Bleakness and Despair the Setting

 Charlie Ferguson-Avery's 

The Vast in the Dark: Expanded

My copy of The Vast in the Dark: Expanded.

Introduction

    Charlie Ferguson-Avery is an Ennie nominated artist, art director / co-creator of Feral Indie Studio, and two of his other works, Into the Cess and Citadel (originally published in 2022) and Into the Wryd and Wild (originally published in 2019), are major reasons why I have been drawn so deeply into the indie TTRPG space over the past two years. The Vast in the Dark, originally written by Ferguson-Avery in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, lays directly in between the other two works and is by far the most focused and tight of the three. This makes sense as the other two are books and are designed to provide GMs with larger toolsets to create different and, frankly, larger experiences/ settings.

    The Vast in the Dark: Expanded, is a short but oversized zine focusing on providing the tools for a GM to build a unique but very specific kind of world on the 'fly'. The zine also provides a menu of sub-systems tailored for the setting's flavor as well as the tools to generate the world, dungeons, and encounters. All of these can be used in part or wholesale, though it is likely some of the flavor and themes would be diluted if too many of the systems were cut out. The themes and tone of the setting are masterfully crafted with the art, layout, and text all building off each other in a manner rarely seen in triple AAA titles.

    

Art, Intent, Layout, and Tone

    Ferguson-Avery goes out of the way to make it very clear in his "From the Creator" section on the very last page that, "The Vast in the Dark was originally written in 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, as I was trapped in home, and while I was dealing with some other scary things in my personal life" (pg 40). In that same section he further elaborates that, "Working on the expanded edition it has has become very personal to me and far more expressive than I had planned" (pg 40). Therefore it makes perfect sense that the sum of the art, layout, and tone of The Vast in the Dark: Expanded is in a word; bleak. It is other things too, it is hopeless, terrifying, and anxiety inducing as well. To the point that I am surprised that it does not include any kind of mention of safety tools, or content warnings. 

    Even before I got to the last page and understood just a little of the context for the work, I was floored by the emotional energy of the sum of the zine in a way that a TTRPG has never made me feel before. Moreover, it conveyed its emotional energy in such a visceral manner I have rarely felt from even world renowned pieces of art. The context of time, place, and creator, is to my mind, crucial to my understanding of why The Vast in the Dark is as bleak and hopeless as it is.

   All of that being said: the art, layout, and text in The Vast in the Dark is all excellent, both technically and at keeping the themes and tone consistent throughout. Blues, grays, whites, and a healthy dose of black predominate throughout the zine. The cover, a somewhat abstract image of three wanderers being erased by the environment of the 'The Vast', is an excellent sample of the both the style that predominates throughout the zine and its tone. 

   There is a distinct contrast between the brutalist architecture of the lodestones and ruins, versus the 'human' character figures scattered throughout the art in the zine. The ruins and lodestones shown, explicitly inspired by brutalist architecture, have a deeply alien, and cyclopean quality to them. Moreover, the ruins as described are fractal and liminal in their emptiness, populated by equally strange body horror monstrosities. Whereas, the images of the humanoids are messy, dirty, covered in odd little bits, and very well, human and vibrant - they clearly have personalities and are resisting erasure. The style of the humanoids more closely resembles the knight creature from the IV page of Into the Cess and Citadel, than it does the landscapes throughout the The Vast in the Dark. This contrast works well at illustrating that the environment is alien and hostile to humanoid life. This is further elaborated on by the image of a party of delvers discovering the 'Thespian', an unmoving multi eyed giant (presumably a member of the ruin building civilization) found only in a randomly generated room of the ruins (pg 22). The delvers are tiny and insignificant compared to the alien monstrosity towering above them. 

    The only image of the body horror monsters, referred to collectively as 'The Crawl', that make up the non-humanoid population of the The Vast in the Dark is hellish in appearance. It is a grasping thing of fingers, chittering skulls, bodiless legs, and eyeless cyclopean skulls all with thin skin stretched across the mass.  Frankly, it looks like the sort of thing the cenobites from Hellraiser would have designed. One of 'The Crawl', the innocuously named 'Griffon' is described as, "Dozens of hands writhe in the guise of wings and a face. Fingers twitch hungrily around drooling jaws..." (pg 39). All of the other descriptions are equally unsettling. The special abilities of 'The Crawl' are equally disturbing and some of them provide setups for truly challenging and trying encounters. For example, the Wyrm can mimic any mortal it has heard perfectly, "It prefers to ambush, luring with its many tongues" (pg 39). 

Core Systems and World Building Systems

Core Player Facing Systems

    The rules content provided in The Vast in the Dark are designed to be system neutral, but have a distinct old school feel to them. This is reinforced by their implied high lethality and in the choice of recommended systems provided on page 2. 

     Ferguson-Avery does make it very clear early on that, "The Vast in the Dark was made with the intention of being modular and easily adapted into any game" (pg. 2). Despite this, the zine does include some systems which make it what I might call a 'partial system' if they are all included wholesale. These include a system for replacing hit points called, "Grit and Flesh" which is designed to be, "a representation of superficial harm and pain tolerance versus serious injuries" (pg. 5). A draconian slot based inventory system that is reminiscent of Old School Revival (OSR) games like Shadowdark. And, perhaps the most crucial system to the tone of the setting is that of memory loss implemented in a devilishly simply system called the "Harrowing." Essentially characters enter the setting with a set number of memories and when they suffer an extreme hardship they lose one, and when they are out of memories they are essentially out of the game, as their mind is too shattered to continue. There are very limited ways to recover memories in the setting, and at least one of them involves stealing memories. The memories system, I suspect, would induce a fair amount of anxiety in players as their characters very self is slowly whittled away by their time in 'The Vast'. Which is the point. The final sub-system is more functional, and details the use of a D6 and various compounding resources in an innovative way of representing navigation in a world of only landmarks and no means of utilizing compasses or stars. It is frankly, brilliant, and I intend to use it in other equally strange settings where more conventional means of navigation would be unavailable. These rules taken collectively seem like they would do an excellent job of reinforcing the sense of hopeless struggle a party 'adventuring' in the setting would and should endure. But as Ferguson-Avery makes clear above they are modular and can be mixed and matched at will. 

