I bought this title because I heard good things about this being a solid little one shot, and after one read-through I was hooked. The setting is incredible - bleak and depressing, but with enough life and colour to allow the islands themselves to play their own part in the shaping of the story. The characters were well described in both appearances and mannerisms and it made roleplaying them a breeze. I ran this using the Call of Cthulhu 7th ed ruleset so I can't comment on their balance for Trail, but their conflicting motivations and secret knowledge made for some incredibly tense and epic encounters. The clues were plentiful but not in your face obvious as what to do next - I found the players always had something or somewhere they wanted to go and the action never really faltered over the course of the scenario. While I am aware you can do this in 3-5 hours, our group ended up taking around 14 hours as they got engrossed in the story. Take your time with this one if you have that luxury. We didn't use the pregens as they came in the box but we took the most interesting parts of some of the characters and used that for the basis. I would have liked to have seen more female PCs but the male ones can easily be gender swapped if you have more than one woman at your table. Keepers, make sure you read through the whole scenario and prep properly for this as the PDF is a little bit scattered and there are mentions of various NPCs, scenes and locations in places you may not expect to see them. The editing could do with some work but don't let it deter you as this is an incredible scenario well worth the asking price.

P.S. we actually recorded our playthrough of this as part of our actual play podcast The Fumbled Anthology, so if you want to listen to a playthrough first before purchasing, you can do so!

The greatest tabletop role-playing adventure ever penned.

I generally agree with Vincent's review from 2011. Laws presents a system of terms and symbols for tracking story beats, whether the narrative is moving towards hope or fear, and illustrates the use of them through close readings of Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No. I enjoyed those close readings in themselves. But several things struck me as odd about this book; it's missing quite a lot I would have expected.

The first thing that struck me as odd is that several times, Laws points out that the relative intensity of a story beat is very important. Yet there's nothing in the terms or symbols to reflect that.

The second thing that struck me as odd is that Laws never explains what is the point is of analyzing story beats in this way. He occasionally refers to the fact that a narrative has a lot of downbeats, or that there's a series of downbeats interrupted by an upbeat. But he doesn't really discuss what patterns to look for, merely implies that we ought to be looking for patterns.

The third thing is, he doesn't really explain how to apply this to role-playing games. In most role-playing game systems, there are mechanics to introduce uncertainty into the narrative, and what is uncertain is precisely whether the outcome will be a downbeat or an upbeat.

In the game system FATE, for instance, players can accumulate FATE points when they experience significant downbeat outcomes, and use those points to make an upbeat outcome more likely. So there's a pattern of failures leading to an ultimate success. However, this pattern is baked into the structure of FATE; it's probably obvious to most people that players would most enjoy a game in which the characters have setbacks but win in the end.

Arguably, Laws's system would suggest that a GM should adjust the difficulty of different challenges to make success or failure more likely, given an understanding of patterns of upbeats and downbeats in classic narratives and the significance of those patterns. So the lack of direct discussion of patterns of beats, and the effects of those patterns, is what is most obviously lacking from this text.

It's as if a literature professor told you to make a note of syllabic stress patterns in Shakespeare's plays, but never mentioned iambic pentameter, or the significance of when he uses it and when he doesn't.

The system is swift and flexible, and gives the player quite a bit of agency if the GM understands the mystery, and how the different scenes can branch off each other and respond to the player's interest. I was able to quickly improvise responses when needed. The game experience was much more satisfying than I had expected a one-to-one system to be!

Such a wonderful game. If you like high-powered heroics in the style of Conan or Lies of Locke Lamora, this is THE game for it.

The system is masterfully tuned for its specific genre and tone, and the author does a great job of explaining it.

The city of Eversink is really unique and brimming with adventure hooks. Hell yeah!

Mutant City Blues is a very clever implementation of the Gumshoe system for investigating superheroic crimes. Imagine a mash-up of Law & Order and Heroes (without the writers strike).

