Soulmuppet’s Paint the Town Red. A game for sad gay vampires!

I’ve gone through my journal of places I went, people I saw and my favourite non-game experiences at UK Games Expo 2025, but I’m saving the best for last.

I like playing and talking about board games and was covering that beat as Mike wasn’t able to make the Expo, but my heart belongs to roleplaying games. I had some lovely long chats with people at different stalls and thought I’d share any scoops and updates here:

Pelgrane Press

It’s always nice having a catch up with Cat from Pelgrane at their stand. The company’s one which is small but has grown a bit, adding Robin Laws as their creative director. 

We discussed Robin’s arrival, something which I was surprised wasn’t already the case. Something of particular interest was how Robin’s looking to cultivate talent and run workshops. The industry’s full of and encourages a lot of talent who have been in around for years. They’re all getting older, so a focus of Robin and Pelgrane is to look into legacy and what can be done to get new voices to the table.

Fear Itself, from their site as I didn’t have time to photograph their stall.

13th Age – The second edition PDF is imminent and looking to print in August.

Trail of Cthulhu – The second edition’s manuscript is done and they’re evaluating feedback. They’re hoping for the end of this year or start of next. The screen apparently looks gorgeous.

The Yellow King – The Spanish collaborators who handle layout are being brought in to handle Cassilda’s Song’s layout. It’s looking like it may end up being four books, like the core Yellow King.

Fear Itself – Cat mentioned that it doesn’t get enough love and that the Book of Unremitting Horror and Ocean Game are some grand products for it. They’re still working on the recently completed Backerkit and putting together an adventure collection.

Night’s Black Agents – There’s a Threat Profiles book being worked on. As ever, it’s difficult to live up to the Dracula Dossier, and this antagonist book sounds like it’ll be a really nice tool. Like Quest’s Character Book or iHunt, this is one which doesn’t focus just on types of monster, but profiles of individuals. This makes a lot of sense for something like NBA.

That’s the rundown of progress on existing games, and as ever with Pelgrane, it’s a long process, so we’ll see how it all goes in the next year. What about new games?

Foot Patrol (originally nicknamed ‘Shire’s Out’) is something with a bit more of an all ages focus than a lot of Pengrane’s output. This is a standalone Gumshoe mystery game which sounds charming and provisionally is looking to crowdfund in the future.

Ballad Hunters (originally Shanty Hunters) is about folk songs which have come to life. Investigators have to determine whether they are a threat and how to use the material in the song to solve them. The style is intended to be on a lay-flat book like a songbook. Again, this should be crowdfunding at some point in the future.

Page Turners is mostly written. It’s a Gumshoe One-to-One game, with one player and one GM. I admitted that while I have digital a copy of Cthulhu Confidential, I’ve chickened out of running it so far. The core book for Page Turners look to cover different genres, and is easily expandable.

One of the protagonists of Page Turners.

Paragon Blade is another One-to-One game, set in a fantasy world with three adventures for three specific characters: a barbarian, a sorcerer and a rogue. It’s about three quarters done and mainly needs indexing.

Pelgrane Press can be found here and if you want any development updates, you can check out their See Page XX articles.

Soulmuppet Publishing

The Soulmuppet stall is always gorgeous, with several books being shown off with lovely displays. Mol from Soulmuppet gave me a whistle-stop tour while my normally incredibly trad RPG friends were drooling over Inevitable.

When the Walls Fall is a game in a small folded booklet, where you build a dice tower and watch it fall to build a ruined city. I picked up a copy but have yet to read it. 

Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are gorgeous system-agnostic books which allow you to build a garden and library, respectively. The worlds made are weird and ever-changing, embracing tables and anti-canon approaches.

Orbital Blues’ expansion Afterburn was being shown off with new ships, adventures and a VHS tape box of adventures. The display for Orbital Blues is always surrounded by charmingly analog technology.

Soulmuppet’s display for Orbital Blues.

There was a brief detour for a rant about crowdfunding after my RPG friends had brought up another larger company selling books which they hadn’t fulfilled to backers. I’ll spare you all the details, but tread very carefully with that sort of thing, ideally keeping everyone in the loop, arranging potential pickups and so on.

Paint the Town Red had a lovely display, but was not on sale yet. The digital version is imminently due to be released which is great as it’s still a while until Interview with the Vampire Season Three comes out.

Later in the year there’s a plan for something called Doomspiral, which Mol sold to me as, “defy fate, fight gods”. It’s a Soulsborne-type game by Nick Spence with a die pool to use for stamina, as a resource for players to spend. It’s probably going to be two books totalling roughly the size of Inevitable.

There have been a lot of RPGs which capture the vibe of Souls games, but this is one which takes death and respawning into account. They’re hoping to crowdfund it in September. Further information can be found here.

Modiphius Entertainment

Modiphius and their giant Pipboy were back again, and had a little time to chat about what’s happening with them. 

I cunningly forgot to get a photo of Modiphius, so imagine two of these and you’ve basically got their system.

Hardwar is a mech skirmish game which they acquired the license for and are going to be crowdfunding later in the year. Quick update, it’s live now.

Heroes of Might & Magic was funding at the time of the con and the RPG version of Cohors Cthulhu being fulfilled. Dreams and Machines is going to get a new setting and campaign, but little more was shared about that.

I’m not a big Discworld fan, but I asked how that was going. The RPG’s manuscripts have been approved by the Pratchett estate and layout is nearing completion. Modiphius are hoping that the PDFs will be out shortly after their pledge manager finishes. They have a close relationship with the estate and after they release the book to retail, they have other things they want to do. Unfortunately I couldn’t pry more out of them about that.

Black Armada

Josh and Becky from Black Armada are always fun to talk to and they had Nick Bate with them, too.

Josh and Nick, busily hawking their wares.

Lovecraftesque Second Edition took up most of their display and looks gorgeous now it’s finished. They said that board gamers have been intrigued by the box and kids loved playing with the UV torch and all the hidden elements in the books. 

First up, I spoke with Nick about what’s going on with him.

He’s almost done with Against Time & Death, even meeting the project’s artist for the first time at the Expo. Folks will remember that this was one of the ‘hot games of 2025’ predictions from Dragonmeet last year. It’s currently in editing and working to fulfil on schedule.

Nick’s next big game he’s working on is called Speed Demons. It’s a mech racing game at the end of the world. Inspirations include Fast & Furious and Matrix Revolutions. In a dark apocalyptic future, people resolve their conflicts by mech racing, which is a conflict resolution method I think we can all get behind. 

Currently it uses some Forged in the Dark ideas, but changes things up. One aspect is that downtime actually increases your pressure as the world’s so grim, then you blow off steam by racing.

Josh Fox took some time to talk about his big new game: Ex Tenebris.

The cover of Ex Tenebris

I admit I’d not paid a huge amount of attention to it as someone who 1) was done with Warhammer 40k back in the 90’s and 2) is fully Brindle-pilled and saw him saying about trying to ‘fix’ some of the issues he had with Carved from Brindlewood games. In a short amount of time, Josh turned me round on both these points.

Ex Tenebris is a gothic space horror RPG, where the grim dark future where there was only war has changed. The endless was has stopped, but there are still remnants out there. Demons, sorcerers, and an underfunded government agency who have to deal with it. The concept was a, “Less fashy Dark Heresy” which as someone who’s played Dark Heresy, I can entirely get behind.

Players carry out investigations and can go down ‘shadow pathways’ a kind of metacurrency which can give bonuses, but drive you down a dark path as the campaign goes on.

The influences from Carved from Brindlewood games are clear in the mystery-based investigations and clue-gathering. What I should have expected, was that there are elements from Lovecraftesque which are also being used here. The GM ‘leaps to conclusions’ like in Lovecraftesque, but in this case it’s the bad result if the players fail their roll to theorise about what happened. The core mechanic is the part that’s in flux, and I love that a game’s mechanics can be worked on with whether you roll d6’s or d10’s to do things being less of a priority.

The game will have multiple conspiracies as multi-investigation mysteries. Players will also be able to use downtime to look into them, along with linking individual mysteries to the overall conspiracy. 

Hopefully the game will crowdfund later this year. Black Armada are some of the best creators who use crowdfunding campaigns. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses and well done Josh (and Nick!) for getting me on board with it.

Rowan Rook & Decard

The gorgeous Eat the Reich.

I generally leave Black Armada and Rowan Rook & Decard until last as I always have a nice time chatting with them. I know they’re always going to be my jam as far as games go, and they should spend their time pitching to people who haven’t already bought their games. That said, this year I left RRD a bit late and was almost out the door when I got hit by Hurricane Grant.

Grant Howitt’s got a magnificent presence and runs on an enviable amount of energy at conventions. He showed off his rummage box which was a new thing they were trying this year. After having experienced folks at other conventions selling miniatures which people would gather up from a selection and then the staff would eyeball a price for, they decided to do that with old RPG stock. It’s a fun idea and Grant explained how entertaining it was watching (and being) an English person with no real experience of haggling.

Voidheart Symphony has approached completion in a backwards-seeming way. Layout is done, editing is next. This is what happens when you get the person doing the layout also doing the art. Mina’s layout work is gorgeous and something I’ve used in process design talks at my day job before.

Heart: Ways & Means is nearing crowdfunding and Grant was proud he’d only added one bard. It can be followed on Backerkit.

Hollows is in final editing. There’s also a quickstart on their Itch page.

Rowan Rook & Decard have also announced Salt, the follow up to Spire and Heart, this time set outside of the titular Spire. Players will get to sail the seas and see what’s out there in the wider world.

Grant mentioned that he wants to play with the Havoc Engine again, given how well it worked with Eat the Reich. 

With that, my time at the convention was over, I had a coach to rush to (via the wrong door) and hopefully, I’ll catch up with each of these companies over time, whether at conventions or outside of them.

The post UK Games Expo 2025 – The RPG Report appeared first on Who Dares Rolls.

