RPG REVIEW: DuckQuest by Darcy Perry

Cover art by Jon Hodgson

Picture a game that mingles Marvel's Howard The Duck and Rocket Raccoon, with the adventures of Usagi Yojimbo, Stan Sakai's rōnin rabbit, and a dash of Disney cartoonery, then pepper it with humour akin to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.

Now you'll have an idea of what's to come when you leaf through the pun-packed pages of Darcy Perry's DuckQuest: Quack Starter Edition (from 2021).

Initially created as an adjunct to one of Darcy's Kickstarter campaigns for the wonderful, often anthropomorphic, miniatures he produces through Star Hat Miniatures, the game is now available for the general public to purchase as a gorgeously illustrated 64-page PDF (click here).

Back during the Kickstarter, Darcy explained the genesis of DuckQuest:

"Unlike other games where ducks are relegated as side-kicks or comic relief, imagine they're the star players; the heroic explorers on an epic adventure. It's an idea that didn't go away. The more I looked around, the more I noticed that ducks got a raw deal. Something had to be done. So combining the need for ducks to be represented in a better light and a lifelong dream of writing my own fantasy heartbreaker RPG. I took the plunge and dived in!"

Mechanically, DuckQuest is an ultra-lite and streamlined d20 game (the core mechanic is essentially roll a d20, add a stat, score over a Target Number), with a freestyle magic system (that still retains some simple mechanics to rein in overzealous players), and a wonderfully Tunnels & Trolls-like method to condense monster statistics to a minimum.

Although the book's fluff skews towards the players taking the role of ducks in the game, there's nothing stopping them from playing crows, cats, dogs, squirrels, turtles etc

Emphasising the science-fantasy leanings of the game, the A-Z of 26 suggested character backgrounds (their 'quackstories') even embraces cyborgs, time travellers, and stranded spaceship pilots.

After picking a quackstory and a suitable name, character creation primarily involves allocating one to five points between the five QUACKtributes (Quickness, Ugly, Arcana, Cool, and Kismet), determining physical (Heart) and mental endurance (Psyche), adding in some quirks (which are largely for flavour and roleplay prompts), and then sorting out what equipment you have.

The Dramatic Universal Cosmic Kudos System (DUCKS) core rules (light as they are, but with a basic scenario concept of "quests", often involving killing monsters and stealing their stuff) are certainly evocative of the 'old school'.

However, there's also strong elements of more modern narrative sensibilities in the rules, such as starting objects in a character's possession being colourfully named but their exact "crunch" being down to player suggestions and gamesmaster fiat.

An example of the game's gorgeous
and idiosyncratic art

Employing all the main polyhedrals (even up to a d30), DUCKS includes a small number of simple mechanics - such as dice steps and exploding dice - that tick all the right boxes for this fan of funky dice play.

With a core mantra of "it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to make fun", a great deal of emphasis in the book is put on a group shaping the game and the default setting of  Aqualoonia (if they even choose to set their campaigns there) to their own whims.

To be honest, beyond the evocative place names on the map, and occasional bits of lore dropped in along the way, Aqualoonia is largely a blank slate for players and gamesmasters to fill in as they see fit.

For instance, some of the breadcrumbs scattered through the text send my brain racing off towards the world of my beloved Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve's literary masterpiece, so that's another avenue my imagination could explore through the funhouse lens of DuckQuest..

The core game book also contains a delightfully inspirational page of "duck cryptids", compiled by legendary games designer Jennell Jaquays. These are folk tales and ghosts stories of the feathered folk that can work as delicious background matter and plot hooks.

DuckQuest, full of fowl humour and loving parodies of pop culture, is not a game to be taken seriously.

That said, it is a fully-functioning roleplaying system with enormous campaign potential thanks to its easy-to-grok "levelling up" rules and bulging bestiary of killer critters - ranging from tiny mushroom men to kaiju-sized monstrosities that would give Cthulhu a run for his money.

Given the solid framework that Darcy has created, DuckQuest is also primed perfectly for hacking, should you come up with a house rule or two on the way to conjuring up your own campaign.

Isekai? It's Narnia Business!

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界; transl. 'different world', 'another world', or 'other world') is a sub-genre of fiction. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, webtoons, anime, and video games that revolve around a person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe, with or without the possibility of returning to their original world.

