books my FLGS sold all of them on Tuesday, and so no one in my group other than my son and myself had the new PHB yet. Still.....I am sure they will grab it on D&D Beyond or something quick enough, or when the formal non FLGS release hits on the 17th.

By the way, I have gotten over the freakishly friendly smiling phenomenon I was ranting about yesterday. After making such a big deal about it, I began to notice that this is not quite the bother it initially felt like to me.....yes, there are still about 10-15 notable illustrations where I am a bit weirded out at the maniacal joy of the expressions on these character's faces, but a disproportionated number of them appear to all be bards and (weirdly!) druids. So yeah....probably just a "me" problem LOL

Anyway! We already started using the book in actual play to look up stuff like spells and such. We did not find any surprises (yet) but there are some. Healing seems to be buffed up a bit, for one. It is much, much easier to look content up in this edition, so it is already feeling pointless to me to reach for the old PHB unless I really needs to identify some legacy content information, such as on a class that got more heavily revamped, or the poor half orcs and half elves who have lost their identities in this new edition. 

Speaking of half orcs and half elves Is it just me or does that feel like some sort of weird form of discrimination? Was WotC more worried about the kind of questions being half-this and half-that raised, and decided it was better to not raise those questions and hope no one brought up the counter point that in a world where elves, orcs and humans can all apparently interbreed that there will be people of mixed descent? Is this purged because they decided to remove the concept of races and go for species, implying everyone is genetically too different to interbreed? The entire thing feels weird to me, and like there was no right way for them to address this without offending some camp, so they just tried to dodge the entire issue instead. I feel like this is even stranger given they made orcs, as the most contentious example, far more "not evil" in this version, at least according to the lone paragraph of detail they get, which strongly implies that humans, elves and such who have a green muscle mommy fetish (damn you internet for creating these memes) would inevitably lead to even more half orcs in the world, not less. Oh well. It's like 1989 all over again, and no doubt a future book will find a way to delicately address this such that the WotC overlords don't look like they are crapping on people of multiracial descent through their fantasy game analogues.

2024 Player's Handbook Is In the Wild!

 I picked up my special edition cover of the 2024 Player's Handbook yesterday and spent a fair amount of time reading through the book. As many have already commented, this books' single greatest contribution to the game is organization....the book really is incredibly well organized, in a smart way that makes a lot of sense, and leads the reader to wonder why it took this long. I have a few other observations so far....but this is hardly a proper review as of yet, just observations. The real meat of any discussion will have to wait until I've met with my group tonight and we have formulated a plan of attack for when we will start using the new PHB in actual play. But in the interim, here are those observations....

Someone Hates Fluff

This is the least fluff-filled PHB I have ever seen. A single page for most character species (and I like that they are using the term species now) of which half of the page is an illustration seems scant at best. Most of the species and their possible subtypes are getting maybe a paragraph of introduction at best. 

Gaucho Orcs

Orcs got a reboot in this book. They have exactly one page, half text and half illustration. Gruumsh is now some sort of orcish analog for Odin or something, and orcs have a penchant for nomadic wanderlust. There's like 1 paragraph of detail, and half of it reframing Gruumsh. All of the other details can be derived from an illustration of an orc family that makes them look like sombrero and poncho wearing gauchos from the old west. In a post World of Warcraft universe I respect the idea that orcs are a thing people want to play but it is insanely weird to see all the core conceits of what it means to be an orc get completely stripped out and replaced by a vague suggestion of form in the example illustration. 

Very Clean Class Write-Ups

The classes are all reframed and reformatted, to the extent that even spell lists are now included for each class in the class description proper. Its incredibly efficient and impressively done. There are so many weird little changes to the classes that this part more than any will be where people find the most arguments for this being a D&D 5.5 or even better a 6E.

The Core Mechanics are Still The Same

There are lots of tweaks and bits everywhere, but the way the game plays remains the same. This system is arguably a bigger jump than 3.5 was from 3.0, but it all in the extraneous details such as classes, spells and species and far less in the mechanical core.

A Really Weird Number of Characters in This Book Have Freaky Open Mouthed Eerie Smiles

I don't know what the artistic intent is here,* but the number of characters smiling like they are hopped up on mushrooms or derived from some freaky AI generated model is just a tad on the disturbing side. There are, thankfully, lots of illustrations of D&D characters doing actual D&D type stuff (fighting, spell casting, exploring, investigating, etc.) but possibly better than half the illustrations in this book appear to be of freakishly weird denizens whose exact class and species is up for debate smiling like an amorphous AI generated illustration about to bite your head off, and it's frankly weirding me out, like, a lot.

The Garb of Characters is in Stark Contrast to Equipment Illustrations

Aside from the excessive use of smiling and expressions of sheer, unmitigated and possibly drug-induced joy, the art in the book is pretty solid. There is a moment of disconnect for me when you get to the nice but very mundane sample illustrations of arms and armor, and I then look at the insanely elaborate dress and garb of the sample characters and wonder to myself, "no one is wearing any of the practical gear this book is telling me the average mundane PCs will be using, they are all wearing aristocratic designer garb straight from the poshest corners of Waterdeep, the sort of things you wear to your cousins' wedding and not to a dungeon fight."

There's more yet to be gone in to. I am still soaking up the new stuff, especially weapon stunts and the enormous number of class tweaks, but overall this is a pretty solid book, and still feels very much like 5E in terms of what its accomplishing, so I can accept the interpretation of the 2024 PHB being more of a 5.5 edition than anything else, because its mechanical core remains the same solid nugget we've been using for the last ten years. 

*I once watched some Youtube videos where they talked about how adding a open-mouthed, shocked or smiling look to your image in a thumbnail was supposed to dramatically increase clicks (user engagement) with the video. So for a while every bloody Youtube video had someone in the thumbnail expressing delight, surprise and shock with a wide open mouth. Eventually, the novelty of this conceit must have worn off as people got tired of the gimmick and it stopped being useful to most Youtubers except I imagine for Mr. Beast. 

I bring this up because I feel like the art team at WotC were told by someone that people love sheer, unrelenting borderline insane expressions of joy crossing people's faces, regardless of the illustrative intent or context of the image, and that became an embedded design imperative. Luckily, as I mentioned, there's enough more conventional illustrations to offset this, but holy cats....either a few more smiling maniacs or a few less illustrations of non drugged up adventurers behaving normally and I think the art alone could have sunk this book just by crossing some uncanny valley line. (EDIT - probably not, and this is probably just me and my preference for characters "fitting the mood" better for the subject....and me being out of touch with the totality of what the mood is for D&D 2024, I suppose. But still! I can't be the only one who finds some of these maniacal smiling adventurers off-putting.....this is probably just a personal extension of why I don't enjoy Disney movies or something.)