By Stonemaier Games, Paul Saloman

I don’t know what it is with games which have really mundane themes, but something always appeals to me about them. Fantasy and science fiction are fine, I’ve got several games about Cthulhu and about zombies, but if you tell me there’s a game about a stamp convention, I’m in.

The stamp convention in this game lasts over three days, with players collecting, trading and then sticking stamps in their books. In true Stonemaier Games fashion, this game takes the form of several little choices each with their own mechanics.

Like Canvas, you have several different categories your stamp collection’s being judged on, but unlike Canvas, you can only score one on each day of the convention. There are four different categories and a final scoring one, so while everyone might be looking to have groups of stamps of the same colour, they may happen at any point and in any colour. This means you’ve got a bit less of a dash for the same thing, although that’s not eliminated entirely.

The general loop of a day goes between Collect, Swap and Show. These are drafting stamps, swapping stamps and then showing them off in order to get some points.

First up, three cards are drawn with a layout of face-up and facedown stamps, along with some cards and tweezers for the first player. One of these cards will have a visible effect or ability, such as letting everyone draft an extra stamp. Players draft six things from the pile, which feels like too little given the amount of items out there, but you’ll get use out of it all. Face-up stamps are visible to everyone but only you will see any facedown ones you draft.

Once everyone’s got six, players reserve one item and split everything else into two groups. Players go around, picking someone else’s stamps, then that person takes their remaining pile and takes their turn. The tension of the ‘I split, you choose’ meaning that you’re often splitting what you want from your draft so you don’t get stuck with duds, or you might be gambling on someone else’s stack of facedown stamps. It’s deliciously tense and fun to see people umming and ahhing over whether or not to risk it.

There are several things to keep an eye out for when you’re drafting and swapping stamps. Each stamp has a colour and a theme. Player mats all score extra points each round for a specific theme and specialist cards may give colour bonuses. There are reference cards showing the styles of both theme and colour, as both have identifiers so you know what you’re looking for even if you’re colourblind. The size of the stamps is often a scoring criteria, too, as some prizes are for groups of big or little stamps. There are used stamps which don’t have a point value on them but will always be in one of the scoring categories and faded stamps with a negative point value, even if they’ll help with your goals, theme bonus and colour bonuses.

In addition to stamps and the first player tweezers, there are the oft-forgotten (at least in my game) forever stamps. These have little infinity symbols and are smaller than the others. Whoever’s got the most of them at the end of the game will score a lot of points, followed by second and third places. The problem if they can be inconvenient when you’re trying to fit groups or avoid edges. There are gold stamps which are worth a lot of points but don’t meet any theme or colour; they’re generally sweets and have gold foil. Without the right specialist card, you can’t reserve them when it’s time to trade. Then there are specialist cards which give you extra abilities or scoring criteria. They handily give you symbols for the rounds when they’re active. These can both be traded as easily as stamps when you’re splitting things.

Once everyone’s got their chosen stamps and the pile no one took from their own supply, it’s time to get sticking! Each player board has a ‘page’ filled with squares to place your stamps on. You need to be mindful of what the score cards are asking, as some might want edges filled or avoided, they might want a batch of small square stamps or single colours. In the first round, you’ll probably just want to go for whatever you can score with your small supply of stamps. And once they’re on, they’re stuck on. Not literally, luckily, please don’t lick the tiles.

Players show off their boards and which prize they’re going for, scoring points for it and putting down a ticket to show that it can’t be re-scored. On the third day, you also have a final round of scoring for an overall theme. Like a lot of Stonemaier Games games, you have all the information up front so you can try to aim for the final goal from the start, or you might just be trying to survive as you go.

Ultimately, the game is short and sweet, with some beautiful aesthetics and some little bits of spite you can throw in there during the swapping phase. Each time I play, it feels like I’m not drafting enough stamps and I’m not able to get as many points as I’d like, but our boards are still pretty packed by the time we’re done. It’s a good sign when a game’s biggest sin is that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and that’s definitely the case with Stamp Swap. The only other minor gripe is that sometimes we’re not immediately clear on what some of the specialists do or how they interact, but the rulebook contains clarification for them.

Stamp Swap can be found in game stores and on Stonemaier Games’ webstore.

The post Stamp Swap appeared first on Who Dares Rolls.

The final day dawned and I’d not paid for breakfast this time. given it was pretty mid compared to some hotels I’d stayed at, I didn’t mind heading to a cafe at the NEC for a coffee and a muffin while waiting to meet up with a friend. 

Big Table

I’d bumped into James Wallis in the press preview and attended his Big Table talk on Saturday. As I was looking around for a sticker of Astarion from Baldur’s Gate III to get for my partner, I found the Big Table at a surprisingly small table.

We had a chat, but I’ll get into this in a future article. Personally, as someone who’s been thinking a lot about legacy and helping improve ways of working both in my day job and in gaming, it’s been interesting seeing someone trying to help this along. Big Table’s definitely something to keep your eye on if you’re in the industry.

The British and Irish Games Trade Assembly “Big Table” can be found here.

Folded Space

I love the Folded Space board game inserts. My partner likens them to three-dimensional puzzles and while I like putting them together, she’s far better than me at doing them.

Folded Space were showing off their colour inserts and it feels incredibly petty to say, but I really love the colour versions. The inserts work well both in the box and on the table when playing games, so making them look prettier than grey foam is a good touch.

Chatting with them about what they’re doing next is always an interesting experience. So often it’s a case of asking, “What are you doing next?” And it’s pretty much more of the same. In addition to the colour inserts, they’re looking to update their packaging so they fit better on game store shelves alongside their board games, but that wounded like it as far as innovations in the space.

Folded Space can be found here.

Anomalia Games

I was in a rush to get to my coach and to get a last minute chat with Rowan, Rook & Decard when I got distracted by RPGs in tin cans. It looked like an interesting gimmick, but I rolled my eyes, figuring these “Emergency Roleplaying Games” would end up being some kind of 5E clone. Then I got clobbered by someone asking if I wanted a quick demo of the rules.

Fine, I bit. We were interrupted by a Dalek who’d been pestering them by trying to knock over the cans throughout the convention. When they’d passed, the designer of the games came to speak to me.

Anomalia aren’t normally in the market for making their own RPGs, but after finding a source for tins, came up with the idea of an ‘emergency RPG’ which people could have around and pop open if they needed a game. The rules are extremely basic and in large print to encourage players of all ages.

The GM book has the rules and a set of mad lib style entries about the setting at the back. These can be filled in by the GM ahead of time or by the group as a whole. Then there are ‘skeletons’ which are adventures each contained in their small booklets and referencing the answers in the mad lib section of the rulebook.

The system is nice and simple, with the tin containing the relevant dice, pencils and tiny character sheets. There are two versions at the moment, “The Start” is adventuring-based while “To Arms!” Is a war story. The skeletons can be used independently or together to make a connected story, but they’re also genre-agnostic. This means that To Arms’ skeleton had to be vague enough to make connected war stories which could be fantasy, science fiction, apocalypse and so on. It’s a neat idea, and there are plans to make horror and superhero versions if these first ones sell.

You can sign up to be notified when this project launches on BackerKit here.

After a brief chat with Grant Hewitt (I’ll cover that in a future article), I hoofed it over to the coach and rode home watching episodes of Star Trek for Casual Trek, all based around weird space pregnancies. This made for an awkward journey of trying to tilt my iPad so the group of youths near me couldn’t see the extreme close-ups of Troi giving birth to a cosmic entity.

Top Five Non-Game Things At UK Games Expo

And now, here are some non-game-based things of note from the convention.

Fans

The hot new fashion accessory of UK Games Expo! Next year I definitely need to remember to bring either my hand fan or my USB fan which plugs into my Anker power battery.

On my way to the press preview I saw someone with a massive fan they were carrying and I didn’t realise how jealous I would be for the whole event. There were people with hat-fans, small fans, fans on their wheelchairs. Even dressing in shorts and a light floral shirt wasn’t enough to keep me cool in the halls. By Sunday, there were stalls selling fans for people and I’m sure they made a killing.

Corners

UK Games Expo’s halls are normally One and Two, separated by a set of stairs, and Hall Three, separate from both of those entirely. This year it was Hall Two, Three and Four, which were all connected by large open corners. The layout of the stalls meant that it was possible to keep going and not realise that you’d changed the angle you were at in a hall. There were multiple times I’d lost track of which hall I was in, and in trying to leave found my way at the back of the a different hall entirely.

By Sunday I was a bit more used to it, but this made for a very disorientating convention.

The Starbucks Workers

First of all, I must apologise to my Casual Trek cohost Miles who used to be a Starbucks worker. I generally don’t go there out of solidarity, but they have the best hidey hole for relaxing and being away from crowds in the NEC. I went there a bunch during the con and they were swift, patient and one of them made an art out of dramatically bellowing people’s names. 

I feel in return for mentioning Starbucks here, I should link to Starbucks Workers United.

Staying Near, But Not Too Near the NEC

The Crowne Plaza was a short walk away from the main hall. I wasn’t in a rush and I was out of view of the convention itself. During breakfast I could watch the procession of nerds on their way to the con, then join them. At night I could walk back from the Hilton, past the trees and alongside the water. It made for great decompression on the way to and from the con.

Sitting Down

On Saturday afternoon I walked past a person who was sitting down at a demo and they let out a sigh of relief. I was so jealous. I couldn’t wait to sit down, too. Unlike the fans, I can’t really do much about that next year, just remember to take some breaks or participate in some well-planned demos in order to rest up periodically.

A runner up is the time that someone sat on their walkie-talkie meaning that none of the staff could communicate. This was announced mainly through shouting.

With that, my daily coverage is finally over! I’ve got a couple more articles to share with you soon. Hopefully when I cover Essen later this year, I won’t be overcome with con crud.

The post UK Games Expo 2025 Convention Diary – Sunday & Top Five Non-Gaming Expo Things appeared first on Who Dares Rolls.

There are also cosplayers who attend the convention. Some are simply attendees who like to dress up, others are professionals who have come along. A friend of mine from work has dressed up as a Ghostbuster and I thought I saw him on the way in, but the guy wasn’t entirely identical. It turns out, it was his twin!

