Elfquest Revisited

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Core Rules, Elfquest, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Following in the wake of their Kickstarters to put out special archival rereleases of old RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu material, Chaosium have done the same for Elfquest. In some respects this is an odd call – Elfquest was always one of their less loved RPGs, in part because Steve Perrin ended up using it as a testbed for the 3rd edition RuneQuest mechanics, which were several orders of magnitude too crunchy than were called for when you’re doing a light RPG intended to appeal to fans of the Elfquest comic and be a gateway drug into roleplaying for them.

On the other hand, revisiting the game in this fashion also makes a certain amount of sense. Elfquest, despite never becoming a majorly famous franchise, has kept chugging along over the years, and with the broader propagation of RPGs into the cultural zeitgeist in the intervening decades perhaps there’s now more of an overlap between Elfquest fans and RPG players (or potential players).

In addition, the Elfquest line was fairly terse; there was the original boxed set, the Elfquest Companion, and two additional supplements, and then 2nd edition came out collecting the booklets from the boxed set and the Companion into a single book, and then that was kind of it. This means that there’s scope to put out the whole product line in a single special anniversary box and still have room left over for nice-to-have enhancement like standees, an additional colour map, and a few enhancements of the material here and there.

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When I previously reviewed Elfquest, I was rather unsure about the whole Recognition mechanic by which elves recognise their soulmates – it’s a big deal in the comic (which is arguably a pioneering work of romantasy before the genre even had a label), I understand why it’s there, but equally if mishandled it can be a recipe for disaster at the gaming table. On rereading, I think I can at least see a route towards a method of handling it which is actually quite good: in character generation, if you roll Recognition and don’t choose to have another player’s elf be your Recognised soulmate, then you get to stat up the elf your character shares Recognition with, and either the referee plays them as an allied NPC or you get to play them yourself.

The latter strikes me as being an especially good option – and if you go even more radical with it and let the player play NPCs they end up Recognising during play, it opens up some genuinely interesting play options. Sure, it might take a little extra work for referees to give players a briefing on the NPC that they’ve recognised, though if you’re not up for that chore you don’t have to make the Recognition roll at all, and having a Recognition occur when meeting a new clan of elves during a scenario can be a really interesting wildcard way to take things in a new direction.

Most importantly, if tables go with the convention of “you get to play the character your PC ends up Recognising”, that’s simultaneously an interesting experiment with the format by allowing for multiple PCs and also eliminates almost all the potential squick from Recognition situations, because by definition if the player is playing both partners in that connection, anything that happens between them is something that player has decided is going to happen between them. There’s simply no better way to make sure this type of play respects a player’s boundaries than by giving them full control of the characters who are involved in it.

In these special anniversary reprints, there’s some additional sidebars and materials added in here and there, and I really think the Recognition stuff deserved a sidebar exploring it a bit further, because there’s a route to a really interesting twist on things which is present in the original text but which I think could do with more emphasis.

Beyond that however, I think the additions to the core material are highly welcome. All the errata originally identified in the Companion has been implemented, and the pointers provided there on simpler combat are integrated into the text as sidebars. It’s the combat where the overly-crunchy RuneQuest 3rd Edition rules really cause a problem for Elfquest, after all, so working in the tips for streamlining it into the core and encouraging people to consider them is a good idea; no more will people have to flip between two different books to implement the simpler combat system, a burden which would otherwise entirely undermine the point of having a streamlined combat system.

Important caveats are provided when it comes to the effect of these changes – for instance, if you take out parries and dodges you certainly speed combat up, but you sped it up by making it much bloodier – and at points the sidebars are outright critical of the original combat system. In particular, the suggestion for removing Strike Ranks is accompanied by a (more or less true) statement that Strike Ranks add the most complexity for the least impact out of all of the crunchier bits of the system. That isn’t to say they’re wholly worthless – I know some people quite like them – but unless you value what they bring to the table very highly I can see that they feel like they’re not quite worth the effort.