The Myriad Ways Nostalgia Seeps In

 So I think I hit a nostalgia phase recently, and I realize now that there is a vast difference between "Nostalgia as represented by other people online," and "Nostalgia that works for me." To be more specific, I recently began thinking about what would be considered "nostalgic" for me in a sense that I understood....that is, wanted to engage with and liked in a way that felt like I was reconnecting with an old past I had all but abandoned. 

It's hard for me to feel nostalgia about D&D because, in the time I have been a gamer I have played D&D consistently across about six editions and numerous variants almost weekly now for close to 43 years. So D&D specifically isn't a nostalgia driver - its an old warhorse I can both rely on but also feel the need to give the poor old boy a break these days, as he's old and weathered.

I likewise have a lot of bygone hobbies that no longer "click" for me at least partially because the overall value of the hobby has now passed on to memory, or its dated in a unique way that makes it difficult to re-engage with. Sometimes its because the elements of the hobby that made it fun now seem a bit quaint, as I have moved on from it and developed more sophisticated tastes (for example: as a teenager I was fascinated with Transformers, but that was 40 years ago and I really don't care for them these days outside of mild amusement and perplexity at just how much that IP has polymorphed and warped over the years). 

There are sometimes hobbies I was so in to that I exhausted my interest, and now find that any rekindling of interest is mostly a mellow "reappreciation" of an old interest. I think of Star Trek this way, for example. Loved it - a lot- back in the day, will still watch any of the original movies and episodes on occasion, but otherwise have very little interest in what goes on in Star Trek now, or in seeking out, collecting, or obsessing over the Star Trek of yore. It's time has passed for me.

But, amidst all of this, I figured out what does click for me on the nostalgia scale: stuff I was really into in the very late eighties and much of the nineties, stuff I particularly enjoyed and then moved away from, often due to life circumstances, but never properly got back to. Sometimes its also because my moment of enjoyment was deep and profound, and the "thing" in question was ultimately left behind but not because I was oversaturated or done with the property, but because life conspired to take me away from it. I have managed to identify a few of these things, which I have been rediscovering lately and finding I am really enjoying getting back to these ancient, neglected interests. Specifically, here are a few:

Cyberpunk - Specifically Cyberpunk 2020, the most played game I ran in college that wasn't AD&D 2E, and easily one of the best gaming experiences I had back in the day. I moved away from it for plenty of reasons, none of which were because I was done with it, although later editions didn't tempt me back; we'll see about Cyberpunk Red which I am reading through again with an eye for seeing if it can recapture that zeitgeist of Cyberpunk gaming in the early nineties.

Image Comics from the Nineties - I jumped hard on the Image comics explosion in 1992 and stuck with it until time and money conspired to take me away from comic collecting following my move to Seattle in 1995. I have very fond memories of just how great, new and interesting it was to follow the various comic creators behind Image at that time as they constructed a new, interesting shared universe that was outdoing Marvel and DC at every turn. It fell apart eventually, but I only left it because I graduated and went off to Seattle to pursue some direction toward a career. I came back to comic collecting in 2012 and have stuck with it, but only recently did I begin to recollect various Image series from the nineties (all of my original comics have been long gone). Wildcats, Stormwatch, Grifter, Authority, Gen 13, Team 7 and many others are all a "best of" from  unique era in the nineties when creator controlled properties briefly made the entire industry quake in fear. Of these, Spawn alone is the one I have kept up with collecting so I don't need to bargain hunt at local comic shops and on Ebay for Todd McFarlane's angry hero from hell, but for the rest? It's proving to be a lot of fun to restore these lost collections, and even find the stuff that came out after I was forced to take a 17 year hiatus in comic collecting.

Unknown Armies - I played a lot of 1st edition Unknown Armies, and loved that edition. I was out of the loop by the time 2nd edition was released (it was too soon!) and now I've had 3rd edition on my shelf for ages. But that said, I think that either getting back to the original 1st edition or re-embracing the newest edition is another proper nostalgia itch scratcher for me. 

Pseudo-Nostalgia: Over the Edge - I actually loved reading all the Over the Edge books, and wanted to run it but never got the opportunity. I am now recollecting with exactly that intent!

Anyway.....these properties (and a few more I might write about in the future) have actually been ticking the nostalgia box for me. So now I think I understand how some people feel....maybe!

Borderlands Movie Review

 I saw Borderlands over the weekend with my son....it was, well, fine, but the movie clearly has so many weird little issues that it was doomed from the beginning. There's a lot of individual performances and moments that feel very right for Borderlands, but the film is stuck in a pre-Last of Us/pre-Fallout Series quagmire of the sort of lowered expectations Hollywood has had toward video game franchises from the time before someone started doing it right. Still better than the Halo TV show, but that's a super low bar. See if for free and be only slightly disappointed.

Pros on the movie:

--Looks really good for the most part; some nice effort was put in to give the world of Pandora its junky, trashed feel from the games.

--Cate Blanchett really puts it all in on a grizzled older Lilith, who is a gun-toting shoot-first lady version of Han Solo in this film.

--Jack Black really nailed Claptrap the Robot, enough so for me that he almost sounded like the game version.

--Kevin hart does a pretty good Roland circa Borderlands 1. Krieg is Krieg, though if you know him from Borderlands 2 he says a lot of crazy stuff this version in the movie barely touches on. Marcus the gun dealer works surprisingly well given he, like so many Borderlands characters are such distinct visual and audio personalities that that can make it tough for a live actor to live up to the more cartoonish elements of its source material.

And the Cons:

--Made years ago during the pandemic, this project clearly went through too many screen rewrites and edits, and the story is a mashup of bits from the games and "Save the Cat" plot elements jammed in by nervous screenwriters who didn't know what to do with the material and were worried it wouldn't appeal to a mass audience. It ignores or rewrites chunks of game plot in ways that The Last of Us and Fallout Series have shown you do not have to; it is an artifact of the elements of Hollywood that do not like video games and do not know what to do with them.

--The movie has three principle female leads, all in their fifties to sixties. In an action movie about a video game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, featuring mostly characters also in their teens and twenties. Gina Gershon as Mad Moxxie is arguably the closest in age to her own character, but in the Borderlands universe even Mad Moxxie is still using some unholy biogenetic/cybernetic enhancements to make herself perpetually young looking (maybe, I dunno; its video game logic, okay?) But as I watched this movie all I could think to myself was, "I saw the perfect actress for Lilith earlier this year, and she was playing Furiosa." 

