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Zephyr is a fantasy roleplaying game in a rich and dense miniature style---visually, think Hollow Knight, Evan Dahm's webcomic Rice Boy, or Maskwitches Of Forgotten Doggerland.

And while those are points of comparison, if your instinct is to immediately then think "oh, so it's just like Hollow Knight" you are completely wrong.

Sidebar: this PDF is 252 pages. And all of these pages are illustrated.

The text is sometimes a natural part of the illustrations (for example, one bit is written as carvings on an illustrated cave wall), but when it isn't it's still visually nestled into the gaps between illustrations. This is hard to do, and the text is quite readable in spite of this. Zephyr's information is always arranged in a way that's super easy to read and bite-sized.

There's also a lot of creativity in the art, sometimes pointing to and recontextualizing parts of the text. The table of contents has graffiti on it, giving hints. Character creation includes visual panel-splits that branch your choices through a series of small narratives.

And before we go on, let's take a moment to talk some more about how hard Zephyr is working. I've just described several really, *really* difficult things to do in making a TTRPG, and Zephyr does them so effortlessly that it can fool you into thinking "oh, well it can't have been that hard to make it."

But, like. I couldn't make Zephyr. I couldn't make Zephyr if I had a hundred years to try and make Zephyr. Two hundred and fifty two illustrations by itself is already a gargantuan undertaking. And there's a game in there too.

Which, let's talk about.

In Zephyr, you play as creatures made of emotions living on the back of a walking continent. Counter to those creatures are the Salt States, which have bureaucracy and debt and a regimented political structure. Zephyr self defines as an anarchist game, and it positions anarchy as a deliberate and eusocial association between individuals which must struggle to survive in the world and in the systems that surround it. The book doesn't talk overmuch about this, but it includes a list of well regarded books to read if you want to know more.

For folks who like big, built fantasy worlds, Zephyr has a lot to offer. It's one of those games that's as much about the setting as the characters, and the setting is fun, nuanced, strange and familiar, and easy to grasp.

For folks who like detailed character building, there's plenty here, but Zephyr has its own unique mechanical funk that isn't quite like any other system I've seen. These factors combine with the character creation process being quite narrative (you're reading short stories and picking options from them to determine your starting abilities) to produce a gamefeel that's best described as a little scurrying arcane critter. Once you grab it, you have a secure hold of it, but until then you're chasing it around the floor of your shop.

Also, this is a tokens game.

In Zephyr, you have four types of tokens. Each of the tokens represents a sort of proto-emotion. And they're used as the foundation for everything else. You metabolize these emotion tokens, take damage to them, use them for checks, feed them into and collect them from your environment, use them to fuse into other characters and control them, etc.

Checks are handled in a simple fashion. You pick a number, put forward that many hidden tokens, the GM picks a number, and then you try not to tie---but there's more granularity than that, and your ability to pick numbers decreases when you're lower on tokens. If you don't like the result of a check, you can spend your tokens to influence it.

Spending tokens, by the way, affects everything around you. Some ways of spending put your token on the game map. Others banish it from the game. Others add new tokens from outside the game. This flow of tokens influences the environment, and tokens from the environment can be used in turn to do things like change the weather (which is not standard rpg weather, it's genuinely super important in Zephyr.)

Alongside tokens, there's equipment and Bonds. Bonds are physical, wearable pieces of emotional connection that you create from spending tokens. Physically wearing your emotions as accessories is rad as hell, but Zephyr doesn't belabor when it's done something cool. It just says it and moves on.

Equipment takes two forms, technologies and tools. Technologies are bought with what is effectively anarchist debt, a sense of obligation that weights on you spiritually if you don't try to repay it (and which is in turn different from Obligation as a system concept, and Debt as a lore concept.) Tools are just things you have, and there's a good variety of both tools and technologies in the book.

I cannot possibly cover all of this book in detail, but other stuff that's neat in the system includes: Entwining (temporarily fuse with and control another character,) Patterns (physical stitches that link between your Bonds and generate specific effects,) equipment load being partially calculated based off of your relationships, cooking and dietary subsystems, hang gliding subsystem, and the bestiary positioning creatures in a social context instead of in a violent one.