The super powers any single person can have are subject to scientific rules, according to something called the Quade Diagram, so you can logically reason out the powers of suspected perps—it worked surprisingly well in the starter adventure provided in the book.

This is a very niche game, however. I would only recommend it to groups who watch tons of police procedurals. As GM, I had all the rules of evidence and probable cause (the TV versions, at least) in my head, but I was shocked to learn that this was not in fact universal knowledge.

Highly recommend if you have the right group.

This is a short and sweet adventure that can work either as a one-shot or as the starting point of a longer campaign. It does everything it needs to do: a short intro to all the different aspects of the rules, the setting, and a very moody adventure that gives you a great idea of what the game is about, while short enough to be played in about 4 hours. Definitely worthy.

I feel like the rules are poorly explained and I had trouble using them. There are also lots of spelling mistakes that can make some of the information harder to parse. There are some good tools in there, but I was disappointed overall.

Very good book enjoyed it. Noir. I like the main character and the monster was cool.

13th Age is a game I've really enjoyed running, though I haven't had the chance to try it as a player. It does a great job at combining narrative and gamist elements without bogging down into bloat. Some of the concepts seem a bit heavy-handed at first, but when you get past the moderate learning curve, they become very easily internalised. I've read comments online that there aren't many viable character builds. Personally I haven't run into that problem yet, so we'll see. In any case, if you're looking for a game with excellent combat and a powerful narrative system, 13th Age is worth taking a look at.

Thoroughly enjoyable story to read and run. Exactly what I was looking for as an introductory adventure. Well set out, good ideas of skills to use. Nice story you can edit to fit your own needs. Generally great all around. I wish Pelgrane would release more like this, like an Arkham detective tales they did for trail of Cthulhu. But for this system. Please do more.

I'd only ever played a single one shot of a GUMSHOE game prior to picking this up (Night's Black Agents), and found the system to not be to my liking, but oh man has Swords of the Serpentine turned me around. This is one of few systems that I actually think I'm more excited to run rather than play, cause of how much excellent guidance is packed into this book. The adversary creation system is robust enough to handle a ton of ideas, and the implimentation of traditional and social combat is really exciting for fast but meaningful conflict. As someone who runs a lot of one-on-one and two player parties, I love the attention payed to scaling character power levels, and the freeform magic. Eversink as a seting is wonderfully fleshed and feels fresh as someone who has been playing RPGs for over a decade at this point.

I can also see the base of this system being easily hacked to run more traditional D&D fantasy, but if you're a sword and sorcery fan, this is perfect as is. I'd love to see this system get all the love in the world, expansions, more adventures, further setting books!

The indispensable companion volume to the 13th Age rpg. If you play 13th Age you want this book. The "no one true. way philosophy really shines here but it is pure gold. that can only make your game better

What a great application of the GUMSHOE system. As a GM who is frustrated with many games at this time, this game provides a great new way to play fantasy games. The setting, the artwork and the maps are all top notch. Most rpgs deal with social combat and reputations poorly, but this game with the GUMSHOE system, allows for games of investigation, intrigue... Truley Amazing. To anyone who has not read the new rules, soo many things can be done with manuvers, I was worried about how it would deal with combat. I am happy to say, the combat is great.

Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/08/100-days-of-halloween-lilith.html

Continuing my mini-dive into Lilith in various games.

Lilith

This book is by RPG luminary Ken Hite. It is only nine pages but it presents some background on who Lilith is including her "Herstory" (look if you don't know who Lilith is and why "herstory" is FAR more appropriate than "history" then I can't help you.)

We get an overview of her time in Babylon. A bit on the Burney Relief (the cover takes its cue for that) and how they are working under the assumption that it is Lilith or Lilîtu. (Personally, I like the idea that it is Ereshkigal.)

After this there are sections on what Lilith is doing in various Pelgrane Press games like Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists, Mutant City Blues, and the Dying Earth RPG.

Wonderful concept.

The zip file comes with PDF, MOBI, and EPUB versions of the book for ease of reading.

There are very few historical characters you could do a product like this with, so I really admire this choice.