Beyond the core set and the Companion, you get The Sea Elves and Elf War here. Sea Elves is notable for being written by Elizabeth Cerritelli, who was also a major contributor to Elf War and the Companion. Cerritelli seems to be a bit of an enigmatic figure; looking her up on RPGGeek I saw that she and Lynda Bisson (who has no other RPG credits) had co-written The Assassin’s Guild for Dragon issue 64 back in 1982, expanding on what such an institution might look like (the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules alluding to their existence without providing much in the way of details). Other than that, Cerritelli’s RPG career seems to have been a brief burst of creativity focused solely on the Elfquest RPG.

A key clue is offered in Sea Elves, in which Cerritelli mentions that the dolphin-riding elf culture described there first appeared in The Siege of Suncliff Island in Yearnings, an Elfquest fanzine. A quick check of ISFDB and the Fanlore wiki reveals that the story was written by none other than Elizabeth herself under the name “Betty Cerritelli” (under which she seems to have been involved in several fanfic scenes), collaborating with Debra Vorgias.

For those asking the question “But who is the Elfquest RPG for?”, there is now an answer: it is, at least in some part, for Elizabeth. Questions may have arisen as to whether there was really enough of a crossover between Elfquest fans and RPG enthusiasts to justify the game, but here we find Elizabeth sat straight in the overlap of the Venn diagram.

It’s little wonder that Chaosium would eagerly work with Cerritelli once Elfquest was off the ground – having someone to hand who was both an enthusiast of the subject matter and fully conversant in RPGs must have felt like a godsend. If anything, it might have been good to have her involved from the get go, because the material she was involved with does a great job of communicating what you might do in an Elfquest game and how to fit PCs into this setting.

For someone who hasn’t read Elfquest in particular, Cerritelli’s contributions go some way towards building a case for how Elfquest roleplaying campaigns may differ from typical fantasy roleplaying fare, with exploring the world, making contact with disparate elven clans and smoothing over troubles between them being significant themes in the Elf War scenarios. This type of exploratory/diplomatic fantasy feels very ahead of its time, making this reprint by Chaosium doubly valuable – both showcasing the work of a designer who’d otherwise be forgotten and giving Elfquest‘s distinctive features another chance to be appreciated. It’s particularly appropriate that now, at last, Cerritelli’s name actually graces the front of the core rules, given her impact on the line as a whole.

Over On Fake Geek Boy: Boldly Going Where No Gamebooks Have Gone Before!

On By ArthurIn Comics, Gamebooks, IDW, Referee's Bookshelf, Star TrekLeave a comment
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I’ve just put out a review of various Star Trek: Lower Decks spin-off publications over on my books-movies-and-TV blog, one of which may have crossover appeal to regular readers here – that’s Warp Your Own Way, a choose-your-own-adventure gamebook in graphic novel form which does some especially fun things with the format.

The Fifty-Year Mayday: This Is Free Trader Beowulf

On By ArthurIn Digest Group Publications, FASA Corporation, Game Designers' Workshop, Games Workshop, Gaming Community Drama, Hero Games, Imperium Games, Mongoose Publishing, Referee's Bookshelf, Steve Jackson Games, Tabletop RPGs, TravellerLeave a comment

Shannon Appelcline has cultivated a bit of a career as an RPG historian, producing material which is less academic than Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, The Elusive Shift, or Game Wizards whilst casting a wider net than Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon. His magnum opus is the Designers & Dragons series, whose core release constitutes a bunch of potted histories of different game companies, arranged by the year they entered the RPG industry; I reviewed the four-volume edition here a while back.

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As well as looking to push the series forwards with a volume on companies of the 2010s and a collection of “lost histories” of companies that didn’t make the cut on the first go-around, Appelcline has branched out into a number of side projects under the wider banner. One of these is This Is Free Trader Beowulf from 2024. Taking its name from the iconic mayday message that graced the original Traveller boxed set nearly fifty years ago in 1977 (sorry, gang, I think the Beowulf is toast), this is a “system history” of the Traveller RPG – a journey through the game’s publication history from that iconic collection of three little black books through to Mongoose’s latest efforts.