      Ferguson-Avery uses phrases throughout The Vast in the Dark like "Save vs. breath" but nowhere that I can see in the zine are these defined. I happen to know what is meant because I can look it up in my copy of Into The Cess & Citadel - it means a save related to "moving and dodging" or in simple terms a dexterity check. This is a little frustrating and I suspect that the page explaining this terminology, present in both Into the Cess & Citadel and Into the Wired and Wyld was left out to reduce page count more than anything. This is a minor issue, but an issue none-the-less. 

Worlding Building and World Building Tools

   At is core the Vast in the Dark is a series of tools for creating a unique world and tone in a very specific setting. Thus it makes sense that the bulk of The Vast in the Dark is filled with tables and rules for randomly generating the world. The Vast in the Dark builds its world map using the same system found in Into the Cess and Citadel, that is to say a high level hex map generated using the random throw of a handful of D6s. With smaller scale hex maps generated for each of the larger scale hexes as needed. When the D6s are rolled they are rolled on top of the hex map and the face up number then equates to the contents of that hex. Each hex can contain one of three things: empty wastelands of sand and rubble, ruins of a truly alien cyclopean precursor civilization that sometimes contain settlements of bedraggled residents, or vast monolithic pillars of lodestone that hold up the distant ceiling. While the back page of the zine describes the system as "No-prep World Generation" I think trying to do this at the table would be time consuming. However, I have found that this system is great at providing a detailed starting point for fleshing out the world. It fires up my mind creatively speaking.    

    Each of the three core biomes (ruins, settlements, and pillars) is then further procedurally generated using D6s and the occasional other types of standard TTRPG dice. The pillars are the simplest to generate and use a system of D6 rolls to simulate a series of tunnels and caverns. The ruins are more complex to generate using a combination of a two D6s (ie D66), a D20, and a D12.  Given the number of possible combinations a GM might benefit from creating ruins in advance and making them a little intentional - especially if a specific plotline is being explored. One of the more interesting mechanics presented for both the pillars and ruins is a system for escalating the results of the die rolls higher, to ensure that as time goes on things get worse and stranger, to simulate the increasing alienness of the locations. Because of this escalation mechanic, the 'Pillar Events' table goes to 15 on a D6 roll, the 'Ruin Encounters' table goes to 22 on a D12 roll, and the 'Ruin Features' table goes to 31 on a D20 roll. The settlements are generated using a D6 and a D12. 

    If you were expecting the settlements in this setting to offer a break from the despair and hopelessness that runs rampant throughout zine, you would be wrong. For example, the most 'hopeful' of the entries from the settlement atmospheres table reads in part, "...The hedonistic denizens make their homes and work in communal spaces, most growing anxious or frightful at the prospect of being alone" (pg 14).

    Each biome, other than 'The Deep', has several factions associated with it. Each of these gets a short write up, quest seed, and reward/ mechanical benefit associated with gaining its approval. The 'Travelers and Denizens' page of the settlement section contains some of the shortest and most evocative descriptions of NPCs I have seen. These entries each include a colorful quest seed that hints at a potential larger plotline.

   The ruins do have a unique feature found nowhere else in the setting; the potential to generate an entrance to 'The Deep'. 'The Deep' is essentially the setting's high level or 'end game' area, albeit a tonally consistent one. Unlike the rest of the setting which can be generated randomly, 'The Deep', is set in the challenges it contains and the order they are presented in. Perhaps my personal favorite element of the zine is the monster that hunts the party in this region, I won't spoil much of it other than to say that it bears a passing resemblance to Machin Shin, "The Black Wind," from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  Similarly, I won't spoil the six challenges of 'The Deep', but suffice to say they are all a combination of challenging, depressing, and anxiety inducing, with the final one being perhaps one of the most emotionally brutal things ever written for a TTRPG from a PC's perspective. 

Conclusion and Recommendations 

    The Vast in the Dark: Expanded is a system neutral zine from Charlie Ferguson-Avery of Feral Indie Studios, it clocks in at a reasonable and very art heavy 40 pages. The atmosphere created by the conjunction of the art and text is that of a barren alien wasteland eternally decaying in an endless night. The bleakness is only punctuated by the futile attempts of the pitiful residents to survive and retain a sliver of who they once were, while their personalities slowly decay. The rules and world building systems in the zine reinforce this atmosphere exceptionally well building, with minimal word count, a world that will create a sense of anxiety and despair in any party unlucky enough to get trapped in this liminal hell. To that point, I actually have reservations about running this setting for my main gaming group, because I feel to do it well might run the risk of triggering some of my players, and perhaps even triggering my own depression. As disappointing as that revelation is, it does not preclude me from admiring the zine for its obvious merit as a work of art and tabletop RPG setting. 

    As much as I would have enjoyed reading more about the world of the zine, I can see that the setting presented by The Vast in the Dark is complete as it is - focused and done with clear artistic intention. Any additional content provided would have run the risk of diluting that expressive focus. In the same way that Eat the Reich is a masterclass in how to make a self-contained game and adventure, so too is The Vast in the Dark a masterclass in building a self-contained setting.    

     As much as I like this zine, and I do, I think my recommendation should come with a caveat: it is depressing, dark, and hopeless in tone. That's sort of the point. It deals with and focuses on themes that people can find difficult to deal with, yet must contend with in their daily lives. Even more so in what seems to be an increasingly hopeless and bleak reality in 2026. If your group does not like deeply dark settings then this is not something you should run for them, at least not without a very serious conversation about safety tools ahead of time. Despite this, I strongly recommend this zine for GMs that want to add a deeply bleak setting to their repertoire. I would also recommend it to anyone that appreciates a quality piece of dark emotional art, as I do.

