Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I've witnessed man made
horrors beyond your comprehension.
And today we're going to be looking at Never Going Home.
This is a party focused eldritch horror role play game set in the
trenches of the First World War inspired by World War occult art
of Charlie Ferguson Avery. Yeah.
Arts Labs. A berm hack.
Fan Yeah, we've looked at I think.
I think that's. I think that's the only one
we've we've looked at that's actually like written by Charlie
Ferguson every. But I'm positive we've looked at
games that have Charlie's art before and I have a I mean, I
have like everything Charlie Ferguson every has ever done.
So I should, you know, I should have grabbed all that because so
much, so much of their stuff slapped so hard.
I, I also know that God, let's tangent right away.
At some point they were talking about doing more of Ermac and
I'm still really excited to get more of Ermac.
Yeah, Feral Indie Studios is the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maybe we never will. We'll see it.
I mean, Vast in the Dark is fantastic.
And then we also just got like Ave.
NOx just came out. I still only get the regular
version of that. I got the special edition, which
is gorgeous. But Charlie's art is also on
like the regular version. So it's one of those things
where like sometimes you want the regular version even more
than the special because of the art.
Anyways, yeah, so. So we're looking at Never Going
home. This is a cool one that we've.
It's been on my list forever and I wanted to do it a long time
ago. And then they they launched a
second Kickstarter and I'll get the info about that in a little
bit. And then I actually mailed you
like the original book. So I didn't even have the book
because I just backed everything on the Kickstarter for or
everything on the Kickstarter. For those that can't see the fat
stack I got in my hand right now it's 123456789.
It's 10 books plus some dice and some cards.
So actually let's look at that a little bit.
Let's just hey, we haven't we haven't done we've done like 1
episode in three weeks because we were super sick.
So it's nice to be back and we. Did it Which arrived.
Yeah, and Hunter's obviously feeling 100%, I feel.
Like today, right now. I didn't go to the ER last night
at all. That would be ridiculous.
Be crazy to do an episode after that.
But regardless, here we are. So let's let's talk about Never
Going Home a little bit. So Never Going Home was
crowdfunded on Kickstarter on December 3rd, 2018 with 786
backers for $33,188.00 with stretch goals unlocking the
books once more on To the Breach, Tome of Corrupted
Beasts, and A Book of Whispers. And then in 2023 more campaign
dossiers were released. Bones in the Dust, Blood on the
Snow, and Tears in the Sea. And then it returned to
Kickstarter in 2023 for Never Going Home, The Beginning and
the End. And that was to fund 3 new
books, the campaign dossiers, Bile in the Streets and Spit in
the Dirt, and the Magical sourcebook From Beyond the Veil.
It was It funded on June 10th, 2023 with 781 backers for
$65,811.00. Yeah, between the two
Kickstarters in 2018 and 2020, they made about 100 grand.
Wow. That's, I think it was
literally, if I did the math, it's like $99,998 or something.
It was like the closest to 100 grand you could get.
But, but it's cool. So prior to that though, I, as I
said, this was inspired by World War occult art by Charlie
Ferguson Avery. That's actually a Kickstarter
that happened that Charlie did, I believe in 2017.
We're going to kick over to the Down Cam today.
Let me turn the light on. And that's actually what this
book is right here. So for those in podcast land, I
went with the Down Cam and I'm showing this World War occult
with this concept art by Charlie Ferguson Avery with text by
Bryan Ferguson Avery. Together they do feral Indies
studios. So this is just a a dope art
book all the way through where there's basically a picture on
the right side and then a little bit of text on the left side.
So first page it says, no, let's get that one.
That's just a so here's one that's got this soldier looking
wounded, dead, but has a bit of a crucified look to him.
And it says to keep them out of enemy hands.
We were not allowed Diaries. Our sketchbooks were forbidden.
When my Sergeant finds me pin to page, I promise him I'll burn
them all. He knows I'm low on matches.
So the entire book structure like that where there's a piece
of art on the on the right page of the spread and some really
cool vibey writing on the left. Combination of black and white
and color all the way through and as I said, this was the
original inspiration for never going home the game and then
obviously they used Charlie's art throughout and a lot of the
pieces from World of War occult this book are in in the original
never going home book so. Brook Man, I wish, I wish I had
this. This Yeah, I so I found this on
eBay. It actually wasn't too terribly
offensive, but even if it was, I would have got it anyway
because, you know, I love Charlie's stuff.
And and honestly, the art fucking slaps so hard.
Like the vibes are Immaculate. I can see why it inspired
someone to make a game, but but yeah, so on top of all the books
here, I'll flip through them so you can see the covers because
honestly, the covers of every single one go so hard.
So this is the original Never Going Home book.
It's got a number of these, kind of like esoteric World War One
soldiers on the front, some information on the back.
Blood on the Snow is a later one, but it is one of the
campaign dossiers. This is the one that said in
1916. Toma Corrupted Beast was part of
the original campaign. Book of Whispers was a magic
book that was part of the original campaign.
I love this one with a red cover.
It's absolutely stunning. Never going Home.
This is From Beyond the Veil. This is part of the second
Kickstarter. Then there's Bile in the
Streets, which was, I believe, part of the second Kickstarter,
but it was a prequel. This is Campaign Dossier said
1914. And then we got Bones in the
Dust, another fantastic, I mean, they're all fantastic covers,
but this one is set in 1915. Then, as I said, Blood on the
Snow is set in 1916. Tears in the Sea is set in 1917
and then it is bookended there on the back with the spit in the
dirt, which is set in 1918. And then part of the original
campaign to was Never Going Home once more onto the Breach.
And that is a book of 21 adventures for never going Home.
Yeah. And this one is it looks like a
like a folder, like there's like papers and stuff on the back.
It's like brown and it's it's kind of like a Manila folder
ish, kind of look to it. The rest all have different arts
and things like that. So I'm going to pull this one up
hard because that's what I'm going to talk about.
So yeah, so that is that is all of the stuff.
Never going home. In addition, they also did put
out a set of dice. These are really dope.
They have these like, skulls with a World War 2 helmet, but
it's also this like, weird, kind of like Eldred snakey design.
And then other for the sixes and the pips otherwise are little
flies. So that's pretty cool.
Set of dice. Yeah.
And then there's a set of cards that I've not opened yet because
I haven't played with them yet, so I want to keep them
protected. But there is a set of cards that
comes with it. It's a full deck of standard
playing cards with 52 playing cards and two jokers.
And you'll understand why there's a deaf cards once we are
actually talking about the game, but that is all of the stuff the
deck. Of cards.
Oh, crazy, right? But that is all of the stuff
that you can give with Never Going home.
It's a fat stack of stuff. There's a lot of stuff, it's a
lot of content to interact with, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I think I'll hide this
for now. We're going to be coming back to
the down camera for reasons that's that will become evident
once we get to but going into so the actual review starts now.
Future Ryan for the time stamps, never going home again.
The cover slapped so hard. Charlie's art is incredible.
It's amazing art, yeah. Yeah, and and the logo is really
cool too. Like I know it's it's it's just
like a a serif font, but it's very weather beaten logo
definitely helps with the vibes, but but the art is incredible
color cover with these three. As I said, these three World War
One soldiers and but the very esoteric.
The one is like cuts all over this arm.
A lot of them have these like kind of like fetishes or or
decorations on their armors. And World War 1 was such a
different vibe. First of all, it's not Hitler,
so that obviously you know it it you know, but the the gas mask
aesthetic that is used pretty. There's also just like something
inherently like fucked up about like the whole like extended
trench warfare that was like people got sick, they got gouts,
they were like dying left and right from the conditions.
They like really, they fought for just miles, like throughout
the entire war, really just like a couple miles back and forth
because how entrenched they were.
Yeah, it was, it was incredibly dark.
Like it makes a lot of sense for like a like eldritch horror war
setting, you know? Yeah, I mean, I mean, there
there's a reason that Trench Crusade also uses World War One
as its setting exactly like you said, just the not that there
wasn't trench warfare in World War 2, but it was such a focus
in in World War One that yeah, it was definitely very, very,
very, very different. Yeah.
So never going home. The plus one there's a we are
getting to a credits page. The plus one system, which we'll
talk about soon. Written by Brandon K Eighton,
Matthew Orr. Writing in the book is Irvin
Jackson, Matthew Orr, Sarah Orr, Aiden.
Additional writing from Taylor White.
Let me turn this light off. Adventures by Corey Capps,
Crystal Maser and Stephen Wu. Art from Charlie Ferguson Avery
and then the editor is Carol Darnell and the layout is WM
Knox gun. And this is from Wet Ink Games.
Wet Ink Games is the people that do this.
So Feral indie is Charlie, but Wet Ink games does they they
they have a number of other games.
I think they're the ones that do like there's like a doggos game.
I think they're putting out a cat game too, but they have a
bunch of they have a bunch of stuff.
I actually look like 3 weeks ago when we were for supposed to do
this and I've completely forgotten at this point so.
I have all my notes are hyperlinked to all the
Kickstarters, but I forgot to write down the other stuff that
wet ink games stuff. They've done a bunch of stuff, a
bunch of interesting things. So, so never go.
So when so all right, so. Now, all right, so.
All right, so before we get too deep in the book, there is a
quote right at the beginning. Death is what we see when awake.
When we are asleep, it is dreams.
Heraclitus complete fragments, fragment 21.
So we do our best here on the show.
A couple of things. Let's just do let's do some
prefaces. Let's hedge, let's hedge some
shit a little bit, right? We are very critical here on the
show. We have high standards for the
things that we go over. We we can get super pedantic
about things. We can be pretty picky about
things because I mean, that's, that's critique, right?
Is, is a desire to, to elevate things, right?
Is to like, hey, this might be great, but it could be better
with these like small tweaks. So these are the things we we
point out, we go over and things like that, right?
We never try to be mean on the show, but we will be blunt.
We will sometimes be frustrated. Often times that's because
something could be great, but there is something that nags a
little bit. So we never try to be mean on
the show, is what we're saying I do.
But we're going to be pretty critical of this book for a
number of different reasons. The one of the things that I
think both of us had pretty negative opinion on that we'll
just knock out right away is the layout.
Yeah, it's pretty egregious across the board in almost every
way. Yeah, it's it's not great.
It's not great. So let's we'll we'll point out
how it's not great as we go through.
But here's my first beef. We're going to look at this
these two pages here. Let's go to fit visible.
Now let's go to zoom to page level.
Can I, can I page display this into a two page view that'll
give me both pages? No.
OK, so let's look at this two page view here, right?
So what we're looking at is basically it's 2 almost
completely empty pages at the full spread with just like a one
line of for that quote that I said on the left side.
But what the background is, is a page texture.
And I think this is one of those things where it's like, I have
no problem with using a page texture for a book, right?
Like, for example, if you look at like D&D, it's got a, a
parchment tea kind of background, right?
Yeah, fine. Right.
But what what this book does is it's not a page texture, it's a
fake page. Right.
It's just one though. It's two, yeah, but so and this
is this. There's a page missing here.
This is supposed to be together, so it'd be two spreads.
But the problem is what this one does is a couple of things that
that I, that I, I find pretty, pretty, just not great that I
would avoid going forward. So specifically for this page
right here, let's go to zoom to page level again on the left
side of it, as I said, this is a fake page.
It's not a texture. So there's actually like, it
actually looks as if there's a stack of pages on the left side
and then on the right side there's a spine down the middle
like about a centimeter. And there's a spine of pages on
the page as if it's a fake page that's like spread open.