In fact, the book was put out from Mongoose – meaning that Appelcline is in something of a “court historian” role here where he might not necessarily be able to be as critical of Mongoose as he is of some parties. Ken Whitman’s bungling of both his responsibilities at Imperium Games during the T4 era and later his botched Kickstarter for a Traveller television pilot does feature here, and whilst Appelcline keeps things as civil as you can, it’s pretty hard to lay out the bare facts of what happened in those situations and not have it turn into a character assassination on Whitman.

Continue reading “The Fifty-Year Mayday: This Is Free Trader Beowulf“ →

Thoughts On Concluding a One Ring Campaign

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, Tabletop RPGs, The One Ring3 Comments

For the last year and a bit, I’ve been running the second edition of The One Ring for my Wednesday evening group. It’s been a lot of fun; we played through the Tales From the Lone-Lands campaign, with me drawing extensively from the Ruins of the Lost Realm for further material whenever the player characters went off-piste. Over the course of play we’ve batted our ideas about the game back and forth, and what better time to go back, do an autopsy, and consider our conclusions?

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The Challenge of Canon

I went with using a prewritten scenario collection rather than all-original material as a result of several considerations. Firstly, I thought Tales From the Lone-Lands was pretty good as far as published campaigns went, and wanted to use it. By and large, I am mostly satisfied with it; we felt that the scenario Kings of Little Kingdoms didn’t land right, with the revelation about what the culprit is up to and who they’re imitating not really landing well, but otherwise most of the scenarios landed well (including, thank goodness, the conclusion). The second reason I used it was simple enough – I wanted to save time.

Over the course of play, a third good reason to use prewritten material emerged. The general consensus of the group was that if we’re going to do The One Ring, it’s because we want to play through material which cleaves reasonably closely to Tolkien’s worldbuilding and ethos. It’s not automatically the case that a prewritten scenario will capture Tolkien’s tone, of course, but taking your own efforts to mimic the Professor’s style and trying to assess whether you’ve really done a good job is tricky – it’s generally not good practice to mark your own homework.

Conversely, because the scenario was a text by another hand, I could look at it, think about it, consider where I saw the Tolkien-ness in it and where I saw the discordant notes, and adjust accordingly. (The one major instance where I didn’t, in fact, was Kings of Little Kingdoms, which is possibly why it was the weakest episode of the campaign.) A lot of the fun of the campaign came from the group going off on tangents about some Middle-Earth subject or other and simply discussing that – something which is frequently going to be an added flavour of fun in RPGs based on beloved fictional settings that the participants all have fairly developed views on – and it was good to be able to engage in that discussion on the level of another person engaging with the prewritten material rather than chatting about my own inventions.

Likewise, having Ruins of the Lost Realm to enrich the campaign was handy in its own right because it allowed for the players to have a reasonable amount of degrees of freedom, so that when they took an unexpected route across the map I could pull something out for them to encounter as an extra little side story. Of course, I could have just improvised – but I liked the sense that we were all exploring a real place where there were things placed where they were placed, ripe for discovery under the right circumstances.

The most extensive improvised segment of the campaign was the characters’ unexpected trip into Moria, which allowed me to make use of the glorious boxed set and dip briefly into the sandbox possibilities of it.

Continue reading “Thoughts On Concluding a One Ring Campaign” →

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle o’ Borg!

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Free League, Limithron, Mörk Borg, Pirate Borg, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

One of the signs that a tabletop RPG system has really made it once people start selling reskins of it. D&D hacks have been coming out almost as long as Dungeons & Dragons has; the Powered By the Apocalypse system has become the big beast of the self-proclaimed narrativist end of the market because people seem to find it easy to crank out some playbooks, develop a moveset, and toss a PbtA game out there in the genre of their choice.