Lovecraftian Horror by Committee

Joshua Fox and Becky Annison's

Lovecraftesque: A Story Telling Game of Eldritch Horror Mysteries 

 

Black Armada's Lovecraftesque Second Edition.

 Introduction

Lovecraftesque: A Story Telling Game of Eldritch Horror Mysteries is published by Black Armada and written by Joshua Fox and Becky Annison. It is part of a growing genre of cooperative narratively driven board games that blend elements of RPGs and traditional board games together. It might be better to call it a collaborative story telling engine more than a 'game' in the traditional sense of winners and losers. The phenomenal youtube channel, Quinns Quest, did an excellent review of several of these sorts of games late in 2025. The rules booklet is detailed and a bit dry with some art spread about to break up the text. The rules flow very well during actual game play, but take one or two games to really understand. The rigid-ish structure of the rules forces the game into a distinct framework that ensures the players' narrative has clear acts with a distinct arc. Despite this somewhat rigid framework, the game has no problem generating wild and unique stories. I would be shocked if any two of the narratives generated by the game's engine are even remotely similar - even if players use the same scenarios. 

Art and Tone

The art for the game is evocative and does an excellent job of communicating the fear of the unknown that is central to the cosmic horror genre. Some of the art pieces are more surreal than other pieces, but it all holds together well.  I would argue that the best piece of art in the game is either the box art or the board itself. The art direction and graphic design is also quite good and the text layout is good and easily understood.

The board for Lovecraftesque, showcases its art style quite well.

The intended tone of Lovecraftesque is very much that of cosmic horror, but not that of its namesake H.P. Lovecraft. Unlike some Lovecraftian games, Lovecraftesque makes a concerted effort to divorce itself from its namesake's legacy of racism and bigotry in a meaningful manner while preserving the tone of the genre he helped pioneer. This is a worthwhile endeavor and Annison and Fox, I would argue, succeed at it. The core scenarios and the expansion scenarios are all devoid of problematic elements, such as harmful ethnic stereotypes or allegories about the 'evils' of mixed race couples, that are common in some Lovecraftian games and stories even to this day. True, players could lean on these common tropes as they develop out their narratives but the game's text does everything it can to discourage it. I would further argue that many of the scenarios provided actively discourage this. For example, the scenario "Through the Waters, Darkly" from the expansion Waves of Darkness includes a multi-ethnic cast lacking in stereotypes. More explicitly, one of the expansions, Citadels of Shadow, goes so far as to turn the tables on traditional bastions of bigotry - entrenched power structures - and make these organizations the explicit homes of cosmic evil. Two of the scenarios in this expansion stand out as examples: "We Serve and Protect" which deals with police violence and "The Hidden Cabinet" which deals with corruption in the halls of power. I suspect both of these scenarios would be very hard to play through in 2026.

Moreover, the authors helpfully include two sections in the extras manual, "Lovecraft and Race" and "Lovecraft and Mental Health." These sections give examples of Lovecraft's bigotry and advice on how to counteract their influence on the genre during gameplay. I personally found these sections illuminating and useful to how I approach Lovecraft and cosmic horror. 

The extras manual. It has some excellent advice on handling H.P. Lovecraft's problematic legacy.  Read it, implement it.

 

The Ruleset

This is a cosmic horror game that can touch on issues that are painful or actively harmful to some people. However, Annison and Fox clearly want to make the game accessible to as many people as possible, in as safe a manner as possible. To that end the game wisely includes at the very beginning of the rules a section entitled "Making the Game Fun for Everyone," that details several safety tools that are more common in the modern table top role playing space, and an exhortation that they be adjudicated at the start of every game. These tools include a ban list and what are essentially two variations of the X card. 

Annison and Fox's rules are little complex to understand straight out of the box and require careful review by at least one of the players ahead of time in order to guide the rest of the group. However, once things get started the rules flow remarkably well during actual gameplay, as they follow a simple series of gameplay loops. The game can either be played using a custom scenario designed using the guidance contained in the core rules, or by using one of scenarios included with the game or the expansions. 

The game is divided into three acts and the conclusion: Signs and Portents, Impending Doom, Journey into Darkness, and the Final Horror conclusion. These acts are divvied into eighteen distinct scenes across all acts, the conclusion, and the epilogue. Each act has a set of rules that bind the narrator and the witness roles to specific limitations that help shape the structure of the emergent narrative. The rules change four times throughout the game at set intervals, allowing for the escalation of the cosmic horror from the subtle to the overt and violent in a very satisfying manner. 

The Lovecraftesque rules manual. It clocks in at a reasonable 43 pages.

During each scene one player takes on the role of the narrator another the role of witness (ie the main character in the scenario) and everyone else takes on the role of whispers. The narrator controls the story and can play mystery 'clue' cards to add an additional element to the narrative. These elements range from the subtle, like "Unusual Weather", to the more overtly strange such as "Horror Out of Time." Helpfully, each card includes multiple examples of what the clue could be. The witness player is supposed to embody the main character of the scenario and react to scene that the narrator is building. Whispers, on the other hand, are there to interject and add flavor to the scene. Once the narrator is done with a scene the roles are passed on to the next player in line and the process begins anew.  At the end of each of these scenes each player is required to write down what they think the horror is, on either scrap paper or a sheet from the conclusions pad included in the core game. These conclusions are kept secret from the other players in order to prevent collusion and to keep the Final Horror a surprise for everyone involved. This is also a good exercise for helping players keep track of the narrative and organize their thoughts while preserving a strong element of suspense. 

My badly spelled notes and conclusions from our second game.

This loop of narration continues until possibly the end of the seventh or eighth scene wherein the third act, The Journey into Darkness, begins. This third act is much faster, with the game play loop changing to that of each player adding a detail before passing the speaking role on to the next player as the narrative charts the protagonist's journey towards the final confrontation with the horror. The confrontation with the final horror can be trigged at any point from the thirteenth step/ scene through the sixteenth scene by any player who is actively the narrator. It is at this point that the final horror is revealed in a suitably dramatic scene.   