That's not, it doesn't look good.
It looks in my opinion, like I don't know what words to
describe it except for tacky like to to every page looks as
if it is a fake page as opposed to just the texture, which would
have been fine. I don't like the the background
texture either. It's a very darkish brown with
like a stain on it and a bunch of these like black dots all
over it. And if you look to the next
page, you'll see the other part of the spine of like what would
be like. Spine part is definitely more
bothersome than it's just the the printed on texture of the
page the. Text I'm saying is if it was
just the texture if they zoomed it in a little bit it wouldn't
be though so bad but like the fake spine down the.
Middle and the fake. Spine and the fake and the and
the pages on the left side. It actually looks like fake
pages. But not only that, the one page,
which I think would be the right page on the layout spread has a
bunch of black dots all over that are like part of the
texture that is so annoying when reading the book because it's
actually like these giant black dots in text.
And we get to a one page where there's like black dots for like
the layout for like bullet points, but that are surrounded
by black dots for the texture. And it's a very dark brown.
So the black against it gives it this like obviously you can read
it, but it's not, it's a dark brown like with a black text on
it. So it's not great for that
reason. So just the, if you're going to
go with a page texture, just do a page texture.
Don't do fake page edges and stuff like that.
It just looks, I don't know, amateurish.
It looks extremely tacky and it really takes away from the the
look. And the other problem too is
like you said, it's just the 2 pages.
It's one spread of these textures for like 120 pages.
One because it's one and then flipped on the other side.
It's the exact same page flipped so.
No, I don't think so. No it's not because there would
be the black dots on the other one.
I think it's it's A1 full spread with like the spine down the
middle. So it's one full spread of
pages. It doesn't look so similar.
I guess it's not as many. Yeah, so.
It looks so similar because the stain is like almost a meter.
Yeah, so it's just the same 2 spreads through the entire
thing, which also doesn't help with like it looking.
I don't know. It makes it and even the one
page even has like a tear on the bottom.
Like it looks like the page is torn.
So every other page you get a fake page tear, but it's the
same page there 60 times. Like just use a texture like
don't use a fake page. It really detracts from the
book. But the thing about this though
is if you actually look in the book when, since we're talking
about the layout, we'll go right in, we'll we'll look at a page
on here real quick. When you actually look in the
book, it's kind of less of an issue because it's cropped
pretty bad, pretty poorly because the margins in the
actual book are like 1/2 a centimeter.
They're literally. Crazy small there's like there
is no gutter to anything in the in here.
There is 0 gutter. There's zero margin, so they
literally cropped it so far that you almost lose the fake pages,
except it's still a little bit on the one.
And then if you look at like the fake spine in the middle, it's
actually cropped to the point where it's almost gone.
So it's almost a little bit better to read the physical
because it looks almost kind of like it's supposed to be there a
little bit, except that when you actually look at like the
digital and you see what it's supposed to be, you just realize
that like it was cropped super poorly for the book and the
margins are like egregiously small.
So reading the physical is awful because you get like again like
1/2 a centimeter on the side of margin, top side, bottom and no
gutter. That's probably right there.
It's such a perfect, it's such a perfect like representation of
what going through this is like. Yeah, it's rough.
So I read it on PDF because the margins were just like breaking
my brain because you can't even really hold the page without
like having to move your thumb because there's not enough room
unless you're using like your nail to hold the pages open and
not be like over top of so much of the, the stuff.
So that's pretty. That's one of my biggest beefs
on the physical is that they they cropped the shit out of
this and really destroyed like the margins.
But we're going to get into a lot more reasons on why the rest
of the layout is pretty poor in our opinion.
But that's right off the bat is just the the use of not just a
not a page texture, but actual fake pages with fake paged spine
and tears and and stuff in it. It it does not in in my opinion,
and I assume yours as well, does not look good.
Then. You could probably use like a
fake page texture in your own game and it look OK.
This is just not done well. Yeah, well, that's what I'm
saying is like use a texture, but don't don't use a fake page
as in like there's a a pretend spine and a pretend edges to the
page and pretend tears on the page.
Just use a parchment background. It's totally fine.
You just don't need all of the you don't need this right here.
This like fake spine fold and and tears and stuff.
So continuing on, we get to the table of contents, which is not
hyperlinked and there are no bookmarks at all for the entire
thing either. So usability and navigation
pretty. It's only like 120 pages.
Right, but also we're going to get later.
There's the table of contents is kind of like weird what they
decide to do and also like we're going to get later.
There's no real differentiation. A lot of times, you know I
sometimes you don't even realize that you suddenly hit like the
next. Like section or like, yeah,
there's, there's not like clear delineation by use of like
Heathers and stuff like there are Heathers and sometimes there
aren't. And sometimes I think the fonts
a little bit different on them and so they don't strike you as
headers or this looks like the same as the text.
That's a. They basically use this same
font for everything to the entire book and are just use
weird variations of bold. Also, the font is not a great
choice. This kind of like very, it
bothers me when you get closer, when we talk like the headers
and stuff, because everything is bold.
Basically everything is bold and it's a very wide, thick bold
serif. Like when we're looking at the
table of contents page, like the space, the letter spacing is
pretty wide on all of it. It's just, it's just, I don't
know. It feels it's I don't know.
It doesn't it's not it doesn't look nice to me.
Like if you're going to get the serif font, it's just not great.
What what's interesting though, and as we get farther into this,
remind me to pull up one of the other books, one of the later
ones that has the same kind of vibes, but just a much better
layout. And we'll and we can point out
the reasons why it's that. So let's cruise through this.
There's a whole page in the beginning here that is kind of
like the first one is like to the memory of my great
grandfather to there's an one that says to those who came
home, these are dedications. That's what I meant from a bunch
of the different people in the book, Matt Orr, Brent Aiden,
Sarah Aiden, Irving Jackson and Charlie Freaks and Avery each
have a dedication at the beginning of this for very for
basically the soldiers or family members in regards to World War
One. The media media like get into a
page called the buy in. So this is something we're not
going to go over. It basically says the beginning
that this is a party focused role-playing game set in the
horror haunted trenches during the First World War.
If this sounds good to you, skip this page and get ready to
deploy. If you aren't sure, read on.
I'm OK. Like if you're going to do a
what is a role-playing game page, at least preface it by
saying that like, if you're in, don't fucking read this page.
I'm fine with that. So there's a number of sections
here. It says a role-playing game and
basically says what is a role-playing game?
Party focus. What does that mean?
I actually do like this part it says uses the plus one system to
focus play on growth, on what an individual character can do as
part of a larger story that follows a group of soldiers
called a unit. So basically what this is saying
is like the individual characters are important, but
the unit is most more important play.
It's not true play, but at the end of the day the point is for
the unit to survive, not necessarily the individual
characters. And the story is the story of
the unit, not the individual characters, which I think is a
really neat way to do a military game.
It makes a lot of sense too. Yeah, Horror.
Haunted. It talks about this is the veil
between worlds that is opened by the slaughter from the war and
the munchers. Whispers of beings holy, alien
to humanity that can now be heard.
Some people have listened to the whispers enough to gain arcane
powers, and they'll struggle to maintain control as their minds
and bodies begin to change. Dope again.
And then it says the First World War.
The setting is real Earth. My characters are all humans.
It basically says that the game is set between the years when
the veil was torn in 1916 and when the war ended in 1918.
And there's some information of stuff like that.
And it says this is your last chance to turn back.
So before we get deeper into the book, we talked about the layout
a little bit. We will say the vibes of the
game. Pretty strong.
Immaculate like insane like World War One Eldratore, so much
death that it tore open the veil and now like these things
whispered to you and and break your mind and stuff.
Awesome. Yeah.
And there's a, there's a big section in the middle that's all
like the pseudo history, like it actually is World War One
history and then where it diverges into like this.
And I really actually, I totally enjoyed reading that part.
I, I had a blast reading through that I thought was really
interesting and I well, it's like there were actual like
historical World War One things happen.
Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that and we're not going to read
through too much of it. But like you said, I love, I
love how it's like so much real plugged in.
And it's like, except for like this part, it's, it's cool.
It's a great way to set things in your mind where you're like
it. There's a kernel of truth in it,
so it makes it feel more real. It's easy to latch onto when
they do that or when you do that historical game.
Absolutely. There are a lot of like
diegetic, like artifact kind of things in the book too.
So there's a lot of like, well, the page we're looking at now is
a letter. One thing also that is not, in
my opinion, great. Like if you're going to have
fake pages, this is how you do it.
You don't make the whole page that the words are on fake.
It's on the page. It's on the page.
But the problem is like it's a very again, the the actual page
background is a is a very dark. It's not, it's not, I don't even
know how to describe this guy. It's a very, it's a tannish
color, so all these diegetic pieces over it are also brown.
And it just, I don't know, it could have been maybe put like a
little shadow or something, I don't know.
Yeah, well, you just think it's a little muddy or?
Yeah, it is it like it just the the colors are too.
I don't know. Again, when we look at we're
going to go over a bunch of layout stuff, maybe win way to
remind me when we get to like maybe like the lore stuff to
kick over to the other one. As we've seen enough of the
layout that we can talk about. Like the one we're going to look
at blood in the snow to compare the layouts and and talk a
little bit more once we've gone through a lot of the digac stuff
is cool. The writing is OK in it.
It's a lot of like letters written home or or things like
that. Like the beginning is basically
like what this whole book is, and it's basically to His Royal
Highness King George the 5th. Enclosed is a report I'm
required to submit regarding my involvement in and knowledge of
the events that occurred on the Somme battlefield beginning July
1st, 1916. And that's basically been the
Veil tour. So there's a whole letter here
that's basically saying like I'm going to tell you a bunch of
stuff. It's crazy.
Here you go. And then we get to a piece of
art. This is another just very weird.
This is what I'm going to try not to be super frustrated, but
I knew this in the show before, knows that I'm going to get
frustrated. I don't understand the point.
They put a piece of art here, which is a dope piece of art,
and then they put these fake like metal kind of ornate frame
pieces around the corners. Yeah.
And then start the playing the game section on the bottom, like
quarter of this page. And I don't understand.
And they do that a lot where they for no reason break
sections across multiple sections.
Multiple pages for a piece of art that they could have either
not done or just like there. Why wasn't this just a whole
page? Why wasn't this just like a
whole page? I couldn't tell you.
And then on the opposite side, then you have playing the game.
So you have a spread that's like odd on one side, words on the
other. Right.
But then we're going to get into what?
Like this thought earlier so. And they do this a lot and we're
going to put this out a lot, but like here's the thing.
This is the playing the game section and it's the same.
It says playing the game in the middle of the page underneath
the art in a font that is only like 2 more than the skill rolls
font. That's bolded in the exact same
font as the skill rolls fault, which is also bolded.
Then you get into the skill roll, which is obviously then
going to be split across 2 pages because you're starting on the
quarter at the bottom because you make.
This weird decision to start without enough room to put it
all. So weird.
And it's it's. So.
Weird. And as far as like layout goes,
like I'm not fantastic. Like I've read a bunch of layout
stuff. I've we obviously go through
layout a ton of stuff like that. There's just some things that
are kind of like rules to like doing good book layout and this
the this, every one of those is completely disregarded in this
book and it's extremely frustrating.
But so we're going to just start playing the game and we're going
to get into skill role. So I'm going to read some of
this stuff because the next thing that's going to we're
going to be kind of be critical of this is the rules language.