--Even Kevin Hart, despite playing a decent Roland (IMO, YMMV), felt a bit too old for the Roland from the game who I would have pegged at maybe 25-26 years old and fresh out of a tour of duty leading him to vault hunter as a profession. Plus, in the movie, he's actually portrayed as an AWOL crimson lance, which is....maybe what happens to him in a later game? I don't honestly know, I only got about 10 hours in to Borderlands 2 (I've played the first game start to finish 3 times, but never finished 2 or 3, sorry).

--What was with female General Knox (and why gender swap Knox when there was a perfectly workable actual female villain in the original game who filled this exact role?) and her relationship with Roland? Why was that not even remotely developed in a way the audience could see so it had some meaningful payoff? Was that stuff that was filmed and then cut in editing? 

--No skag attack? In a Borderlands game? Yeesh!

--A mishmashed ending which took more from Borderlands 2, but shifted who the characters were and made only a slight nod to the tentacle brother to Cthulhu that is the end boss of the original game. Okay but also not ideal.

--The biggest con with the movie was how remarkably little of it felt "right" and how those moments stood out when the movie did, in fact, occasionally start to feel very much like Borderands, only to then do something that felt ham-fisted and either the result of poor writing or poor editing/direction. 

--The fights lacked pizzazz. The director (Eli Roth, I believe) doesn't seem to know how to do satisfying fight choreography.

--For every region from the game that got an interesting facelift (such as Fyrestone or Piss Wash Gully) there was another location where it was just head-scratching as to why they changed it (the ending sequence, for example, where the Vault entrance is located).  

--Weird and ham-fisted "Save the Cat" plot moments felt jammed in to satisfy story beats or force emotional resonance. The entire backstory of Lilith, Tannis and Lilith's mom was just...unnecessary.

--Tiny Tina was a doomed choice of character from the start; no one was going to top the Animated Tiny Tina for sheer crazy, period.

--Tannis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis is the most out of place of all of the characters. In the game she is a late twenties/early thirties scheming psychopath driven mad by the planet in her pursuit of Eridian artifacts. In the movie she is a seventy-something savant on the spectrum who botched her friend's request to take care of her daughter and who hides away in some attic studying artifacts with no real agency. Curtis does fine, but this just ain't the game's Tannis, by a long shot.

--Why do none of the characters reflect their iconic abilities? How could the movie go at length without showing Lilith use phasing powers, or Roland using his turret machine gun? These were such easy gives for certain scenes, essentially the character's superpowers, and they ignored them. 

--The vibe of the movie is just completely off. It feels at moments like the art and FX team totally got the message, but the writers and director totally did not. Somewhere in this mix someone knew enough to crib material from the game, but not enough to understand the core appeal of the game that could translate to film.

So in short: I give the movie a C for trying, but also a C for somehow failing so badly. I don't regret seeing it, but I also hope the movie is quickly and quietly forgotten so that maybe now, in this post-The Last of Us era of films based on games, we can see a real Borderlands movie done right eventually. I wonder how much cash could be thrown at George Miller to make it? Seriously, he made a much better Borderlands movie earlier this year, called Furiosa. 

This is Probably too Clever But....

 In reference to my post yesterday about being confused as to why Robert Downy Jr. would return as Doctor Doom, the thought crossed my mind that if you wanted to have a big Iron man comeback, and didn't want to obviously give away your plans, this is the way to do it, through misdirection. Unfortunately a fellow I know with more Marvel lore than I do says the whole Iron Man/Doc Doom connection is a thing in recent Marvel comics, so maybe its just that. Who knows!

Let's Play: Losing the Plot or Out of Touch!

 The title of this blog came to mind after two conversations. The first one was with a couple friends who, like me, are of an older generation that remembers a time when Star Wars worked reasonably well because the oversaturation of content was restricted to comics, books and games; the core conceits of the universe were officially corralled within a handful of movies. So today my son, who should be target demographic #1 for Disney's Star Wars, had lots of scathing opinions about The Acolyte's loose effort at either mishandling or redefining the core conceits of what its universe is. In a bygone age something like Acolyte would be another random Dark Horse Comic or maybe a West End Games sourcebook that was quickly forgotten. Today....it's a TV show and sort of feels like someone has steered wildly off course on the original sparse but satisfying core nugget of the Star Wars Experience.

The second one was me reading about How Robert Downy Jr. will return to the Marvel Universe as Doctor Doom. I don't know how this works. I can speculate its more of their multiversal madness, but the reason they are not working right now is precisely due to the fact that multiversal storylines do not make for coherent storytelling, and they reduce the gravitas of the main plot. Comics use multiverse storylines to "fix" issues prior authors and artists caused for future artists. They sometimes use it to do hard reboots to clean up the myriad obscure plots that make it hard for new readers to break in to the current books. They often (in DC's case) use it to tell cool stories they can't tell any other way because the core conceits of a comic universe require things be static and not change. But the film universes of these comics clearly work differently, and the application of multiversal themes seem to be the death knell of both the Marvel and DC film continuities. You can have fun in the moment, but then you leave and realized it tasted great but was just empty calories. These is nothing to feel invested in, at the end of the day. It is a storyteller's dead end.

That prompted me to think, so am I the crazy one who is out of touch here, thinking that bringing Iron Man guy back s Doctor Doom guy....a  move I can only imagine will do no justice to either character....is just kind of digging the hole Marvel is in even deeper? Or am I Out of Touch, and if I were one of the cool kids this would all make sense somehow?

My son, who is 12, barely remembers the Avengers movies that offed Tony Stark as a character. He has seen some Fantastic Four films and found them old and out of date. He doesn't know of care why the Iron Man actor is now also the Doctor Doom actor, and has so much Marvel content at his finger tips that he gains satisfaction by refusing all of it, because his generation, to survive, must set these boundaries against the hordes of IP issued forth by the Media Overlords. So....if you feel this way does that mean you are Out of Touch too? Even at 12? Or has Disney well and truly Lost the Plot?

I guess if we're lucky my son will know how awesome (or terrible) a Downey Jr. Doom is before he's graduated High School!

Long-Form vs. Short-Form RPGs - Or, There's Never Enough Time to Run Everything

Right now my gaming group....well, I as GM anyway....have a problem, and that problem is that we are currently playing Dungeons & Dragons 5E on both Wednesday and Saturday. That's a good thing, sure! People love playing games and its nice to have had a consistent D&D group in one form or another for decades now. But here's the problem.....I''ll provide a short list:

Tales of the Valiant; Mothership; Call of Cthulhu; Savage Worlds; Pathfinder 2E Revised; Traveller; Mork Borg; Vast Grimm; Mutant Year Zero; Gamma World; Swords & Wizardry.

