Mork Borg's rad! I took some liberties with rewiring the mechanics, but it's a really solid base system. Please feel free to check out Cthork Borg and Morbo's as well! I try to make sure everything has community copies; if it runs out, I'll fill it back up.
kumada1
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Generally, the Complicit has a slightly better handle on their faith than a typical cultist. But the line is meant to be thin. Not everyone in a given cult gets along, so a Complicit might not always agree with what their god's followers or creatures are doing, but there's also some responsibility on the player playing the Complicit not to create someone who will not turn on the group (unless the group's cool with having traitors,) and who will instead work to limit the harm that their god is doing.
Dreadfarer is a cosmic horror ttrpg themed around exploration and discovery. You could call it a kind of 1800s imperial SCP game, played solo, with stats and resource tracking and lots of little decisions to make. There's also sketching and journaling, with the goal of creating an artifact of play by the end of the experience---if you're not killed first. You play as an explorer who has sold most of their possessions to go make discoveries in Lemuira, a newly uncovered Pacific archipelago.
The PDF for Dreadfarer is high quality. 220 pages, full color, large text, high contrast, with a few tricky to read fonts but mostly extremely legible on a quick skim.
The interior art is also excellent, using photobashing and distortion to create plausible artifacts. Every piece feels like the foundation for a decent 2010s creepypasta, and they all feel coherent with each other and within the layout. There's even a writing system unique to the book that appears in a few illustrations---I have no idea if it's an actual conlang, but some of the characters do repeat.
In terms of game loop, the basic structure is fairly simple. You choose a relic to go looking for, you traipse off into an unfamiliar country with your provisions, you have harrowing experiences along the way, and then you decide what to do with your discovery.
There is character creation, and this is a game you can lose. Creation is not overwhelmingly technical, but each character class comes with a backstory hook, an hp pool, a quantity of cash, and a unique artifact. The difference between these classes feels good, and shapes gameplay. The displaced noble heir can invest in long term resource generation, and has the starting funds to capitalize on this. The starving youngster recovers health constantly, but loses money just as fast and gains corruption quickly. Several classes are slightly cryptic, enhancing the impression that the game book is meant to be puzzled over.
Expedition planning is slightly random. You choose the pool of locations you might investigate, but then where you go specifically and what's available to find is on a d20. This does keep things breezy, but at the slight cost of some intentionality in play. Also relic duplicates are discarded, making it slightly frustrating when you roll repeats.
Writing-wise, I think a lot of what you're playing Dreadfarer for is to soak in the atmosphere, and with that in mind the writing absolutely does not disappoint. There's a lot of cultural context, a lot of mysterious sites, a lot of small mysteries that piece together into an ominous whole, and you could treat Dreadfarer as a kind of tourism simulator if you wanted to---with the caveat that you are in danger the whole while.
I do think some elements of the game pull against each other. The journaling and sketching that you are instructed to do is a slow and deliberate process that adds weight to the game, but the rolls and combats and resource tracking play quickly and can end your journal prematurely. I don't think this is ultimately a problem, but Dreadfarer may be best for those with a temperament that can enjoy both types of play.
At the same time, Dreadfarer adapts to its structure by having you pass the journal and sketchbook between characters when one is killed. Even if you get a run of bad luck, you won't lose the thing that matters most: your real world artifact of play.
It is also worth stressing that there is an incredibly wide variety of things to encounter in this game, and that they are all very detailed in their implementation. Each zone has four unique biomes, each biome has four encounter types, each encounter has at least two branches, and this is without getting into the integumentary parts of the game like shopping, traveling, and suffering curses.
Rules are provided for a canon ending, as well as something that I think is rare but neat: explicit multiplayer support in a solo game system. You can take a buddy with you into Lemuria, even competing with them for relics.
Overall, I think this is probably a book you want in physical. It's lovely and immersive and has a very well developed sense of itself, traits that will shine through even stronger when you also get the tactility of flipping through it. As for whether it's right for you, I think if you like taking solo games at your own pace, and you like creating art and writing as you go, (and you like cosmic horror,) this will be a good fit. If you are one of the many, many people who's enjoyed Thousand Year Old Vampire, you will likely enjoy Dreadfarer too.
Minor Issues:
-This is probably the nitpickiest note I have givenin a while, but I think the CWs being mostly listed as their full phobia names makes them a little harder to read. Trypophobia is probably fine, since it's such a specific thing that people who are screening for it probably know its name, but I had to look up casadastraphobia.
-Page 127, "If you repeat an Encounter". I do not understand this section. Is it saying that if you reroll an encounter you may repeat it exactly as it went the first time, rolling the same numbers and suffering the same consequences? Or that you can alter the lore of how the encounter happened the previous time? I fully couldn't figure this one out.
-Page 127, "the ant swallowing it gladly" should this be ant-lion?