I actually really like this system.
I think the system is incredibly interesting.
We're going to get into it. The core of the system is
basically it's a dice pool system.
And then there's the plus one system.
It's a plus and then the word 1 and then system and it allows
you to manipulate the dice that you roll are the things you can
do before or after. And then there are also cards
incorporated in it, which are used for a lot of really cool
things. So the the amalgamation of all
those things together, super interesting, right?
But again, the rules, language and the way some of this is
explained is not wonderful. Yeah, it could have been tripped
out a lot in a lot of places, or rewarded.
I think rewording would would help.
So. So we're going to go through
skill role. This is like the kind of core of
the game. So when a character wants to do
something, they may be asked to make a skill role against a
target number at TN. Great.
Some target numbers are set by missions.
The narrator sets all other target numbers.
Players were all D6 dice called skill dice, equal to their
training in the skill dice showing 5 or 6 are successes.
So we know it's a dice pool system and 5:00 and 6:00 is a
success. The number?
Of. We love a good dice pool.
We. I don't know why you've done so
many dice pools I. Love a good dice a dice pool
system. The number of successes in the
role must meet or exceed the target number to accomplish the
action. So the target number set.
Let's say it's three. You're going to roll a bunch of
dice, and you have to get at least three fives or sixes.
Easy peasy. On each roll the player may use
as many plus one. It's a plus, and then the the
word 1 again. Manipulations equal to their
current score of the governing attribute of the skill being
rolled. OK, so if you have a four and a
skill, that gives you 4 possible manipulations right?
Easy peasy. Attributes do not decrease
through use, so you have 4 each time.
You don't lose them by spending them, you just have them.
Failure simply means what the character was attempting doesn't
happen. I'm not a fan.
Obviously, we like you know, nothing ever happens, but it
says you do. And then here is my first beef
and they do this a bunch. It says all skill rolls take the
form quotations, roll bracket, skill name, bracket, colon, TN
number quotations. So that is roll skill name,
target number and then the number that you need to hit,
right. That's a that's fine.
I that's complete. That makes complete sense.
But then it says which means quotations.
Roll dice equal to skill training, Manipulate dice equal
to attribute rank meet at least the required number of
successes. That is not what that means at
all. That is a very weird way to
write that, because that is not what that means at all.
What that means is roll a skill and beat a target number of
whatever it is, right? That is what that means.
It does not mean roll dice equal to skill training, manipulate
dice equal to attribute rank meet at least required number of
successes. They literally could have just
put that kind of at the beginning or or say like break
those into two separate sentences and say it's like in
summation, what a skill role is is this thing.
It's a very weird way to be like here is here is a formula and
that means this completely separate thing that is the
definition of all skill roles. Not very mathematical of them,
yes. No, it's weird.
Also, what is an attribute rank? Oh, that's.
Weird. It is weird.
We're Oh no, that was kind of rhetorical because I'm going to
bring it up a bunch. They mentioned that attribute
rank again. They do in very weird spots.
So let's move. We get you skill manipulation,
which is the plus one system. The attributes are linked to
specific skills which dictate ones they can manipulate.
Easy peasy, right? A character's score, comma or
parentheses rank in a skills governing attribute dictates how
many times a skill can be manipulated.
A role can be manipulated in the following ways.
So now we know in the skill manipulation section what rank
is, but again, this is a very weird way to write a rules
language because what it should say is a character's rank.
Parentheses is the attribute score because the rank rank is
your keyword. Score is not your keyword.
So why would you put the keyword in parentheses as opposed to
just saying the character's rank in a skill parentheses, you know
what you have in the attribute. Explain that in parentheses,
right would be what? That is, right?
So it's weird to put the keyword in there.
But when we get to character duration, let's try to find rank
again, OK? Yeah.
So basically the plus one system basically says that whatever you
have in an attribute, whatever your rank is in your attribute,
Say your rank is 3. You get 3 manipulations each
time you roll a skill, OK? And there are before roll and
after roll options. Before A roll, you can
temporarily gain an untrained skill dicer bought separately in
parentheses. OK, add a dice to the roll.
Example, roll 4 dice on a skill with three training.
So which is a weird way to say just add one more dice.
Yeah, that that example is not very useful.
There are later examples that are more useful, but I remember
reading that one and being like I don't know what that means,
but immediately after there are better examples so.
Also, saying temporarily gain an untrained skill is a very way to
is a very, very weird, confusing way of saying that you can roll
on a skill that you don't have training in.
Yeah. Because temporarily gaining and
untrained, you're not like it's a, it's a weird way to kind of
think it's a backwards way. Maybe it's just not the way my
brain works. But to be like you, you
temporarily gain a skill versus saying that you can on this
roll. You can roll on skill you don't
have training in. Yeah, there there's some way to
reword the law stuff that's on this page and other ones.
Yeah. So then after a roll, add a pip
to a die, which is saying base, it says example, change A4 to
A5, Cool. And then re roll any number of
dice and then keep the results. And it is once per skill roll
you can do that. And then it immediately goes
into 3 examples. And why immediately?
I mean there's no, there's not even a, there's not even a tab,
there's not a separation between.
There's nothing that says that it is that they are even
examples. So I got like half a line in
before I was like, wait a minute, like what are we talking
about? I.
Was like. So this is an example.
OK, OK. Yeah, and then there's three of
them. But again, there's no break,
there's no change in font, there's no italicis, there's no,
for example, there's no nothing. There's and there's lyric again,
not even a space. It is literally one line.
In the very next line it just immediately starts, which is
weird because there's plenty of room when you get to the bottom
that they could have put one line between just so there's
some separation. One of the examples, just so we
know we're talking about Simpson has two training in ranged and
three ranks of guts. That's a OK.
Anyway, to hit an injured Trench Stalker requires 4 successes.
His player buys two extra dice with two points of guts because
he has three ranks and guts, right?
So we're talking we're we call them score, we call them ranks,
and then we call them points. Multiple different keywords for
all the same thing. So 2 points and guts could have
been 2 ranks and guts and rolls 543 and a one.
OK, he keeps the five and rolls the remaining 3 dice again.
So those are his three manipulations.
He he bought two extra dice and they did a re roll.
OK rolled A6A5 and A2, a total of only three successes.
The shot misses great. I think that's super.
Fucking interesting. I do too.
I think the manipulations are cool.
I think they give you options in the dice pool system and I think
they're the cool part of this for sure.
Yeah, yeah, the plus one system is really great.
The skill, all of this is super, in my opinion, super
interesting. It's a dice pool system.
You have attributes, your ranks and attributes give you a pool
to use, and that pool determines how many manipulations per skill
role you have. Really great the local language
for it, I really could. Use.
Yeah, I could use some punch it up.
But like, I really do like the concept of this system.
What was I going to say? I totally blanked what I was
going to say, but it was going to be a nice thing.
What was I going to say? Ryan, this is your fault, right?
I don't know. It's not.
It was up till 5:00 AM or anything.
Yeah. Actually, I should lose my look
at my notes. I also I but I don't like
obviously us like, you know, I don't like the idea that like
something just doesn't happen, right.
And that is the thing that is like clearly bringing the rules.
It literally says you just miss. That's it.
Yeah, I don't like that. I do remember, I was going to
say more or less the numbers are very small in this game for like
amounts of dice and dice pool, but you're to hit sometimes will
be like 4, which is like genuinely really incredibly hard
to do in a dice pool system that's hitting 5 or 6.
So it is really cool that manipulations give you so much
wiggle room, especially with the re rolls, because that's like
really statistically significant to making this work a lot better
and still feel like I feel like a very heavy and horrifying game
where you could fail. Yeah, and failure.
Nothing never happens. I do agree.
Yeah, I I think that the plus one system really is extremely
fun and interesting. Like you said, the math seems to
math really, really well and the manipulations are designed
because like, for example, even like just changing the pip,
right, because oh, you rolled like 2 fours.
OK, then I'll change one of the fours for five like you just
said. Math wise, that's great.
Yeah, re roll is great. Adding more dice is great.
And then being able to roll in things that you don't have
skills in because you can temporarily gain in the skill
you you can roll on untrained skills.
All of those are exactly ways like you just said that to, to
alter the statistics. But what's interesting about it
is all the choice mechanics involved in it.
We're like, fuck, I only have three points in guts, man.
Do I, yeah, I don't know the Dyson before.
Do I do another one after? So the skill role, every skill
role you get becomes this like kind of like gamble of, you
know, all of these different options for for trying to like
eat the best out. And I it's it's so interesting.
It's so incredibly interesting. And that's one reason we know of
this game. We're going to be pretty
critical of this game and we don't do games we don't like.
Like usually we definitely don't anymore.
We sometimes accidentally do because we get too deep in the
book to not do it and realize we don't like it.
I love this game. I think it's really great.
We're going to be pretty critical of the products, like
the writing, the layout and things like that.
But the game itself is, so I do want to say, is so good in my
opinion and is really, really interesting the deeper we get
into it. But the whole book could use a
2E with a whole new revamp on a lot of it.
Anyway, moving on, challenges is the next thing.
And basically what a challenge is is it's basically like a
group skill test, right? It's when challenges too big to
overcome, overcome alone and require the characters to work
together. It requires multiple roles and
things like that. Fun, interesting.
If you're going to have kind of a quasi troop style, then
challenges are great. We're not going to go over that.
Too much sick piece art here. But also weird.
Yeah, but also in weird layout because like it's chopped off on
the sides and tops. Why don't you just blow it out
to the edges of the pages like you know what I mean?
Like why have it chopped on your word margins?
It's a piece of art. Just blow it out for the entire
blow it out for the entire thing.
You know what I mean? Like it's just again, like none
of the rules for like good layout were were followed in
here. And if we go to so, for example,
I mean, let's let's look at it. This is the same piece of art in
the book, in the actual like World War cult book.
See how they just like have it filling the entire page all the
way to the page edges. I don't understand why you
wouldn't just do the exact same thing on this page as opposed to
just like cropping it down to fit your word margins.
It's just not a good design choice in my opinion.
Moving on from there, we have more diegetic things here.
We have a letter to Mary Warbeck from Alfred.
It's great. It basically is like a things
are going, we're on the front, you know, kind of thing and it's
great. We're not going to go over to
Bunch. The font choice in it is
interesting. And Alfred's correspondence
actually continues through this book.
Like there are several letters to them or back and forth to and
from them. And I do really like the this
use of these like diegetic in world pieces in the game.
I think it's super vibe and like you said and you can see Alfred
like shit getting darker for Alfred as they go through the
correspondence. Yeah, he's having a bad time.
Yeah, it's a cool way to do it. But also, again, they do this
thing where they use this like letter page and then go to the
cards page on like the bottom quarter instead of just like
centering that on a page and starting cards on the next page.
It's so weird. It's so really.
Truly bizarre actually that they do and not even one.
It's like it really like this whole section.
It would look so much better, like immediately if you're just
like, move this down and all the section starts on the page.
The thing that that drives me nuts about it is we we get we
get 2 cards right, which is in, in, in a it's it's letter, it's
it's sentence capitalized. So it's CARDS, but only the C is
capitalized, but it's a header, right?
And then but immediately underneath that is like a sub
header in the exact same font, but like 2 sizes smaller.
So there's like no real different.