It is important to note that there are a couple of cards that allow the narrator to radically violate the rules for any given act of the game in a profound manner. These special cards can and will change the narrative and structure of the game in an extremely satisfying manner if handled well. 

Play Experience

Annison and Fox's ruleset took my play groups a little while to understand and implement the first time. However, once we understood, the rules were intuitive and worked very well; the core gameplay loop of passing the narrator role around the table worked exactly as intended. The both groups built on each other's additions in a constructive manner generating a plot and story of eldritch terror on the fly.

The first game of Lovecraftesque that we played we built out our own setting and characters using the rules for doing so from the rule book. Our first go at the custom scenario involved a disgruntled college football mascot as the protagonist. It ended with a rakshasa-esque cat and its minions devouring the personality of the protagonist. This game went well enough, though it became a little competitive around the second act as players tried to implement their own vision while incorporating the additions of everyone else. I think this was more do to with us trying to start off our first game with a bespoke scenario rather than an intentionally designed one.

The second game was played with a slightly different group of people, and we tried a scenario from the expansion Waves of Darkness dealing with an isolated research base in the Challenger Deep. This game started out with a bang during the first scene with the narrator playing the special card, "An attack", and destroying a large portion of the Challenger Deep research base. By the end of this narrative our protagonist and the supporting characters were dead, devoured by a monstrous hermit crab monster masquerading as a H.H. Geiger-esque city. This second time things went much smoother, despite two of the special cards being played and radically shifting the story around very quickly. 

During both our games things tended to start out a little silly but slowly became more serious as we grew attached to the protagonist and the suspense increased. During the final few story beats during each game everyone was hanging on the words of everyone else waiting for the final horror to be revealed. The confidentially component of the conclusions and note taking preserved the suspense remarkably well in practice. 

Expansions, Support, and Alternate Game Modes

Lovecraftesque has three expansions: Citadels of Shadow, Echoes of the Past, and Waves of Darkness. Each add several scenarios based around a central theme to the game. Citadel of Shadows adds scenarios focused around the malevolence and corruption of those in power. Echoes of the Past focuses on ancient and lost histories. While the final expansion, Waves of Darkness, deals with oceanic themes and the unknown of the deep depths. Each expansion is well written and thought out, with each of the component scenarios offering a very specific experience. The core game box helpfully includes a tray explicitly designed for the neat inclusion of all three expansions. This sort of nod towards practicality is very welcome! 

Interestingly, rules are included in the extras booklet for solo and two player game modes. This booklet also includes advice on legacy play across multiple sessions with recurring locations and horrors. The game does make it clear that doing legacy play does require players to generate their own cards for use, but it does helpfully provide guidance on how to do so. I suspect that there might be a way to hack this game in manner more closely resembling a traditional RPG as well, with one player taking on the role of narrator for the duration, and the rest of the players acting as a group of witnesses. Though, figuring out the details of such an implementation are beyond the scope of this review.  

Remarkably, Lovecraftesque has an official Roll20 module, that is pretty affordable and functional. It is even possible to conduct a hybrid game using the physical and digital product in unison. Though it is not a simple thing to do, keeping everything synched up between the physical and digital during the heat of game play. 

Conclusion and Recommendation 

Lovecraftesque does a very challenging thing; create a satisfying cosmic / eldritch horror game while distancing itself from problematic elements of the genre. The rules are fantastic and preserve the narrative suspense throughout by masterfully building and preserving tension. I would not play this game with anyone younger then fifteen or sixteen and even then it would need to be a pretty mature teenager given the potential for it to generate nightmare fuel. Regardless, I give this game my highest possible praise - I'll play it again and I am looking forward to it. 

Old Fashioned Fascist Fighting!

Grant Howitt and Will Kirkby's 
Eat the Reich

The gonzo neon cover of Eat the Reich.

A Note on Nazis:

Let's get what should be very obvious out of the way first: Nazis are vile monsters given human form. This is as true today as it was in 1932. They simply wear suits and ties now instead of the uniforms of the SA, SS, or the Wehrmacht. Anyone ascribing to their views or sympathizing with them is not welcome here - full stop. Now that that is taken care of let's move on to the review. 

Introduction

Eat the Reich (by Rowan, Rook, and Decard's Grant Howitt of Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath fame and illustrated by Will Kirkby) is a masterclass in how focused and narrow in scope a TTRPG can be. Howitt and Kirkby set out with a very clear, and very tight goal in mind: how best can we make a game about vampires killing Hitler? They do this spectacularly well in both form and function. 

In Eat the Reich players take on the role of crack vampire commandos from the allies' secretive F.A.N.G organization with a singular mission: "Drink all of Hitler's Blood." Eat the Reich's rules are simple and easy to understand, providing substantial narrative flexibility for GMs and players alike. However, these rules demand significant creativity and engagement from players, so shy or less creatively inclined players may have a harder time than those used to more narrative games. Kirkby's art and graphic design is in a world all its own and in conjunction with the text clearly conveys Eat the Reich's gonzo anti-Nazi tone and intent. The core 'Let's Kill Hitler' scenario is fantastic in its structured flexibility and potential for player driven chaos and mayhem. Finally, the ancillary products provide good value for money. 

Art, Layout, and Tone

The tone of Eat the Reich slams into you the moment you pick up the book and does not let up for all of its short 72 pages. The totality of this style can only be described as anti-Nazi neon gonzo grindhouse. This anti-Nazi tone is core to the intent and experience of the book, "This game is anti-Nazi propaganda. It's a place for imaginary Nazis to get their teeth kicked in." This is something of an understatement as the entire game revolves around massacring Nazis, making them weak and ineffectual in the face of the righteous onslaught of the undead. The game makes a point of making the characters most likely to be voiced by the GM, the Übermensch 'bosses', to be each divorced from the Third Reich in some unique manner in order to further deny Nazis' a voice. 