On to the con!

Parable Games

I’ve chatted with Parable Games before, mainly about Ion Heart. They also make an RPG called Shiver which I admit rubbed me up the wrong way with its combination of funny dice and the main pitch being that it’ll basically do any horror. This time they’ve got a pair of starter sets which actually pick a specific genre. Blockbuster is a dinosaur theme park horror game, then Slasher is set at a summer camp. I like the idea of both of these, and it’d be interesting to see if they mechanically back up the premises in those sets.

Ion Heart’s apparently almost at the point where it can be digitally released, which is pretty exciting. I know they’ve got a multiplayer version planned, but the core concept as a solo game always appealed to me and has a great aesthetic style.

The main event for me was Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG which I admit my stubborn streak instantly made me want to play, just to prove it wrong. The fliers also announced that you were cursed, just by looking at it.

The author, Charlie Menzies, was there and it was a joy talking to him about the creation and concept behind it. You’re cursed by some kind of entity and through journaling, art or whatever medium you want, you go through the steps taken to placate it. A playthough normally goes through about 20-30 events, and then can be passed on to a new character player by you or someone else. 

Charlie explained that the influences were games like Thousand Year Old Vampire, however he wanted to make sure there was a dramatic arc with a beginning, middle and end. He mentioned that their community already had channels on their Discord where people shared art, journals and audio diaries. He also gave the tagline of, “It’s like Pokémon Go, but where you’re trying to find the Blair Witch before she kills you.”

I bought a copy of the game, so I guess I’m cursed. If it goes well, I’ll resurrect Playing With Ourselves to show you what it’s like. Charlie kindly provided a journal for me, which already has the first two pages filled in with a handwritten run which did not end well. I don’t know if that was intentional, but it’s definitely an interesting start.

1 Sick Puppy 

It’s a nice surprise when I see an RPG and company I’ve not heard of before. Dimday_Red is just such an example. 

Spiros Drakatos introduced me to the concept of his game, which you can probably guess with the board he’s pictured with. Earth has fallen out of orbit and in 52 years, it’s going to get so close to the sun that all life will be extinguished. Well… bugger. That’s a rough start.

Society has understandably gone to the shitter after that, but players will try to use their time to figure out what to do with a life where everything will be gone in 52 years. Now, I’m a 44 year old overweight man, I’ve not got 52 more years in me, but does that mean I act like the world is over after that long? No, not necessarily. In fact, things like that just fuel my anxiety.

In this game, the wealthy have decided to fence in the poor, rather than do anything to help or deal with them. They intend on living well until the end and don’t want people getting in their way. So what will you do? Level the playing field with the wealthy? Get revenge on someone? Do right by your neighbours? Create something? It’s an interesting setting, although the part of me who idolises superheroes finds it difficult not wanting to bash my head against the concept, trying to find any way to fix things. So that’s probably what I’d do.

The system is a Powered by the Apocalypse framework, with lovely trifold character playbooks. There’s been a main release, zines and Spiros plans on having some more zines in this world.

Smirk & Dagger

I mentioned on Thursday about a game laser-targeted to my partner’s interests, and now here’s another one. We have too many books in the house and that’s not stopping anytime soon. I need to put up more shelves for books at the moment, as there are some loose stacks about.

A Place For All My Books is a game of basically that. Players have an apartment where they’re looking to gather and sort their books, gaining some energy by doing tasks. You lay out your shelves using lovely little wooden tokens, then use some energy to go into town and buying more books. So it’s pretty much mine and my partner’s life. The presenter explained that this was very much a love letter to introverts, building up energy with lonely fun and reading, then going out and getting yet more things to read. My one worry was that the set collection goals might seem a lot like the terrible act of sorting your books by colour. Running it past my partner, she said that it’s fine if it’s a game, so it passes that test.

A Place For All My Books is out in August. Hopefully my new book shelves will be up before then.

Three Sails Studios

The big release from Three Sails was Mappa Mundi, an RPG in a boxed set containing a book and cards. It’s basically a ‘Reverse Monster Hunter’, where you’re all people trying to create a bestiary and observe monsters, but also to leave them the hell alone. You might help them, but you’re not fighting monsters in this game.

A disaster cut off parts of the world and has since retreated. Now your group of ‘adventure academics’ must scout it out and track down monsters.

Then there’s the angrier game, which isn’t out yet, but definitely caught my eye. Gallows Corner is about the Peasants Revolt, set in 1376. It’s a game of ‘working class rage’ and sounded like an act of catharsis from the designer after making Mappa Mundi while existing in the real world. The plan is that it’ll Kickstart in February.

Oink Games

The big game Oink Games were showing off is literally a big game compared to their usual offerings. Dying Message comes in a larger box, with cards, a little box, a die and a piece of cloth made to look like a bloodstain.

This is a kind of shorter, simpler Mysterium. One player is the victim, who rolls a custom d12 which determines which one of six suspects murdered them. They pick from a selection of 15 cards and try to position any or all of them in ways which might tell a message, then they die, putting their head on the ‘bloodstain’ and either pointing at or covering part of a card. Players have to read the suspects’ bios, look at their pictures and look at the individual clues to be able to guess who the murderer was.

I was the victim in my first game. The clue cards are all either lines or simple symbols. There was a ‘power’ symbol which I covered with part of my hand to replicate the hat of my murderer. They also had recovered a martial arts scroll, so I tried to pose some lines to look like people fighting. It was understandably misinterpreted and the other players thought it was an act of pottery, then forgot what I’d covered up.

The second game went better, with the murderer being a squid catcher who was scared of whales and resented his work. The victim made a great boat with two cards and a shuttlecock-looking thing which I realised was a squid.

Some touches like the bloodstain and the victim collapsing are just for effect, but this is a great way of boiling down a Mysterium-style experience into a smaller experience.

GMS Hobby Game Logistics

Brother, Why? Is a fantastic-sounding game, but one which might not end up on my shelves, just because of the group I’ve currently got.

The concept’s a nice and simple one. You’re a monk and when you were on the sauce, you drew some daft images in some worthy medieval books. You then need to defend your reason for having done so. It uses 100% real medieval marginalia, and looks gorgeous.

This might be one to get for CabinCon’s “Talking Bullshit” night, even if my regular players are less likely to get a lot out of it.

Mining British Folklore For TTRPGs

The first talk of the day was later than I’d expected, thanks to a misprint, but was worth watching.

The panel were Chris Bissette, Scott Malthouse and Sarah Cole, with Chant Evans asking questions as well as providing some answers with the rest of the panel.

There was a little faffing with the microphones which is pretty usual for these kinds of events, frankly. Once that was done, the group got into what their favourite folkloric things are, which included big cats, hyper-local myths and several local pieces of folklore to where they lived. Things like a “Skull House” near Chris Bissette, a map for the Holy Grail in a church near Chris and Sarah’s love of the many big cats.

The group went into definitions a bit, with clarifications about the differences between folklore and myths, histories and so on. Sarah mentioned the term, “popular antiquities” for folklore, the role of it as cultural expression. One of the definitions Scott mentioned was, “Evil Country File” or as Chris added, “Country Vile”. 

Part of it was that it was passed on, by and for ‘folk’. It wasn’t just a bucolic view of the past. Chris Bissette gave the take, “The trees are evil”, which definitely works well for folk horror. 

One question which got them all going was whether folklore ends at the border of cities. Sarah initially said that yes, it did, mainly as a joke. Scott clarified that it’s everywhere, with work, offices, in-jokes and so on. Also that folklore’s invisible unless you look at it. As someone who works at an office in his day job, I can definitely get that and have experienced it.

Chris asked what the distinction between folklore and urban legend was, and Scott answered that folklore is urban legend. 

Sarah mentioned that folk horror’s often tricky in a city, as it tends to be about community. Chant brought up the local outrage when a thousand year old tree was felled and how it changed the land in the city.

When asked what they loved about folklore, Chris mentioned that it was always how he’d interacted with the world, about an old neighbour who’d tell stories in the pub, often changing them over time. He liked how stories aren’t necessarily truth and to embrace the liminality of stories.

Scott agreed, bringing up the magic and the day-to-day ness of it. A normal world, but with a goblin down the road. Sarah added that it’s like a layer put on top of everyday life. She mentioned the origin of a normal word like ‘bonfire’, which came from ‘bonefire’ thanks to celebrations on St John’s Eve. Also apparently the people of Penzance are doing that again.

So, how can this be used in RPGs?

Scott mentioned about how it’s really malleable in what you can do and where you can put them. It can inform culture, jokes, rumours and more. Sarah said about how she’d sometimes make up folklore and then realise that there is some extant folklore which was similar. An example was some of her use of will o’ the wisps As being linked to kids in a game and then discovering that in the Isle of Wight they’re linked to unbaptised children. As someone born on the Isle of Wight, I was baptised. Kind of. In Dunwich, once my family moved to the mainland. Hopefully I wasn’t haunted by will o’ the wisps.

Chris brought up ambiguity, something already said as something interesting in folklore. In this case, you can build it into your settings. If there’s a dungeon next to a village, there are going to be rumours. The further out, the vaguer those rumours are going to be. This can be in the form of stories from NPCs, either as a focal point or simply flavour.

Scott mentioned bringing up folklore in small, inconsequential things, and letting players make up their own folklore which the GM can then bring back into the game. 

Chris asked whether it’s important for folklore in a game to have a ‘truth’, despite the vagueness of it all.

Sarah said that she likes to write with one in mind, but it’s not likely to be on the page as it’s not needed. Also in providing vague details means the GM doesn’t need too much brainwork.

Chant asked about how to deal with players who want to get to the bottom of things, given the vagueness. Sarah suggested leaving it to the GM and how RPGs are good ‘detective games’ compared to video games, as you interact differently with them. 

Scott brought up his solo game English Eerie, which uses prompts and cards for players to latch onto and drive their stories. Chris mentioned that stat blocks aren’t scary, so keeping things purposefully vague can help.

Chant asked why folklore lends itself so well to horror?