I could go on....but you get the point. There's a lot of RPGs I have I'd like to also be playing right now, but I keep running D&D 5E. The reason, of course, is because D&D at its heart is a long-form game experience. You can run short campaigns, sure, but D&D is built around the core conceit of forging lengthy tales of heroes who venture forth and have exciting experiences over many, many game sessions. As a result, starting a D&D campaign isn't just (for my table, anyway) a case of "go explore that dungeon," its a campaign-level "Start at level 1 and work your way to whatever level the DM can get to before breaking," type deal.

Some of the other games work much better with a more short-form experience, where the game can last 1-3 sessions or maybe a mini campaign arc of 5-10 sessions followed by a satisfying conclusion. Savage Worlds does this well. Horror games are particularly suited to this format and I run Call of Cthulhu and Mothership usually with the expectation that a campaign will rarely go past 5-10 sessions. I did once run a CoC campaign that went 18 sessions, but even that one had to end spectacularly and with a measure of finality that was quite satisfying and is still talked about years later.

The problem is: I love running long-form campaigns but I really thrive on short-form campaigns where you can remain more focused on a specific concept space. And right now, I am running essentially two long-form campaigns because when it comes to D&D and its clones, it is all too easy and natural to slide in to the lengthy campaign format, sometimes without even realizing it. Now, luckily for me the Saturday campaign has a definite potential closing point. For whatever reason, my "secondary campaign" night (which is Saturdays) is always easier for me to eventually tire of and want to bail on. So I expect we will get 2-3 more sessions out of it before I am proposing something new. This is unfortunate for my players on Saturday who would like a long running campaign, but necessary for my sanity, because deep down these days I am full of 20 ideas at a time, but have room for exploring only one and a half-of them at a time. 

Wednesday is the real problem for me: I want to try out Tales of the Valiant, but we're hip deep in our ongoing D&D 5E campaign with no end in sight. Tales of the Valiant is meant to be a 5E replacement ruleset, so in theory I could cheekily just start using it and gradually shift the campaign over but....nah, that wouldn't be as satisfying as starting a new campaign aimed specifically at using Tales of the Valiant by itself. So yeah, I remain stuck there for a bit.

Meanwhile, I have loads of new ideas for other games, including Mothership, Cthulhu, Savage Worlds and some more obscure ones such as Dreams & Machines and Gamma World (the 4th edition of the game from the nineties, no less!) that I want to entertain. I feel like I could have done this more efficiently twenty years ago. Ah well! We'll see what I can do.

Tales of the Valiant is here! Let the 2024 Edition Wars Commence

 I finally got my Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide and Monster Vault books, along with the very nice GM screen. Together these two books comprise all the core you need to play the game, so I am intrigued to see all the useful (but non critical) content in the GM's Guide coming out later this year.

The new books are sturdy, standard Kobold Press style, with gorgeous Kobold Press artwork that "feels like D&D" which is the best compliment I can provide to the game. Given that the Kobolds have essentially positioned Tales of the Valiant to be to D&D 6th Edition what Pathfinder 1E was to D&D 4th edition, this is a good place for them to reside.....whether that is by accident or design I cannot say. If D&D 6th edition -and go look at all the release details so far if you don't think the new D&D 2024 isn't a full-out new edition!- does not grab as much attention and go over as well as it could or should, then Tales of the Valiant could provide a more than suitable alternative. 

TotV will most likely remain niche no matter what, as its the kind of thing you sort of know about and get interested in if you're already hip deep into RPGs, while D&D has cornered a different kind of market with a more casual crowd who's overall interest is less obscure and more trendy. But if it turns out that D&D shed too much of its identifiable crust in the remaking, then we could indeed see people start looking around for alternatives (or maybe even just stick with their old books). 

I can see this happening: D&D 6E seems to be caught between two markets right now. The general perception of the new class and rules promotional details coming out strongly suggest a mechanical rework designed to appeal to a more hardcore crowd interested in a bit more mechanical rigor and tactical acumen. Simultaneously we are being told the game is being revamped for "how people really play" and there seems to be a strong push toward friendlier and less violent art, character focused development that leans hard into the "start as a super hero, not super zero" thematics that 5E was already noted for, and a broader sense of inclusion for game tables which eschew the rigors of mechanical combat in favor of pure role playing. These are interesting and very opposite demographics to appeal to simultaneously in a product....and I will be interested in seeing if WotC can pull it off.

There's also an entire segment of modern D&D gamers who have only come in to the hobby with 5th edition, and have never had to experience an edition change. For many, a perceived increase in mechanical rigor (or even just a moderate level of changes for change's sake) could be more than they want to deal with. I could be wrong....who knows!

Even if D&D 6E takes off and also succeeds via D&D Beyond and Roll20 (which, correct me if I am wrong, seems to be substituting for D&D Beyond's original goal of making the online experience more video-game and microtransaction driven), it's okay, because Tales of the Valiant clearly has the "I like physical books" crowd covered, and even better if you do want to go VTT with it, Shard Tabletop is a damned fine product. If TotV can manage to make Shard or something similar provide an easier set of tools to desgn and subsequently print out for live table gaming, they will manage to cater to both live and virtual crowds easily. With D&D Beyond.....I feel like maybe D&D is not as poised here as they had originally intended. But hey, it's not September yet, we shall see how that goes.

Amidst all this are other game systems, but I think they all suffer in odd ways that prevent them from getting to be the next Pathfinder 1E to D&D. Pathfinder 2E, for example, shed so much OGL identity that it is functionally a different sort of game now, one with few to no identifiable "D&Disms" left. At least Tales of the Valiant wasn't afraid to include an owlbear, for example! It retains a lot of stuff that firmly plants it in the realm of "D&Dlikes" which means its comfort level will be more familiar to many players now than PF2E. PF2E, meanwhile, is poised to be a good alternate for people who want a D&D inspired experience but also really want a lot more mechanical rigor and very tight math. There is a crowd for that, and they are already playing their preferred game (PF2E). 

Other potential contenders lurk out there, but each offers a niche experience. Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised is my favorite OSR experience next to OSE. OSE is also cool. Shadowdark is out there, and it seems like people do like it. None of them are poised to become the next Pathfinder 1E, though, because each is catering to a specific playstyle subset of the broader population.

