RPG book review: A Visitor's Guide To The Rainy City

As this month's RPG Blog Carnival topic relates to weather and seasons, what better time to get round to reviewing one of my favourite setting books?

Photo ironically taken on the only non-rainy day this week...

Who are the players and what do they do?

PCs are denizens of, or visitors to, the Rainy City - an island city at the end of the world and enduring constant rain.

Piracy, exploring, smuggling, protecting/exploiting the weak, guild work, diving (to explore the flooded ruins of a magical academy), starting a cult or a will-o-wisp business, founding parliaments, flaunting their riches, salvaging shipwrecks, serving wizards... There are no set adventures, but a huge number of seeds, ideas, and potential hooks here.

What's the core mechanic?

None - the book's all fluff and no crunch. What's great is that it's all written as prose, from the pen of Beauregard Hardebard of the Master and Four Wardens of the Fraternity of the Art and Mystery of Haberdashery and Millinery. The core mechanic I guess is settling down to read it.

What's good?

Each area of the city is sketched out over a couple of double-page spreads, each has its own feel, goings on, denizens, and weather.

So much varied rain. The rain varies by location, be it stormy, misty, or - on the Headlands:

The rain varies by season (Quiet, Firelight, Rainy, and Windy seasons) and creates interesting challenges (and solutions) for lighting, heating, and cooking. Hats are important.

Every location is crammed with rich nuggets of interesting prose, characters, things, events ... Honestly there's so much going on you could run whole sandbox in each district. Nothing is wasted and all of it is enjoyable.

If I ever run Blades in the Dark again, I want to run it in the Rainy City.

Honestly the best thing about this book is just how much fun it is to read. Close second best is how many ideas it conjures in your head; it's an OSR DM's dream!

What's bad?

I guess some people would want some of the named locations to be mapped out, or more explicit adventures, or explicit "quest givers". I think it's a breath of fresh air and I love it.

Bottom line?

It's great. If you want somewhere to game that's more Ankh Morpork than Saltmarsh then this is the place.

Even if you never play it, you'll enjoy reading it!

Please drop your thoughts in the comments if you've used this book - how was it for you?

RPG Book Review: Skycrawl

Who are the players and what do they do?

Explorers of a "weird, whimsical, endless sky". The main focus is on exploration and travel.

This is a supplement (setting?) for any roleplaying system, packed with systems and procedures for journeying between mysterious lands floating in an endless azure sky, ship to ship combat, and more.

The colours are better in real life!

What's the core mechanic?

The book itself is systemless and provides guidance and examples for how to use it with d20, 2d6, percentile, or FATE mechanics, but could easily be used for dice pool games or other mechanics as well.  The core procedures use standard terms such as "crit", "strong success", "success", "complication" which can be easily defined for any method of generating these outcomes.

What's good?

The procedures here are wonderful; there are systems for:

• Procedurally generating Lands and the Folk who inhabit them, and the ships that move between them
• Tracking the movement of those lands as they orbit in the sky
• Researching, plotting, and executing journeys between these lands
• Ship-to-ship combat
• Orcery, which is an interesting alchemy system 
• Generating and resolving random encounters in the skies

The systems used for play utilise "moves" which will feel familiar to anyone who has played a PBTA game, but these can easily be explained as player procedures at the table if not.

I particularly like the systems for travel; PCs accrue and spend a meta-resource called "tack" to help with navigation and journeys are planned out and executed in several steps (be they days, weeks, or abstract measures of difficulty) which naturally resolve into scenes and encounters as the players spend their tack and decide how best to play out each step.

Lands are mechanically easier to get to if the party have been there before, or if they have discovered three or more rumours about the place - which is something I love as a driver for exploring and interacting with the world.

The main procedures are seemingly based on the designer's other game Downcrawl, which you can get a good feel for in its free HTML version here.

The lore and art, that there is, is evocative and flavourful too. It's a great book!

What's bad?

Honestly, I'm struggling. Some people might find it a little wordy for their tastes maybe (I really don't) but that's just thinking of something - anything - to put in this section!

Bottom line?

Highly recommended. There's a lot here to mine from and adapt to other games (the systems shared with Downcrawl could just as easily be adapted for overland travel and traditional pointcrawls, and these rules could just as easily be applied to traditional sailing ships with a little tweaking) and it feels like it could be run straight from the book. Looking forward to doing so!

Fans of the depthcrawls generated by The Stygian Library or The Gardens of Ynn, traditional OSR hexcrawl mechanics, or the travel procedures in Ultraviolet Grasslands would probably find a lot to like in this little gem.

If you have any favourite procedure-based RPG resources then I'd love to hear of them, either in the comments or by submitting a link to one of your blog posts on this month's RPG Blog Carnival hub, where the theme is "procedures".

Blades in the Dark: a Review

Inage (cc) Yowan2008

I haven't been tending to the blog for a while, sorry.  Covid has affected gaming opportunities, I have not had a personal laptop, I have had difficulty getting things down on paper.  Plus I have been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077.  A lot.

Here I am trying to re-ignite things with a review format that feels like it could have legs.  Let me know if you want more of these.

Who are the players and what do they do?

Characters in Blades in the Dark are scoundrels in the underworld of Doskvol, a haunted fantasy-industrial city fuelled by leviathan blood and electroplasm.

The players work together as a Crew, lining up and running "Scores" to acquire Coin, Rep, and Turf.  At the same time they need to manage their Heat (and Wanted level) and relations with other Factions in the city.

What is the core mechanic?

Dungeon World + Trilemma Adventures

Last week I got to run a one shot of Dungeon World - for all my enthusiasm about it I had never actually played it - but I'd heard good things.  I'd also heard good things about Trilemma Adventures so I decided to grab one of their free dungeons to play in.  How did it go?  Read on, bold adventurer...

We played The Sky Blind Spire by Michael Prescott

Friday Freebie: Stars Without Number

Image (cc) Phil Parker on Flickr

How could I not recommend the magnificent Stars Without Number as a top tier FREE GAME?

Stars Without Number is the game that changed how I DM.  It helped me prep just enough and forgot about "building encounters" and start enjoying the game so much more. It's the game I wish I'd run first, but more on that later.

But how does it play?

Mechanically, it's an odd mix of d20 (for combat and saves) and 2d6 (for skills) but the players didn't seem to mind.  Skills are distinct enough without being too granular and it all seems to work.  Being an OSR game there are hit dice and hit points, and my favourite method for rolling HP when you level I have seen so far: roll all your hit dice and get that if it's higher than your current total, or get +1 HP if you rolled lower.  It really helps to smooth the curve.