It’s what we don’t know, was Chris’ answer. Things like being enchanted is a scary idea. Sarah added about a lack of certainty about what things are going to do, like the way spiders can react. Or how Dr Who’s weeping angels were far more interesting when we hadn’t seen them move.

Scott said that folk stories are often warnings, and that makes things scary.

Chant asked what happens if players discover the truth and Sarah pointed out right away that it’s probably too late! 

The presenters each shared their reading lists.

Sarah’s included the abridged Reader’s Digest Myths & Legends of Britain, British Folklore Tales & Legends: A Sampler, also to go to places like Vinted to get local books of folklore pretty cheaply.

Scott mentioned Westwood & Simpson’s Lore of the Land, The National Trust’s Treasury of Folklore books, Folkloristics, and to become a member of the Folklore Society as you’ll get access to their archives. Oh, and to talk to folks.

Chris suggested All The Haunts Be Ours as a collection of folk horror films and documentaries and random issues of Fortean Times.

Chant mentioned to go to your local library and there’ll be a librarian who knows where the good stuff is.

There were a few questions about things like whether folklore’s quintessentially British (no) and about trespassing on religions (more complicated, but there’s definitely a distinction between the structure of religion and how folklore behaves).

The talk was really interesting, especially as I’m currently working on a Trophy Gold scenario.

I attended an industry talk with Big Table later, but I’ll get into that in a separate article.

RPG Night: Slugblaster

We decided to move from a packed room in the Hilton over to one where there was only another table playing, mainly as we knew we’d get noisy.

Slugblaster’s an RPG using a loose Forged in the Dark framework, and with a much sillier theme. The concept is that you’re teenagers living in a dull hometown with a rough home life, so you have fun by hoverboarding across dimensions in a sport called “Slugblasting”.

I was the Guts of the group, with a pair of teleporting trainers which allowed me to grind on rails like I was skating. My character, “Amazing Case” wore sunglasses indoors and luckily I had a pair (okay… two) with me, to use as a prop. The rest of the crew were Kevin Can Wait, Secondhand and Saint. Notably, we were missing a Brains, so we decided that Secondhand’s dog Harvey was the brains of the group.

As we were playing a convention game, we missed out on the angst of the aftermath of a run, but we got to play through the fun chaos of trying to win a sponsorship from Scramcat.

We skated through a haunted mausoleum and were chased by an eight-armed ghost. We got chased through a busy labyrinth of apartments and then got blasted into a jungle realm by a rival crew. I love clocks in RPGs and as this is a kind of multiversal Tony Hawks Underground, the GM used words like “RAWR” as a clock for when a dinosaur would try to take a bite out of the crew.

I felt sorry for the GM when we had some great plans to leave the jungle dimension, failed and sent the dinosaurs through instead. We discovered that Scramcat were selling out to the equivalent of Apple, eventually found our way back and I got to yell at Scramcat for being phonies. I challenged their CEO to actually slugblast and we ended up fighting a corporate team of business-skaters. Our rival stepped in to duel the CEO with a kickflip-off, only for me to flip between them, flipping them both off while grinding on a quantum centipede which Secondhand managed to summon.

This was a blast. The system’s nice and simple, with bonuses from taking dares from the GM, and the ability to do a stunt by yelling “Check it!” Just before you roll.

It was almost midnight when we were done, we were all stoked from the game and that gave me the energy to go back to my room and finish my Star Trek Adventures review.

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That said, I had places to go, friends to meet up with and scoops to get, so after fortifying myself with breakfast and coffee, I was off.

Wise Wizard Games

I’m a big fan of Star Realms and a friend of Saffron, one of the workers at the stall, who had returned to Expo for the first time in a little while. There was also Rob Dougherty, the company’s CEO, available for a bit of a chat.

Star Realms Academy was going shown off, as a version of the game rebuilt for an all-ages audience with no language comprehension needed to play. It was clear they’d done more than remove trickier mechanics, but actually considered the audience.

Rob told me about the next expansion of Star Realms, which is going to be dealt with in a different way than usual. There’s going to be a Gamefound campaign for a digital version of the campaign, with a physical campaign to follow. This will allow playtesting and amendments to be made in the digital sphere before things are committed to cardboard. It’s an interesting idea, and they’ve also thrown in a deal for people who back digitally to get promos at a discount if they back the physical edition later.

And what does this expansion do? It brings a new type of card: Planets! These planets are bought using the combat resource instead of cash, and when acquired, they’re permanently added to your side of the table. There will also be new commander decks with single factions, where the previous packs had a combination of them.

As a person with an interest in Star Trek, I decided to ask about Star Trek Star Realms, which is currently simply a reskin of Star Realms’ core set. Rob explained that he was thrilled by the license and the depth of conversations about which faction matched which (a surprise as I thought it was simply that Blob & Romulans are green, Klingons & Machine Cult are red, and so on). There’s going to be an expansion which introduces the Borg as either an enemy for everyone to fight, or for a player to control when fighting against other players. This will be unique to this version of Star Realms (but compatible with opaque sleeves). Rob said he was a fan of Trek and excited to actually be designing with it in mind. Personally, it’s an incentive to get Star Trek Star Realms when a new expansion arrives.

Wise Wizard was also showing off Elemystic, a two-player game which was a lot more self-contained than Star Realms. Players have nine cards each that they’re drafting as they’re looking to master the elements. It was only a brief preview, but looked interesting as a portable game.

Paizo

I don’t normally cover D&D or any offshoots, which includes Paizo. My friend Graham was down for one day and in his gregarious manner, dropping off bags of sweets and biscuits for folks on stands. The people at Paizo’s booth were really friendly and chatty, so I’ve covered some of what we talked about.

Starfinder Second Edition has been looking to bring Starfinder up to rules parity with Pathfinder Second Edition. The whole Action Economy (if you want to show people you know about Pathfinder, just mention the Action Economy, they all love it). There’s not going to be a Beginner Box at launch for second edition, but they’re looking to make a deluxe introductory adventure. They’re going to experiment with one-book adventure paths compared to the multi-book versions previously released.

There’s going to be a Starfinder novel, “Era of the Eclipse” which goes into some of the early days after “The Gap”, the big plot device where everyone’s lost their memories after a certain point and all histories prior to that point are gone, too.

Speaking of which, a product being shown off was The Infinity Deck, an in-universe prop which was a fancy foil-embossed deck of cards. because the rules for the game were lost in The Gap, there are a lot of folk games which have sprung up as people have made their own games. As such, there are a few different example games and people are encouraged to make their own.

Yay Games

I was lured into playing a demo just before the trade hall closed. I thought I was going into a sheep game, but the demoers in the Yay Games stand suggested one about body parts instead. Frankenstein’s Bodies is a game about being grave robbers who are making their own monsters. You’re collecting pieces from a deck and a few open cards to make one of two monsters. You can also steal other people’s body parts or ‘gift’ them parts which don’t quite match. It’s fine, it feels a bit old and looking it up, it’s 11 years old. 

RPG Night “Daggerheart”

Last year I tried out Candela Obscura out of morbid curiosity. I’ve never really followed Critical Role, although I’m aware of their work. I was looking for a Friday night game and there were a shrinking amount of slots for Daggerheart, their latest game.

Daggerheart is an RPG very much in dialogue with Dungeons and Dragons, possibly second only to Pathfinder. What I saw of the rules and character sheets looked like it was formatted in a very similar style, and the style of high fantasy is almost identical. The GM said the phrase most trad GMs say to win folks over, about how it’s got a ‘very narrative focus’ but at least my tally of mechanics being directly compared to D&D was only three.

The system uses six ability scores which are added to a 2d12 roll, then summed against a difficulty rating. It’s nice someone’s trying to do something with a d12, I guess. The big difference is that they are coloured differently. The player earns a meta-currency of Hope if one die is higher, the GM earns another called Fear if the other’s higher. Hope fuels some player powers and can add a bonus die to rolls if spent beforehand. The GM can add a negative die, have enemies act outside of their turn order and I assume more, but I wasn’t behind the screen.

Characters have a number of different traits. My character Khari had the following:

Ridgeborne – My community lived on rocky peaks, giving me bonuses to navigate them.

Giant – My ancestry meant I had an extra hit point and treated melee ranges as being very close. I should have paid attention to what that meant.

Stalwart – For being a Guardian, I was hardier than the others.

Whirlwind – I could spend Hope when I was in Very Close range of multiple people, in order to damage them all a bit.

I Am Your Shield – I could mark Stress (another metacurrency) to take a hit meant for someone Very Close to me.

This was a first level character, and just through this you can see I could do more than a D&D fighter type. I could absorb hits well, and take on groups, acting as a great bodyguard.

Fights use a structure of passing between player and GM character turns, with everyone deciding on their order and the GM potentially interrupting by spending Fear. Attacks are handled like skill checks, with an Evasion score to meet or beat, but not generating Hope or Fear by the sounds of it as there’s a lot more rolling. Everyone has wound thresholds which mean you’ll be suffering 1, 2 or 3 hit points based on how much total damage you take. Armour can downgrade the level of damage, but generally you can only do that once per strike. My character could do it twice, or if defending someone else could mark any amount.

There are long and short rests, with characters choosing from options like refreshing health or armour, or getting some Hope which was great as I rolled higher with my Hope dice twice in the entire evening.

As far as the story, we were disastrously close to being caravan guards, something I’ve grown to loathe as a lazy high fantasy con game trope. Luckily we were just travelling in one, trying to get to an arcanist. We had some exploration, a couple of fights and a nice encounter in a tavern. The ‘map’ was all printed standees, which I was fine with, and the range was abstract. 

There’s a point in my notes where I started drawing the forest wraiths we were fighting, stag heads and pondering how to make a Carved from Brindlewood game specifically to run in a convention time slot. This is no shade on the GM, who didn’t seem to have been given enough time to learn the system to a level an irritating player was when he kept prying into it again and again. There was a nice d8 ‘ritual’ counter on the map, with us having to kill eight undead while there were only four on the table. We had to fight forest wraiths and get them to spawn more undead specifically to end the ritual and tick the counter down.