This is good feedback!
Re: factions and foes advancing their plans, I actually don't click with threat clocks too much, so I left this one really loose. It's not meant to be "everything on the board needs to act," it's more "whatever feels relevant advances its plans." I'll update the text to clarify this.
Also as a side note I'm only like 30% confident I have correctly understood 1920s motorcycle pricing. Modern motorcycles are on average cheaper than modern cars, but it's possible this may not have been the same way a hundred years ago, or that my listed prices for motorcycle and car may still be too low.
No worries! The Morale change was born from me reading Mork completely wrong for almost a year, and then I decided I liked my way better and stuck with it. It keeps everything on the d20.
$195 is totally fine for a motorcycle with seat and sidecar.
I think I ultimately caused myself some problems by setting Cthork ambiguously in the whole 1920s rather than picking a specific year, since automotive prices shifted over the course of the decade. A car that was $450 at the start might be $250 by the middle, and there were motorcycles going for $300 in the late 1910s and $100 in the late 1920s. And this isn't even factoring in used models, special sales, haggling vs sticker price, etc.
In general re: equipment costs, I think as long as it's within a loose ballpark of what feels appropriate, it's fine.
Morale in Cthork works a little different than Morale in Mork. It's d20 vs a DR of the Morale score. The gadabout isn't particularly brave, and so is at a 17.
For the sidecar and pillion seat, I couldn't find historical prices, but scaling based on modern prices I'm going to say $30 each. This makes a three person motorcycle cheaper than a car ($180 vs $250,) but lower carrying capacity, less sturdy, and you really don't want to crash in the motorcycle (in the car, everyone gets to test to avoid the damage. In the motorcycle, everyone just gets hurt.)
Iron Sleet is a military science fantasy ttrpg that invites immediate comparisons to Arknights, but very much charts its own course. It's also simple, meaty, and incredibly tightly made.
The PDF is 66 pages and dense with high quality black and white art. Information in it is well organized, the layout is evocative but unobtrusive, and the overall vibe is massively professional. Purely on visual, this is an extremely good book.
Also in terms of clarity, this is an extremely good book. Everything is explained in dead simple terms, and in a way that teaches you the system bit by bit without you really noticing that you're learning. Font sizes are big, important paragraphs are spaced out from each other, and despite there being some real mechanical bite here Iron Sleet might be one of the easiest to teach rpgs I've read in a few years.
Mechanics-wise, Iron Sleet is a d20+d6 system. The d20 is rolled for every check, and a number of d6s are added or removed from it based on difficulty. This is *very* easy to intuit, and not as swingy as something like 5e's advantage.
Onto this framework Iron Sleet adds a pretty robust lite combat system. Movement, equipment, armor and evasion, plus multiple rollable stats are all tracked. Actions are on a stamina system, with stamina only half recovering after each round of combat, so if you go loud one turn you have to shepherd your resources during the next. There's also a universal reroll stat called luck, and some simple stealth and status effect mechanics to keep things fresh. There's vehicles, and they're dead simple but satisfying.
HP is handled through wounds, and wounds are divided into minor, regular, and critical injuries. If you get hit but it doesn't pierce armor, you take a minor. If it does pierce, you take a regular. If you take too many regulars and then get hit again, you take an injury. Injuries can kill you outright---but you have luck to mitigate that. Essentially, characters have some serious staying power, but you can take them down if you really light them up.
Character creation is detailed, with a big pool of build points to spend, but the ways in which you can spend it are simple, easily explained, and well organized. Your rollable stats start at -5, which is weird and wild, but not actually a problem. There's a good variety of feats and abilities and they all have a measured impact on play.
There's a full equipment chapter, including the ability to take animal companions, and you can kit your weapons the heck out with tacticool mods, custom ammo, and runic enchantments. There are vehicles, but they're priced outside of really being affordable by a group and I suspect need to be given by the GM via the mission budget system.
Character progression is simple, with a stat point being handed out after each mission. Each stat point has a noticeable impact on gameplay, and there's a *lot* of room for players to go, so you could get a long campaign out of Iron Sleet without the mechanics starting to distend.
For GMs, there's a bestiary and a mission generator. The bestiary in particular does a lot of worldbuilding in the margins, and its ideas are evocative, gameable, and fun. The setting rules, honestly. It blazes its own trail and---while still very Arknights-y---is referencing Arknights primarily in tone. Its ideas are its own, and it feels more feral and divinepunk with how it centers its gods in its world.
Overall, would I recommend Iron Sleet? Yeah. It's firing on all cylinders pretty much continuously. If you like tactical rpgs with a pulpy worldfeel and mechanics that walk a razor line between simple and deep, you should really give this a look.
Minor issues:
-Page 1, "player's characters" players' characters
-Page 4, Luck, "or when they rest" or when you rest