by sdonohue

Ancients of Gaia is a 2020 release with an update in 2025 from Frontier Gaming. It was written, edited and illustrated by P. G. Harrington.

Presentation
The game is presented in a 73 page pdf, but several pages are unnumbered (mostly art and chapter headers). The background information is primarily in two-column format, while the bulk of the book is a single column. The font is large and clear and the book is readable.

Theme
The game is set in an alternate history of the Bronze Age. Characters are adventurers and citizens of the realm who go adventuring to seek personal growth. It is a time when city-states are a growing power and character's can make a name for themselves in a variety of ways depending on their skills and focus.

Characters
Characters are defined by their Axiom, which is similar to a class and provides some unique abilities. The Pragmatist believes in direct action as a way to solve problems, the
Gnostic relies on their own knowledge to choose a path, and the Savant pursues an agenda known only to them. Each axiom grants one starting ability and then additional abilities cost experience to unlock. Characters also start with a single Aspect, but may learn more as they gain experience. The aspects are mostly based on elements of the natural world: Sky, Sea, Land, Heart, War, and Underworld. Each of these grants the character a magical ability and the opportunity to learn more about their current aspect or to add a new aspect with experience.

The game also uses skills and these are in four groups: Magical, Combat, Personal, and Technical. Characters choose the groups they focus on; the Primary group gets 8 points, the Secondary gets 6, the Tertiary get 4, and the Outside group gets 2. Within the skills, the numbers matter: 1 is Novice, 2 is Initiate, 3 is Practitioner, 4 is Learned and 5 is Zenith. Starting characters can't have more than 3 points in any skill.

Once a character has their Axiom, Aspect, and Skills, they need a name, background, and equipment. Equipment and weapons are described in tables and each item has a cost in shekels as well as some special abilities.

System
The game focuses on a fairly common roll vs. difficulty. Characters roll 2 six-sided dice then add their skill and equipment bonuses. If they meet or beat the difficulty (typically set by the GM), then their action succeeds or Passes. If they roll double the difficulty they have an extreme pass, and if they roll double 1s, they have a blunder. An extreme pass means they achieve the desired effect and get a bonus. A blunder means something bad happens to them.

Characters have hit points based on a wounding track and on a successful hit, a d6 is rolled and a table by weapon type determines the damage and any other effects.

When characters succeed on a check of any type, they receive experience for their effort. The system tracks experience in each skill category and most character improvements require an expenditure of experience points of the correct type.

Playing the Game
There isn't a lot of information on playing the game. The GM is reminded several times that they should work with the players to ensure everyone is having fun. There aren't really any suggested adventures and the GM section devotes more space to suggestions for creating weapons, armor, equipment, and NPCs than it does anything else.

Evaluation
There are a lot of grammatical and vocabulary errors in this book. Affect & Effect seem interchangeable and illicit vs. elicit are also confused. Capital letters are also odd, with many words capitalized with no clear reason. In places, it feels like a word has been replaced with a fancier but inexact synonym. There are other strange errors too, like the table of contents goes from page 12 to 48 in one column, then back to 13 in the other column. The book seems to have lifted sections from the author's previous work. The book uses Morningstar several times and it's nonsensical until you realize the author also wrote Morningstar: The Triumvirate Pacts; it's not a reference, it seems to be an artifact of the previous effort.

The book was updated in 2025 and I can't help but wonder if it was tossed into an AI generator with instructions to expand the page count and use fancier words. No proof of course, but it feels like that could have been part of the issue.

As a system, it's nothing special 2d6 plus skill isn't unusual. It could probably used less exposition on weapons and armor (about 14% of total page count) and more tips on playing the game. The storyteller's section is about 3 pages and includes one page on creating new weapons and armor.

I guess it's lucky that there are about 15 published adventures; maybe they'll provide an idea of how to play.

A new episode has been added to the database: 63. Delta Green: A Victim of the Art - Pt 1.

A new episode has been added to the database: Declassified Q&A 4

A new episode has been added to the database: Troika! Two-Fer After Action Episode!

A new episode has been added to the database: Round Table Episode 57-59

A new episode has been added to the database: Agents of DAMNED C2E51: Medium Bar Brawl

by bryce0lynch

By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A. Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Levels 2-3

They can’t see you. They don’t need to. A colony of blind, grotesque predators has infested an abandoned temple deep inside a canyon. They hunt by sound. They move in packs. And they’re starving.

This thirty page adventure uses about fourteen pages to describe seven rooms. Obviously long-winded and padded out, you kill a few monsters. Also, it’s not dark.