I think ultimately it was fine. It’s still pretty trad and incredibly in dialogue with D&D. I would like to see how it can stand on its own, without having to basically be a not-D&D. I guess that’ll be its ultimate challenge in the long run; whether the pedigree of Critical Role and their use of the system makes it a contender. At the con it seemed to do pretty well. My friend Graham was pleased to nab the penultimate copy from the stall Darrington Press were demoing at. 

That was day one. I had a couple of long chats with Pelgrane Press and Soulmuppet, but I’ll be compiling them with my longer RPG chats soon enough.

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UK Games Expo’s back, and bigger than ever. I attended as the roving reporter for Who Dares Rolls and decided to even go as far as attending the press preview. This is the first time I’ve done it, as normally I’ve got company who aren’t press and have just arrived in town.

This year I was flying solo. No Mike and no Graham, the friend I tend to crash at a Travelodge with and drive in. This time I was alone in the Crowne Plaza, a hotel just along the water from the NEC. It was pricy, but worth it for being so close to the event. The trains were a nightmare, so I took a coach which was late enough that I barely had time to check in my luggage and make sure I wasn’t sweating too badly before heading to the preview.

For those who haven’t attended, this is like a mini-version of the Expo, with several temporary stalls set up for the press and industry folks to run around for a couple of hours, getting any initial scoops. I found it a relief for getting some information prior to the con, so I didn’t have to rush as much. It’s also a mini-version of the Expo in that it’s incredibly packed.

Earthborne Games

It took me a moment to realise I was being pitched a card game by Andrew Navarro, who worked on Arkham Horror Living Card Game and current darling, Earthborne Rangers. I was stopped and asked if I wanted to know about a card game called Hubworld: Aidalon. 

Hubworld: Aidalon’s an attempt at bringing back a competitive LCG scene, with players acting as individuals trying to poach agents from each other in a science fiction hub world that used to be a central place of trade. The release model isn’t going to have any core sets, with each set released as a standalone box, able to be used as a ‘drafting cube’ which I’m sure means something to a card game person.

The cards looked nice and there was evidently a good amount of lore Andrew and his assistant could rattle off the dome right away. Something reassuring is that it’s going to follow the same environmental model of production as Earthborne Rangers, showing that they’re committed to the concept rather than simply using it to match the theme.

Speaking of which, Earthborne Rangers’ current campaign is still a couple of months away from fulfilment and there are going to be some announcements after that, but Andrew was keeping quiet about that.

DR Games

Toby Lancaster’s made a series of 2D6 Dungeon solo game books and spin-offs, including the new 2D6 Realm which allow players to make a lair and explore the outdoors. Toby showed off some great illustrations from his community who have played his games. 

Towards the end of the year he plans to release 2D6 Void, a solo science fiction RPG set on a failing spaceship which you need to explore and stop before it crashes.

Moaideas Game Design

I like the occasional train game, but the 18XX ones never feel too appealing. With the current edition of Mini Rails, Moaideas have reissued their game in a way which is instantly adorable and does a lot of work to make itself easily readable to people. I’m still not entirely convinced, but I’d be up for giving this a try.

Enchanted Needle

I’ve met Enchanted Needle a couple of times at Dragonmeet and Paradice in Worthing. They were showing off some adorable new designs like a Dice Goblin and a Gelatinous Cupid.

The OP Games

This stall was incredibly busy showing off Tea Witches, one of a few tables which felt laser-targeted at my partner. The board has a Lazy Susan in the Centre and little pots of ingredients which people are collecting for their teas, then serving a queue of customers. Customers who are served well become ‘loyal’ and return the next day for more. It’s by the makers of Flamecraft and looks great.

Outset Media

I’ve had mixed experiences with Feed the Kraken, and one of the main criticisms I have is the size of it for a loyalty game, compared to games like Resistance or Quest. This con, they were showing off a smaller version of the game, Feed the Kraken: Essential Edition. All the plastic is replaced with card and the board is smaller. This will end up retailing for around £35.

They also have an expansion in the works, which will lean towards the deluxe components (e.g. plastic guns), but will be compatible with the essential edition.

Stratagemma Edizioni

The first RPG company I spoke to came from Italy, a country which has produced some really interesting RPGs like Outgunned and Fantasy Quest. Admittedly I’d not heard of Stratagemma Edizioni before, but they had a lot of interesting games.

The stall was showing off Red Borg, a game powered by the Mörk Borg engine, about revolution. I asked how they approached making a game like that without it being a bummer, and was told that they’d lived through a long time of Berlusconi being in charge of their country, and they got through that with humour.

Also using the Mörk Borg engine was Odyssey: Black Tales, a grim Homeric game which even name checks Homer in the credits. They admitted that he got his work in early for them, which was nice, and didn’t ask for any money. They’d had the same experience with Edgar Allen Poe in their previous RPG work.

There were a number of interesting zine-level games such as To Rebehold the Forest, which I could have perused for ages with more time.

Sinister Fish Games

Another popular stall was Sinister Fish. I wanted to look at Yonder, but while waiting for them to be free, got distracted with Honk: A Game of Geese.

Honk uses a pile of cardboard geese with symbols and apparently plays like a child version of Splendour.

Yonder is the first game by the designer of Villagers and Moon which takes up a regular board game box. It’s a fantasy worker placement games about building a settlement. The workers are all different creatures with different abilities, but they all (barring skeletons) need feeding. As everyone builds villages players can put workers on their spaces. This means they’ll need to pay for those workers, but also they’ll get to use them. Just like Moon and Villagers, there’s a lovely style to it all, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the final game is like.

Kaioss Games

It took me a moment to realise Kaioss Games was ‘Chaos Games’, which I’ll blame on the long coach ride. The main game being shown off was the Fable of Mable on the Witch’s Table. Players move a cat around a witch’s table, knocking things off and drawing cards to see what they are. They score positive or negative points, and there are action cards to do things like make the cat refuse to do an action other players’ give it. I think the lack of control of knowing what’s being knocked over and inability to manipulate it are off-putting factors.

There was also Betty Two-Bricks, a game in a box shaped like a brick about historical gangsters which sounded deliciously cruel. 

Saashi & Saashi

The new offering from Saashi & Saashi was the Great Evening Banquet, a game which was described as ‘Azul meets Calico’ and there are a few elements which definitely give that vibe, but it’s quite nice on its own.

Players have a selection of dinner tables they’re looking to fill with guests, drafted from carriages. The tables have requirements, as do the rows and columns. These can relate to the type of guest or the background colour/pattern. Or how much wine the table will end up drinking. It looks like a fun set collection game.

Team Custard Kraken

I was pretty cruel when I was going through PR emails and saw “Wiz’n’Bang” in there. It sounded like either a sex act or a cleaning product and I wasn’t going to get round to visiting them, but I ended up chatting with the folks on the stall.

Wiz’n’Bang is a game about grumpy hermit wizards who are trying to build a tower away from everyone, but they all had the same idea. As each player tries to build a seven-level tower, they also take potshots at each other. Apparently tower completion tends to only happen about 20% of the time, with things often ending up as a battle of attrition between wizards.

Despite my dubiousness about the name, it looks like it could be good fun. I’ve got a two-player print & play demo, so I’ll check it out and see how it goes.

Iconiq Games

Iconiq were showing off Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos, which had a Kickstarter campaign starting shortly before the show. It’s a solo board game, despite looking like it was a larger game with a bunch of tiles and miniatures. It looks like it could be good fun, with Lara going through a multi-chapter story, gearing up and facing challenges set on decks of cards based on the location she’s going in. A drawn tomb will show the tile layout, the challenges and the reward. 

V8

Spokes was being shown off and looks gorgeous. Annoyingly while it was here, it wasn’t being not being demoed or sold. I’ll have to keep an eye out for its arrival, as it sounds like a brain-burner in a fantastic way.

Wrenegade Studios

I admit I came away from the Wrenegade stand still not entirely sure what the Beyond the Veil RPG’s mechanics actually are. It’s a supernatural investigation game, and that all sounds like something I’m interested in. There’s a scale of skeptic-to-believer which affects how people deal with fear (e.g. skeptics suffering Fear less often as they write things off, but a larger amount when it happens).

There’s a digital prologue which I’ll look at to get a better idea of what it’s like.

Great Nothing Games

The final stand I visited was showing off The War of the Worlds: One More Day. It looks like a really interesting solo card game, set during the classic story. Initially it presents two characters to choose from: a soldier and a journalist. Then you go through six scenarios, trying to survive against tripod and people alike.

War of the Worlds has been on my mind lately as I have a friend who’s launched a Kickstarter for a comic about Thunder Child, one of my best friends is a War of the World fan and 2000 AD’s started a new Scarlet Traces arc. So this got my interest right away. It’s launching later in the year, and I’ve signed up to be notified on its launch.

Closing Thoughts

The preview event was good fun, although being packed into a small space still meant a bit of a shove at times to get through it all. I don’t think I saw everything, and I’ve removed some entries who I had more thorough conversations with later in the con.

Once things ended, I went off to Resort World, which I’ve never been to before in all my years of going to the Expo. I ate at a restaurant alone, which is something I’ve almost never done, while finishing A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Eventually, I sat by the water and looked at the lights, ready for tomorrow.

The post UK Games Expo 2025 Convention Diary – Thursday – The Press Preview appeared first on Who Dares Rolls.

[Exchange pre-mission psychological test record begins]

Game Designer, please acknowledge.

Game designer here.

Identify your name and your credentials.

I’m Graham Walmsley. I’m best known for horror writing, especially Cthulhu Dark and my work for Pelgrane Press, which won an Ennie Award.

I’ve also written for Doctor Who: Adventures In Time And Space, Blades In The Dark and lots of other games. And I’ve written a bunch of weird indie stuff too.

What is Cosmic Dark?

It’s my tabletop roleplaying game of weird space horror. 

How does this game differ from its predecessor, Cthulhu Dark?