Of course, some games are easier to reskin than others. PbtA‘s move format, love it or hate it, has the benefit of each individual move being comparatively simple – you decide what event in the fiction triggers it, you describe what the move represents, you specify the roll, you outline the outcome of the roll. Basic Roleplaying can be adapted as you wish through the simple expedient of adjusting the skill list to suit your setting and then picking an appropriate subset of the existing subsystems (or inventing your own bespoke ones); the BRUGE manual provides handy checklists for this purpose. D&D 5E reskins make a virtue out of the fact that most people interested in such projects don’t really want a radical shift away from the type of gameplay that D&D 5E offers and so you can just do a fairly straightforward surface-level palette swap rather than actually re-engineering anything.

Somehow, Mörk Borg has managed to become one of those indie RPGs people like to make hacks off, despite the fact that producing something which doesn’t look like an abject embarrassment next to Mörk Borg or CY_BORG feels like it would be somewhat demanding. You need a big heavy doom metal concept, you need great art, you need lots and lots of interesting tables and charts with options on, and all of them need to reinforce the setting and atmosphere. A good Mörk Borg-alike needs to be information-dense, in part because the underlying action resolution system is dirt simple and so it’s very much the cool setting content, awesome tables, and engaging artwork that’s providing the meat.

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Pirate Borg, the self-proclaimed “worst pirate RPG ever made”, is Luke Stratton’s pirate-themed Mörk Borg hack, developed via his Limithron label and put out in conjunction with Free League via the Free League Workshop program. As well as the core book and small adventures like the introductory scenario Buried In the Bahamas, the naval combat scenario The Battle of Dead Man’s Cove, and fun little endeavours like The Sinking of C’thagn, an adventure provided as a big fold-out poster map with the adventure details on one side, Stratton/Limithron has put out two thick expansion books with a similar form factor to the core. Down Among the Dead is primarily written by Stratton, whilst Cabin Fever is a “best-of” compilation from a Pirate Borg writing jam hosted on itch.io. As a result of all this, Pirate Borg enjoys a level of support beyond that of many indie RPGs.

The basic concept is simple enough – it’s pirates but engagingly spooky, like The Secret of Monkey Island with a doom metal soundtrack. (The illustration for the “Antiquarian” optional class in Down Among the Dead is a homage to an iconic scene from LeChuck’s Revenge, in fact.) The setting is the “Dark Caribbean”, a horrifying alternative to our own world. Here, the islands have been blighted by the Scourge – hordes of the undead out to drown the world of the living in bleakest horror. Despite the danger posed by them, human greed still leads desperate and violent individuals to seek their fortunes here – through piracy or through more official channels – in part because of the incredibly valuable narcotic known as Ash, produced from the refined remains of the undead.

So far, so hardcore. One thing which does give me slight pause is the concept that all of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were, in this setting, all dead when Europeans showed up to settle the islands. This feels perilously like taking Europeans off the hook for the atrocities involved in colonialism at the time, although I suppose the door is left open for a reveal that Christopher Columbus did something horrific and blasphemous back when he visited which devastated the region and unleashed the Scourge.

Other than that, the setting feels comparatively open compared to the claustrophobic worlds of Mörk Borg and CY_BORG; there’s still a drumbeat of increasingly apocalyptic events you’re supposed to drip-feed into your campaign, mind you, but the nature of this apocalypse feels more flexible and, most significantly, you feel less fenced-in geographically, given that you can sail around from island to island. In contrast, the Mörk Borg world is actively falling apart at the seams, whilst CY_BORG takes place in a single densely-packed city.

There’s a simple hex-based naval combat system to complement the “sailing” side of things, which is just as much as packed with flavour as everything else. The mark of a really solid table-heavy game is when you can crack open a book, see one of the tables, and think “oh my god, that looks like so much fun” – as is often the case with Pirate Borg (Down Among the Dead has a set of tables for randomly generating your very own pirate flag, how cool is that?).

All this plus a truly meaty sample scenario in the core book (in comparison to the Mörk Borg sample dungeon, which I think you can blitz through in a session or two, the scenario here could support months of play by itself) makes Pirate Borg excellent value even by itself. The strong support line is a boon, and it feels like you could also fold in material from Mörk Borg itself a bit more easily than with CY_BORG.

