Armchair Reviews: Devil's Gulch for the BRP system

I posted a quick listing of various Western RPG books a while back, but here's another one that just recently came out for the Basic Role-Playing System.

Devil's Gulch does double-duty as both a setting book and a genre sourcebook, and given a page count of only 92 pages, that's a tall order.

It delivers both, sufficient to kick off a short Western campaign set in Devil's Gulch for a while.

On the genre sourcebook end, it provides an all important one-page listing of various aspects of the 'Code of the West' in the Old West -- measure a man by what he is today, not by his past; never try on another man's hat; give your enemy a fighting chance, etc. It's great at evoking a real sense of the times and climes of that almost mythic era.

It also gives various character professions that add on to the other more normal (time-period appropriate) professions for the era -- with a particular 'weird west' bent to them. I particularly like the snake oil hustler and the hexmaster, though the medicine man is also a welcome inclusion as well.

As a setting sourcebook, it gives a respectable number of locations in Devil's Gulch that are easily extractable to your own setting if you wish. Each location has a map, a statted-out NPC or two if appropriate, and a short but detailed description of what if found within, along with telling details that reinforce the western feel of the setting. I enjoyed little things like the lists of supplies that can be found in the general store, and how easy fires can be started in the dry, almost-entirely-made-from-wood buildings of Devil's Gulch.

The NPCs are also memorable, worthy of stealing from when looking for a random NPC walking the streets to liven up the session.

That interior art is consistent and distinctive. It's not really a photorealistic approach, but a moody, evocative, slightly cartoony feel -- kind of like the art in the Weird Western comic book The Sixth Gun and the art in Alan Moore's League of Extra-Ordinary Gentlemen -- that captures and evokes the weird western feel quite well.

If you're looking for something to expand your Weird West collection of materials, or have been hankering to run a Weird West campaign using the BRP system, this would be a fine addition to your sourcebooks.

I really wish there could be more, but in a market that may not have that much call for too many Weird Western books, this is a strong entry to test the waters with. Hopefully folks will buy it -- especially at the current less than $10 price.

If you want to look at a series of posts I did on the comic book I mentioned above (The Sixth Gun) and what things can be mined from its pages, here are the links:

Inspiration: The Sixth Gun
Mining the Sixth Gun: Weapons of Dark Purpose
Mining the Sixth Gun: Monstrous Men
Mining the Sixth Gun: The Strange and the Familiar
Mining the Sixth Gun: Friends and Posses

Armchair Reviews: The Laundry RPG

The Laundry RPG is based on the series of novels, novellas, and short stories by Charles Stross that detail the adventures of "Bob Howard" in a setting that mixes espionage, office bureaucracy, math, computer theory, geek culture, and unspeakable gods.

Now, since I like the series, it stands to reason that I'd be predisposed to an RPG set in its milieu.

However, I have to say that I also like the RPG on its own merits. Here are the reasons why.

Layout

The book / PDF document has a great feel to it, as the layout has the look of a dossier of material. While most of the fonts are the same, there are 'paper-clipped' photos and annotations in different paper types and fonts to reinforce that feeling.

Writing

The style of writing is clear and clean, with a mixture of exposition and explanation and just enough of the humor and informality to be The Laundry. It doesn't dip into Stross's tendency to throw sink-or-swim bits of espionage telling detail or mathematical esoterica that work so well in the fiction, but would leave gamers screaming bloody murder.

Updated Character Creation

It looks similar to the fast character creation rules in Call of Cthulhu, and it should -- The Laundry RPG uses the same Basic Role-Playing system. However, there are some modifications and additions to that process.

Characteristic Rolls -- back in the day, there were only Knowledge Rolls, Idea Rolls, and Luck rolls that were all percentile chances based on a STATx5 formula. Now there are Effort Rolls, Endurance Rolls, Agility Rolls and Influence Rolls, also based on the same formula. I like it, because it makes attributes faster than the old method of referring to the Resistance Table (which still exists, but only for instances with opposing difficulties).