For GMs and players, a lot of resources are provided to help get acclimated and play, but I think this is really a book that you want everyone to sit down and read. There's a lot of lore and mechanical nuance to Zephyr, and running it 5e style---where just the GM knows the rules---will take away from the group as a whole's ability to contribute to play.

In terms of who I'd recommend Zephyr to, I think it's a staggering feat of art and design. Anyone who likes rpgs as art probably wants a copy. But also, it's doing ecological and socioeconomic worldbuilding and game design in interesting ways, and I think it'll be a hit with people who already like Ryuutama, Wildsea, Coyote & Crow. Also anyone who's interested in designing their own TTRPGs specifically I think could learn (and develop some strong feelings about design) just from reading this.

Grab a copy if you can. Zephyr's impressive.

Minor Issues:

-Page 13, "pullullate Ophoi" I think this is meant to be populate

It's really cool!

Missing Month is a wistful card-based storytelling fantasy game.

You could compare it to isekai, but if so you'd be reaching for Escaflowne and Narnia and Terabithia more than the modern power-and-comfort face of the genre.

I think it's also maybe fair to call this TV-Glow-core.

The PDF is 30 pages, with a gorgeous hand-drawn cover and ornate, well-organized, and readable interior pages.

Setup-wise, this is a pretty simple game to prep for. You need a stopwatch, cards, and something to write with.

As is the case elsewhere in the genre, you pull those cards to generate prompts. The prompts build your character and give you tasks.

What is different about Missing Month is that it gives you a total amount of time to play for (2 hours 30 minutes) and that it has you take breaks between play sessions in order to forget things.

Yeah. The overarching premise here is that you can visit another world, but that you forget it while you're in ours, so the structured breaks are used to create intervals where your real actual self will start forgetting things.

This creates an interesting gameflow.

Up until the end of play, it's easy to focus on what you're doing in the other world, what problems you're trying to solve, and the game's short timers and cards encourage this. With only three minutes to answer a prompt sometimes, you have to stay in the moment and think fast. But in the last 30 minutes, that rapid fire structure stops. Instead, during your last 30 minutes you know you're going into the other world for the last time. And you have to decide if you want to stay there.

While you're playing, there are also prompts that ask you about your life in the real world. What you're neglecting. What you're hiding. What gets pushed aside while you concentrate on your fantasy adventure. They nudge at you, a reminder that daydreaming is a choice, and choosing one thing excludes another.

Do you give up the people you know for a fantasy?

I don't think it's fair to say this game is mean, but it has teeth and it uses them. You can absolutely hurt your emotions on it.

At the same time it's deftly written and well structured. Contrary to its name and themeing, you'll absolutely remember playing it.

I would strongly recommend this to people who like journaling games, feeling things strongly, and facing the world as it is. It's well made, a brisk read, and if you're inclined to writing you *will* get a solid narrative out of this.

Happy to hear that!

Take 'em.

Take 'em.

Take 'em.

Take 'em.

Godeaters Of The Astral Sea is a cosmic whalepunk setting for What's Old Is New.

The PDF is 24 pages, with clean and well organized but bare text.

Contents-wise, a chunk of Godeaters is system neutral, but a lot of specific guidance is given on how to conform it to WOIN's baseline expectations.

Flavor-wise, Godeaters is quite flavorful. You're cruising around a weird cosmos on out-of-date sailing vessels, extracting blood from the husks of dormant gods, sword dueling pirates on deck, etc.

When the lore and mechanics interweave, you get good results. The aforementioned god husks are dungeons, and retain some of the original god's portfolios, making them very flavorful dungeons.

A lot of the hazards you can encounter while cruising space are also very conceptually cool, like shoals of clotted dreams.

I do feel like Godeaters could be expanded and formalized a bit more, but as-is it's a very useable document packed with tables, and its alterations to the core WOIN mechanics feel reasonable and interesting. If you're already comfortable with WOIN, or if you like whalepunk and are cool with learning WOIN, I'd definitely give this a look.