So there, there's no. Use of what Peters one size
smaller though. It's but it's so bad, Like I, I,
I'm trying not to say like that it's bad, but like the the there
is no good structure to the way that like headings and
subheadings and things are used to this entire book because
randomly we're going to get to stuff where like they'll just
start randomly underlining stuff too as a way to differentiate
things, which is like super weird.
And like there's again, it's the exact same font the entire they
don't even capitalize the whole word cards.
So it feels like a little bit different.
It's just such and also cards is on the left, but like the
playing the game was like centered and like it's just.
There was no. Consistency to any structure
that they use on this whatsoever.
But the thing that drives me nuts specifically is there's
this giant letter home, right? And then we get to the cards,
the journey, healing and character growth, right?
A standard deck of 52 playing cards with two jerkers is used
to represent the emotional resources and memories of the
characters. 4 for six or more players. 2 decks with two
jerkers each are shuffled together and then it goes to the
players may use any decks they have on hand.
The four traditional suits are called for in the game so make
them recognizable and then it talks about spades, clubs,
hearts, diamonds and jokers. But because the letter is so
long, spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds is on one page and then
jokers which is in the which is in the same bullet pointed list
is then broken onto the next page because of how long the
letter is instead of just moving it up or starting it all on the
next page. They do that constantly where
they will put a piece of art or like these fake the the diegetic
letter pieces in, but that forces the layout into a bad
design decision to separate rules text across multiple pages
when you could easily just not do that.
Decision. Yeah, like you could just you
don't like it's such a weird decision to separate rules text
made the explanation of a thing. You know, it's not like, oh,
they explained a thing and then the separation is goes to the
next thing that they're explaining.
They're literally in the the middle of the thing that they're
talking about. Yeah, they break it apart for no
reason because they could either move the art, have the art as a
full page, or just, yeah, move things around.
But we're also going to get to the start of this page, too, on
the Joker section, where it's like a bullet.
The word Joker's is bullet pointed and then there's two
bullet points underneath it. But then also you get to those
like weird black dots. I said about like the on the
page. So in this little section here
there's literally like 6 black dots and like half of them are
bullet points and half of them are page sector.
But it all looks the same and it's just really weird.
So the cards wise, spades is knowledge, learning, growing,
overcoming suffering. Clubs is things, overcoming
obstacles, action, adventure. Hearts is relationships, which
are your emotion or connection. Diamonds is yourself, your
ambition or hopes. And then you have the jokers.
And jokers are considered wild and functions as any non joker
card. And then after a joker's played
or revealed for any reason, reshuffle the deck including the
joker. Super interesting.
When we talk about the cards a little bit more.
It's a really great way to do that, especially when you drop
the joker. But then underneath that you
have another bullet pointed thing about the joker, except
the bullet point is like way off to the side for no reason.
The Black Joker also. That was page texture.
No that dot. Where it says the black Joker.
Yeah, that is a bullet point. Oh my God, I thought that was
paychecks. You're genuinely, I'm not just
saying that to go in on this. I actually did think I was like,
oh, there's not another bullet, which would make sense.
But it's the only bullet point in that entire line.
Basically through the entire thing, it's so far to the left
of the other ones. And the indentation's not in
line for the actual words with the other words as well, but
it's not. It's its own indentation.
It's entirely its own indentation, which is double
tabbed in compared to the single tab that starts the paragraph
right on the line below it. It's just not good.
The Black Joker also triggers a draw for possible corruption,
which we'll get to OK. Each card in the player's hand
represents a character's memories and constitutes what
makes them human. Let me just go through this.
The aces are high jokers are wild.
Let's just get into this a little bit Aces are high maximum
cards is 7. If you use one, it means you're
forgetting something about yourself.
So as it said earlier, it says that the they represent
emotional resources and memories.
So using one means you're losing part of yourself, which is super
viby for this game. Yeah, well, you're.
Never going home, so yeah. Cards are earned for surviving
missions, completing special tasks, defeating antagonists, or
when the narrator links thinks the player has done something
awesome. So card G's for a lot of stuff,
and there's a whole list here for what the cards are used for.
There is. There's the Journey initiative
plus one whispers healing, character growth, but character
growth. There's a piece of art to the
right of this. So there's like there's a text
wrap around all of the art of a soldier standing there.
So that character growth at the bottom is broken across 2 pages.
So there's 4 lines to start the next page.
As opposed to just not putting the piece of art here and
keeping all of the explanation on one page because then
underneath that is a box. And I think it's one of the only
boxes like this. This is in the entire thing and
it gives you more explanation for Joker stuff.
Even though Jokers are on the start of the previous page are
the very top of the page, right? So, so the very top of one page
has Joker stuff and then the very top of the next page has
more Joker stuff instead of just putting it underneath the Joker
stuff above that which Joker's, which traditionally Joker said
basically it says there's, there's a black Joker and A and
a colored Joker in almost all card decks.
And if there is, just pick one, if there, if there isn't, right?
Hey, I just want you know, I scrolled really fast.
That's the only box in this that's not around art.
Like it's just a stand alone thing.
So it's. So again, like the layout choice
and then there's are so weird. So the rundown of what what each
of these are the journey, right? Players must contribute at least
one card each journey made by the unit.
If they do not have any cards, they put one in from the deck
towards the journey without looking at it.
Capital J. What's a journey?
I do. I I was going to ask you this.
I was like, OK. You know how long it is, so we
found out what a journey is. Where is it?
It's about 60 pages from now. What's it under?
Just so I know. It's in the GM section.
The players never, never is it explained the structure of play
for players and the journey, which is basically like the
whole game until like page 60 in the GM section is.
So anyway, initiative player who reveals the highest card.
I love the initiative system in this too.
The player who reveals, Yeah, the player who reveals the
highest cards. Basically in your hands when
combat starts, everyone has to reveal a card.
The player who reveals the highest card chooses who acts
first in each combat. Cards revealed for this purpose
are not discarded. Players without any cards may
discard an initiative card from the deck which is not added to
their hands. So basically they draw from the
deck and they just show their initiative.
But basically if you are the highest 1 you get to choose who
acts, which is cool. I think it's cool.
I also think it's cool that they have this really fun initiative
system. And then also for the GMs ease
of use, the monsters just have numbers, which I'm like, I
appreciate that as a GM because I know I don't want to be drawn
a bunch of cards while I'm working on running this game,
so. Yeah, they they do a good job of
of the endings and stuff. So plus one a card may be spent
for a plus one effect. Whispers.
Many whispers require cards. Healing in combat cards can be
spent on a one-on-one basis to negate damage and out of combat
card. Magic, by the way, so I don't
know if we said that out loud. Oh, no, yeah.
Well, yeah, yeah. Whispers magic.
Well, there's a whole section on whispers in combat that can be
spent on one-on-one basis to negate damage out of combat, a
card can be burned at any time to heal anyone.
Attribute one point. This implies taking a break,
mentally preparing yourself, or bandaging your wounds because
we'll get into why you need to hear yourself with that.
And then character growth at the end of a mission, characters can
spin sets of cards to increase their attributes and skills.
So you get cards for a bunch of different reasons, you spin them
for a bunch of different reasons, but you need them in
order to basically level up. And it says in general the
number of cards needed is one more than the number of the new
rank in the skill or attribute. For example, buying a fourth pip
in bronze. Why?
Why is it called pip instead of rank?
I thought it was rank, you know? We've already in Braun requires
discarding 5 cards and then we get to character and stuff
later. So again, it's such a we are
anyway, let's we're going to cruise through some of this a
little bit faster. So corruption, certain instances
will cause a player to draw for corruption or take a chance.
So there's whisper effects, adversary abilities, mission
incidences using the black Joker.
As we said before, the black Joker is anyone that if you do
use it, you have to reshuffle the deck and draw for corruption
and then for character advancements.
For whispers, ranks 3-4 and five basically says when a corruption
chance occurs, but the player draws a card from the deck and
looks at it without revealing the card to the other players.
If it is a black card, the character gains 1 corruption
point. There's an extra space in there.
If it is a red card, no corruption occurs.
After the player sees the card, they pass it to the narrator who
also looks at it, and the narrator keeps a secret list of
who has gained corruption. So the only people that know if
they've been corrupted or not are the player who draws for it
and the narrator Slash the GM. I do really love that.
So everybody's around you don't know you're slowly going insane
with dark magic. Yeah, the narrator keeps it a
secret. Corruption is not clear to the
end of missions that there may be chances of shed corruption in
specific situations. If any character has five
corruption points at the end of a mission, they do not return to
the base of the unit they are. They are just one of the capital
O others now. So love that.
If at any time someone has three corruption, the narrator can
choose to add from the deck to the journey one card per player
with three corruption if it we don't know what the journey is
yet, but you get to explain it. If at any time someone has four
corruption, the narrator can choose to add up to two cards to
the journey per player with four corruption.
And this represents the chaotic outside influence.
The player and narrative should both keep track of their
corruption, and the player may not wish to write down the
character's corruption because there's supposed to be a secret.
I mean, right on your sheet, no one's going to look.
The narrator keeps the law of it.
We've already explained this a bunch of times.
As a character gains more corruption, this illustrates
their slow loss of humanity. How much they role play their
corruption is up to the players. As a character takes more
corruption, they may not make the most optimal choices.
Basically you are the only you and the narrator know that you
have corruption RP the more corrupt you get.
And once you hit three and four, it can actually mechanically
affect the way that the game is played.
And at 5, when the mission's done, you're crazy and you just
are one of the one of the you. Might turn into a wear hair and
get haunted by your friends, you know, Yeah.
So cool, love it. So let's talk a little bit more
about. So then we have another
something from Alfred's journal. Then we get to combat.
Notice the size difference between combat and then
initiative order underneath it, how vastly different those
things are. One looks like a header and one
doesn't. Again, no structured whatever to
font sizes, bolding anything, whatever.
So we're going to cruise through combat real quick.
So there's an initiative order. So basically it's your highest
ranking card. You do not discard it.
You, the highest ranking one goes 1st and then they pick who
goes next. I love that that like whoever
goes gets a pick in space does it.
Popcorn style initiative where you pick your next person you
know. Yeah, after detecting the
character who acts, determines, yeah, yeah, Death in Space does
it. And I was like, let's see how
that goes. Until we played it.
And I thought it was the coolest thing ever, because if you just
pick all of the good guys to go first, you're going to have an
entire turn where all the bad guys are just fucking you up.
So you have really can strategically decide, like how
you want to do that defense. So basically how the way the
defense works is the targeted attribute, the rank of the
targeted attribute is the target number for any attack.
OK, so attacks target Braun by default, but some abilities can
target other attributes. So basically whatever the Braun
is, is the target number that you're trying to get past.
And that's what your your target number is too.
The way armor works, the target number is Braun or armor,
whichever is higher. And attacks at Target, other
attributes are not affected by armor.
So if if you're, you know if it's attacking.
What are your attributes by the way?
Braun guts. And there's another one, and
there's another one to do that attribute as well.
Yeah, we'll get. We'll get to it.
Super well explained so far. Damage is by weapon or whisper.
And then there's a whole page of sample combat, which it's, I
mean, it's like an entire page and.
And and more. It is like a page and a half and
I was like very interesting. I started reading it and I was
like cool and I. It makes sense.
It's a great example of play. I love it.
You should read it again. Once I when I read this, I was
like, this system fucks. Like it's really fun and
interesting. Like it's really interesting.
Then there's a whole weapon section which for some random
reason is like the only time it suddenly changes font to what is
in my opinion a way better font. It's like a typewriter E style
font, but for no reason whatsoever.