Supplement Supplemental! (Cults, Forests, Creatures, Screens, and Catalogues)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, BRUGE, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams1 Comment

Time for another article where I give quick breakdowns of supplements I’ve looked at lately. This time, it’s mostly Basic Roleplaying-based, with supplements for RuneQuest, Pendragon, BRUGE, and Age of Vikings, but I also dip into the grim darkness of the far future to see what’s going on with Imperium Maledictum.

The Gods of Fire and Sky (RuneQuest)

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This is the latest volume in the Cults of RuneQuest supplement series; this one covers the pantheon ruled over by the sun-emperor Yelm, whose members take in everything from abstract illumination through to humble cooking fires. Some of these deities have been alluded to in other volumes in the series; The Lightbringers, for instance, is defined in part by the constituent gods’ involvement in the Lightbringer’s Quest to bring Yelm back from the underworld after Orlanth, the lead Lightbringer, killed him in the mythic before-time and came to badly regret the consequences.

However, there is a very clear logic to why these deities have been put into this book: the pantheon as a whole represents a particular cultural outlook, rooted in Dara Happa and with outposts elsewhere, which offers a direct contrast to the outlook presented in books like The Lightbringers. Indeed, the Yelmian version of the narrative has a rather different emphasis, in which the divine justice doled out by Yelm is so potent that it reached out beyond the grave and caused his killers to die, recasting the Lightbringer’s Quest less as an epic journey and more as a penitential pilgrimage of Orlanth and his co-conspirators to apologise to Yelm for being bad, and for Orlanth to sacrifice himself to bring Yelm back.

Continue reading “Supplement Supplemental! (Cults, Forests, Creatures, Screens, and Catalogues)” →

Slouching Towards Tokyo Episodically

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Sons of the Singularity, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

The Sutra of Pale Leaves is a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1980s Japan and sold in two volumes – Twin Suns Rising and Carcosa Manifest. Rather than being developed in-house by Chaosium, the project was spearheaded by the Sons of the Singularity, an indie RPG design house which has put out several products under its own name. The founder Sons of the Singularity are Jason Sheets and Jesse Covner, two Americans who met whilst working in China, but they have ample connections to Japan (Covner in particular following up his 15 years in China with a 7 year stint working in Japan); their design team for this project also includes people from a range of backgrounds, from local Japanese designers to expatriate Anglophone gamers.

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This puts The Sutra of Pale Leaves in a particularly advantageous position when it comes to presenting an English-language RPG supplement for gaming in Japan. Having a mixture of people born and raised there and more recent immigrants means that the team is not only steeped in the culture, but can also get a handle on what aspects particularly need to be explained to outsiders without prior exposure (or whose encounters with Japanese culture are limited to some anime and manga).

On top of that, all of the participants are well-placed to take a look at Japan’s thriving Call of Cthulhu play community and draw on innovations originating there, whilst at the same time being steeped enough in English-language materials for the game that they know how Chaosium typically presents their products and how Anglophone readers expect scenarios to be presented – so they can act as intermediaries not just on the level of national culture, but also in terms of the different roleplaying subcultures they hail from.

Continue reading “Slouching Towards Tokyo Episodically” →

The Nocturnal Chronicles of Pendragon

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Nocturnal Media, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs3 Comments

Handsomely presented with gorgeous cover art and hardcover presentations in trade dress which allows them to sit seamlessly next to your 6th edition Pendragon collection, the new “Pendragon lore” releases from Chaosium consists of two extremely useful reference works used by Greg Stafford in devising the game in the first place, and useful to referees and anyone researching Arthurian myth in general.