Portal fantasy, also called portal-quest fantasy, gateway fantasy or crossworld fantasy, is a plot device in speculative fiction, particularly fantasy fiction and science fiction, in which characters enter a self-contained fantasy world through a portal, typically within a quest-based narrative that focuses on exploring and navigating that world. Portal fantasy works typically feature protagonists who enter alternate realities, explore unfamiliar landscapes, and encounter distinctive characters. Overall, portals in speculative fiction act as catalysts for narrative movement, worldbuilding, and thematic exploration.

With a new vision of C.S. Lewis's Narnia coming to Netflix at the end of the year and the fact that I am listening to the BBC radio play adaptations of The Complete Chronicles of Narnia, I'm entertaining different approaches to hooking players into any future fantasy roleplaying setting I conjure up.

Given that the current hot contender for "game du jour" is the upcoming video game and anime-inspired Twilight Sword, I can't help but be drawn to the concept of isekai (see the definition above if you're not au fait with the term) - although I don't know if it would be appropriate for that particular game (on the other hand it is baked into Break!! as a core character concept).

But, more specifically, my current travels in Narnia have got me wondering about the idea of "child adventurers".

I know these days this is a much more common concept - thanks to the ubiquity of Stranger Things, a whole heap of anime, and RPGs like Tales From The Loop and Kids on Bikes -  but it's an idea that takes me back to the early days of Steve's Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the 1980's, where a core concept was you play "yourself with superpowers".

You didn't roll random numbers to generate your statistics, but rather you and your fellow players 'graded' each other on a scale of three to 18 for the the primary stats of your characters, then you generated random superpowers and bingo! That was how the Acrobatic Flea was born.

But, of course, the big difference between superhero roleplaying games and Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy adventures is that supers games are generally skewed towards keeping the player characters alive, where as dungeon delvers tend to be fragile, little snowflakes when they are just starting out.

There is a long literary tradition of "child adventurers" - in fact many of my favourite books have juvenile or young adult protagonists (e.g. Philip Reeves Mortal Engines saga, The Wizard of Oz and, of course, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland) - but literary tropes don't necessary work as written in a roleplaying format.

I like the idea of "Earth" men and women traveling to an alien world (e.g Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter books), as it means you don't need to explain everything to the players beforehand and they can explore the world as they go along, and I have no qualms about tooling up imaginary child characters with swords and bows, but what are the logistics of such a starting point?

How would I go about generating statistics for the player-characters? Would the players play younger versions of themselves (as per Villains & Vigilantes) or roll new characters? How would players, particularly those who were parents, feel about putting (fictional) young characters in harm's way?

Philip Reeve Takes Us Back To The World of Mortal Engines

Philip Reeve, my favourite author, returns to his incredible World of Mortal Engines next February with Bridge of Storms, a sequel to the last year's fabulous Thunder City.

On a futuristic Earth prowled by mobile cities and airships:

Tamzin Pook and her group of unlikely fighters-turned-friends have managed to make it out of Thorbury alive. Now with a massive, terrifying, armoured, and un-dead Revenant (and its pet kitten) as one of their gang.

For their next mission, Tamzin and her friends head to the city of Museion to help save it from the ferocious predator suburbs that surround it and keep it trapped in the mountain valley known as the Frying Pan.

Here, Tamzin, Max Angmering, Oddington Doom, and Hilly Torpenhow are in for the toughest fight of their lives. But as they battle for the fate of Museion against the terrible predators that surround them, people on board Museion start to die one by one from a traitor within.

They've got to figure out an escape, but every direction looks like a trap.

Featuring an evocative Ian McQue cover, Bridge of Storms is due for publication, by Scholastic Press, on February 12.

On his blog, Station Zero, Philip has also revealed that a third book in this current series has already been written and will, hopefully, be published in 2027.

BOOK REVIEW: Thunder City by Philip Reeve

I realise I'm a bit late in getting round to Thunder City, Philip Reeve's latest book set in the World of Mortal Engines, but the wait didn't dampen my appreciation of this amazing book.

For me - and I love all the books in this world - this was the best since the 2001 original, Mortal Engines.

Thunder City is a vivid - and surprisingly violent - ensemble action-adventure about a plucky group of rebels trying to retake an usurped traction city in the far-distant future of a reshaped Earth.

A postmodern Victorian scientific romance, peppered with sly jokes (the one about a certain tourist attraction in Paris made me laugh out loud) and cinematic references, as well as the usual rich assembly of engaging and interesting characters, Thunder City was a blast from start to finish.

The ending certainly leaves the door open for more stories about the protagonists and I just hope we don't have to wait quite so long for our next visit to the World of Mortal Engines.