It just turns into this kind of like kind of a table with a
completely different font. That is the only time this font
is used in the entire book. It's Yep.
And uses like these box kind of highlights for tabletop things
that no other thing is used. So weapon damage inabilities
basically goes through all the weapons, goes through all the
melee weapons. So fists, knives, clubs, sword,
bayonets, staff, firearms, including pistols, rifles and
machine guns, explosives, grenades.
And then it gives you basically we'll pick 1.
So we'll say that a sword or bayonet has weapon, so sort of
in it has damaged. So this does one damage and then
it's got an ability. So plus one damage ( 2 and then
wreck ( 3. What does that mean?
We'll get to it in a second. So what is wreck?
It says permanently reduce armor of the target by 1.
So how do weapons work? So for weapons successes in
excess of the number required to hit, usually the targets Braun
are spent after rolling for various weapon effects.
The number of successes needed for each effect is listed in
parentheses below. I love this.
First of all, it feels good because it's the same kind of
way that the plus one manipulation works of the
consistency feels fantastic. But using like there it's always
interesting to to when you do a dice pool game, how games decide
what to do with extra successes. Like I only needed two, but I
got 5. Like there's you should get
something for that. This game uses that with your
weapons and it's really cool. So for example, the sword or
bayonet does one damage, but if you get 2 successes in excess,
you get to do plus one more damage.
And if you get 3 successes in excess, you get to do the wreck
damage, which is reducing the target's armor by 1.
So almost every weapon, yeah. And there's a bunch of different
weapon abilities. There's aim, which is re rolling
your damage die, assault, which is ignoring armor, a critical
which is you roll D6 for damage instead of just the one or two
you normally get flurry, fragmentation, spray, stun and
then wreck. So a lot of really in the way
the weapon system, neat, simple, consistent, really love it a
lot. General equipment basically says
it's abstracted your soldiers. You get soldier shit on you love
that. I like that because this is
definitely more of like a game about telling a story and less
so like a dungeon. The dungeoneering slog through
whatever you know exactly. All right, we're going to create
some of this other stuff. There's a a big section on
vehicles and guess what? It works exactly like how you
think vehicles work. They drive, they shoot and
that's it. So it goes over trucks, tanks
and airplanes. So you get a little breakdown of
truck, you get initiative value, armor, the Braun for the truck,
and then it's got skills and abilities for the truck, the
tank or the OR the airplane. Cool, love that.
Interesting whispers. OK so basically the way whispers
work is the powerful beings from beyond the veil whisper through
the cracks in reality. Those who choose to listen to
these whispers learn how to manipulate reality and you can
RP it however you want. That's basically how whispers
work is that the veil was torn asunder and something is
whispering to you and you can use those whispers.
It's really interesting, super vibey the the the the writing
that is used to all this. The whisper skill can be used to
know general information about magic, like recognition of
maroon, identifying the effects of a particular whisperer, or
potentially knowing the weaknesses or habits of
supernatural creatures. If the whisper skill is bought
temporarily, it only applies to the knowledge.
Like there's a whole breakdown of all the things you can do
with the whisperers and that's I'm not going to go through all
that. So this, it does the steps of
casting a whisper. You choose a whisper and any
augments you spend, any spell requirements, discard a car,
take damage, anything like that. You roll for successes, you make
additional sacrifices if it if your path needs it, and if
successful, you apply the effects.
Easy peasy, right? So there's a bunch of different
whisper paths. There are Blood rights, Rotten
tricks, so there's 2 bronze, 2 smarts, and two guts pass, so
there's 6 total paths. So the two bronze paths are
Blood Rights and Rotten tricks, the two smarts paths are Old
Ways and Elemental rituals, and the two guts packs are Healing
Words and Chaos songs. Let's go through one of them so
we can talk about a whole whisper path, because it's kind
of like a big core of the game. Yeah, let's do Blood Rights is a
good basic one and rotten Tricks is a good like atmospheric war,
World War One. So you pick one.
Pick one of those. Let's do let's do blood rights
like you said, it's Braun. It's pretty straightforward.
So the blood rights path the caster willing to use her own
blood as a source. We we love blood magic.
Mad. Magic.
The caster are willing to use her own blood as a source of
power. Becomes much harder to stop
until they bleed themselves dry. For each blood right they use,
they must take one damage. 2 bronze.
You're actually damaging your attribute.
This counts as one automatic success.
Many rights do not require a skill role.
Because the blood mage targets themselves, they may take
additional bra damage themselves, or allies may take
the damage to create additional successes.
One point of damage per success. This additional damage may be
taken before or after rolling the dice.
So you get a bunch of blood right effects.
Here you got Strength, Gabs speed interject.
Blood blade and blood double. So let's talk about let's just
we'll pick two of these. Blood Blade, A magical blood
streams from the casters open wounds and forms a solid object
to cut into enemies. The attack targets Braun and
deals 1 damage plus one damage for one extra success.
You can do flurry for an extra success.
And then there's the target may be made from range for with an
extra success. So that's good.
And don't forget just by casting it you damage yourself and get
one success right off the bat. And then blood double when the
caster would take damage instead, their body explodes
into a pool of blood and the caster appears unhurt nearby.
It lasts until used or until the end of combat and yet plus one
additional double. So basically you do you do like
a what? What do they fucking do in
Naruto where it suddenly comes to the log?
They escape when they they replace themselves.
The log substitution. There you go.
Yeah, it's you basically doing a blood substitution, which is
cool. So and you.
Really like that power, by the way, just like the vibeiness of
the you get killed and actually just falls into the pool of
blood and you step out from somewhere else, you know?
Yeah, it's cool. The the vibes and the mechanics
throughout this entire section, over the entire whisper section
is really, really fun and interesting.
Like the the rotten tricks ones are cool.
And again, I I'd like that they give you 2 paths for every
attribute. So if you really want to play a
smarts person, you can you can lean into that with your
whispers, which is really, really great.
We're not going to go over too much of that because we're 17
pages into 120 page book, but surprisingly, we're actually
like halfway done. Oh, we're pretty.
Yeah, there's not a ton after this.
I mean there's lore and then the GM section, the best theory, but
yeah, the lore is most of it. Yeah, we swapped it over to the
entire character creation section, which is pretty, pretty
simple. Yeah, here's here's another.
No, no, this isn't the one. So more diegetic document here
as we go through the bottom, just like a bunch of different
pages in Alfred's journal. Then we get to character
creation, which is again, it says recruitment at the top,
randomly underlined for no reason, not capitalized the same
size as everything else. It's just so again, there's so
anyway, OK, so. So.
Yeah, this is the way the characterization works.
You divide 10 points amongst your 3 attributes, Braun,
Smarts, and Guts. So Braun is.
It's all exactly what you think it is.
So each stat requires a minimum of one and can be enhanced later
through gameplay. The average human ability is 3.
I love that they say this. The average human ability is 3
and the peak human ability is 6. Attributes greater than 6
indicate superhuman and possibly supernatural abilities.
I really like that it gives you that context of you have to have
at least one and everything, and if you have less than three
you're less than average in that so it's a great way to do it.
Attributes govern 3 things, health, defense, and skill
manipulation. So health is your physical,
mental, and emotional health. When you take damage, you reduce
the targeted attribute. This gives me care.
It's caring a little bit, right? Where like after you get through
your hip well into the odds, into the into the odds, where
after you get through your hip protection, you start hitting
attributes, just go straight to attributes, which sucks because
your attributes are what determines your manipulations.
So if you're losing attributes, you're losing your
manipulations. Yeah, in a strong manner.
So when you take damage, reduce the targeted attribute.
If any attribute is reduced to 0, your character dies.
That's it. They just fucking die.
It's defense is this is the target number others need to hit
to damage the attribute and then skill manipulation.
It's basically this is basically a copy paste of what was written
before. It's the plus one system.
The attributes are linked to specific skills a dictate blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah. And then it gives you a before
the roll and after the roll section.
And then the lower an attribute gets, the easier it is to hit
and the less manipulation you have at your disposable.
Right? So we just went through
character creation. Did it talk about rank at all?
No, just single fucking time. Yeah, there's only one other
time that rank comes up in this entire thing, and it's it's
coming up. But it's just so weird that they
rank pip, like score. There's no consistency to the
keyword used for a very important part of the game,
which is the number you give to your attributes.
Again, that's just that's, that's not good.
Gender, sexuality, and personal history, they exist.
Again, here's a page where they actually just put the whole the
art as the page there. We go, we did it, we got it one
time and then they start the next page in the new section.
That can all be not cut halfway through weirdly.
But what's crazy is see how big the word training is and it's
underlined. It's not the same size as the
word for recruitment. Look at how small the
recruitment is. Yeah, it's underlined, but the
font size is the same as the rest of the font size and
everything else. It's like it's going back up
combat corruption. None of these cards, none of the
other ones, are underlined. Nope.
But again, recruitment is the header for this section and it
is let's say it's size 10 and everything else in the page is
10. I totally get that.
But then when you get to the next thing training, it's like
size 16. It's so much bigger, like so
the, the complete and total lack of consistency in all of the
headings and subheadings and bolding and underline and
everything. It's just, it's like every
single page. They just forgot any concept of
like consistency for what they've done before.
It's crazy training. So like 3 skills from the
following list and these are your train skills.
So the list is athletics, melee which is hand in hand combat,
stealth. Oh and they're by attribute 2.
So athletics, melee, and stealth are all your Braun.
Communication, knowledge and mechanics.
Your smarts and investigation. Ranged and transport are your
guts. And then whispers are variable.
It's your magic and then you assign 3 skill dice among your
train skills. So each point of training
represents either a level of formal school.
Why is this written like this by the way coming up?
Oh, here's another. Here's another box.
Here is another box. Each point of training
represents either a level of formal schooling in the subject
or years of experience. These points can be distributed
in any way. 300210111 A trained skill with no skilled ice is
still considered a trained skill.
If you assign a skilled eye to the Whisper skill, choose 1
whisper path and choose one spell from that path.
When you assign additional skilled ice to the Whisper
skill, you can either add training to a current path or
training a new path. You will have one spell for each
point. I don't know man.
Can we touch on how fucking hilarious it is?
Like you have three points to spend between three things.
You can divide them however you want.
Here's written down all the possibilities for how to divide
these between. It's like, yeah fucker, there's
three skills and three different things to put them in like.
That's weird. Deployment.
Draw 3 cards representing your starting mental and emotional
resources. So this is saying so deployment
is you start the game with three cards in your hand and we talked
about the way that you can that cards is when we talked about
cards you start with three. So this is how your character
works. A quick rundown of character
creation and everything we just talked about.
So you have 3 skills or you have 3 attributes, Bronze, smarts and
guts. You start by distributing 10
points across all of those, right?
And those attributes determine your health, your defense, and
the number of times you can manipulate things, right?
And then you pick three skills to have training in and then you
have 3 skill dice. And then you give a dice to any
combination of those three skills and then.
You draw. Those combinations look like
they have. They have and then you draw 3
cards. That is how to do a character
cushion. It's pretty simple and
straightforward. I like it.
If you happen to put one of your dice in the trained skill of
whisper, you pick a whisper path and you have your characters.
That's how it works. And then character growth is the
only other time we talk about rank at all.
The way character growth is is you receive decoration cards at
the end of your mission that you can use to build up your
character. That is the the cards, the
cards, the way the cards work and the way this works is you
can do skills, attributes or modifiers.