Kirkby's art for the book is frequent and universally good, with some sort of large full color spread every couple of pages. It makes liberal use of a wide variety of neon colors and and generally displays a scene from the vampires' adventures through Paris, building on a potential characterization of them in some way. Most of the Übermensch and the the Vampirjagers also get pretty good large art pieces that are expressive in their own right. The art goes beyond simply being technically good. Rather, it was clearly done with an eye towards reinforcing the text. For example, the full page art of each of the vampires in their resting places communicates very quickly through visual cues the stock character of each one. You immediately know when looking at the portrait of Nicole that she is supposed to be a stock French Resistance fighter, as she is depicted wearing a variety of stereotypically French symbols including a beret, a badge bearing the iconic Cross of Lorraine, and a proliferation of cheap cigarettes. I am sure there are other symbolically French things in the image that I am not picking up on. All of the other character portraits are similar in how they convey the nature of each. I particularly enjoy how the bat-person-monster, Flint, is implied to be the most veteran of them all with its ten mission tallies proudly tattooed on its chest. 

The layout is also excellent, easy to read and supports emersion of the reader into the fictional F.A.N.G organization. I was surprised by the attention to detail in the documents that are used to frame the text in the layout. Having once worked in an archive I have some knowledge of what old declassified documents from the 1940s look like and these match them to a 'T' in style and tone. Just to be clear, the real ones did not mention vampires. 

A Narratively Driven Ruleset

The characters are all pre-generated for the core adventure / mission, but they are all interesting with short little blurbs serving to provide seeds for how the character might be played. There is some advice for how to make custom characters in the back of the book but it is clearly not the focus. These seeds are both descriptive and at times even silly, as is the case with the man-bat Flint. As stated above the art reinforces these descriptions rather well. 

The rules for Eat the Reich are dead simple with a pronounced focus on narrative play rather than mechanical complexity. Howitt uses the HAVOC engine originally pioneered in his aptly named HAVOC Brigade game. Each character is defined by seven statistics that form the basis of the dice pools generated by the HAVOC engine. Each also has a bevy of limited use equipment, a variety of pretty wild abilities, and the capacity to consume blood from their foes to fuel special abilities or conduct healing. 

At its heart the HAVOC engine is simply a d6 dice pool building system. Each player describes whatever wild or crazy thing they want to do in the context of the game and then they build their dice pool based on what elements of their character sheet they have incorporated into their description. For example, if Nicole the vampiric French resistance fighter wanted to gun down a bunch of Nazis hiding in cover, then that would be based around the shoot statistic (in her case 4 dice). However, if Nicole's player incorporates the following elements into their action description: using a smoke grenade to distract the Nazis and cover her advance (+2 dice) to set up flanking with an M3 submachine gun (+2 dice) and potentially spends 1 blood to summon a rat swarm (+2 dice) to distract the Nazis their dice pool would be: 10. They would then roll the dice and any resulting 4, 5, 6 would be successes. With any 6s being criticals that might be spent on fueling special abilities or simply counting as 2 successes. The GM would then roll a number of dice equivalent to a given enemies attack rating counting any 4, 5, 6 as one success and therefore 1 potential damage from the adversaries present. In contrast each player success rolled allows the players to: deal damage to an enemy reducing its threat rating by 1 one, regain 1 blood, or apply 1 dice towards achieving the objective of a given scene, or act as a defense thereby eliminating 1 success from the GM's pool.  

This system requires players to be wildly creative with their descriptions - its core focus is player agency.  It is incumbent on GMs to explain this clearly in their set up that players need to go wild with their descriptions in order to do well during the game. 

The "Let's Kill Hitler" Adventure

Scope and Scale

Much like the rules, the 'core' or included adventure is relatively simple in scope and scale. The scale is a fictional Paris in the grip of a massive Nazi occupation far surpassing that of the actual occupation in World War Two. The scope is dead simple, "Drink All of Adolf Hitler's Blood." This simple premise is broken down into eighteen distinct zones on the fictional map of Paris across three sectors. The player being their journey in the third sector and must massacre their way across the map to sector one where Hitler's Zeppelin is docked at the Eifel Tower. 

This adventure is not quite a point crawl in the same semi-rigid manner as, say for example, Luke Rejec's Old School Essentials (OSE) adventure Holy Mountain Shaker (which is an excellent module for a radically different system). Whereas Holy Mountain Shaker is a series of points of interest with distinct interconnections, Eat the Reich is a non-linear series of points across three broad sectors of Paris for the party to traverse with no specific lanes of connection between them. Other then the whims of the players and the GM, of course.

Play Experience  

When I ran the adventure I did so with no specific outline of where I wanted the players to go. Rather I simply laid the map in front of them with a series of suggestions and adjusted the world and enemy placements on the fly to accommodate their chaos. We rolled randomly to determine where they would land in the third (starting) sector, and from there I simply let player agency take hold. I only provided guidance when narratively appropriate, and a little bit more when we were running low on time. 

Eat the Reich encourages this sort of open-endedness within its frame work, going so far as to have a section titled "Provide Opportunities for Chaos." The GM must also be evocative in their descriptions of things when establishing the shared fiction in order to facilitate the chaos of the players. This is further encouraged by the narrative focused nature of the HAVOC engine and the simple nature of the eighteen  location descriptions. The engine and simple, but open-ended, structure enable rapid improvisation and experimentation in a manner I am unused to seeing in mainstream TTRPGs. 

At one point I had created an entirely new location and scene for the players on the fly to explain how the vampires marched a massive quadrupedal walker between two locations in the second sector. The structure of the locations - an objective and threats - made it simple to create on the fly. For some added flare, I had some Ju-87 "Stuka" dive bombers attack the vampire's walking tank as it strode down the fictional Champs-Élysées, scattering commuting Parisians before them.

Moreover, I transformed one of the Übermensch and moved another to keep things fresh. The Stahlsoldat became a mecha monster blasting propaganda. The vampires smashed apart the mecha with a Panzerfuast (I forgot they had) and a combination of sewer rats infiltrating gaps in the mecha armor to devour the pilot - and lucky rolls. I also had the Rust Witch chase down the vampires from her location in the fair grounds by riding a run away Ferris wheel to their location - where she was blown up by grenades. All of this was done easily on the fly enabled by the engine and the structure of the adventure.  

