Category: Role Playing Games

Roleplaying and board games reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade

Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade was a bit of a hard sell for me, being a quasi fantasy game in an oriental mish-mash fantasy culture with a heavy anime influence…that is kind of a laundry list of things I don’t like (except for the fantasy part). And yet, while I was reading (and loving) Apocalypse Prevention Inc., the book’s writer Eloy Lasanta asked me if I would be interested in checking out Wu Xing for a review…off the strength of the API series, I said yes.

Old-School Magic

Old School Magic by Charles Rice is a 29 page supplement for the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) which, for those of you not familiar with the OSR, is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons retroclone originally written by Matthew Finch. Old School Magic expands on the OSRIC magic system by presenting a breakdown of magic levels from low to high, new ways of implementing spells, new magical archetypes, and new spells.

Skull Mountain Review

Skull Mountain by Faster Monkey Games is a 36-page adventure module for the Labyrinth Lord Roleplaying Game. This is a review of the PDF I purchased from RPGNow. It uses a two-column, right-aligned layout with a clean, readable font. The font is fairly small, which means a lot of content is packed into its 36 pages. The writing is clear and the editing is good (I actually can’t recall any typos).

Divine Foes

Divine Foes is a short PDF supplement for the Divinity system. The layout is a simple 2 column affair with a good sized font and no real art save for a background design on the pages themselves. The pages are designed to look old and faded, with a vaguely arcane symbol imprinted in the centre. While I like the virtual aging of the pages, I’m not a fan of the background image. While subtle, it draws my eyes away from the text and makes the PDF more challenging to read than it needs to be.

Trail of Cthulhu

Lovecraft based games have been around for over two decades now. The first Role Playing Game came out in the 80’s and many editions of the game have graced our shelves ever since. From the initial percentile based based system that still stands, to the Monte Cook version of the game that attempted a D20 system conversion with not terribly good results and now, the Gumshoe System that rules Trail of Cthulhu, and it does it admirably.