Oh lop-sided page count, where have you been? I’ve missed you. Look, I get it, PDF pages are “free”; you’re not paying to print them. Why not put in a bunch of appendices, and lead in, and backstory, and everything else? It’s free! Academically, I agree. But, in practice, what I see time and time again is a poor adventure with a low “core” page count with a whole lot of extra information. While a bit hyperbolic, one must ask oneself, is the designer interested in writing an adventure or ar they interested in world building and the adventure is just a pretext for that? Again, I don’t care if you world build. I don’t care if the page count ration is one adventure page per one hundred pages of backstory. But if you’re selling me an adventure then it had better be a ROCK. FUCKING. SOLID. Adventure. And it almost never is. The designer is distracted by the fluff. They spend their effort there instead of in the core adventure text. What pops out the other end is just another crappy adventure surrounded by a bunch of backstory and appendices. Who would like to guess if this is in the one in a thousand adventure in which there is a lot of fluff and a solid adventure? We all know the fucking answer already. You have to AGONIZE over the adventure text. It should be the best possible, that you are capable of (… ) and more.

Ok, so, we’ve got some eyeless creatures in a cave. There’s a long backstory here about bandits, a holy order, orcs, and so on but all that really matters is that there are eyeless creatures in a cave. They hunt by sound. This whole “shrieks in the dark” thing doesn’t really matter. They can use a sonic attack, but the party is never limited on light. So, you’re just stabbing some monsters in a cave. The central conceit, of these creatures who can hunt without sight, is never capitalized on. We get long monster ecologies (in fucking italics …) who nothing about them putting out lights, etc. So, you’re fighting 5HD orcs in a cave that have a sonic attack.

Room descriptions average a couple of pages each. There’s no need for that. Nothing that interesting is going on. “The disc was collected by the Shrieklings along with other debris from the caverns and has no special significance to them.” Great. You want me to etll you about the pile of shit I collected this morning? It has no bearing on anything, so why not? Backstory, meaningless trivia. Overexplained things. “The Shrieklings’ thick, mucus-coated skin produces a scent that naturally repels the barracuda, allowing them to swim and hunt freely.” Explanations on ecology. Great. That’s not coming up during play, so it’s a great thing it’s in there clogging up the descriptions (as my aforementioned shit this morning may have the toilet?) These are simple rooms with simple interactivity that are just padded out in what amounts to a wall of text. Bullet point up the main issues, but if the bullet is half a page then what’s the point? Sixty some words to describe “+4 to move silently when within 15’ of the waterfall.”

The designer notes that this is inspired by the a Dungeon Design Framework. Monsters have patterns and routines, etc. There are a couple of charts to help with the monsters wandering patrol paths. I’m not saying they are wrong, but they are poorly done, not noting the creatures locations. Just dots and blips that you must then interpret and expand on. Hooks are all “you are hired to “ nonsense. And, in particular, the claim that “Inside, you’ll find tightly written areas built around meaningful encounters, and systems that keep the dungeon active between player actions.” would not be true. Tightly written. Meaningful encounters. I think not.

This is likely the last Cubas review, joining Mohr, Filbar, Elven Tower and the rest.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. Meaning nine pages of background/fluff/intro and one that starts to show the first room. (There’s another full page of room one info.) Take a look at that Gannt chart like thing. The blue and reds could be handled much better to show current location, not moves.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563481/c-c-shrieks-i...

by bryce0lynch

By Pat_Sagor
Pat_Co Productions
Nimble/OSR
Level 3

In the heart of a volcanic wasteland, the Tower rises amid fire and ash, a slender edifice of stone. Its citizens never leave the Tower, and keep their mysterious traditions out of sight from the outside world. But they have gained immense wealth trading wondrous artifacts extracted from the depths below the Tower… Outside the Tower, Baron Hugues DeMort’s massive army has been laying siege for over a month. Unable to breach its impervious gates, frustrated and desperate, he has devised a plan to infiltrate the Tower, and he just heard of a group of adventurers that are brave, capable, and … expendable. The perfect team to send on a probably suicidal mission!

Greetings Green Level adventurers! Friend baron has a new, fun, and exciting adventure for you! This fifty page adventure describes about twelve scenes inside a gigantic tower/city that is under siege. The party travels through a rigid caste-based society that really be in a 70’s social commentary scifi movie instead. Follow the script, stab the bosses and then … win?