Anyway, the last six months of this year will be a fun roller coaster for D&D and now Tales of the Valiant. I'm developing a new campaign (well, an old one set in a new -or old- era) for TotV and will start posting some details here soon. I think I have buy-in from my group, so I'm excited to get a chance to try it out before the D&D 6E madness hits in three months.

One Month In! The Book Standoff Continues - On Carbon 2185, Rokugan and More

 Well it's been a month since our move-in, and the vast majority of my book collection now has ample shelf space. I am still clearing out some books, several boxes to be specific, and eyeballing all the other stuff I have. I'd rather get it all to fit on the shelves I have rather than watch every ounce of free wall space be consumed by shelves of books....we'll leave that to my study, and of course my son's room, which increasingly growing in book volume as he absconds with my collection into his own (or adds new stuff). Some of this is just kizmet....turns out for example I was never likely to run Fallout RPG, but my collector's penchant made it super easy to simply give him the books I had on hand so he could then run it. I had a spare Call of Cthulhu Keeper's Book which is now his, too. Drew the line at the Malleus Monstrorum set, though. He made off with it, but in exchange for its safe return I promised him I'd snag him his own copy. 

This is the delicate tet-a-tet we have in house. As a gamer dad I have All The Books and All The Money and as Son of Dad he has to figure out how he can best whittle All The Books and All The Money away from me. Luckily for him I am fine with this! Now I just need to narrow down our understanding of what is definitively up for grabs vs. what I am using. For examples....

Carbon 2185 - a 5E-powered cyberpunk RPG I snagged in 2022 during the abominable Florida Expedition, has been lounging around in the collection for a while. I like the premise, but never could find the right time to try it out. Now my son has it, and is running games in it, and I have even gotten to play in one. It's fun stuff! So my buying this book then has profited for me in spades.

Rokugan - Off limits! Well, sort of. This book provides copious setting content and rules for the Japanese themed campaign in 5E I am running on Saturdays now, and as such I need the book very much. But my son has extracted much from it in the process for his characters, too.

Malleus Monstrorum - we solve this by arranging for him to work off and earn his own copies. He's drafted up a prolific Gaslight campaign for Cthulhu, and I expect we'll be playing in it sooner or later. My son is obsessed with Tarot and the Simon Necronomicon so it behooves me, as his father, to try setting him straight on his mythos lore by making sure he has copies of these books, at the very least. Must avoid summoning unintended things, right?!?

GURPS - For reasons perhaps caused by me talking it all up too much, my son wants to learn and run GURPS, too. Fine with me! As one oddball youtuber commented, GURPS is now "D&D, but for nerds" and that has never been truer than now in the zeitgeist of D&D becoming so mainstream. 

Anyway, the point of all this is that I am finally, at last, getting a chance to really let my collection breathe, watch it get more synergy thanks to my son, and also allow me to eyeball what I have and make realistic assessments of why I have collected some of the stuff I have, and whether or not it may be better suited elsewhere. We'll see! The new place has engrained a satisfactory sense of "no rush, I can take my time on this" that I hadn't felt before. 

I've written a lot but no pictures. Time for some! Here's our dominion (walking on a nearby trail):

My Son's disaster of a room (it's gotten better since this pick):

Some true order at last in my study:

Moved In!

 So we have a nice new house in the middle of the desert, in a development underway in west Los Lunas. This is the closest I can get to leaving Albuquerque without actually leaving Albuquerque. It's a 30 minute commute to work (my in-town commute was previously 15 minutes) on the highway but it's a very nice change of pace. We're the first owners in this branch of the new development so its laden with partially constructed and unoccupied homes. Fun! I am going to have to rewatch Poltergeist, the best movie about buying and moving in to a new development for new homeowners.

Even after securing 10 new book shelves I don't have enough room for all the books. Time to open up the Ebay shop again!

More to come...

Imminent Closing!

 Closing on the new house, that is!

Many of you have had this experience like me: renters instead of buyers, never finding the right time or opportunity to feel like settling down is a good time, or never having the right job or the right level of job security. Maybe life just catches up with you (as it has with me) and you realize one day you're getting too old to move every few years, and the idea of not having to uproot and displace every now and then no longer feels liberating, it feels like maybe, to quote the old saying, "I'm getting too old for this S***!"

And so it is.

I'll have internet up at the new house next week....will blog post post move then! For those interested, this is a brand new house....so new that Google Maps shows an open plot of land where a house currently stands. So new that the local realtor and HOA contacts indicated we are literally the first people to move in to the new neighborhood. So new that we get to do a walk through tomorrow with the contractor who built the house! So...yeah, pretty new.

It's also the largest house I'll have occupied in many an age. We have had large rentals in the past, but at 1550 square feet this house has enough room that my wife and I are contemplating the need for more furniture to fill up the copious extra space we will have. I am debating the possibility I may have enough space for as many book shelves as I need to get the entire collection out of the 150 boxes and on display. I still want to cut that total down by half, but....yeah I could totally do that at the new place if I wanted to. 

Alrighty then! Next blog post on the other side.

Moving and the Plight of Owning a Large Library

 I have now in my garage 120+ boxes just of books, all banker box sized because anything larger than that is a pain to haul (though I do use larger boxes for board games and lighter weight stuff). It's a lot of stuff! At 53 years of age I realize I have more books to read than I have time left on this planet, more games to play than I have any free time ever. I need to figure out what to do with this, or my family will be cursing my name at the wake. 

One fun exercise was establishing what not to pack before the time to move (later this month, presuming all goes as planned and we close on the house purchase around May 17th). Sometimes you get that moment of insight on what "really matters" when you are forced to consolidate and think carefully about what you both need and want access to in the coming weeks. For me, I effectively left out the core D&D 5th edition books, a copy of Cypher System, the Call of Cthulhu 7E core book, BRP,  Dragonbane, and the Traveller books. I had Savage Worlds out but ended up packing it, as it is very unlikely I'd be running it before I am fully moved in. I also now have the glorious deluxe boxed set of Mothership in hand (it arrived Monday), so that's staying unpacked for now while I absorb it. All of these are going into boxes for moving soon enough.....but not until mid May.

So if these aforementioned systems are the "core" of what I need to sustain gaming, then what the heck is going on with all those boxes? About 2/3rds of those boxes contain games. Many of them I know I am holding on to them purely for purposes of maintaining a collection, especially my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition D&D books and Pathfinder 1E tomes. I have collections I probably won't ever use, even if I enjoyed reading them at the time (Numenera comes to mind, as does most of what I have bought from Free League). I have a vast collection of Pathfinder 2E stuff which I think I have no further use for. I continue to play and enjoy the game, though less because I am enamored with the system and more because I enjoy gaming with my friends and the GM in question. For me....I kinda like the new revised PF2E but as a result I am not sure I need more than those core revised books now. All the rest of it? Probably best to find new homes for it.