Killing Time is an existential duet rpg about a hero attempting to kill the embodiment of the concept of time. This sounds like it should be pretty lightweight but I've got good news for TTRPG sickos. This game is *wildly* maximalist with its design.

The PDF is innocent enough. 35 pages, with clean but bare text throughout and a solid, evocative cover. As of this review, the game is out in an ashcan format, so text and visuals are not finalized. 

Now, content-wise, for a duet game Killing Time is relatively resource intensive. You need a tarot deck, a coin, a grid map, miniatures, timer, d6s, d12s, and tokens. It's also kinda thematically heavy. Safety tools are included.

The heaviness is because Killing Time talks about mortality and doomed causes and changes in the universe. It is also, interestingly, a duet game that the players can lose. The hero can take damage and die. Time dies if the hero makes it to the end.

Mechanically, the first part of Killing Time plays a little bit like a Wretched & Alone. The hero pulls cards, Time reads prompts, the goal is to progress through the deck---although there's a risk of taking too much random damage before then and dying. While this is happening, a timer is also running. Various cards interact with this timer, and include delays. Furthermore, the more the players are drawn into the roleplay, the more the timer runs down naturally. Time can kill the hero just by being interactive.

The second part uses the battle map, and the cards from the previous phase as a resource, to conduct a 4e style grid combat. Both sides have moves. Time has bodyparts that can be broken that change its attack options. There are multiple phases to the fight.

The third part of Killing Time, when it arrives, is difficult to explain. It's a choose your own adventure, and the goal is to guess the pre-set right answers, but the two players are also roleplaying the entire time and the story is moving back and forth between a frame story and a story-within-a-story and there's an owl and it's kind of a lot.

The fourth and final part of Killing Time is a long guided conversation between Time and the hero. And I mean long, long. The game's sections are forty minutes each, but there's enough material to cover that it feels plausible to run out. It's also considered and philosophical, and I think even if you don't play the game you could get something out of reading the fourth part.

Overall, I think for people that Killing Time clicks with it will REALLY click. If you like kinda sensitive existentialism and absurdity and having fight chemistry between you and the universe, I'd strongly recommend giving this a go. If you just like duet games, I'd still recommend taking a look at Killing Time, because I haven't seen many rpgs that are quite like it. It takes an extremely audacious swing and makes solid contact with the ball, and I think it ought to be talked about more.

My Hands In The Fates Of Gods is a high fantasy journaling game about cataclysms. Think Nausicaa, or LotR, or stories in those styles.

The PDF is 20 pages, with charming illustrations and a soothing color palette. 

Contents-wise, Hands has a pretty simple gameloop. At the start, you roll on a table for a prompt, and then you figure out how the prompt fits in your story. The tables are fun and evocative, and the illustrations throughout do a great job of setting the mood. The writing is clear and easy to follow.

As the game moves into its second section, you pick items from lists. The things you pick select what is *not* destroyed in the cataclysm. The tone is more martial, less cozy, but the game's strong writing and atmosphere continue.

In the third section, you continue building the world in an epilogue without your character. It's a good epilogue, with a lot of potential tension, and I think is the strongest worldbuilding tool in Hands. I don't think you can emerge from the epilogue without having a story you like at least a little.

I'd encourage Miyazaki fans to take a look at this game. I think anyone who likes worldbuilding and storytelling may also want to check this out. For folks who aren't very TTRPG familiar, there's really only one dice roll, and the game's instructions are super easy to follow.

Also, I'd like to stress again how good the art is. Restricted color palette, but that's not holding it back. Every page feels like it's dragging you into the game world. 10/10.

Thank you for writing the game!

Wildfire Trilogy is a set of four related TTRPGs about the fall and return of magic.

The PDF is 21 pages, with lovely art and big text. It's a quick read, and every page is visually splashy.

The first game, Conclave, is quite simple. It's a story premise (wizard politics) with a die roll and some group decisions to set up the rest of the book's conflict. I actually quite like this approach---it's breezy while still accommodating player input---and Conclave could be a cool prelude to roll out before starting a big campaign of something.

