Strays

Overall Score: ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♡ 9/10 A New Faevorite

(Disclaimer: I’m writing this review after having read the book. I have not at this moment run any games with it.)

Strays is one of the most outstanding RPG source-books of my last few months. Perhaps even the whole year-to-date. I expect anyone who picks up this book will find it hard to put down, after learning the basics. They are a decent introduction to the PbtA system, if you haven’t read about it before. But if you do know about it, skip to page 31 for the magic to begin.

World Building: ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 10/10 Enchanting

Strays is strongest in its descriptions of the other worlds and their inhabitants. In a brilliant departure from the usual “Basically immortal humans bound by arcane rules” depictions of Fae presented in most modern media, kumada1 depicts them as bound by very few hard rules, but rather driven by unique motivations and customs.

Gloomfae love secrets, but they wouldn’t collect intelligence to become information brokers, nor would they use their extensive powers of stealth and illusion to assassinate people. Remnantfae have a rather unorthodox view of having guests and generally prefer to contemplate the vast stretches of past and future (while completely neglecting the minutia of the present,) which feels appropriate for beings virtually incapable of dying. Conversely the Bloomfae of The Court Of Leaves And Mockery live fast lives without fear of (unusually frequent) death, and will fight in Flowers Wars for, frankly, inane causes (or just for the love of the fight.)

Complementing the faerie courts is a wealth of other creatures and organizations (from the artificially created sentient Fetches and mercurial Goblins, to the reality defying Halfborn and the ghosts of houses. And, of course, the National Paranormal Security Task-force – US Government can’t let the Reds win the Faerie Gap¹, now can they?)

Even if you never see yourself running this specific game, I would still recommend giving the second half of the book a read, just for the inspiration.

Visual Presentation: ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ❀ ❀ ❀ 7/10 Has its moments

The design is quite solid, for an indie publication, but I do have 2 nitpicks.

The smaller one is that the book could use better separation between the Player and GM parts. The player facing part of the book (Basics, World At A Glance, Character Creation, Combat and Equipment chapters) is interrupted in the middle by a chapter on GMing. Conversely, the chapter on 1950s America could be moved from the rest of the material, as that is the world the PCs (who loved there for over a decade) are expected to be well familiar with. The worst offense here is that players are sent to pick their special moves and burdens into a full section on faerie courts. While I do understand the separation between player and character knowledge, I feel this is a disservice to the process of discovery of this wonderful world.

The other is the artwork. The full color photos of nature that precede each chapter (and especially each of the 7 season-themed realms) work well. On the other hand, the drawings seem unrelated to the text, and they work the better, the more they are abstract (the flowers are nice too, even if they don’t match the described realm most of the time.)

Oh, and the page numbers in the PDF are off by one.

Mechanics: X/X Outside my competence 

I have yet to run a game Power by the Apocalypse, so while I feel I have a good understanding of the theory, I don’t have the practical feel for it. With that in mind I do not feel it is my place to judge the exact mechanical twists this game adds to the basics.

① “Faerie Gap” is actually not mentioned in the book, but with the Cold War kicking into high gear, its likely to be one of the motivations.