Finding new homes for such a large volume of books is a pain in the ass, though. The hassle of assembling and shipping them anywhere is a nightmare, especially if selling it all on Ebay, though I did do that one summer a several years back and could do so again. I have thought about calling up local used book shops and inquiring if they purchase large volumes, such as an estate sale, and how they would go about doing that. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that while I know I will never reduce the collection down to zero (do not want to do that) I think 40 boxes would look a lot more realistic right now than 120 boxes. For the interim, though, I am stuck moving it to the new house when that time comes.....and who knows, maybe the much nicer, newer and more spacious house (it's a brand new house, too) will embolden me with its copious room for shelves and space. We'll see.*

*All of this is of course without considering the reality, which is that my son will likely confiscate a nontrivial chunk of my collection for his own purposes. He most recently absconded with my copy of the Fallout RPG and is now running it for his middle school group, and I think he has designs on my Alien RPG collection, too.

The Ambernic RG556

A while back I concluded I was settled on the handled PC/console gaming cycle, with a Steam Deck on the one hand, a Switch OLED in the middle and a Asus ROG Ally on the other. Well, I lied. Since then I have acquired an Ambernic RG556 and a Legion Go. Oh yeah, I have also had access to a Logitech G Cloud, about which I have some thoughts as well. Why? Well I have at last concluded that, as a kid, I had a deep fascination for the concept that one day you could have handheld devices that did all the cool stuff. It explains my obsession over tablets and e-readers, and now of course handheld console and console-like PCs. It is not a healthy obsession, and the only good news I have is I regularly see guys on Youtube posting videos about their own obsessions, from their recording rooms laden with dozens of such devices. Admittedly, they probably get some revenue from Youtube or freebies from the manufacturers and can subsidize their bad habits accordingly, but many of these guys have maybe a few thousand subscribers at most, so I doubt they are benefitting from the views....only a handful have very popular shows. 

Anyway, to add to the pile of what has been discussed before, here's my quick takes so far on the Ambernic RG556 and its unique gateway into Emulation-based handhelds. I'll talk more about the Legion Go and G-Cloud soon.

Ambernic RG556

This is the first emulator handheld console I have purchased.* I snagged this one based on the plethora of reviews suggesting it had a high level of functionality, a nice OLED screen, was easy to get in to without having any real prior emulation familiarity, and would potentially stave off my son's recent obsession for collecting relics and antiques from The Before Times, what he sees as ancient gaming history and I see as "stuff people played when I was in my 20's and 30's." Like Gamecube, PS1/PS2, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, PSP....that sort of stuff.

When you get a device like this, its power determine how much you can emulate. The 556 can mostly emulate on up through Dreamcast and PS2 without issue, but Gamecube and Xbox seem beyond its scope of ability (although I've learned the Xbox emulator crowd is much smaller than for other consoles). It works out of the box. Emulator enthusiasts will give you lots of seemingly useful advice, on the surface, but it is bad advice for a novice; the onboard emulators are just fine to start, and you can gradually learn to mess around with other, better emulators at a later date. I may write more about how to do this.....but trust me when I say that if you don't know a lot about emulation to start, be very careful of the advice from the pros, they are not writing for people with no real knowledge of how to go about doing emulation, and it will lead to a fairly useless or limited device quickly if you are not careful.

Part of this is probably due to the tricky issue of emulation and piracy, although the vast majority of the games on these old emulators are essentially unattainable by any other means, short of trawling through garage sales or occasional retro game stores for used copies. Not even products such as the Evercade offer most of these games, and many are consigned to oblivion due to licensing issues (as an example, I was completely unaware of how many 2D arcade side scrollers from the 80's and 90's existed for the Aliens franchise until the Ambernic showed up). I am not entirely sure how Ambernic can do this, but assume its because they are A: under Chinese law and don't sweat lawsuits from Nintendo and B: are selling a piece of hardware, and presumably the "loaded stuff" that comes with it is just a courtesy? No idea, but if someone knows I'd be interested in details, as the emulator community dances around this subject constantly.

That said, the device out of the box, with me adding more ROMs from specific sites for my favorite specific games from back in the day (mostly PS1, PS2 and Dreamcast) have almost all worked great,  and the Ambernic RG556 screen is a very nice device, super comfortable and easy to figure out. I got one for my son and wife as well, and they play these things constantly now. It hasn't quite solved my son's desire to keep collecting old games, and may if anything have backfired a bit as he is now even more interested in finding the original cartridges just for bragging rights to his Zoomer buddies, but overall this product was well worth it. It's not bad an an android device, either, though it is disappointing just how few android games are really worth any time or effort these days; the modern landscape of mobile gaming is just a repulsive sea of grifters, con artists and pure garbage, with only a handful of gems floating in the murk. As such, the Ambernic shines best as an emulator, reminding us of how, not too long ago, games were made to be actually fun and complete experiences, and not as pure cash grabs using predatory tactics to part consumers from their money. 

*I do also have a couple Evercades (the original, the Vs. and the remake from a year or so back) but those are licensed products with new releases of classic games, most of which no one has ever heard of or remembers, with the gimmick being that you can buy collections of games on cartriges for the system. It's a cool system, but I stopped collecting after a while when it became clear that any genuinely interesting games were unlikely to get licensed out to Evercade. A few exceptions have happened, but the Evercade does not have analog thumbsticks which means its a limited experience outside of a specific era of gaming; their Duke Nukem collection, for example, borders on unplayable without an analog stick. 

The Slow Roll Gaming Show of 2024 - Swords & Chaos, Comae Engine, and More

 This is a remarkably quiet year for a D&D 50th Anniversary. Some stuff is coming out, which is cool, but the key new edition books are all delayed to the end of the year and in the case of the Monster Manual, next year. But luckily I expect to have Tales of the Valiant in my hands in maybe just a few weeks? We shall see!