The second game, Wildfire, is about awakened spells. Kind of crucially, you don't use dice or make checks, you just explain what an awakened spell is, what it does, when it dies. As a whole, the Trilogy is less interested in mechanically addressing conflict than in giving the group a springboard to storytell off of.

The third game, Ember, follows in a similar trend. As a depleted wizard, you cast one final spell. And then magic fades. Which leads into the fourth game.

Susurrus, the fourth game, is a small worldbuilder. You explain how magic comes back, what it does to the world, and how people try to cage it again.

There's a poetic structure to the Trilogy as a whole, but more interesting than that is that it uses its microgames to give a rhythm to your group's storytelling. I don't have synesthesia, but this is an rpg that I could hear the tempo of by the end of it.

I think if you have a group of writers who haven't touched a TTRPG before, I think you could deploy this on them and they'd do great. And conversely, if you have a group that's only played with strict GM roles and hard mechanical resolution, it might take a second for everyone to get the hang of Trilogy.

However, I think Trilogy's a really solid title and worth picking up, and a great party TTRPG (snacks and introspection type party, not alcohol and loud music type party). Grab a copy if you have a chance!

Minor Issues:

-Page 15, "whose", this should technically be "who's" as a contraction for "who has", but the "whose" isn't causing any lack of clarity in the text and I don't think it does any harm to leave it in

Coffee & Chaos is a short TTRPG about running a coffee shop and dealing with small catastrophes.

The PDF is 5 pages, well organized, and packed with great art.

Supplies-wise, C&C is a little odd in that it uses cutlery. You need playing cards, but also knives, forks, spoons, and teaspoons (or proxies) to play.

The cutlery is used as stakes in checks, or as a currency to roleplay and get back some of your cutlery. The checks are basically matching cutlery type to card suit---hearts are free, but every other suit has a specific type of utensil it matches to---and the difficulty doesn't seem too high. It *is* possible you can consistently make the wrong call and whiff all of your cutlery, though.

I think this game might shine the brightest when used as a coffee shop AU for your main campaign. There isn't a lot of tension in the implied cozy setting, but if you're bringing in characters you're already familiar with, who they are as people will add some spice to the cozy.

So if you've got a long running game and you'd like to do a lighthearted sidestory, the art is lovely, the rules are fun, and the gamefeel is light and collaborative. I'd give this a look.

Whoah! Thank you for the coverage!

Oppai Sluggerz is not, despite its name, horny. It's a pulp riff on 80s OVAs with the feeling of an old console brawler. Pink and the word oppai aside, there's no adult content here.

The PDF is 64 pages, with a bright, punchy layout and a lot of characterful illustrations. The cover is rad, but again plays into the false impression that this game is in any way about sex. The interior illustrations are consistently charming.

I do think the super-horny aesthetic as well as the words of the title may be a barrier for people who want to play or recommend OS (in a way that I don't think Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants really had to deal with.) I also don't personally vibe with the way the Japanese words are integrated here---the Japanese translations next to the text are neat and add a bilinguality, but stuff like "otaku joshi" as a class name and "oppai sluggerz" as a title feel very 90s American anime ttrpg core. There's a superficiality that, while stylistic and intentional, feels alienated from the material it's riffing on, and I like the material that it's riffing on.

Mechanically, OS is a bit weird. It's light and rule-of-cool-y and class based, but it's also got a check system where you're picking a number of d4s to try and roll an average result within a +/- 5 range of the TN. D4s rolled are expended, and you only get a d4 back on a success, so you can end up in an attrition pattern.

This "roll and hope you hit a specific number" mechanic also shows up in other parts of the system. Combat has a juggle system that uses it. I think the math is solid, but the dicefeel may be a bit strange.

Expanding on that juggle system, combat in OS is quite interesting in how loose it manages to stay while still having detailed juggling and combo mechanics. I'd compare it to something like Project X Zone, where basic enemies are fodder for combos and elites are where you spend the points you farmed from those combos.

The game outside of combat is also very mechanically loose, which leads to some fun 'yes and' abilities for PCs but also kind of funnels gameplay back towards combat because that's where the mechanics are. This isn't actually a problem, but it is a tendency the GM may wish to remind themselves of.