I should note that Eat the Reich warns against trying to run it as a single session game, this is good advice - heed it. This warning pans out rather well when it makes contact with lived experience. The scenario, while technically able to be blitzed through in a single long session in the style of a convention game does not do the best when run that way. I found that running it as a one shot / convention game required me to speed through scenes far quicker than I would have liked, resulting in less time for the players to massacre villains and cause chaos. It was also very hard to keep the descriptions and action level fresh and high tempo across the 3.5+ hours we ran through the scenario in. In the future when I run this game, which I intend to, I will take more time and play it across 2-3 sessions. That being said, even the truncated version I ran was wildly fun and engaging.

I did no real prep work for the game other than carefully reading the book over a couple of times and writing some notes. This worked well enough, but I would recommend some slight expansion of the locations that a given GM wants to focus on. I plan on doing so for the next time I run it, as I think it would help maintain some narrative focus a little bit more.  

Supplemental Materials

Rowan, Rook, and Decard produce excellent ancillary products like large glossy map folios and GM screens. However, in my experience they often sell out and can be kind of hard to find. However, I was lucky enough to find a copy of the Eat the Reich: Character Sheet and Map Pack at my Friendly Local Game Store the other day. This product is essentially just larger two page spreads of the vampire characters from the book and two page spreads of the map of Paris (locations and blank). Normally this would not be worth much comment from me, but what I found especially interesting was that rather than just a single set of sheets and maps, the packet had two of each. This is excellent nod towards practicality and value for both the players and GM.

A value pack of vampiric mayhem!

Conclusion and Recommendation 

In summation, do I recommend the vampiric rage fueled Nazi killing game? Yes, yes I do. In fact I give this game my highest recommendation - I will play it again and look forward to doing so. 

It is a masterful combination of focused yet extraordinarily flexible game design, enabling a GM to easily understand its core rules and implement them with very little prep work. Moreover, it is a masterful joining of art and text in such a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. I would, however, strongly recommend running it across 2-3 evenings instead of a single long session. Finally I might recommend GMs apply a little bit of prep work work above and beyond the book in order to truly make it a unique experience for players. 

Eat the Reich can be found online at Rowan Rook and Decard's website and at fine friendly local gaming stores world wide. 

 

Wizard Fight in the Snow!

 Joseph A. McCollough's 

Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City

Second Edition

The cover of Frostgrave Second Edition.

The cover of Frostgrave Second Edition.

Introduction

Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City's second edition is published by Osprey Games and written by Joseph A. McCollough. It is a skirmish wargame for 2+ players set in the frozen city of Felstad. On some internet forums Frostgrave is sometimes referred to as "Coldhiem" for its passing resemblance to the classic Games Workshop (GW) game Mordhiem. Regardless, Frostgrave has been wildly successful in its own right, spawning four derivative games each with multiple expansions, also by McCollough and published by Osprey Games: Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago (no longer in print), Stargrave, The Silver Bayonet, and most recently Heroes of Athena. All of which will get reviews here... eventually.

 

McCollough is a prolific writer; this is not even close to his full corpus of work.

In Frostgrave, each player builds a warband composed of a wizard, an apprentice, and up to eight hired mercenaries. The core objective of the game is to collect treasure found scattered through the ruins of Felstad and improve your warband across the course of multiple games. Every game of Frostgrave will, without fail, have at least five or more treasures scattered about the board. 

The rules are simple and straightforward with almost everything, other than movement, relying on a simple D20 roll to resolve actions. Additionally, model activation uses an alternating activation scheme centered around groups in close proximity to the wizard or the apprentice. This translates into fast paced action were neither player has to wait very long to take an action. 

The art is fantastic and plentiful. The tone is one of a gritty, violent, frozen world; however world building in the core book is mostly absent and that seems to be by design. This is somewhat compensated for by the proliferation of expansions containing what is likely over a hundred different additional scenarios, each adding a little bit more implied, or as is the case with The Red King and the Thaw of the Lich Lord, overt world building. Also noticeably absent is an index, though this is remedied a little by the addition of a well put together rules summary at the back of the book.  

Warbands

Each player in the game assembles a warband composed of a wizard, an apprentice (these cost 100 of your starting 400 gold crowns), up to four specialist soldiers (such as archers, knights, treasure hunters and so on) may also be recruited at various costs. Interestingly, the apprentices stats are derivative of the wizard's so as the wizard improves so too does their apprentice. The player may also recruit as many thief and thug soldiers as they want, for free, so long as the warband size does not exceed ten models or eight soldiers.  It should be noted that thugs and thieves are free because they are generally speaking: terrible. But being able to recruit them for free means a player should never have less then nine models even if those models are just the wizard and the eight drunk thugs they found at a local tavern. Some spells and base upgrades, like raise zombie or warhound kennels allow a wizard to violate this warband size limit, but they are infrequent. 

Core Mechanics 

The rules for Frostgrave are based around a simple conflict resolution system of rolling a D20 and adding or subtracting situational modifiers and stats in an attempt to meet or beat a target number, called simply a 'TN' in Frostgrave. It is fundamentally the same mechanic that was introduced for difficulty checks (DC) in Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) and is common in DnD descendants even today. 

Each character has six stats: Move, Fight, Shoot, Armor, Will, and Health. Move represents a models speed in inches, fight is the stat for dodging and melee, shoot the skill for shooting another model with a ranged weapon or spell, armor is essentially damage reduction, will represents a model's ability to resist spells, and health is simply a model's maximum health.  