It has no character creation. You sit down and start playing straightaway, when the GM says “You’re on a shuttle, descending to the surface of a planet”.

And it does campaign play. The book comes with six scenarios in a mini-campaign.

And it’s about weird space horror.

Cosmic Dark appears to have had quite the development cycle, how has it changed?

It hasn’t much! It’s one of those games that worked the first time it hit the table. 

I wrote the scenarios over about two years. The ideas came really quickly: I’d write a scenario about alternate universes, then think “I should do something about memory”.

Please describe an experience from your games which is indicative of Cosmic Dark.

I remember Alex Roberts, who designed For The Queen, screaming because rock had invaded her throat. In character, obviously.

Given the one-shot nature of Cthulhu Dark, why is Cosmic Dark a game that encourages campaign play?

If you read or watch space horror, there are one or two people who survive at the end. They might be injured, they might be mentally changed, but they get out.That’s different from a Lovecraft story, which leaves every one broken at the end. 

And so the surviving characters can go to the next scenario. 

Cosmic Dark also has new campaign rules. When you finish a scenario, you get a Burnout score, which goes up slowly over time. 

And then the company you work for gives you surgery, adjusts your attitude if needed and sends you out on the next mission. 

Which part of the human body feels the most alien to you?

Eyes are really weird.

What guidance is there for running and creating scenarios?

Lots! And it’s different from the advice in Cthulhu Dark. 

Cosmic Dark tells stories about life, technology and reality going wrong. If you’re writing a scenario, you decide what’s gone wrong, then work from there. 

And the game is structured so it gives you tools as a GM to tell the story.

Please name the crew who will be joining you in this project?

For the art, I’m working with Matteo Bocci, who did the beautiful interior art for Cthulhu Dark, and Paul Bourne, who did an astonishing cover.

Nic Rosenberg designed the cover around Paul’s art. Nathan Paoletta did the wonderful text ornaments that make the layout so unique. And Jon Hodgson did the amazing Kickstarter video.

There’s also an incredible crew of stretch goal authors, including writer and designer Kieron Gillen, Call of Cthulhu author Scott Dorward and Julian Simpson, creator of the Lovecraft Investigations.

Which of this crew is most likely to commit murder?

I think Jadzia Axelrod, who’s also doing a stretch goal, could kill if you pushed her too far.

What is next for you and Cosmic Dark?

When the Kickstarter is done, I’ll finish the text and publish it, and the stretch goal authors will get writing.

I’ll run Cosmic Dark at the online convention A Weekend With Good Friends in June. And I’ll be at the 3w6 convention in Vienna in August.

And then there are lots of exciting things in the future! I’ve mentioned a game called Dragon Dark, although who knows whether that’ll come off. There’s a weird little game set in a forest court. And who knows what else.

Thank you for your answers, game designer.

[Transmission ends]

Cosmic Dark is currently on Kickstarter.

Graham Walmsley’s Patreon is found here.

The post An Interview with Cosmic Dark’s Graham Walmsley appeared first on Who Dares Rolls.

Preview copy provided.

Diaz stood at the edge of the ravine, a piece of phospherant purple rock in her hands. She let it go.

The act took Diaz back to her youth with Derek, finding pieces of ruined spaceships and clambering up to a high spot in order to drop it. A simple pleasure, one of the few things they could do for fun on the blighted world of Breaker 59.

Derek fell too. His climbing winch snapping, dropping him and Doc down into the depths of the mine and the explosives they’d set with too short a timer. The flames would get them before the mine… hopefully.

Diaz watched the rock fall, watched the spaceship debris fall, watched Derek fall. She took a step one last step and joined them.

Cosmic Dark is a sequel to Cthulhu Dark, a game which I’ve reviewed and… enjoyed is a tricky term. I love it, but it’s caused the bleakest, weirdest Lovecraftian RPG stories I’ve ever run. So my expectations were pretty high for Cosmic Dark. It’s been in development for a while, mainly through Graham Walmsley’s Patreon and shown on a few actual play channels such as Ain’t Slayed Nobody.

Cosmic Dark is a science fiction RPG with a weird, bleak tone to it. The ruleset is extremely simple, giving little space for people to hide behind mechanically. You are exposed to space and to the weird things out there.

This isn’t Alien though, or even Event Horizon, although it borrows some tonal elements from them both. While technology is as junky as Alien, there’s a lot of the modern day to it, too. Built in obsolescence and the horrible maths which decides whether sending employees to what is probably their doom is something which is acceptable compared to the profit they can get.

There are strange and unspeakable horrors, but this game is all centred about Extracsa, who characters all work for. They’re not adventurers or investigators, but Employees. The game starts and ends there, a new innovation compared to Cthulhu Dark which did not expect characters to be usable by the end of a story. Employees live on The Exchange, a gigantic ship which flies around a golden tear in space called The Glitch. Characters are sent on mission after mission and if they survive, hopefully they won’t be too burnt out to keep going.

As much as I love the Alien movies and Event Horizon, the characters are hardly deep. That’s no bad thing in a movie, but Cosmic Dark takes a different approach, one which I adore. Character creation is handled in game, something which I’ve been chasing the idea of for years. It starts as simply as the GM prompting, “Mining Engineer, please acknowledge”. Whichever player speaks first is now the mining engineer. This continues for each player and then we flash back to their childhoods. 

This is an important part of the game and a great way of creating characters. Each player has only the most basic element of their character; their role. Now they collectively make their home world and play through scenes of their childhoods. What did they look like? Who were they? Something really interesting here is that the short childhood scenes all have the GM feed the opening line to a player and get them to go from there. This is a wonderful tool which I’ve not seen before but will have to use in games in the future as a comfortable prompt for players. After these vignettes, the players and the GM have more of a sense of who they are. 

Ideally by this point, characters will have a name and relationships, as well as their specialism. As one last touch, the Exchange’s computer asks questions of the characters when they’re drifting off to sleep, to check the psychological wellbeing of everyone.

Questions like: What scares you about space? If you could murder one of your team, who would you kill?

You know, normal stuff.

This is all relevant, this is all important. As much as none of this provides a statistic for you or anything like that, as the line from The Wire goes, “All the pieces matter.” There’s a nice GM sheet with spaces for each character and for the home planet, where you can write down details to bring back later from their childhood, their psych profile and general chatter in game. I used the borders to draw relationship arrows and shared details between characters, which definitely helped when doing things like seeing if someone will save their rival.

Characters are built in game in this lovely fashion, and they learn in the same way. The rules are embedded in the first scenario, with a guiding hand to suggest how to interpret dice. It doesn’t hold on too tightly and gradually eases up by early in the second scenario. I had a criticism of the Arkham Horror RPG Starter Set embedding rules throughout the scenarios, mainly as they didn’t have a separate listing of the system. Cosmic Dark’s preview compiled the rules in the back which was really useful.

My first group made a world called Breaker 59, a junkyard world where people harvested pieces of old ships. Diaz and Derek narrated their childhood dropping pieces of ships from heights. “Doc” and Gregor narrated their special schooling as people singled out for scientific knowledge. Of course, this led to a rivalry between them and some interesting cybernetics in Doc. Despite being team leader, Derek admired Doc due to his position aiding the group, then rounding things out, Gregor believed he could confide in the normally cold Diaz.

We had our group, so what about the system?

Gregor immediately started scanning the asteroid and I introduced the group to the Investigation roll. Players roll one die if the task is in the realm of reality, one if it’s in their specialism and a Change die if they’re pushing themselves. Like Cthulhu Dark and Trail of Cthulhu, no matter the roll the plot will keep moving. You look at your highest die and on a 1, you still get some information even if it’s limited. A 4’s the sweet spot, giving you what you want. A 5 will dredge up something about Extracsa and the mystery, while 6 will show you an Anomaly. Too much. This will often lead to a Changed roll.

I love the Changed rolls. You make them when you encounter something weird or if your Change Die result is higher than the others. If it’s higher than your current Change score then it’ll go up. At six, your character is eliminated. This means that it’s really easy for the score to go up early in the game, but as it gets higher, you’ll be less likely to do it. The players are actively encouraged to make the call about whether they roll and to do it often. Listening to the Ain’t Slayed Nobody, there was a definite sense of fun when people would make the roll. My first group were pretty good at prompting themselves, although Doc must have had ice for blood as he kept rolling 1’s no matter the horrors he saw. My second group were a little more cautious and wrote a lot of things off. You can reduce your Change and unlike Cthulhu Dark, this can happen from 3 instead of 5. My second group were pretty quick to try and reduce their rolls, even though that did mean some amputation at one point.

There’s one more type of roll which covers anything that’s not investigating. I started calling it a Risk Roll in the style of Trophy, but you can get away with just asking people to make a roll. This is similar to the Investigation Roll, but you don’t get the extra and/or horrific information on 5’s and 6’s. There’s one last wrinkle, which is the Failure Die. Anyone around the table can roll a die against you if they think that failure would cause an interesting result. Then you have to roll higher than that, with a tie needing a compromised success. At the end of the first two scenarios, there are finale points where the GM rolls two Failure Dice and the players need to beat the highest result. For both of my groups, I rolled a 6.

This is a campaign game, which feels perplexing after running my fair share of Cthulhu Dark. My first group had two people die in an explosion, one throw herself down a ravine and the last one seen wading into icy water, hands reaching up for him. My second had one player send out a warning for people not to come to the asteroid, another broke her back in a deep hole and narrated being found centuries later, displayed as a piece of strange art. One player tried to flee and another fell into a gooey pool of kind-of-people. In both of these games, some of these characters were straight up dead, but some can be recovered.

Extracsa generally recover you if you’re not at Change 6, if you’re not dead in the narrative, then they’ll heal you up using cloned body parts, memory anaesthetic and more. You gain a new stat (yes, double the stats compared to Cthulhu Dark!) called Burnout. This is like your Change score for surviving in the long term. You roll to see if it goes up when you need surgery or when you don’t trust Extracsa.