In terms of GM tools, there's a bestiary, some guidance on making your own content, and a sample adventure. The system is also simple enough that after a readthrough you should be able to run it without issue.

In terms of safety tools, there's a sidebar about the X-Card that also feels kind of strange because it talks about the game being fan-service-y, and I don't think it is. Again, there's sort of an aesthetic blare of presumed sex when you look at the cover and branding, but there's nothing behind that blare. The closest the game gets to talking about titillation is in that safety section.

For game designers, there's a very friendly license attached to OS, and it's got an interesting system. If you like working with push-your-luck and rule-of-cool, you may want to grab this just to tinker with it.

Overall, I think there's a solid game here that people may miss because they're either looking for a horny game and it's not, or they're not and it looks like it is. Grab it if you want something with an arcade-y cartoon-y feel and a parental advisory sticker for aesthetic reasons.

Minor Issues:

-p. 34, Enemy Attacks, "Eachenemy" missing space

Happy it resonated.

LMAO always happy for my games to have unplanned use cases.

Also thank you for the review! And big congrats for the Vincent Baker praise, that does sound like a rad system

Dang. Still, that gives me hope that there might be some tech I can do post export. I'll experiment a bit and see if I can find a way to correct the numbering.

Thank you for the incredibly kind review!

Also, yeah, the PDF counts the cover as the first page, so the PDF's page count will always be one off from the actual page count.

Both knights depicted are, in their own way, atop the World Horse.

Yeah, that challenge is way harder with longer books. I would've taken one look at Strays' pagecount and set it aside for a different occasion.

Whoah, that's a heck of a challenge. Good luck! I'll be rooting for you!

Thanks!

Darkwood Pines is a cozy modern supernatural setting for Original Finish.

The PDF is 6 pages, well organized and cleanly layed out, with a good text size, a lot of whitespace, and an excellent illustration of a cat.

In terms of mechanics, Darkwood Pines gives different supernatural templates you can add to your trainer's breed card (fey, vampire, werewolf, witch) and lets you swap out a more conventional horse for a cat familiar (this is clever and I really like this.)

In terms of worldbuilding, Darkwood gives a quick outline of its environment, complete with a few adventure hooks and NPCs, and a lot of these hooks are tasty. The rideable bramble bears, the phantom hanoverian that wants one last good race, the werewolf support group, it all feels perfectly calibrated for a good oneshot or long-running drama.

Overall, if you're craving some warm small-town supernatural, I would definitely give this a look. It's got a structure and vibe that feels like it could easily have had a multi season run on Syfy in the late 2010s.

MacGimmick is a beer-and-pretzels tabletop rpg about being a certain 80s action tinker guy.

The PDF is 7 pages, with a dense, well-organized zine style layout.

It begins with short fiction, which is a solid tone setter---if you're not familiar with the source material, you'll get the gist immediately.

Mechanically, MacGimmick is a one player multiple GMs game. The player is MacGuyv---immick, and the GMs play background characters and judge whether our hero's stratagems succeed.

There aren't dice here, instead the difficulty of checks is how many pieces you need to incorporate into the device you build.

You can't fail (it wouldn't be interesting, and it wouldn't fit the show,) but if you need to consult a web resource to figure out how to build your way out of danger, you give the GM a resource they can spend to introduce plot twists.

In terms of GM tools, there's some roll tables and good advice throughout, but no canned adventure or support for solo play.

Overall, this is a mechanically clever system that doesn't dwell on being mechanically clever because it's too busy having fun. The engine here is really novel! But more importantly you can turn a t-shirt and some rubber bands into a catapult and use them to launch you over the castle walls to break the scientists out of the dictatorship's clutches.

As a side note, I do think the style of this game could work for a lot of television of this era. Like, you could do Airwolf without a lot of modifications, just with "use a helicopter in increasingly unlikely situations" in the place of "contrive a contraption."

Minor Issues:

-Page 6, Exotic Components, "would might involve"

That said, the mechanics here are more of a jumping off point for engaging with the game's strange vibes. I've edited and tested them, but they're still at least a little ramshackle.