Personality Types and Assignment & Training -- in COC, your Profession determined your primary skill set. Now you have Personality Types and Assignment & Training which do the same thing, but with different rationale. This fits in with the Laundry getting people from all walks of life and backgrounds, and then shoehorning them into the org because they know too damn much about the wrong things.

Possessions -- you get some default equipment based on your work in the Laundry and your various skillsets.

Great Setting Resources

Chapters Nine, Twelve, and Thirteen give great starting background material for folks unfamiliar with U.K. government intelligence institutions and their international counterparts, and the Laundry itself, of course.

Chapters Nineteen and Twenty-One define some pretty important code words in the Laundry setting: BLUE HADES, DEEP SEVEN, GORGONS, and of course, CODE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Fifteen share some of the gear and flavor of working in an occult espionage agency plagued by modern views of bureaucratic best practice.

Chapter Fourteen is a welcome chapter, as it deals with magic. Devotees of the series know that magic isn't as per traditional Cthulhu spellcrafting goes -- there's a layer of mind-straining electromagnetic and mathematical theory on it. Here's where we get to differentiate between mathematical sorcery, traditional sorcery, and the enigmatically named true sorcery. Also, some spells that are mentioned in the books make an appearance here.

Chapter Eighteen has the statted-out characters that appear in the series, as is tradition for many IP-related sourcebooks. What is great is the inclusion of stats for generic support personnel (Plumbers, Cleaners, Baggers, and Toshers) -- unlike the more maverick and isolated cell-structures of the American-based Delta Green RPG / sourcebook, the Laundry is an organization that supports its personnel as much as it tortures them.

Overall, a great book! I just wish that the PDF had a better set of bookmarks.

Armchair Reviews: Laundry Files - Agent's Handbook

And here's another review of an RPG sourcebook -- Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook, a sourcebook to The Laundry RPG.

Let's get this out of the way first: Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages; Stenography is the process of writing in shorthand. While it could be argued that very very few write in shorthand these days and would constitute a hidden message, it is an incorrect (though understandable) misuse of the term.

I hope it gets fixed (if it hasn't already been addressed) as soon as possible.

Anyway, Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook provides a wealth of resources to Players and GMs running the Laundry Files RPG. With a lot of fluff -- filled with telling details from real-life and fictionalized tradecraft, gear, and bureaucracy -- and just enough crunch to add gameplay weight to the source material, this sourcebook will help all parties become acclimatized to Charles Stross's humorous mingling of agency politics and operations, humor, and supernatural monstrosities lurking at the edge of our reality.

Steganography issues aside, the Tradecraft chapter is a must-read. It sets the tone for an operative, and gets certain basics out of the way so that rookie mistakes and questions aren't raised in the middle of a high stakes adventure. Plus, the proper usage of terminology gets players and GMs in the proper mood.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters on Laundry Gear, Bureaucracy, and Training Courses. They emphasize the difference between this type of campaign and the typical Cthulhu-inspired campaign, which often results in scores of dead or insane characters and very few continuing PCs, and they suggest or raise interesting ways that modern technology can be combined with occult knowhow to aid in the fight against the dying of the light.

The layout is clean, and the affectation of images as 'taped on' pictures and tables as 'taped on' reports in dot-matrix printout format helps add to the feel of the setting as well.

I highly recommend this book, not just to players of The Laundry, but to any GMs interested in running campaigns in the Contemporary Urban Fantasy genre.

Contemporary Urban Fantasy, is one of my favorite genres too. I loved playing Cthulhu Now and Delta Green campaigns way back in the day, and have been intrigued other takes on the genre, from the Ghostbusters RPG, to Tri-Tac's Stalking the Night Fantastic, to both editions of Chill, to BTRC's Code: Black, to the Dresden Files RPG, to this one. I think there's even a HeroQuest 2E one out there, and I've also taken a look at the World of Darkness material for a look at how the big three monsters (Vampires, Werewolves, and Mages) are handled -- though I avoided Hunter for some reason unknown to me.

Oh by the way, The Laundry RPG is apparently powered by the Basic Role-Playing System. That means a lot of Call of Cthulhu source material can be used with it.