The first scenario; Extraction, is a very good introduction and gets the tone across very well. This is less Event Horizon and more Solaris. One of my second group compared it to a storyline in The Expanse, but as I’ve not seen or read it, I’m not really in a position to comment. The horror’s quiet, creeping, but still worked well to tell a complete story in a three hour session. My second group rushed a bit near the end, but we had a shorter amount of time and they had taken a bit more time analysing things.

The framework of the scenario has different anomalies and files from Extracsa which can be used, and locations which allow different experiences. Both of my groups experienced the key events in different ways, specific to their backgrounds and psychological assessments. They also went to different locations and had different finales. 

The preview included the second scenario, Time Murder, which is set on a planet where people are harvesting strange glassy-golden flowers. I won’t spoil things for it, but I’m very excited to run it. While Extraction shows the general tone, Time Murder dials up the presence of The Glitch. That omnipresent scar in space runs through each of the scenarios (I’ve been listening to the campaign being played on Ain’t Slayed Nobody, so I’ve got an impression of what the others entail). I assume there will be an ‘end’ to the campaign, even though it’s unlikely to be the glorious overthrow of Extracsa. Why would you want that, after all? There are a lot more stories which can be told with it, and a host of guest writers are adding two-page scenarios to the book in the crowdfunding campaign.

This year’s been one of space horror for me, with Mothership and Alien already having taken up a lot of my play time, and even some moments in Star Trek Adventures getting that way. As much as I love Cthulhu Dark, I did wonder whether it would be doing the same thing as Mothership and Alien. I’m pleased to say it really doesn’t. The tone of Walmsley’s Cthulhu Dark and his Trail of Cthulhu scenarios have a unique, gorgeous, bleak flavour to them. I recently reread his roleplaying advice book, Play Unsafe, and it’s interesting seeing how his skills have grown and he’s putting them literally in the game to help GMs create a great session of weird space horror.

Cosmic Dark is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

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The Star Trek Adventures RPG Second Edition boxed set and Spock Messiah for scale.

Last time I reviewed the Star Trek Adventures Second Edition Starter Set, the components and the system. In order to help my findings I ran the “Infinite Combinations” campaign and a couple of Mission Briefs from the Campaign Guide.

To help give a better understanding of what the game entails, I’ve gone through my experiences and thought I’d share them with you, in case you want to run the game.

Charlie’s Crafting Corner

I’m a good GM, but I’m also also a fairly lazy GM. I like to have reference materials for games, but I’m not going to go nuts with it, so here are some things I put together:

GM Screen

My GM screen and behind-screen setup.

I have a customisable GM Screen which I bought from a Savage Worlds stall at UK Games Expo. I’ve had one of these for years, but my old one finally broke. It’s landscape, which is my preferred orientation, and I can put in anything I need.

I didn’t have a pdf copy of the starter set, so I downloaded the free quickstart guide and used the snipping tool to slice out tables. I also used Word to write down a list of the characters and one of the most essential things for any RPG: pick-lists of NPC names. I then made four sheets which went beat-for-beat through each of the main stories and then one for the three Mission Briefs. I put in boxes for any extended tests and took a dry erase marker so I could write on the screen.

For the final sessions, the group said it would be good to know how much Threat the GM had and I’d been honest whenever they’d asked, so I made a little stand on a corner of the screen to put it on. It meant I could quietly take some and look directly at a player who noticed something bad was happening.

This was fine on my side, but the tables were a little small on the player side. While there is an official screen, it wouldn’t have these things and if you bought the starter set, you’d have a pdf you could snip better tables from. In the future, I think I’d probably try and just make some reference sheets in the style of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark GM sheets.

Map & Tokens

Character and ship tokens printed out.

There are maps in the campaign book, but not in the box. For the first session I just went Theatre of the Mind, but for the third I realised that modern phones are actually pretty good at taking photos, so that’s how I got a photo of a nebula, printed it out and used that.

I have a token tool which I’ve used with VTTs and used the snipping tool with the quickstart pregens (handily also this set’s pregens), then put them in tokens with their duty station and used index cards to show who was where in the final session. I don’t think I’d have fully mapped this out anyway, to be honest.

Shuttle Stats

I bought the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook a little while ago and had a pdf of it. I was going to do my best not to refer to it during the review, but I did use the snipping tool to grab the shuttlecraft stats and print them out for the players. This is one of three instances I used the core book.

Character Logs

Without a pdf, I typed up the characters’ logs for each of the missions as it was a nice idea handing them over and having a player read them out. I typed a little too quickly and had some typos in the first one, but luckily no one took the ship’s captain at that point.

Infinite Combinations

Be warned, spoilers.

The Group

We had five players in alternate line-ups. This was going to be played during the absence of one but ended up going on before and after they were away. Luckily this was an episodic game, so it worked with rotating players.

Lee played Lt. Jg Rashid Kemal, a hotshot pilot who loved skateboarding.

Vinny played Dr Vorall, a Vulcan who had an alien encounter, showing her the value in emotions.

Mark played Lt. Cmdr Burk Ven Jaxa, an old Tellarite who had seen it all and was good at jury-rigging.

Arthur played both Ensign Lanyar Tennan, a Betazoid, and Commodore Nella Xen, a secretly-joined Trill.

Gihan played Xanthus Th’raviq, an Andorian with an icy demeanour.

Episode One: Incursion Point

A sky city, like this one, but it doesn’t depend on The Machine What Kills Children

Starring: Kemal, Vorall, Ven Jaxa and Tennan.

The game started with disaster recovery already happening. The flying city of Cressida above a Jovian planet was being attacked by strange creatures. The crew had to help with the evacuation effort. While it was good to kick things off in the middle of action, it felt like it went into a combat-type situation pretty early. What didn’t help was how I’d not paid attention to how the minion rules meant the entities harassing evacuees should only take one hit. The doctor ran into harm rescuing people, Ven Jaxa and Kemal started attacking, while Tennan sensed great distress. The good thing is they didn’t instantly go into murderhobo brain and attempt to kill the creatures.

We next had an extended test with the group trying to evacuate people, including corralling people, using PA systems and nabbing engineering transporters to transport people. Part way through, the group figured out a kind of defoliant drove the creatures away and used that along with some rappelling gear to rescue a trapped transport lift. Once that was over, a section of the city started to fall. Kemal did some hotshot flying with Tennan helping out. As Arthur was going on holiday for a few weeks, they decided to have Tennan, a redshirt, sacrifice himself to help save people. So yes, we did have a redshirt die in the game.

Vorall tried to mind-meld with the station’s Orion administrator, only to fail horrendously and get punched out by her bodyguard.

Session two started with Vorall coming to and finding herself in the middle of an argument. Administrator Damaad was trying to get back use of the cargo transporters to move valuables away, while a Nausicaan called Urotoxa was after getting Starfleet to arm the pre-warp society living inside the Jovian planet’s liquid level. The group managed to shout down Damaad and had some concerns about helping out the local species without breaking the Prime Directive. You know, Star Trek shit.

Kemal beamed up to the Challenger and ran to the bridge where he took the helm. Ven Jaxa had noticed the gradonic radiation in the creatures and changed the phasers to work to that pattern, drawing the Bryozoan entities away from the locals.

All in all, the group saved 550 of 600 people and alas, lost Ensign Tennan.

Episode Two: Dare to be Wise

A warp core breach!

Starring: Kemal, Vorall & Ven Jaxa

The episodic structure’s great, but when you finish an episode mid-session you either call the game an hour in or go on to the next one. We picked to play through and see what happened. Luckily this was all done in one.

The group had dropped off the 550 survivors from Cressida to Starbase 323, including Urotoxa who seemed nice and had requested a tour of the ship before going. The Challenger went from there to an asteroid field of weird metals. Yes! This is exactly the Star Trek spreadsheet nerding I was hoping for!

The ship started acting erratically, bucking forward, having problems scanning. Using a linear challenge, the group had a bit of a look and recalibration of the sensors, while Kemal kept the ship from smashing into asteroids.

A strange collection of beings poured out of a dimensional breach, kind of like those in Cressida, pushing through the shields to the warp core. Ven Jaxa was angry enough that things were going wrong with the ship, only to see this swarm of creatures turning into one weird thing.

Vorall ran down from the bridge and attempted to mind-meld with the entity, failing and getting an “improper syntax” Trait. So far she was two for two with bad mind melds.

The translator eventually was able to be updated in order to talk to this weird entity by the warp core. It was part of a ‘chorus’, a hive mind which had decided to separate itself into separate minds in the Twelfth Dimension. While this was going on, Kemal was trying to load up a torpedo to try and send out gradonic radiation and drive the Bryozoans to it, but abandoned the plan.

Security ran down and Th’raviq asked what’s going on with the glowing warp core and weird hive creature. Vinny tried very hard not to have Vorall say, “Aurora Borealis”.

Terminals were smoking, then burning, causing problems. The group very nearly broke the ship and alienated the Bryozoan entity. Luckily they managed to remove the Nausicaan sabotage which Ven Jaxa had identified as what messed with the warp core and sensors. Then Vorall spoke with the Bryozoan, realising that it had been pulled out of its dimension unwillingly and that forced them back into their hive mind mode. Kemal’s torpedo was used to help open up a fracture wide enough for the Bryozoans to get out of this dimension.

Mission Brief: Sour Deals

A mining station

Starring: Kemal, Ven Jaxa & Th’raviq.

We were down a Vinny and at two, it wouldn’t have been great. I asked around and got a friend and old RPG acquaintance, Gihan, to join us. Two of the three Mission Briefs were security-focused, so I asked if he’d be up for taking Th’raviq. Luckily he was.

Starfleet Intelligence sometimes requisition non-spies for help, like O’Brien that one time he infiltrated a mob and got kind-of adopted by an old crime boss>>>. This time, the cast were sent to Talbot III, a mess of a market town, in order to meet up with Cmdr Sayid Akuffo.

Akuffo’s mission was to get some valuable information from a Klingon defector. This was all set around the Strange New Worlds/Original Series time, so the Federation had hostilities and now were in a state of Cold War with them. The characters picked out some disguises. Ven Jaxa dressed like a miner as this was an old mining town, while Th’raviq dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat (adapted for antennae) and Kemal dressed as Don Johnson from Miami Vice.