I was worried this might confuse folks! You always roll a d6, and if you have any skill dice you roll them as well. So a d6 skill means you're rolling 2d6 on the check.

Very kind of you to say.

Truly I am haunted by the Magical Horse College books.

Heck yeah! Thank you!

Ball Game is a Blaseball-styled storytelling ttrpg with a baseball card visual style and some good heft.

The PDF is 40-ish pages, with a clean and well organized layout. There's art or graphics on most pages, and the illustrations pack a ton of charm. They definitely understand Blaseball, but they're also not bound by it and their riffs on its style are interesting.

In terms of contents, Ball Game is a self-professed look at baseball from the outside. Whereas ttrpgs like Dead Ball are born from a passion for the sport, Ball Game talks in its intro about how it had to figure out that passion for itself. And I don't think this is a bad thing. It gives Ball Game a different angle, and it means you get lines like "Baseball is a constant to me. As constant as the moon. As summer. As death."

Speaking of, Ball Game's writing is great. It knows how to pivot from one idea into another. It gets Blaseball's dire and surreal humor at a bone-deep level. The team descriptions are fun to read, which I think might be the bedrock of a good Blaseball-like.

Mechanically, Ball Game is pretty straightforward on its baseline level. It's GMless, 3d6 pool, any 4+ is a success. Contested rolls are highest number instead. You can appoint a coach as a kind of pseudo GM who's more of an expert on the rules and a tiebreaker, which is interesting. 

However, Ball Game also builds on that structure by having you play seasons of baseball, and on different teams, which you can switch between during drafts. Teams give you an aesthetic and a mechanical effect, which when combined with your playbook sets you apart from the other PCs. 

Playbooks are structured as always, sometimes, never. Which is a neat format. The vibe is Belonging Outside Belonging, but a little more informal and with dice instead of tokens. The "never" also isn't a hard ban. It's just you succeed freely when you use your always, and you take consequences when you use your never.

In terms of GM tools, the game is a little light. There are clearly defined events you can choose to drop into play, but the narrative heart of Blaseball is a kind of freestyle, and so Ball Game doesn't have a set scenario to get in the way of that.

Overall, if you like narrative games, eldritch sports stories, collaborative worldbuilding, and solid mechanical choices I think you'll like Ball Game. It wants a few sessions of play, maybe a mini campaign, and shouldn't be hard at all to add to your gaming rotation. It's also as friendly to baseball fans as it is to baseball outsiders, and is a solid introduction to telling stories with the sport.

Oh, you could definitely change that to "after X fishing attempts" where X is the number of PCs. I playtested the adventure with 4--5 people and did some solo testing, but didn't check larger group sizes.

The big advantage of a large group size is that it gives you more freedom to absorb exhaustion, tag in, use the right fisher for the job, etc, but this is counterbalanced by some fish and animals (and specifically the Great Dreamer Challu) scaling off of the party size. A large enough group might make Challu very very difficult without everyone getting more time to fish.

Good catch!

Whoah, thanks! Always happy when a game resonates.

And the re-edited edition sounds cool! Definitely happy to check it out when it's ready!

No worries! It's a really cool game. Thank you for writing it!

Workhorses No More is an Uma Musume with a bit (a lot!) more intentionality behind what it wants to say. Uma has some thoughts about loneliness, friendship, competition, the meaning of success, etc, meanwhile Workhorses is screaming, firing an uzi, and doing donuts on your lawn. If you've ever thought for more than a minute about that throwaway line about how an uma's body is basically a lethal weapon, you are in the right headspace to begin reading Workhorses.

If not, other plausible touchstones are Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica. No I'm not kidding.

The PDF is 20 pages, with a banger cover and a plain but entirely readable interior layout. This has a side effect of highlighting how (positive connotation) batshit the text is willing to get. There's a surreal, hotblooded dreaminess that runs through Workhorses like a spinal column. It's a *fantastic* read, but you'll also be kinda clinging by your fingernails to where you think the setting is going---and I think to vibe with it at all, you've gotta be able to understand destruction as an act of transformation.