So if you choose to do skills, a new skill, any combination of
cards and the cost is one plus the number of extra skills.
First new skill cost 2 cards, the second cost 3, etcetera,
etcetera. You can have a new skill die.
So any combination of cards, we talked about four, it has to be
like one more than what you need.
The cost is one plus the number of the new training pip filling
in pip 4 on communication skill cost 5 cards yeah attributes and
increase in attribute any combination of red cards.
The number of cards spent is one plus the number of the new
attribute rank. So if you want to take a rank
from three to four, you have to spend 4 car like you know 4
cards a distance space. Collecting this many red cards
should be difficult. So only red cards let you
increase attribute, which is interesting and then modifiers.
If the cards are all the same, suit cost is reduced by 1.
You must have enough to buy the advancement, but keep one card
of your choice. And then if the cards are all
face cards and or aces, increase the effect by one.
For example, one more training pip new skills start with one
pip attribute increased is by one rank everything.
So I I like that the the you can actually try to build out your
deck. Yeah, for.
Like your suits and stuff like. That going on for the deck
building portion, yeah, yeah, the interaction with cards is
pretty cool. So first I was like, do I like
this because it's just like a thing?
But it I, I think I do, you know, I think it adds
meaningfully to the game. I doesn't feel like it's tacked
on. There's yeah, there's also like
an obviously like a interesting meta to playing this game when
you kind of get it down with the cards and like where to use them
best. Yeah, it's cool.
So that is the rules of the game and character creation, right?
So let's talk about this real quick.
We've talked about this over and over again and harped it on the
show numerous, numerous times. So here's here's my thought on
how this is poorly structured. We read the rules for the game
before we ever knew anything about character creation
whatsoever. So we talked about, I think the
attributes are mentioned like once, but then we talked about
them a bunch. I, I, I wish that they would
have maybe given that like skill role and maybe even like the,
the, the, the first page, right? Basically skill role, the plus
one manipulations and then stuffed character growth in
there are the the entire character creation section and
then put all the rules after. Because knowing that I start
with three cards and then telling me how the cards work
would make the context be a lot better than saying, Hey, this is
how cards work. And you're like, oh fucking K,
like, all right. And then like and then like 15
pages later, like, OK, I get to start with three cards.
You know what I mean? Like we've talked about as a
bunch, like the best way in our opinions to do layout for rules
and character creation is to give a brief overview of the
system character creation rules and then all the rules of the
system after so that people know what they're using as they're
learning it. So that you know you have 3
cards when you read the the card section, you have the context of
like what's going on with that? So I would have rearranged like
that completely. And if you're gonna do if you're
if, if you're gonna do it where it is all of rules or all of
character creation, I would say I would put character creation
1st and then all the rules after.
But I think a brief overview, character creation and then all
the bulk rules is ideal. There's just a really clear,
like, lack of hard structuring of how information's introduced.
Like it's not introduced thoughtfully.
It just is like on like, Oh yeah, we're still talk.
We're talking about this. It's on the page, you know, but
it's not like all aspects of whatever is being explained.
It's also not in the order that would make it even easier to
provide you context to anything else going on.
Yeah, yeah. And not only that, so as we went
through like the the table of contents is such a weird choice
of things to do, right. So like when we go back to
notice when, when we got to like the remember when we hit the
weapons page, which is like it's in the middle of a page.
It's not even like starting the top of a page.
So weapons is like a thing in the table of contents, but it's
not even it's own like header in its own page or anything, you
know what I mean? Like it's a weird choice
throughout a lot of these because I think, I think like
the veil and nomains, some of these other ones, they're just
like like not a bolded section, not their own page, not
anything. They just randomly decide to
pick them. But anyway, so we're going to
run through a bunch of the stuff, do a couple of the talk
about the running the game sections a little bit, and then
we're done. So the World at War, we talked
about this, the progress events of 1914 to July 1916.
This is like real history. We talked lots before and I love
this part sings all of the lore through this is fantastic.
The writing is really fantastic. Basically it is World War One,
as World War One really happened from 1914 to then.
I think it's the Battle of Psalm in July 1916 when the veil
tears. So there's like quotes here from
stuff. There's actually a really great
breakdown of like First World War and how it started and what
was going on and everything like that.
It's really fucking dope. It's super, super vibey.
It sets the scene incredibly well.
A lot of great pieces of art in two really fucking cool and then
it talks about the world broke in the veil torn July 1916, the
battle of Psalm 30,000 people were killed.
The others were already looking. It tore the veil.
Shit got fucked and that's where the game started happening.
And then after that, oh, here's here's one of my other like such
a random thing that drives me insane.
This is a diegetic document. This is a page from Alfred's
journal. It's got, it's a fake page on
the side and everything. Why is it split across 2 pages?
There's just like an extra little piece of the they cut,
they cut the journal page so they can put it on to the next
page. Just make it a little bit
shorter. It's like 3 lines, just short.
You're writing up a little bit or because it starts like below
other stuff about like, it's just so weird that it's just
like not. Same issue with like the art art
pieces from earlier on. It's the exact same issue.
Yeah, but it's not even that you're like splitting rules text
now. You're literally splitting
diegetic in world document like pictures.
It would be almost, it would be almost like putting a piece of
art in here, but then like chopping it off and putting like
the bottom of a piece of art on the next page.
I would argue that's exactly what it is, so.
Basically it it's just, it's, it's not great.
There's a section about the veil.
The veil is nothing new. It's been here forever.
It is. It is the space between all
world and like the fucks, you know what I mean?
And that becomes torn asunder. And then no man's land.
There's all section here about that.
It's a huge section about trench warfare, which is again really
interesting. A lot of, like, cool
information. I mean, trench warfare was
fucking terrible. But, you know, in the context
that we're talking about, yeah, really great information about
that stuff here. And then it goes through the
breakdown of the Allied Powers or the Intente Alliance.
It talks about the Third French Republic, the British Empire,
the Russian Empire, Italy and the United States of America.
There's a little breakdown for each one of those leading up to
the war. So real historical shit leading
up to it. And then what happens in 1960?
And then each of them also has themes, officer attitudes and
soldier attitudes. So you really get a breakdown
for like every nation at war here and the way that they're
going to act and interact, right?
So, for example, the French one, it gives a whole breakdown of
that. It talked about what happens
after the veil is torn. And the themes are personal
honor, the small comforts, tragic circumstances, the
officer attitudes are this generation of officers has been
preparing all their careers to fight Germany and redeem the
national honor lost in the last war.
They are determined not to lose again and it will do almost
anything to inspire their soldiers to hold their lines and
fight to the last. And then the soldier attitude
says French soldiers are relaxed and somewhat fatalistic. 3 years
of military service, it's compulsory.
So the army contains every sort of French person.
Most hope simply to survive the tour, etcetera, etcetera.
So every nation gets those breakdowns, which I love.
It's basically like adventure seeds and and and or not it's
it's lower seeds and stuff for everything.
So that is the third French Republic, as we said, the
British Empire, the Russian Empire, Italy and then the
United States. We have to see what what the
United States themes and and and.
Yeah, Which was very funny because like, they weren't there
when the veil was torn, so they seemed to be a lot less bothered
overall. But they did they. the United
States policy is literally like, if you see something weird,
trust that you did see it and go ahead and shoot.
Like that's their policy. I'm like very American, you
know? The themes are and agendas,
promise of victory and the quote UN quote adventure of going to
Europe, officer attitude for the most part the world.
The whole war in in Europe is a mess.
The Brits and French badly botched, which now requires US
to help clean up. Typical, yeah.
Typical Europeans, you know, make clean godly war like us,
you United States citizens. And it's just, yeah.
And then there is the Central Powers, which is called the
Quadruple Alliance. It's all the same stuff for the
German Empire, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire in Bulgaria.
Again, a shit load of lore for all of that stuff, I think.
What's the page count for the lower section?
Let's just go back to the table of contents real quick.
It's from page 29 all the way to 57.
So you get, what is that almost 30 pages of lore.
OK, so we'll do some quick rundown for game stuff in the GM
section and then we'll be done here.
So there's an X card, you know what it is, use it if you need
it. The narrator is the GM signal
over noise. So this is basically GM
principles to start at the beginning of this year.
Basically it says signal over noise as one of the players at
the table, the narrator can join.
We're not. I'm not going to read this story
over combat involvement over happiness, creativity over
notes, horror over hope. These are principles for running
the game right. This is a weird GM section too,
because like, this is what you get these like principles for
running the game. And then it would be like, this
is the mission structure. But then you talk about like the
journey, which is literally like the core of the game, which is
not in the player section like at all.
Yeah, which is so. Weird because I didn't.
I did not read all of the GM section.
Not really everything else, but. Yeah, well, I mean in that like
in context, you're like, OK, well I got the rules of the
game, yeah. You just don't get the journey
because you're like, well, I'm not going to read the GM section
on the GM, right. Like put the important stuff
where the important stuff matters.
So basically missions are small adventures lasting about an
hour. Mission folio is what you get
for each mission, right? And there's four parts to a
mission folio. There's a mission briefing,
which is background info and mission objective.
There's the journey, which we're going to get to, which is like
the core of the fucking game. There are the incidents, which
is like the encounters that you'll have, which is like the
main section of the folio is like the shit you actually do.
And then there's the decoration, what they call it, which is like
the cards you get at the end of of the mission.
That's that's everything that comes in your mission folio.
And it just say like they only last about like an hour.
They're pretty short. Little adventures are like
individual excursions. Basically.
They're missions, right? So the journey?
What the fuck is the journey? My notes say just read most of
this. So this is basically the
structure of the game on page 60.
Yep. Cool.
Good, good, good, good, good. All right.
So what do you expect it towards the end?
The Journey is an event that happens at the first part of
each mission and focuses on role-playing or character
moments and help sets a tone for the events to follow.
Each journey list its requirements, IE 3 hearts, one
card of each suit, and some multiple and some more.
Difficult missions also include things to avoid, as in no sixes,
no more spades, whatever. The Journey requirement is told
to players before they contribute cars.
So basically as part of the mission, you're going to get a
briefing and then you're going to do the journey, OK, each
player. And that is when you like put
cards into into a thing, right? And you can't continue on with
the mission until you've done the journey.
So each player must contribute one card from the hand to the
journey, but they may contribute more if they wish.
If a player has no cards, add one card to the journey from the
deck. Without looking at it by group
consensus, players may elect to take more time in the journey to
gather what they need and add add cards in the deck, but never
more cards than the total number of players.
Sometimes a narrator may also add cards to the journey for
corrupt characters. Players hands are always secret
to open discussion of who is contributing what card is
discouraged. General discussion of how
confident the players are that they can succeed at the journey
can be allowed, especially if it is played in character.
Once all the cards have been contributed to the journey, the
narrator shuffles them and deals them out face down to the
players. If there are more cards than
there are players, the narrator may deal themselves a journey
card as well. These cards should not be added
to the player's hands. Anyone may start at a one at a
time players reveal their journey card and either answer
the question posed on the journey.
What? Real quick, there is a sentence.
Anyone may start and. Oh, it's split across multiple
pages. It's.
Split across multiple pages with an art piece in between it.
Yeah, yeah, easily could have just put that on the next page
one at a time. Players reveal.
So basically right now everyone is face down putting up cards
in, right? And but there's requirements to
the journey. So it might be like every, all
of there needs to be one of every suit in the middle.