Part of me acknowledges I am just getting old, but even DriveThruRPG's picking have been....weird....lately. A disproportionate amount of content over on DTRPG seems to have either an intentional or unintentional lack of polish, as if the idea is to throwback the product to a bygone era when your only art resource was you high school buddy who doodled a lot, but meanwhile the rest of the products all have a pristine AI generated polish to them that has that "uncanny valley reality, tinged with anime thematics" look to it that is a grotesque turn-off and an immediate warning that there may have been less actual effort put in to the product. But hey, interesting stuff does slip in the cracks. I am debating ordering the brand new Smoke and Aces BRP book which looks interesting, and I just received my print edition of The Comae Engine, a rather unique reductionist redesign of the BRP/D100 system, and I also ordered a copy of Swords & Chaos RPG, a non-Troll Lord published SIEGE engine RPG heavily flavored for traditional Swords & Sorcery; barbarians only need apply, no pesky hobbits here!

So far, of the two Comae Engine looks a little heavy on the "storytelling mechanics" approach to play which for me is the equivalent of telling me that you can substitute any meat in any meal with an impossible burger patty and it will be just fine. I am not yet decided, and plan to try running it before I make any determination. Some elements such as the skill system approach are pretty cool.....and in terms of trying to make a condensed, modest system that can quickly be skinned for any genre or feel it seems like it might work pretty well in many cases. I think the book could have benefited from about 20 pages or so of examples of how to use it, and example genres/scenarios. 

To contrast, Swords & Chaos RPG from Blackspire Fantasy is a SIEGE engine powered RPG, a sort of updated version of Castles & Crusades which refines the experience to a distinctly classical swords, sorcery and sandals approach to RPGs, with humans as the only species to play, classes that fit Hyboria, Atlantis or Mu, and an excellent roster of monsters that only poaches a handful of classic OGL familiars that best fit the darker S&S vibe (e.g. cloakers, darkmantles), then fleshes the list out with a lot of more traditionally pulp fantasy beasts. No orcs, elves, halflings or dwarves here! 

Put another way, Swords & Chaos is for better or worse more my cup of tea these days, a known quantity my old brain, suffused like a marinade for decades with the swords & sorcery genre, can wrap itself around....like a tasty spinach wrap, maybe. Hmmmm now I'm hungry.

What I like most about S&C is that it is a "all in one" book laden with exactly 100% of what you need to run the game. I am sure you can swap stuff in from Castles & Crusades if you want....but you totally don't need to. This book has it all. I am really big on "one tome to rule it all" lately. I will grant systems where the rules are dispersed over 2 or 3 tomes a pass, so long as those 2 or 3 books combined are 100% complete together.

Despite this, I am still extremely keen to explore the other slightly more traditional yet nonetheless totally cool Dragonbane. I really have too many flavors of classic and pulp fantasy floating around (see also ACKS). I need to wrap up the current D&D campaign so we can get to the other fantasy games all waiting in the wings. Conundrums!

Pathfinder Monster Core is Out - Some Thoughts

 I snagged the new Monster Core for Pathfinder's 2E revised series, and have to say this is a nice, robust tome with a larger page count and content than the original. Like the new ORC licensed editions it expurgates as much OGL styled content as it can, which is to say that you won't find any distinctly D&D-brand level monsters anymore, not even the ones which served some general purpose. Owlbears - gone. Mimics? Gone. Darkmantles and other oddities such as the Chuul? Gone. Some of these monsters may be repurposed or renamed....ones which had already been given a distinct Pathfinder identity (Allgholthu, caligni, and xulgath for example being faceless ones, dark creepers and troglodytes) still lurk in these forms, but if you take a look at the section on demons and devils: whoo boy, this is where the identity of Pathfinder now feels more defined by what is absent than what is present. 

Amidst this are the many monsters out of myth and folklore oddly untouched, even the poor Medusa who deserves to be properly renamed a Gorgon, but oh well. 

I haven't decided yet if this is a good thing or not. Sure, the old Bestiaries work fine with the revised rules and provide those old OGL stats, but I'm a bit of a purist and want to look at the current state of the game for what it is trying to be going forward. Right now it is....interesting. A GM with this book will want to take some extra time to start looking for what will be the new oddities players come to associate with PF style fantasy, and what will be the useful staples for impromptu encounters. They are definitely not going to look like the old D&D stuff.

On the plus side, this actually makes the experience of reading the Monster Core feel a bit novel and different. There's effectively a new and different experience here, and the excision of so many OGL elements makes it feel more distinctly its own thing. On the negative side, it really does feel less like "something new and different" after a while and more like something defined by an absence, probably because ultimately Pathfinder really has always been the "Other D&D" for all practical purposes. What is a fantasy world (or Golarion) like without so many of these monsters that used to define it? What is everything in Pathfinder now, a game which was originally the de facto flagship for the D&D 3rd edition game system, now that it has been rendered neuter by corporate chicanery and a need to brand one's IP more distinctly? It feels a bit.....hollow, almost performative. 

Despite that criticism, I am still keen to explore this book in depth and see what sort of ideas for a campaign it may bring me. We shall see! I have to reconcile my deep dislike of Pathfinder 2E as a player against my deep appreciation for it as a GM. I haven't quite managed to resolve this internal schism in my feelings about the game yet. 

ACKS Has Arrived!

A brief note! My ACKS (Adventurer, Conqueror, King System) core book, Playe's Companion, Heroic Fantasy Companion and Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu tomes have all arrived. I just wanted to point out that I often order from NobleKnight.com, and for exactly this reason: the books were all rated in EX/NM condition and that is exactly what showed up, in fantastic shape. 

I'll be bringing these along to show off to my game group next Wednesday. We're currently in a D&D 5E campaign in my Pergerron/River Kingdoms of Anansis setting, but it is heading to a finale soon and we will have a good opportunity to break if we want to try out something new. I actually have a campaign setting designed around a very gritty old-world theme, the Lands of Selentar, about which I don't think I've posted much on the blog (come to think of it, I need to get back to posting more on the other setting I ran PF2E adventures in, Oman'Hakat, as well). 

Selentar is a fictional analog to Europe around 60-90 AD if it turns out the Roman Empire analog collapsed abruptly after the totally-not-Nero like Emperor of the Eorma was killed in a vicious civil war driven by germanic-like people who realized that the aristrocracy of the empire was riddled with demon worship. All of the gods and beliefs in this setting are derived, at core, from what is known of the various peoples around the equivalent historical time period, albeit with some extra sword & sorcery twists. So...it might be an excellent fit for the ACKS system, in other words.