"This horsegirl game examines hegemony" is a thing you can say about Workhorses and it will be true. It's also implicit and deft in how it talks about the topic. Your character has traits like Yoke (your primary obstacle) and Truth (a thing you believe unquestioningly) and you are a student at the Sisters Of Mount Sinai Academy For Young Girls which forces you to race---and also you rebel from it by racing in secret. There is a lot you could unpack about this.

There's also a good light crunch to character creation. Everything is small numbers, but there's a lot of unilateral powers and bonuses that create a complex game environment. Workhorses' dice are simple but also weird and smart in a way I haven't seen before---2d6, drop highest, add stat, and one die is negative while the other is positive. This means you'll usually get a stat modified by a low amount. Even a total of 1 is a success, but higher numbers translate into more effect. Plus you have a spendable resource called boons, which come back on high rolls, so you can kinda combo high roll into high roll or rescue yourself from bad failures.

Added to this light crunch are some good, quick rules for contests, combat, and a thematic mechanic about speaking in red that is heavily intertwined with the lore and allows you to reverse bad failures into heroic successes. Essentially, red is the color of absolute reality, and if you speak in it, your words are truths stronger than your environment.

For GMs, there's some story seeds and NPCs, but I think the real secret sauce is the writing. Workhorses is a game you have to feel, and reading it does a great job of putting you in the right headspace.

Overall, if you like hotblooded indie ttrpgs and have an even passing interest in umas, this is a strong recommend. This is a stellar game to read and I think will be even more memorable at the table. 10/10 I enjoyed it immensely.

Minor Issues:

-p 8, Social Studies, "a breast" should be "abreast"

-p 8--9, Abilities, the Favorite Subject and Club and Lineage subheadings blend into the rest of the list. It could be worth centering / underlining the text to make the subheadings pop a bit more.

-p 10, I think you can just freely boon every roll that's 0 or better and get the boon back. This might not be intended play. Restoring boons on sufficiently negative rolls instead of positive ones might add some more dynamism.

-p 11, this talks about "rolling on an appropriate stat" such as "Might" but I couldn't find either of these things in the book. Are these holdovers from the core system?

I've been using "this is a ttrpg" in increasingly outlandish circumstances to see when I finally get pushback. Also yeah, the physical dictionary is a bit of a limitation and I couldn't figure out how to adapt it gracefully to wikipedia. Although, I do kinda like that it uses archaic tech. Maybe my next game will require a rotary phone.

Thanks! This one isn't really by me, but I'm happy if it's liked.

This is the kindest thing anyone could have said about my nonsense.

Thanks! I think there's other larpish stuff out there that uses this mechanic, but I wanted to keep it kinda lighthearted while still meeting the technical definition of survival horror.

I was a playtester on this, and can speak pretty roundly in favor of it.

Haghorse Run is a classical style train adventure that is complicated by the fact that it's running in Footfall, so when the turn does come and Things Happen, everyone involved is a physics-ninja.

This both means that Haghorse Run can go more literally and metaphorically off the rails without imploding, and also that the suspense leading up to that moment feels more interesting. There's a real sense of tempo as the PCs and NPCs start exerting more and more influence as they get a sense for the social and physical landscape of the train, and there's a lot of little mysteries to solve or entirely miss. Genuinely, this is one of those adventures where it'll never run the same way twice.

In terms of polish, the version I playtested was pretty full of features but there's been a lot of small stuff added since then. My favorite bit of enrichment for a train scenarios is a period appropriate menu, and Haghorse has one. For maximum immersion, you can try to cook it yourself.

In terms of who this adventure will resonate the most with, I think people who play Footfall like it's Outlast might not vibe as much with the more gradual pace, but if you like mysteries and pseudo-historical RP and stuff like Horror On The Orient Express you'll have an excellent time.

A friend asked specifically for a class about eating gods. I wasn't working on a class pack at the time, which is why it ended up as a small standalone.

You can also use it when you're not being attacked, but during an attack the teleport is slightly slower than the attack, so you still get partially got.

The problem here might be that I called it blink, which implies it's a lot faster of a process than it is. 'Fade' might've been a better word choice.