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Le Morte d’Arthur is Thomas Malory’s epic summation of the body of Arthurian myth as it existed in the 15th Century, a work which both encapsulates how diverse the preceding Arthurian sources really are and ended up becoming the touchstone for numerous major works thereafter, from Pendragon itself to John Boorman’s Excalibur to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and so on and so forth. This version adds marginal notes from Arthurian scholar John Matthews and from Greg Stafford himself (Greg having fortunately finished these prior to his untimely passing in 2018), as well as a short foreword from Michael Moorcock. The Arthurian Companion is Phyllis Ann Karr’s encyclopaedia of Arthurian concepts, delivered along with a set of excellent essays on the subject, which has been put out in various editions, having been originally commissioned by Greg Stafford as part of the research process for an Arthurian boardgame before it then got used extensively in preparing Pendragon.

Continue reading “The Nocturnal Chronicles of Pendragon” →

In Liberty’s Shadow: Taking the Rivers Across the Sea

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, Rivers of London, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs6 Comments

In Liberty’s Shadow is really the first truly chunky supplement for Rivers of London, Chaosium’s RPG based on the urban fantasy series created by Ben Aaronovitch; the game’s had a few scenarios come out for it as well, but other than that players and referees have had to make do with the core book, their imaginations, and the admittedly fairly thick stack of Rivers novels when it comes to material for the game prior to this supplement coming out.

The default assumption of the core Rivers of London rulebook book is that PCs will be members of the Folly – a group that’s one half secret society, one half obscure Metropolitan Police department, which focuses its efforts on providing community policing to London’s “demi-monde”, the local occult subculture whose nature is subtly shaped by the esoteric geography of the city. That’s a very specific focus, both in terms of what player characters are likely to be getting up to and the geographic scope of their exploits, but that also tracks with the focus of the series. The full-length Rivers of London novels which form the backbone of the series are very much focused on Peter Grant and his work, which almost entirely takes place in the UK and only occasionally strays outside London. Things get more diffuse in the penumbra of expanded media around the series, which includes short stories, novellas, an upcoming TV show (assuming it doesn’t die somewhere in development hell as TV shows often do), and a graphic novel series co-written with Aaronovitch’s old Doctor Who buddy Andrew Cartmel; some of the expanded media stories have touched on other parts of the world, focused on characters other than Grant, or explored periods prior to the present day. Even then, these are very much occasional exceptions.

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Given the core book’s strong focus on the Folly and London, one might think the natural first significant supplement to do would be a “rest of Britain” book. Although the Met doesn’t have UK-wide jurisdiction, it’s still well-placed to lend help to other forces, and Folly PCs aren’t necessarily Met officers in the RPG since the Folly does have civilian consultants. As a result, you’d expect to be able to set Rivers of London scenarios elsewhere in Britain with reasonable ease – the consultant PCs aren’t really disadvantaged by being outside London, and any police officer PCs can be “on secondment” to a local force (the Folly perhaps pulling a few esoteric strings to help this along) for the duration of a scenario. Aaronovitch has done entire novels in the series set in other areas of the UK – I believe the latest one takes place in Aberdeen – so he’s probably got a deep bench of notes on the wider occult geography of Britain, and the rest can be cooked up from urban legend, weird bits of true history, and a sprinkling of folk horror.

As such, In Liberty’s Shadow is a bit more of a departure than I expected, focused as it is on fleshing out the demi-monde of the USA and the various groups that interact with it. This isn’t entirely untouched territory for the series; Aaronovitch has done an entire novella set in 1920s New York, and in the present day of the series there’s an FBI agent who helps out Peter Grant sometimes. Even then, it still feels like a supplement which falls mostly outside the scope of both the default assumptions of the core rulebook and the usual scope of the novel series.

Continue reading “In Liberty’s Shadow: Taking the Rivers Across the Sea” →

Is the Doctor Who RPG Fading Away Into the Vortex?

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Cubicle 7, Doctor Who, Edition Warrior Bullshit, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Vortex System11 Comments

A few weeks back I was browsing the Cubicle 7 website and saw that they had a big sale ongoing for their hardcopy books for their Doctor Who RPG – as in the second edition core rulebook was going for £16, with the PDF bundled in, which is £6.33 less than they’re selling the PDF of the core rulebook (first or second edition) for on DriveThruRPG. In fact, there’s really steep discounts on physical product across the entire line – including the Doctors & Daleks books which adapt the game to the D&D 5E system – which makes me strongly suspect that Cubicle 7 are expecting to lose the licence and are trying to get rid of their old stock.