But you can't tell each other what you're putting in, right?
You put them down, face in, you stick it in, they get shuffled
and dealt back out. So you put cards in, but you
might not get your card back one of the time.
Players reveal the card and either answer the question posed
by the journey in the voice of the character or narrate a scene
of what the character does during the journey.
When the narrator reveals a card, they tell which character
the thoughts they describe occur to, or who's involved in the
scene and narrate. All answers and narrations
should be inspired by the themes of the revealed cards Suit, with
higher numbers being more intense.
If appropriate. The scenes can involve role play
with another character. The table.
Each answer or scene should last for about a minute, depending on
the mission. Successfully meeting the
requirement grants a bonus to the unit for the mission, or
failure will impose a penalty. Reveal this benefit or penalty
after all the journey cards have been revealed.
All cards contributed to the journey are put in the discard
pile. If a joker is played, shuffle a
deck as normal. So basically the journey is the
journey. It's you on the way to the
mission. And it is a it's it is a
narrative act that everyone goes through.
It's basically, I don't want to call it downtime but it's a non
combat. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a
second mode of play. It's a narrative mode of play
using the cards. Yeah, exactly.
So you basically you have this, this, you, every person is going
to narrate a scene as part of the journey before you actually
get to the mission where you're actually going to like fight and
stuff like that. I think it's interesting.
I like it. Yeah, it's great.
It it really brings RP into a tabletop role-playing game.
It's a fun way to to to do stuff.
And honestly, if that's just not your style of play, you could
just not do this. Like, yeah, but yeah, so the
difficulty can float. Some missions do not list a
target number for skill roles, though many do.
Basically, the the part of this is basically saying that like,
fudge, fudge your shit. And I couldn't disagree more.
Yeah, there's 222 things that the score of this game that I'm
not a big fan of 1 is that like when something doesn't happen,
that's it. It just doesn't like, oh, you
just missed. That's it, I hate it, but this
entire section is basically telling you to fudge as AGM to
fudge it, which makes no sense to me because part of the core
of the game they talked about is the unit is important, not the
individual characters of an individual character dies.
Oh well, it doesn't take long to make another one.
It's the unit that's important. So actually reading some of
this, it basically says even with tightly scripted mission
every possibility cannot be covered.
Sometimes the numbers on the page end up not working for your
group. They might be sneaking past
every guard. Many times you will be adjusting
or inventing target numbers on the fly.
Roughly half of skill rules should fail.
The difficulty floats to the level of the party.
Lower or raise target numbers as you see fit.
You can also put more antagonists in the fight or have
allies show up to help. Another option is make any
Scarola challenge. So it's basically saying like if
you throw too much at the players, just lower the target
number so you don't kill them all.
Or if it's too easy, just like just raise it and throw more
people in and make it harder. It's just like that's just such
a 5 E mindset in my opinion of just like don't kill them too
hard. Don't just like set it up and if
they die, they die like it's it's a, it's a I couldn't
disagree more with that style of play.
And I understand if people like that style of play, but that
feels very much like as someone who played 5 E for a long time
and who did this, I can tell you right now you're not playing the
game at that point. You are telling a story.
Yeah. You're telling your your, you
know, because. Because what the players are
doing doesn't matter, you've already decided you're not going
to kill them, so you're just wasting 3 hours of combat time,
you know what I mean? Like the players actions have no
actual consequences whatsoever. So anyway, mobs, they exist.
There are mobs. Antagonist was whispers.
They work the same as the PCs do.
There is a a section here on corruption.
My notes say the rules for corruption here are different
than the previous rules on page 8.
I'll take your word for it because I'm not going back.
Yeah, you use the players characters corruption against
them in several ways. Firstly, they contribute cards
to the journey. You had one additional card for
each character with three corruption. 2 for four
additional cards may give you. Because corruption is secret,
there are no requirements. When a character reaches 5
corruption, they're on their last mission.
I don't remember. I mean, I have it in big red
letters. I don't know why I did that, but
I'm not going to get too deep on it.
Character death 0 in any attribute and you're dead.
Like that's it. Like I like that.
There's no death check, there's no saves, there's no nothing.
You're just done. There's a, a weird section here
of like resources and like other media, which could have just
been like the back of the book or the front of the book or
anything. But it talked about like a bunch
of books, film and TV websites that have like virtual tours of
the Italian front, a list of Canada's First World War
battles, like Wikipedia articles and stuff like that.
All right, antagonists, what's up?
Just cool stuff to have, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, OK.
The way that antagonists work, how to read these entries.
So basically antagonists are going to have a name, a type, an
initiative value armor, they're bronze smarts and gusts.
So they, they, they are going to have these attributes work just
like the player characters ones. And there's weapons, skills,
abilities, weaknesses and rewards.
So realistically, antagonists work exactly the way PCs work
because PCs are pretty straightforward and easy.
And then there are oh, oh, we do get more of the typewriter font
in the in the the little stat blocks for bad guys.
So let's we're just going to look at 111 person commando,
right? A soldier with more fighting
training than an average grunt trained to near the peak of
human ability. They're no longer surprised by
many ordinary deaths, blah blah blah blah blah.
So the type is solo, the initiative, IU 7, the armor's 4,
Braun 5, Smarts 3, Guts 4. Their weapons are knife and
machine gun. Their skills and abilities are
three dice and melee, 3 Dyson stealth and three Dyson ranged,
and the reward is you get to draw a card that is a step lock
for an antagonist. Easy peasy, right?
Easy. Cool art throughout and then
just the whole big chunk of of basically a bestiary.
Fuck off I can't get this. There it goes.
I don't know if that I don't think the pop up show, but it
like it creates like a mini little pop thing.
Yeah, and then and then you get adventures.
But you I didn't even realize I was reading adventures for a
while because it's there's nothing that says adventure.
It just suddenly says the belly, the beast crystal mazer, like
there's nothing that says adventures like there's no
differentiation, there's no break.
So. You have come to expect.
You know, so I think you get, I think there's like 3:00-ish
adventures in the back. There's the, the, the one I just
said, there's the lamps are going out and then, and then
there is the Swordquest. So for example, I just want to
give an example of of the, the, the things you need in emission.
So the emission objective is here, the journey.
So we talked about the journey. It says you travel through
untamed woods, stealing through dappled shadows and heavy foils
to world conflict as much as possible.
The sounds of artillery and firearms echo around you, but
there are still occasional moments of eerie silence, even
in the middle of a war zone. So that is what you're that is
the scene that's being set. For all of your scenes, the
requirement is one face card. So it's someone.
So at some point in the journey, you just have to reveal a face
card. Cool.
And then there is the narrative. In this moment of silence, what
do you observe about your traveling companions?
One of you is the promised king. Who do you think is most worthy
among you? Let the hierarchy and suits of
the cards and form your answers. On a success, the player with
the highest face card is the presumptive chosen one,
etcetera, etcetera. Failure.
There's no readily apparent leader among the players, and
we're not going to. We don't read adventures.
I just wanted to give it a little bit of an example of the
journey. That's it.
And then it gives you the rest of the stuff.
So if you want to read more of those, look at the fucking book
or buy the fucking book. There's a character sheet in the
back which is really super fucking straightforward.
It really is. It's.
And I, I like it. I think it looks, it looks
diegetic because of the, the typewriter or font.
But basically you get like your name, you get the recruitment,
which is like all the pips and stuff and, and your scores for
bronze smarts and guts section for equipment, a section for
your service record exception for your personal history.
There's five dots for corruption that you'll just mark off.
And on the side there's training and then all of the those
listed, and then there's options for three different paths and
the rituals that you get for it, and then a giant X card that
could have just been laying out. And that's the book.
We did it. I want to go over, I just want
to look real quick at blood on the snow.
Yeah. This is a campaign dossier, but
I wanted to talk about how much better this one is laid out than
the other one for like a bunch of reasons.
I will say they still use the same fake page, which is weird,
but it's a different background, which is weird.
So they must have got it from the same there.
It's got the same spine in it, but it doesn't have nearly to
the same degree. The fake pages on the left, it's
a little bit cropped down, but the background is a more like a
what is this? Like a light, bluish, whitish.
OK, am I wrong? Oh, are you not looking at it?
I'm looking at it right now on yours.
Yeah, yeah. So it's it's much lighter than
the brown. Yes, so it.
Looks better. There's like a blood splatter at
the bottom of the pages, which is fine.
Again, it's more texture than than fake or whatever.
No, it's still the same pages. Took all those same dots and
stuff. They just, they just, they must
have just like color corrected it to a light kind of bluish
white. You're right, they must have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's so much better.
It's so much better. But then even if we just go to
a, a, a page, let just look at the look at the font on this,
which this looks almost just like a Times New Roman on the
this is page three. First of all, the header at the
top is blue and underlined and a different font.
Or if it's not, it's like a bigger, it's got to be a
different font, but it's like a big bold font.
And then if we go back to like the never going home font, like
the page font again, this is like a very, I, I think, I don't
know if it's just like that. The, the IT is also a just a, a
serif font. But the actual like, I don't
know, I don't know why it's just better.
Maybe it's just the margins are so much bigger.
Yeah, it, I mean the margins are a ton bigger.
It's still very wall of. Text the font is smaller.
I think it's the same font but it it just it's smaller.
It is still wall of texty. But.
Bigger margins, better headers, different color headers.
Yeah, yeah. When they do do the diegetic
like pages in it, they keep it to one page.
There's a shadow on them and it's a such a different color
than the background that it looks much better.
It's just it's not that much different.
You can tell that it's a similar thing, but there's a much better
consistency for headers, subheaders, bolding, tabbing,
bulleting, everything like that. It still looks roughly the same
style, but it's just better. So clearly, like they know.
They can and this one was laid out by Charlie Ferguson Avery.
It's just a better laid out book than the original 1.
So all right, going to the review scores.
So for those that don't know what it is we do here on the
show, we do read review the book and then we give scores for
various metrics based on the things we looked at.
So we give a total of of up to 10 points for five different
metrics. We do give numbers to our
terrible opinions. Those metrics are art and
layout, which is the art of the book and the layout of the book
visually, Just visually, there's the usability, which is actually
like bookmarks, hyperlinks, if sections are in the right
section. Basically, how easy is the book
usable for learning the game and playing and running the game?
The rule set, which is if it's an adapted rule set, how well is
adapted? If it's a unique rule set, do we
like it? Originality is just originality
and any aspect of it could be lore, could be rules, could be
anything. Value is bang for your buck.
It is not just the cost of the book, the cost of the PDF, but
also like in the amount of content that there is for you,
for you to play, if there's apps, if there's websites, if
there's a bunch of other stuff, like basically, again, how much
bang do you get for your buck? So my issue I think with art and
layout here is going to be that obviously the art fox super
hard. Yeah, but the layout.
Is one of the worst laid out books I've ever read.
Yeah. One of the worst we've looked at
on the show, yeah. Definitely.
So I almost want to just like just do layout for this and just
like delete art off of this one because it's like obviously
Charlie's art slaps and I would hate to to, to, to give a low
score for using somebody else's art in the book in bad ways.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, the art is
obviously like incredibly high score.
But yeah, let's talk about layout for this one, because.
So, so, so and the way the way that we kind of do it is
basically like if we have nothing good or bad to say, it's
a 5, right? That is bang average because the
Max is 10. I think there's only been,
there's only been a couple that I've got 10 in our layout. 5 is
if we have nothing good or bad to say.