Combat is slightly more complex then simply rolling against a TN, with each combatant rolling one D20 and adding the relevant stat / modifier, most often just "Fight", to the roll with whoever rolls the highest dealing damage to their opponent. Damage is also simple to calculate: a model that wins combat simply subtracts its target's armor from the total value rolled and the reminder, if positive, is subtracted from the target's health pool. This, in practice, proved surprisingly deadly with attacks in melee routinely dealing substantial amounts of damage to models, and frequently killing thugs and thieves in a single hit. This has the effect of making melee combats short and deadly, if a little swingy at times. 

Lots of... mediocre thugs and thieves died under that bridge.

Spell casting is interesting in that it is a straight D20 roll versus your spell casting target number which varies for each spell. The target number for spells in your wizard's chosen school are the base value listed in the spell description, while spells from aligned and neutral schools must be cast with +2 and +4 modifiers to the spell's TN, respectively. Based on a reading of the core book little else seems to modify the TN for spellcasting rolls in the casters favor without a cost of some sort. The notable exceptions being the ability of casters to sacrifice their health 1-to-1 to improve the result of an already rolled spellcasting roll to a maximum of +3. There are also a handful of powerful, yet limited, items that can improve casting rolls, such as the one use per game Gloves of Casting.

Spellcasting TNs are rarely lower then 10 and frequently push into the upper teens for powerful spells or those spells outside a casters core school. This low statistical chance of casting spells is more than made up for by spells being very powerful in general. Additionally, spellcasting is not without risk and failing to cast a spell has consequences, with failed spell casting rolls frequently dealing damage to the caster. The amount of damage depends on the amount by which the caster failed the roll. 

Gameplay

Games are generally played at a maximum table size of 4ft x 4ft but you could conceivably play on a larger table with more players for a massive battle royale or a deviously complex scenario.

The game plays very well and the simple rules are easy to understand and implement. Two new players can (and did) quickly understand the rules and play a simple pick up game of the "Magic Fountain" scenario in about three hours with a little bit of prep work by one of the players.

Melee combat is short and brutal with many models capable of murdering each other in a single exchange of blows. Two handed weapons even in the hands of a relatively cheap infantry specialist model are brutal. Bows and ranged spells are also nasty, sniping models from the high ground is very much a valid tactic that works spectacularly well.

Noncombat spells add a tremendous amount of tactical options to a warband's repertoire during a game. For example, the spell "Leap" allows any member of a player's warband to move 10 inches in any direction including up to the top of a tower; where they can see the whole board and snipe people for the rest of the game while hiding in cover.

 

Scenarios 

Frostgrave is very clearly intended to be played with complex scenarios using the book's campaign system. Though you can technically play it as simple pick up game using one of the 20 included scenarios, or even as what the book describes as 'standard game' without any special rules, doing so feels... incomplete. As Frostgrave is set in a vast ruined and frozen city it makes sense that each game calls for a dense board filled with either icy ruins or the detritus of a long dead civilization for games implied to be in a building or ruin.

The scenarios in the core book vary in complexity from the very simple and suitable to a group's first learning game, like the "The Magic Fountain" which features no monsters and only a single key element, the eponymous fountain, (other than the requisite treasure tokens) for the warbands to interact with. This is in contrast with the much more complex "Mine Cart" scenario which involves mine carts filled with monsters and treasure rocketing down a set of tracks in the middle of the environment.

Each scenario has a theme of some sort and almost all of them have some sort of hazard / monster on the field to interact with and add an element of chaos to the best laid wizardly plans. A stand out scenario is, "The Swirling Mist", which involves models line of sight reduced to less than a foot and mechanics for wizards to control the mists to thereby confuse enemy models. Oh, it also has snow gorilla ambushes that each player can spring on each other. The potential for fun emergent narratives is very strong with many of these more complex scenarios. 

Despite the book stating on page 152 that, "Player's are heartily encouraged to create their own scenarios..." it offers no tools for doing so. Rather it states that, "There are no rules, and few guidelines, for creating scenarios."  Regardless of intent, in 2026 with narrative war games like Five Parsecs From Home, and Five Leagues From the Borderlands this feels like a cop out rather than liberating. Moreover, some tools, and more importantly advice, for generating scenarios were actually provided for Frostgrave during its first edition with the co-op/ solo supplement Perilous Dark which includes systems explicitly intended to be slotted into player made custom scenarios and rules for creating dungeon crawls. 

Campaign Play

The campaign system provided in the core book is simple, intuitive and is composed of several steps to be followed after every scenario: injury and death, out of game spells, experience and level, counting treasure, and finally spending treasure. Then on to the next scenario!

After the first game with a new wizard they must select a base of operations from a list - each base has some sort of positive effect and can be upgrade with gold recovered from scenarios, during the spending treasure phase.  

The injury and death system in Frostgrave is similar to Necromunda's in that any model taken out of action (reduced to zero health) is required to roll on a "Survival" table to find out if they are lucky, maimed, or dead. Soldiers (thugs/ thieves and specialists) are limited to being badly wounded (having to sit out a game), dead, or fine. While wizards and apprentices, while less likely to be straight up dead, do have a 10% chance to get a permanent injury that inhibits their effectiveness in some way, like getting their eye gouged out or their toes cut off. 

Out of game spells are something of a misnomer as they do occur in game, just not in the context of a scenario. There are two major spells like this in the core book that bear further discussion: "Transcendence" and "Miraculous Cure" as they have major campaign/narrative implications. "Transcendence" has a TN of 20 and if successfully cast the wizard that casts immediately transcends to another plane and sort of wins the campaign. Though in practice it simply means your wizard has retired themselves via magic and your apprentice is getting promoted! "Miraculous Cure" on the other hand has a couple of effects: remove all permanent injuries from a character, negate the badly wounded condition, or bring the dead back to life. Though this last one requires, essentially, a natural 20 to succeed.

The experience and level up phase is pretty self explanatory. Only wizards may actually accrue experience (exp) and every 100 exp earned equates to a level up. Each level up allows the wizard to improve a stat, learn a new spell, or improve a spell by reducing its TN by one. There is a cap on exp gained per scenario which helps reduce the impact of runaway snowballing.