There weren’t many details about Talbot III, so I made a few bits up about the geography and kept notes to make sure I didn’t contradict which district was which. They went to the hideout of Klarn, the Klingon defector, only to find a pair of gangs arguing nearby. The group managed to fake a Klingon gang coming and the gangs had already suffered at their hands, so they fled. The hideout was empty, with a few clues here and there. A 20 result in researching led to me revealing that a Klingon sniper was still there, observing them, even though the characters didn’t know at first. He shot at a witness and ended up in a foot chase.

The group next went to a bar and the large Andorian bartender Klarn was friendly with. Despite Klingon Intelligence spying on the location, the group managed to rendezvous with her and find out where Klarn was hiding. The warehouse district was surrounded by Klingons and disinterested private guards. Klarn had been found and killed. The group incapacitated some snipers and Ven Jaxa caused an electrical fire in the warehouse with Klarn in it. Gihan felt like he was going through every weapon possible, having used a Klingon soldier’s disruptor rifle, his ceremonial knife and finally an actual phaser.

I’d mentioned that Klarn was identifiable by his glass eye (odd as a Klingon would normally wear a patch) and the group found the intel stored in the eye. The mission was complete and despite the characters not noticing, the players were told that Akuffo was reporting back to his real commanders: Section 31.

This was fun and surprised Vinny who’d left them alone for one session only to find that they’d been in chases and fights. Also Gihan had missed the initial sessions and assumed the Starfleet Intelligence/Section 31 side of it meant a lot more than it did. In truth, this was the least connected to the main campaign, although if people do run it, I’d say to bring Akuffo back for the final Mission Brief, as it involves Starfleet Intelligence.

Mission Brief: Behind the Glass

Look, there isn’t really any Regency Star Trek, so I had to use this.

Starring: Vorall, Ven Jaxa & Th’raviq

I love the idea of Federation colonies picking a theme, but a lot of the time it seems like ‘20th Century America’ is far too often what they go with. Aside from LARP Scotland in the Sex Ghost episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I decided to go with a kind of Regency Bath style for the Federation town on Axanar. A Quick Look at Memory Alpha showed me the details of Axanar and the people there. I also needed to come up with a few NPC names and stores.

The group had been sent down to Axanar to look into an Orion pet shop owner who’d somehow got hold of individual Bryozoans and was selling them. To make matters worse, people including the Federation administrator had their pets stolen.

The Orion pet shop owner was livid that the Nausicaans who sold him the Bryozoans had made him an accessory in selling actual sentient beings. The group tracked down some of the people who had theirs stolen, had some nice conversations and realised that it was regular concerts which had drawn the Bryozoans whose tanks were near enough to it.

Eventually, they managed to track the Bryozoans to underneath a park’s gazebo, where they’d been drawn to music. They used UB40 playing from a cargo vehicle to summon them… I forget why. I think it was some talk of ska and reggae ‘classics’ being when some of the Bryozoans were ‘stolen’.

One thing I’ll mention here which never really got explored was that one of the people with a Bryozoan was ‘celebrity’, Rokk of Izar, a fraud pretending to be the son of Garth of Izar, a famous (now mad) Starfleet captain who saved Axanar one time. This made a reference to both Legion of Super-Heroes and an episode of the Original Series, but went understandably unnoticed.

Episode Three: Whatever Should Be Done Must Be Done

I don’t know what this is, but I want to cover it for Casual Trek.

Starring: Kemal, Ven Jaxa, Xen and Th’raviq

Arthur was back and while they’d sacrificed their last character, there were still a couple left. They went with Commodore Nella Xen and I apologised for what was about to happen…

The session immediately started with Admiral Robert April (the only name-level person in this campaign, which is a nice amount of restraint) calling to have Commodore Xen answer for the crew’s recent actions. He was dubious about letting the Challenger go on the hunt for Urotoxa, the Nausicaan archaeologist who sabotaged the ship. The group held their own quite nicely in a group task.

The crew went to Starbase 323 and had a look for any leads to where Urotoxa was. The starbase was in circular levels with a lot of markets and plantlife making it look nice.

Ven Jaxa was looking through logs and cameras, it failed. Xen assigned more security while Kemal and Th’raviq went undercover. The group were getting a little stuck on motives and who would gain from the sabotage, which was understandable, but less necessary at this point.

Kemal went into The Shattered Star to talk to people, but it was too difficult to overhear. Ven Jaxa scanned the station for gradonic radiation while Xen carried out some forensic accounting.

Unfortunately Th’raviq and Kemal got stuck in a merchant’s who did know about Urotoxa, having helped her get off-station, but who rigged the place with an anti-shoplifter forcefield. Jaxa pulled it down, then they set off.

The group had the warp trail of the ship Urotoxa had flown away on and it went to The Shadow Maw Nebula, a massive nebula bordering Nausicaan, Klingon and Gorn territory. Admiral April’s advice about not sparking a war with any of the groups rang in their heads. Kemal flew the Challenger through the Shadow Maw Nebula, where there was a solar system hidden away, with a single planet, four moons and some weird terrifying cosmic tendrils.

Some of the crew beamed down and managed to talk to Urotoxa and her entourage, defusing the situation and finding out that she’d been looking to use her rift technology to break through into something which could show that Nausicaans were an advanced species once. They would team up, for now.

The final session was a full house for the last half of the episode, with Vinny back as Vorall.

Vorall and Ven Jaxa remained on the moon to help Urotoxa, while Xen, Th’raviq and Kemal were on the Challenger. It was time for a split act.

Vorall and Ven Jaxa had an extended test, trying to beat Urotoxa to finding out the details of the strange glyphs they’d found on the moon, while the Challenger was having to deal with a Nausicaan warship that called them heretics for invading holy space. Kemal flew the Challenger out of the way of their torpedoes and Xen said they were damaged, they needed an hour and would clear off. That actually worked!

The moon team opened up a secret staircase, mostly thanks to Ven Jaxa cheating his way through their mechanisms thanks to his engineering knowledge. The group opened up a statue when Urotoxa used her rift device, hoping it would unlock a perpetual energy source, the characters realised what that meant. It was the Bryozoans. The Chorus returned, incredibly angry at being summoned and pushed into a single entity again.

The Nausicaans got impatient and their reinforcements arrived. Xen managed to defuse them, after the initial horror of seeing so many ships show up, customised to survive the battering of the nebula.

Vorall grabbed and smashed the enhancer Urotoxa made. She admitted to not realising it had caused this distress, but that maybe some good could come from this, as the glyphs on the moon showed that the Klingons, Gorn, Nausicaans and Hur’q were possible all united once.

I had the group describe their end of season epilogues:

Kemal span around in his seat at the helm, just happy to be alive.

Burk Ven Jaxa collected up pieces of the rift machine and started playing with them in his quarters.

Dr Vorall was in her quarters, piecing everything together, and wondering what brought these species together in the past.

Xanthus Th’raviq reported to Akuffo that the weapon couldn’t be retrieved, and Starfleet would need to act and make sure the Nausicaans, Klingons and Gorn didn’t make an alliance.

Commodore Nella Xen held a funeral for Tennan, shooting an empty coffin into space as there wasn’t anything to recover from the disaster.

Reactions

This is the last time Spock runs a game for this lot.

Overall, the group liked the system and the stories. The main takeaway was that the Mission Briefs went over the best both from the players and myself.

Gihan had some concerns about Momentum causing a ‘rich get richer’ kind of thing. He also wanted a bit more of a moral quandary at the end and assumed that the Section 31 plot would have been more of a part of it. After Behind the Glass, Gihan mentioned that he was surprised that the solution was music and investigation, rather than having to fight, which was the perfect encapsulation of why I felt this game worked. While Th’raviq was ‘icy’, Gihan didn’t play him that way, but he made for an entertaining member of the team, shining in Sour Deals and making the best of not fighting in other sessions.

Mark liked the stories, especially Behind the Glass. He mentioned only just noticing the Difficulty 0 moves in the last session, some of which were more conditional than others. He wasn’t sure about how a campaign would go. As the only player who attended every session, Mark did a great job at managing to fit engineering into the problems and solutions in sessions.

Lee and Gihan felt that some Focuses didn’t see enough use, and others like ‘Reverse Engineering’ and ‘Computers’ saw a ton of use. As Kemal, Lee doubled up as security before Th’raviq joined the cast. He did a good job of being in scenes, but knowing when to run back to the ship and fly it around.

Arthur felt that some of the character abilities were a bit too situational and there was a lot of text. I loved that as the game went on, Arthur went from being not as active as captain to figuring out ways of giving commands, helping people with traits and being diplomatic.

I’ve mentioned my opinions on the book and the system in the previous review. This time I’ll get into the stories. Despite the vague names, the trilogy of core missions were good, if a little hand-holdy at times in ways which feel disjointed from the starter set rulebook. I felt like I was a little over-prepared in the system after having read the starter set’s rules and then encountering tutorial-level entries in the first episode. I was pleased that it wasn’t all combat, with only the first scene and Sour Deals having fights in it.

I’d read Mission Briefs for first edition and wasn’t sure how they’d work. I can say now that with a short amount of lead time, you can easily prepare them and have a lot of wiggle room. I generally did a little research on places like Memory Alpha for species I didn’t recognise the names of, took photos to show the group, made lists of names and places and themes for any Federation locations. The adventure itself had some really good moments, such as the relief efforts in the first episode and the whole second episode. The locations were distinctive and while there weren’t a massive amount of NPCs, the ones who were there stood out.

Personally, I think this is a very good introduction to the system and while there are a few things to iron out, none of it’s a deal-breaker.

The Star Trek Adventures Starter Set is available on Modiphius’ website

You can also download the quickstart rules which come with an adventure here.

And as one final plug, if you want to hear me and my friend Miles casually make our way through all of Star Trek one theme at a time, check out the Casual Trek podcast.

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