Ok, so, Baron von Evil is laying siege to the massive tower city and sends the party in through some lower cave/tunnels to get to the city gates and blow them up with the bombs he’s devised for you to carry. You get in and find a massively caste-based society. The tower/city has four levels. The lowest, black are the workers, then the level above has the red managers, then the golden enforcers and judges above that, and then the white intelligentsia above that. We’ll let you decide if Black=Worst and White=Best has any meaning here. Anyway, it’s right out of a scifi movie and, in fact, this probably should have been a Gamma World adventure but, then, of course, it wouldn’t sell any copies at all. Ok, so, anyway, you’re in this city on the lowest levels. You gotta get ahold of some levitation bands to Ascend through the central shaft. Along the way you meet rebels, learns about the rape of an 8 year old by a cop, and find out that hte whites are not white, they are all really just one lich in charge of everything.

The designer kind of knows they’ve written a railroad and has some words on advice on how to make it not a railroad and more interactive. There are some very basic maps of the city regions, but, ultimately, the adventure comes down to the twelve or so scenes/events that make up the plot here. You’re in the tunnels and then watch some cops kill a couple of citizens just minding their own business. You watch an Ascension, where citizens are promoted to the next color up. You meet a rebel and then get arrested by the ol “four more show up every turn” trick. Youre in the middle of the Barons army invading the tower, you boss fight Golden Centurion Marigold 1 (that’s one of the tower peoples names. Like I said, SciFi) who covered up the rape of the little girl. Let’s see, one of the lich’s victims telepathics you, and then you fight the lich. Let’s see … have I bitched about rape yet? Of a child? Why are people putting this shit in their adventures? This is supposed to be fun. You know what’s not fun? Child rape. People just seem to toss that shit around the way they toss around Hitler when arguing. Maybe give it a rest and find something else for the cops to cover up? Maybe Soylent Green is people. That’s fun. Can you imagine? People love it. They riot over it. And it’s actually people. And, notably, not child rape. (and murder! Don’t forget the murder after the child rape.)

The adventure gives you a list of NPC’s, a list of scenes, and a list of locations. There’s a decent number of summaries and background information as well, but, really, it is the people, places, and events that drives this.

Well, I say people drive it, but it tends to be more of a “Guest Star of the Week” kind of the thing. You get an NPC in a scene or situation and then you’ll be lucky if they continue to show up. Thus there is a relatively large number of named NPC’s, each with decently long NPC descriptions. Those descriptions are fairly well done but at some point you’ve got to ask yourself why we have so many people. You can’t possibly form a bond with any of them, not in the amount of time they are showing up. There is supposed to be this underlying theme pr regression, rebelling against order, blind adherence to order and the neutral observers to it all that is handicapped (Let’s see the judiciary enforce their decisions when enforcement power belongs to the people they are ruling against.) And then, of course, ultimately the entire system comes from corruption at the very top, the farce of the liches leadership.

We’ve all seen a lot of liches. Party liches, grim liches. We’ve got a master manipulator here, that shows up a couple of times in public ceremonies impersonating a “white,” Possessing, really. And he has some tells. He raises his hands to his face and says “Actually …” a lot. There’s a fun little gimmick to get the party wondering, This is just slightly farcical and one of the better parts of the adventure.

Looks, it is essentially a railroaded scenebased adventure. The designer tries to help it not be that with some locations and a tad bit of free will, but that’s what it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is, I suspect, how the vast majority of people play D&D, some derivations of scene based with a lot of hand-waving. Not my favorite type, but I get it. If you’re gonna have scenes then lean in and write a scene based adventure. If you want your location based adventure to have events then dump those in. This adventure never fully commit to either and is the worse for it. Devo says you need to Sartre this baby up! This needed to be all events/scenes or a location based adventure with “secrets” to discover and a few events thrown in.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggest price of $1. The preview is eleven pages and gives you a good cross-section of different aspects of the adventure. Good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563227/the-tower-for...

A new episode has been added to the database: Gangs of Neo Galaderon - Ep. 5: Hammer N' Circuits

by Rachel Carpenter

The print & fold tuck box for the Lincoln's Cat PNP has been replaced! Huzzah! As requested, there's now a finger indent on the back of the box. It wasn't that hard to do and will be on future print & fold tuck boxes moving forwards :geek_grin:.

The new rules sheet for Elements has also been posted and the WIP thread's been updated. You can check out the changes here: [WIP] Elements (1p, 2-10 min, mostly in-hand, deck management game)- 2024 9-Card Nanogame Print and Play Design Contest entry (Coming soon to The Game Crafter!).

Work continues on the real tuck boxes (still finding my way around Component Studio) and the new print & fold tuck boxes for Elements, Eight Elephants, and Pumpkin Spice & Everything Nice are nearly done. Whew. Getting there.

Happy Thursday and happy playing!
-Rachel

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A new rpg item has been added to the database: The Forgotten Throne

A new rpg item has been added to the database: Shadow Delves #2: On the Ledge of My Seat