Counting and spending treasure is pretty straightforward as well. You simply roll on a D20 table one time for each treasure your wizard and their mooks were able to recover. Depending on the result you may have to roll on an additional table to generate random potions or magic items. Scenario specific rules might also produce additional treasure. Treasure can be spent to buy anything in the core book at its purchase price, hire a apprentice, recruit more mooks, or pay for upgrades to the wizards base. 

Overall the system, while not as robust or detailed as a game like GW's Necromunda, is excellent and appears well balanced. The system as provided in the core book, however, lacks a narrative through line on which to hang the core of a campaign. This is easily fixed by picking up any number of supplements which frequently do have narratives linking their scenarios.  

   

An example of one of the major expansion campaigns.

Art and Tone

The art of Frostgrave is universally excellent throughout, and most often in form of full page pieces by an illustrator credited as RU-MOR. The style of these beautiful pieces is best described as "fantasy realism." They are comparable to the illustrations in Osprey Publishing's Men-at-Arms historical series. The figures, especially those meant to clearly be the wizards, in each of the pieces is visually striking and they are frequently dynamic in their movements.  The vibrant clothing and eye popping colors in conjunction with the spell effects for each wizard do an excellent job of communicating visually the intended magical school of each wizards. The art of the wizards frequently depicts them in action poses showcasing their determination and grit. However, very little else is communicated about the world itself, in either the art or the text, other than the fact that wizards are also frequently fashion disasters.   

The miniature photography is all quite good, though not up to the level of the highly produced pieces found in GW books these days. The miniatures themselves featured in the photographs are well painted, albeit in a style bearing more similarity to traditional fantasy miniature painting then the modern GW studio style.

All of the world building, other than a single page of flavor text at the very beginning of the core book, is often implied and can even feel fully omitted at other times, with only some gaps filled in by the many supplemental books. In the core book much of the implied world building is communicated through a combination of art, scenario design, and little in universe blurbs called out in icy blue tone boxes. These tone boxes are excellent and quickly communicate a tiny silver of the world: for example, "Perhaps it is the greatest library in the city, but every spell is written on a ten-foot slab of rock, and they scream whenever they're moved..." These tidbits while interesting, leave far too much unsaid. 

The resulting tone and world communicated by the sum of the text, art, and photography is, sadly, lacking in definition. To be sure, the tone communicated is of a frozen, gritty, and violent world. The art is vibrant and communicates the cold frozen nature of the world well through liberal use of cool colors and snow. But it is a world that is generic and without detail. 

It is clear that this relatively blank slate of a world was intentional and the intent was for the players to build their own world in which the frozen city resides or transport it to an already existing world of their choice. Or McCullough simply wanted to leave a wide open world to freely add expansions too. This would be less of an issue if the core book came with rules or systems for fleshing out the world more in a manner along the lines of the Five Parsecs from Home or McCollough's own Rangers of Shadowdeep.  

Expansions and Support

In short, Frostgrave is well supported by its publisher and has been since its first edition launched in July of 2015. There have been over 10 main line expansions published since Frostgrave's first edition was released in 2015 as well as several novels. Thankfully, the core game changed relatively little between editions and all of the expansions released in the first edition are compatible with the second edition. 

Just some of the many expansions for Frostgrave.

Many of the expansions, like Thaw of the Lich Lord or The Red King, add large multi-scenario campaign story arcs to the game, while also introducing new enemies, treasure, and spells. Other expansions focus in on a theme rather than a campaign. Fireheart is an excellent example of this. It's theme is constructs and it adds a whole system for building constructs, as well as construct focused mechanics and elements for almost every aspect of the game. It even includes a mini five part campaign about the wizards infiltrating a palace of constructs. 

It is clear from examining the supplements that any given player's Frostgrave experience is going to be heavily dependent on what expansions their group decides to introduce into their ecosystem. 

Conclusion and Recommendation 

In summation the core Frostgrave book is an excellent product, albeit one lacking in flavor, with a simple yet tactically deep game system and the basis for a good campaign experience. I would recommend it if you are looking for an excellent fantasy skirmish game. However, if you are looking for a fully developed world right out the core book to play in or a system for creating scenarios, you may wish to look elsewhere, or pick up some of the expansions to tailor your experience.  

Introduction to the Eclectic Dragon's Horde!

Welcome to the Eclectic Dragon's Horde!

What is this blog?

The Eclectic Dragon's Horde (EDH) is a blog where I intend to post a variety of things from throughout the table top role playing game (TTRPG) space, the writing and creativity aids sphere, fantasy and science fiction art, and a smattering of other things that catch my interest. Additionally, I want to write up and share TTRPG session summaries along with world building progress and notes. Finally I plan on engaging here with whatever community develops in a positive manner.  

To further refine this and to give everyone a quick preview of some of the topics coming up, in no particular order, here is a truncated list of things I plan on writing reviews for: 

• Into the Cess & Citadel, by Alex Coggon and Charles Ferguson-Avery;
• Into the Wyrd and Wild, by Charles Ferguson-Avery;
• The Grim Harvest and Other Tales: An Into the Wyrd and Wild Compendium, by Corey Capps, Michele Lee, Doug Levandowski, and Sarah Orr Aten;
• The Vast In the Dark, by Charles Ferguson-Avery
• Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, by James Iles and Douglas Santana Mota
• The Story Engine, from storyenginedeck.com
• Lore Master's Deck, from storyenginedeck.com
• Deck of Worlds, from storyenginedeck.com
• The Nomicon, by Matt Finch
• Tome of World Building, by Matt Finch
• Tome of Adventure Design: Revised, by Matt Finch
• Along with many, many more books and adventures I have in my collection!

Why do this?

I am writing this blog because I want to improve my skills in the following areas: Game Mastering, world building, creative thinking, and writing. One of the big goals I have is to refine my writing voice with an eye towards developing a voice divorced from the mundane corpo e-mails I write now. 

How often will I post?

Posting once every two weeks is my goal but I realize life gets in the way sometimes, so while it is the goal I am not going to kill myself trying to achieve it.