As long as I am posting something I just wanted to comment that Mothership Kickstarter just charged me for shipping so it looks like we may finally see the giant boxed set soon! I will in the interim continue our bi-weekly weekend Traveller games, which have been the polar , opposite of Mothership, especially this weekend's session when the group pulled off a Star Trek style rescue of stranded ships captured on an ancient asteroid turned into a relic defense weapon by a lost civilization. Not a shot was fired and yet everyone was gripped with excitement at the mystery and task at hand, followed by success in their rescue. It was a fun turnabout from games involving high levels of death and violence, and does reflect the fact that Traveller is above all else a multifaceted system reflecting the many  concept spaces in science fiction, allowing for a vast swathe of the genre to be represented. In other words....what I am saying is it would be hard to pull off such a pleasant and optimistic (yet still exciting and fun) mission in a system like Mothership. Even if I ran a completely straight mission in Mothership like that the entire party would be constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for mayhem and murder to ensue. But in Traveller? They can take it at face value and conclude that there was no need to assume a xenomorph analog around the corner. Next session they get invited to an Aslan wedding of high importance, and may discover a trafficking ring of non-spacefaring species who are being exploited by a local Evil Empire. If you are one of my players forget you read that sentence!  

Adventurer, Conqueror King System - My PDF experiment failed

Not too long ago I dived in to several systems, one of which was Adventurer, Conqueror King System. ACKS as it is known is an OSR-adjcent RPG from Autarch Publishing which has an interesting fusion of mechanical aspects from B/X D&D, AD&D 1E and AD&D 2E. It uses "class as race" for example but does so by constructing unique classes that are custom focused on the race. You don't play "elf" for example, you pick from elven spellsword or elven nightblade, with each demihuman type having a couple base classes in the core rules and lots more in the expanded companion books. It's a decent happy medium between simpler class choices that are also meaningful in flavor and style. "Spellsword" sounds cooler than elven fighter/mage, after all, or even just "elf!"

Anyway, lots of other things in ACKS appeal to me - proficiency systems, cool subsystems, a distinct sword & sorcery flavor that leans heavily into early pulp fantasy more than later post-Tolkien fantasy, etc. etc. But...ACKS is still ultimately another OSR variant, even if it is dolled up and more original than most. As such, I decided to try an experiment: I snagged all the ACKS books I wanted on PDF through DriveThruRPG.com and decided to see if I could engage with the system purely in PDF format. Could I, in fact, read, learn, and plan for a game with a system entirely held in electronic format?

As it turns out, months later, I have decided that the answer is a resounding no. While having the documents in PDF format is handy enough, actually sitting down and working with them on a tablet or big screen is far more utilitarian, and the horrible truth is that, at least for me, the tactile element of a physical rulebook I can flip back and forth through is more useful and honestly quicker than trying to do the same with a PDF. The only true advantage of the PDF is you can search fairly quickly (as long as it is indexed and your search parameter is correct). Beyond that, books hold the decisive advantage in that you can mark and annotate more easily (if you like defacing your books!), you can bookmark more clearly, you can search about as quickly but also with more intuition because you have a measurable quantity in hand and can know roughly where to look. It's just a more visceral, intuitive experience. Some may have adapted well to electronic documents, but for me? Nope. A lot of people I think feel this way.....it is evident in my son and his friends (of those who do read or play games) that the physical book is far more valued than a PDF. On the other hand, they are all playing D&D 5E, and there are no searchable PDFs out there, but they do use D&D Beyond for character generation in their middle school group, so whadda I know.

This is all a long way o saying I decided to buy the phsyical ACKS books instead with the idea toward running a campaign soon. I grabbed some decently priced copies on NobleKnight.com and the rest in POD through Drivethru. I will write more on ACKS as soon as I have the real books in hand! It is a very interesting system, managing to hew close to OSR norms while still innovating and achieving its own distinct flavor, and I like it. I may be able to blend it a bit or at least utilize it for some of the OSE modules I have accrued, too.....there's a lot to like about OSE, which takes a different and equally neat approach to consolidating various early OSR editions of D&D together, but its flavor is incredibly vanilla as a result, and I am really loving the sort of "Howard/de Camp/Carter/Wagner/Lieber" style that ACKS exudes. 

Dreams & Machines - Some First Thoughts

 This is a very brief post to mull over a couple odd thoughts about Dreams & Machines, the new 2D20 powered RPG from Modiphius. I snagged it yesterday, and am still ploughing through it so this is not a review, but this game evoked some immediate comparisons and observations to me. 

First and most interestingly when I read the back cover text I got this "exploring the unknown, Gamma World style" vibe but the books were sealed in plastic wrap so I bought them sight unseen based on this.

Second, on opening the book I was surprised that the books had a lot less art than I was expecting. Some of the art and the text blurbs are evocative of a kid's observations, and indeed there is some subtext to that effect.....but the game is, unlike its closest obvious influence (Tales from the Loop) not necessarily about rolling up kids in a world of abandoned giant robots. It's about rolling up adults in a world of abandoned giant robots. 

The Tales from the Loop comparison is inescapable. The art is varied in D&M but the best color pieces evoke people (sometimes kids) walking around giant robots. Some of the images look fairly menacing, but mostly its due to the spartan "shadows on shadows at night" style of the artist. The actual text of D&M is a lot more whimsical and youth-friendly; I haven't encountered anything (yet) that would suggest to me you couldn't hand this game to a 12-14 year old and regret it. 

I also felt like there's a slight bit of Numenera evoked in this book, but mostly Tales from the Loop. 

There's a lot of expository text setting up the world, how humans got there, and how and why robots are everywhere. The foes book is not all robots though. All told so far its an interesting read. 

The layout and style of the book is weird, though. It is not nearly as art-heavy or evocative as I thought, and the book barely manages to capture any style of its own; it feels too easy to draw comparisons to other RPGs that already occupy this same niche-within-a-niche genre. It feels to me like maybe an earlier draft of D&M really did focus on kids and robots, and someone midway said, "That's too on the nose, lets make them adults," but a lot of the sample text remained narratively from this kid. 

All that aside, I am still reading and it is quite interesting. A lighter side apocalyptic exploration book is cool enough, and there is ample room in the market for this kind of take. I could not dig the Tales of the Loop "kids on bikes" adventure theme anyway, I spent all my life trying to get away from being a kid, so I am content with D&M focusing on a broader picture. 

I'll post a more proper review soon enough, but wanted to share these initial thoughts!

EDIT: Worth mentioning, the book is starkly white pages with line drawings (meant at times to look simple or childish deliberately, I think), and it is so stark and simple that I feel this is the consequence of Modiphius being overly sensitive to the complaints about prior books (especially Star Trek) having white text on black backgrounds. Now it feels somehow....readable but almost plain and undercooked? Not a real critique, just a comment on how the layout feels to me. It still works for its intent.