My God do I have a lot of bad to say I.
Have a lot of bad to say about this.
This is sub 5 for me. It's unquestionably it's just
how low does it go? So I think honestly that I'm
going to almost disregard art for this, yeah, because
obviously Charlie's artist fucking 10 out of 10, right?
Right. So just looking at the visual
layout and that's not even getting into the usability
aspects of the layout. Yeah, that's true.
Visually, I think it's a bad font choice.
I think the headings and sub headings and or lack thereof is
bad. I think the breakup of like some
of the the the in world documents across multiple pages.
I think the way that they put the art into the book.
Let's let's talk not art is in the way they used it, not the
art itself. How about that?
I don't like those. Used well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like you said it. Breaking things up in like weird
ways like this is not the way that this is not good.
It's not and and like they could have just like full page some
things, but but specifically layout.
It's so weird like that one random bullet point that's like
way up to the side but then like double tabbed.
I didn't realize. I genuinely did not realize it
was a bull. Oh, I know.
Yeah. I only knew because I
highlighted it so I could see like because you can highlight
the text visually. It's it's, it's bad.
I mean, I would probably, but I don't even know.
I don't even know. I don't, I, I, I don't have a
lot of good to say. I again I think.
I don't. Either how low do you want to
go? It might be like a three for me,
like I guess bro, a book like there's still words on a page
so. Three, I think 3 was there are.
Attempts at like having headers and stuff and some sort of
delineation for information. It's just not done at all well.
Yeah, I think we've given a four before.
And I would say that this book is so frustratingly,
inconsistently poorly laid out that, like, it has to be the
lowest score you've ever given. Like, I think this is an easy
three. And again, I want to clarify
that is has nothing to say about the quality of Charlie Ferguson
Avery's art, because I think that is like, honestly, I think
This is why this book made $100,000.
It is the cover because Charlie Ferguson Avery's art slapped so
fucking hard. It is the way that the art was
used in the layout and how just bad the just bad the layout is
usability. So no bookmarks, no, no, no, no
hyperlinks. The table of content is a bunch
of weird stuff. The, the, I, I think that I want
to talk about rules language in usability more than in rules
that if that makes sense. Like, because I think the use of
the way that the rules are written and the way it I think,
affects the usability of the game in and you know what I'm
talking about, Like, like bad rules language versus like,
yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
I think the rules language in numerous sections is pretty
poor. I think the explanations are
pretty like could be written in ways like.
I specifically keep harping on the fact that like rank is like
an important keyword in the game and it is like it's like they
forgot sometimes that it was called rank and then other times
they remembered it. Like in the entire character
creation section. The only time you use the words
rank are in character growth in like character dancement.
Basically at no point when it's describing like attributes and
putting points into your attributes does it tell you that
however many points you put into the attributes is your rank in
that attribute, right? I think that having all of the
rules before you ever care about characterization is not great.
I think the fact that like the basically the way that the game
is played as in like the structure of actually playing
the game is not in any part of the player section whatsoever.
There's no breakdown even at the beginning of the book that says
this is basically what you're going to do.
And it's not even until page like 60 when you start talking
about like mission briefings and stuff, do you actually get any
structure of the gameplay whatsoever.
Which like you said, if you didn't, if you're like, oh, like
I didn't really deep dive the GM section because that's the GM
stuff. Like, and for some reason stuff
between principles, you get like game structure.
It's pretty poor. I think.
It's not, it's not a number. I don't think I could go higher
than 5 on this. Oh, I don't think I can go
higher than 5 on this either. Yeah, Oregon.
Let's go 5 here. Rule set OK.
Hey I like this part. I really, I think the rule set
is that this is the reason we go over this because like
generally, I'm going to be honest, if, if I we don't like
to, we've never given like the Max score is A50.
We've never given a 25 or less, right?
Which means we've never given like fives across the board or a
negative score in total across the board.
We don't do games we don't like. We don't do games that we're
going to be like mean about. I know we're pretty critical of
this one. I don't think we're mean.
I think we're just pointing out stuff that's that's whatever.
But I don't think we would really often choose to pick a
game that we're going to give 8 total points in the 1st 2
scores, right? The reason we really want to
talk about this one, the reason I really want to talk about is
the next three scores. Basically, as far as the rule
set goes, I don't it. The book is poorly laid out.
Whatever as a as a product, I don't think it's very good.
As a game, I think it's really fucking good.
I think it's super interesting. To be had here.
Yeah, I think the skill role is cool.
Like dice pool that you can then manipulate based on your.
Manipulation gives a lot to the dice pool, you know, it really
adds a lot to that style of gameplay.
But then on top of that, your health is your attribute points.
So as you get your ass kicked, your manipulations go down,
which makes everything harder. So there's a really cool
feedback we're building to it. And then the structure where
you're using the cards and you're actually spending them as
like your memories and things like that, on top of like the
narrative journey that you go through to get to the mission
and things like that is really fantastic.
The whispers are amazing I mean, as far as the rules that goes,
this is great like I said, I think it is not a great product,
but I think it's a great game That's how I kind of feel about
about this and I'm pretty high on this rule set like I think
one of the things we talked about before and the reason that
like sometimes even though we love rules like systems,
sometimes systems that have more depth will get higher points is
because of the way that you have to make those systems sing.
And I think the way that the dice pool system mixed with the
manipulation system mixed with the card system all the name on
itself. Card system.
Yeah, I think it actually works really well all together.
Yeah, I think it's I real. I really, really, really want to
play this. I think it's great.
I think do I think it's great? I do think it's great.
OK. I think it's great.
How do you feel about it? Pitch me a number, Ryan. 8.
I'm right there with you. That was my original.
When we started to talk about rules, I was like 8.
So yeah. I mean, this is, we do like this
is, yeah, I think this is super solid.
You know, we, we've only ever given like two 10s.
So 9 is kind of the peak. I think this is right below
that. I think this honestly, this
could be one of those ones where no, I think 8.
I think 8 feels really good for this.
Originality I think. Bro I think originality is
fucking super high too. I mean, not a ton of World War
One games out there, right? I mean, Church Crusade is not a
table top role-playing game. That's the thing that I feel
like this is the closest to this, but the combination of
real world history with the with this, with the veil and
everything that comes after that, I think it's fantastic.
I think the Lord is fantastic. I think that the system itself,
the plus one system with like the dice, dice manipulation, I
think that goes to originality. I think there's a lot of really
fun unique stuff at that. Yeah, the, the use of like
jokers and cards and and, and and stuff like that.
I'm pretty high on originality with this.
I think this is the vibes are great and I want to throw that
in here too because like the way that it's all tied in is is
really fantastic too, Yeah. I'm at about an 8 1/2 for
originality so. Yeah, I'm probably a solid 8 for
for solid 8. Cool.
Yeah. I mean, if you want to convince
me to go to 9, I might be convinced.
But if you're good with an 8, OK.
Yeah, I think the I think, Yeah, I think again, the vibes on this
are are absolutely fucking Immaculate value.
Did I know parts? And value right?
I mean, there's as far as like the amount of available content
through the fucking roof. I mean, we talked about this
before. There are, there are there's an
entire beastiary book. There are two different books of
magic and whispers and then the 21 like just adventure like
missions in the the Breach. And then you have the entire war
basically broken up with an adventure in 1914 or an entire
mission dossier thing. Campaign dossier in 1914,
fifteen, 1617 and 18, which I think is really interesting
because the Veil didn't Thunder till 1916.
So what what are you doing in the campaign dossiers in like 14
and 15? You know what I mean?
Yeah, what is that? Well, you'll have to buy the
books and find out, but the amount of of available content
in this is astronomical through the roof.
It is really interesting. I have read through like a bunch
of it. Like Blood on the Snow is
obviously like really, really fucking good, but I think that's
really great. Did I in my notes that I put
stuff on the bottom and I just linked to the Kickstarter?
I think I might have just. No, I think I did.
Well, I can tell you right now if you want to get never Going
Home or a couple of the like additional books, they're all
$20 each on wedding game site. You can also find the PDFs on
drive through RPG PDFs are $10 and I think that they have.
Did it go up? Oh, they were on sale when I put
it down. Well, they're.
Never on. PDFs are actually on sale right
now for $10. They're actually 15, so.
Yeah. I mean, it's 100 and it's like
120 pages. Like easy peasy.
Yeah, yeah. Man, I think.
So and then you can also get so I don't, I don't think I was
really able to find any physicals of this anywhere.
But there you can get a soft cover print on demand of this
from drive through for $20 and it's on sale right now for PDF
and POD for 20 bucks normally 30 dollars, $30.00 for premium.
Is it premium standard? It's not premium standard, even
at $30.00 for $15.00 for for this is a PDFI think like you
could turn 20 easy and then $30.00 for the softcover and PDF
together I think is a steal too. So as far as like the actual
cost, I think it's good. I think the amount of game there
is out there is great. I don't know, I think I'm pretty
high on value because like not only is there a lot of content,
it's a good spread of content between the beast area, the
magic books, dossiers and just whole mission books.
I think there's a lot and and it's pretty inexpensive.
I mean, as far as I mean, so there's not, there's not we, we,
we look at something like Mothership has an app and shit
like that that that can add into this.
Yeah, yeah, Mark works free. I mean, $10.00 for the PDF is
basically free in this economy, but I don't know.
I'm probably between, probably between 7:00 and 8:00 on value.
I mean, there's so much. I'm actually more leaning
towards an 8 on this one as well.
I think there's a there's a lot going on here for not an insane
amount of money and. I do, I do want to say that like
I, I even throw in value like the the fact that these are
available too, that you can get cards and dice and stuff for it
too. I think I'm pretty high on the
value for that. So when we look at the scores
all together, the total is 8 plus 8 + 8 + 8 I guess.
So it's the 32, which is honestly higher than I expected.
But when you look at Y right, rule set was eight, originally
was 8, value is 8, and then the art layout and usability, two
different scores together equal 8.
So you'll see why like the layout again, we the the game I
think is really, really, really good fun.
Interesting vibes are great. Lord's great everything is
great. The product, the actual physical
book, the structure of the book, the rules language and the
layout of the book is pretty poor in my opinion.
I think this thing could this A2 east of this with a whole new
layout and a rewrite top to bottom of like the rules
language would go so fucking hard and I would do anything for
that to happen. But you'll see in again in the
scores where where that happened.
Great, great game, poor product. That's it.
That is never going home Score of 32 here.
I have no idea what we're doing next.
We have some cool stuff coming up that might have got pushed
back for timing, but we got some really fun, interesting stuff.
If you want to get a little preview of what those things
could be, go listen to our last not cat chats with Jerk.
I think about halfway through in our in our flu riddled minds, we
started ranting about the possible fun, interesting things
that could be coming up on the show.
And we're not going to repeat that again until they happen.
But cool, interesting things coming up.
We'll talk about what we're going to do next week tomorrow.
Listen, if you're not listening to this live, go go watch the
next episode, which should be out shortly after this.
We're going to have Vidichi Valetti on the show talk about
their new project Lance one land ones magic.
So if you're listening now, go check that episode because I'll
probably drop them back-to-back. But Vidicha is we've looked at a
bunch of their stuff. Great person, great creative
mind, super excited to talk about them.
Going to be one of the last interviews we ever do here on
the show. So so show up for that as we
talk to them. Super excited there.
There's someone that has been on my list of of of really wanting
to talk to for a long time so.