It would not be enormously shocking if this were the case. The second edition – heavily branded around the Thirteenth Doctor era – came out in 2021 and after that has had a fairly desultory amount of support compared to the extensive releases that were put out for the first edition, which emerged in 2009, went through three distinct printings (for the Tenth, Eleventh. and Twelfth Doctors), and had a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks put out for it, including a multi-volume series covering each of the first twelve Doctors’ eras respectively and guides for running campaigns based around UNIT or the Paternoster Gang. Oh, sure, there’s also been the Doctors & Daleks product line, but taking a big-name licence of theirs and repackaging it for 5E D&D seems to be Cubicle 7’s standard move if the licence in question of theirs allows it and they don’t expect to have enormous amounts of time left on it – see how they put out Adventures In Middle-Earth towards the end of their custodianship of The One Ring, and those books have largely been quick repackaging of second edition materials.

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Between this and the lack of any content playing on the 60th Anniversary specials or the Ncuti Gatwa era, it certainly seems like the Doctor Who RPG simply isn’t that much of a priority for Cubicle 7 any more – particularly when they’re also quite busy with a range of Warhammer RPGs (two Old World-based ones, one Age of Sigmar-themed one, and two Warhammer 40,000 ones), and are also gearing up to put out a new edition of their The Laundry RPG based on Charles Stross’ eldritch espionage series.

This seems to be the curious doom of official Doctor Who RPGs – despite in principle being a choice bit of IP to build a game around, the franchise seems to have struggled to find a licensee who’ll actually make a major priority of making a success of an RPG based on the show. FASA basically treated it like the neglected, unwanted step-sibling of its Star Trek RPG, to the point where they basically used a reskinned version of their Star Trek system for it despite it being a poor fit. Virgin Books put out Time Lord at around the same time they kicked off the New Adventures novels, but it’s pretty obvious that that was a little self-indulgent treat Peter Darvill-Evans let himself have rather than something they were going to seriously support. And now the Cubicle 7 line seems to have spent the last few years in a state of managed decline.

But there was that brief little window when Cubicle 7 were going all-put to support it – an era when the line genuinely seemed to be doing well, had plenty of material coming out for it, and was getting critical plaudits, which has all come crashing down. It might be tempting to blame Chris Chibnall for this – goodness knows you can blame him for an awful lot of other stuff, given the absolute and total hash he made of the Thirteenth Doctor era. (And no, I’m not one of those people who think Chibnall botched the era from the start by casting a woman – in fact, I think his strongest season as showrunner was his first, the one when he was most overtly and consciously trying to follow a progressive agenda and showcase diversity, and part of the downfall of his era was the way all of that started to bleed away in favour of nostalgic bilge.) Having the core rulebook of the game be quite so heavily branded around an era which was so heavily rejected by many audience members (those who were still watching, at any rate) can hardly have helped.

However, I think Cubicle 7 made some unforced errors of their own with this edition of the game which can’t be attributed to Chibnall. Both editions of the game credit David F. Chapman as their lead writer, and both at least claim to be powered by the Vortex System, a bespoke game engine also designed by Chapman. However, the changes between the first edition (in its three distinct forms) and the second edition have taken what was a fairly solidly-designed if unexceptional little system and added some seriously wonky aspects to it – and on top of that, it’s flat-out changed the way action resolution rolls are interpreted, a change so fundamental that it’s really stretching the definition to claim that they both operate off the back of the same system. As it happens, I picked up a Humble Bundle package comprising PDFs of a large chunk of the first edition line a while back, so I’m in a position to compare here, and the results aren’t pretty.

Continue reading “Is the Doctor Who RPG Fading Away Into the Vortex?” →