The New Flesh

Psi*Run is an interesting new game from Meguey Baker. It is a slim volume that seems to be aiming to be as accessible as possible with lots of talking cartoon heads to explain the game. The scenario for the game is a group of amnesiac characters with strange powers escape from an accident site where they were being transported by a strange group who then pursue them relentlessly with the goal of recapturing them. The characters have a number of questions about themselves so the aim of the game is to stay ahead of the pursuing Chasers and learn as much as they can about themselves and what is happening to them. The core game mechanics are a simple tree-branch map of the locations between the accident site and where the characters are now. The Chasers start at the accident and will then follow the tree to where the characters are. It's a pretty good mechanic and I see a strong "Fugitive" vibe to it. The other system is a playmat where a player places a pool of dice

Would anyone really pay for the beta of a game? Er... hello! I actually like the heart of Fantasy Flight's Warhammer 3rd Edition rules system so I was intrigued to see how it would work with the Star Wars universe. There is some interesting stuff in the rules system as this is much more abstract than Warhammer and while it relies on special dice there are no additional cards and sub-mechanisms going on so the result is something a little leaner and slightly more cohesive. There are also some interesting indie game influences in the form of Obligation which represents the driving motivation behind the group. So Han's debt to Jabba ends up driving his story through the films. However it is still intensely crunch heavy which is something of a turn off as the Fantasy Flight propensity for little, fiddly special rules is here. The design may be good but is never committed to finding the simplest answer to problems. While the equivalent of Talents have been simplified and no

This is a booklet scenario that is very similar to the thin "bookmark" format that Graham Walmsey has used for some of his self-published scenarios. I was pretty sold on the premise/pitch for the scenario: Victorian Fairies meet the Cthulhu Mythos but having had a quick read through it seems to have a few problems. It has the problem that James Raggi was complaining about in Monolith Beyond Space and Time of very quickly hitting the Cthulhu brand names rather than the concerns of the Mythos. Packaging the engaging concept into a very established pattern sucks all the excitement out of things. The game focuses on the parents of a young girl, which is a brilliant premise but then seems to progress as if this will be a standard party game of about five players and spends some time on while all these new arrivals will turn up at remote Scottish village at the same time. I think it would have been better to focus on the three player set up and make that sing. One really int

Picked up at Dragonmeet and its an attractive paperback as most LotFP stuff is, certainly makes me look forward to the IndieGoGo stuff . The introduction is typically bombastic stuff from Raggi, talking about the way that much post-Lovecraft Mythos fiction relies on the icongraphy and "brand" touchstones of the original stories. As a dig at the way that Paizo use Lovecraft I definitely agrees. Defining this adventure as something that aims to be Lovecraftian without the tropes we once again have a bar being set ridiculously high. The main problem is that Raggi doesn't seem to want to engage with structured storytelling and therefore is happy to mix up weird situations with dice-driven random tables and not really bother with the idea that OSR games are essentially about how groups of people interact in response to their environment. Also as normal the prose clunks along and wears its influences too strongly to seem anything other than derivative. I have a lot of t