RPG REVIEW: Amazing Heroes by Martin Lloyd

To give you a quick summation of my feelings about Amazing Heroes (from 2021), consider the fact that I'm on record (probably many times) moaning about my inability to cope with reading large PDF files, being an old geezer who thinks books should be printed on paper.

Then consider the fact that I made the effort to read - and make notes about - the 131-page PDF file of Martin Lloyd's new Amazing Heroes superhero roleplaying game; quite possibly the largest PDF file I have read from cover-to-cover.

Recently Kickstarted into existence, this is Martin's reimagining of his original kid-friendly, introductory, roleplaying system, Amazing Tales, but targeting a slightly older demographic.

Geared towards playing superhero characters (although the freeform nature of the game allows for a great deal of flexibility), the style of play encouraged takes its inspiration from superhero TV shows (particularly The CW ones), such as Flash, Arrow, Supergirl etc, while still drawing on the lore and tropes of comic books, of course.

Expanding on the very simple rules at the heart of Amazing Tales, Amazing Heroes is - in a nutshell - the perfect distillation of the core elements you need for a rules-lite, narrative-led superhero campaign.

Rather than explaining, and cataloguing, every possible superpower, such aspects of the game are left to a combination of player creativity and gamesmaster fiat.

Characters have a handful of attributes, and powers, each allocated a die type.

All checks in the game are player-facing, however if a player fluffs his roll in, say, a combat situation, he doesn't automatically get hurt, rather the situation "escalates", meaning it gets worse for the hero and his colleagues.

Straight off I will say that while I absolutely love this approach, as it addresses a lot of the problems I've had, personally, with overly mechanical superhero roleplaying systems in the past, it's not going to appeal to everyone.

Power gamers, people who talk about "optimum builds", and those who welcome characters that need spreadsheets to keep track of, will be scratching their heads at the bare bones nature of Amazing Heroes.

It's about as far from my own traditional, old school, comfort zone as you can imagine, and yet the primary function of the simple mechanics is to encourage interesting story creation at a fast-pace, without the necessity of constant rules-referencing.

To me, this seems perfect for a game seeking to emulate the biff-bam-pow of superhero comics, TV shows, and movies.

The freeform, storygame, approach of Amazing Heroes means the gamesmaster will often be flying by the seat of their pants, but with creative players the story is also very unlikely to run afoul of a crunchy ruling.

It does require the players to buy in to the superheroic world that they and the gamesmaster are creating, but with the right ensemble, of any age, I believe great things are possible.

The whole book is gorgeously illustrated in full-colour, with the player's section of the rules taking up the first 23 pages, followed by about 22 pages of GM advice (ranging from pacing and villain creation to guidelines on awarding experience so that player-characters can grow through the campaign).

The rest of the book covers the default setting of Storm City, on America's west coast, a plentiful array of example villains, a collection of story hooks (tied to different areas of Storm City), and then two adventures.

When you read through Martin's sample setting and the fully-fleshed out adventures, you can immediately grok the fact that you don't need pages and pages of stats and description to run an exciting and inspirational scenario.

Amazing Heroes is available to buy in POD or PDF from Drivethru.

Move Over Frieren Friday, We're Heading To Maul Monday

THROWBACK THURSDAY: My Life and Humanoid Ducks In Roleplaying Games

Part of the reason for my passionate support for Darcy Perry's wonderful DuckQuest roleplaying game - and why I backed several of his anthropomorphic duck-related miniatures Kickstarters - stretches right back to my earliest days of gaming.

In the late '70s and early '80s the bulk of my long-form (rather than random one-shot) gaming was with Gublin, a friend who lived five doors down the road from me.

Although created for a specific Dungeons & Dragons adventure at our local gaming club, my enduring character from those days was a female half-elf fighter/cleric/magic-user called Staghind, who enjoyed a storied adventuring career, before becoming a queen of her own nation and retiring.

At some stage in her life she adopted an anthropomorphic duck called Quincy as one of her many children and he taught her Quack Fu. Or she was taught Quack-Fu by a master and then she adopted Quincy. My memory from those days is like Swiss Cheese!

My ideas about humanoid ducks were entirely shaped by reading Steve Gerber's bonkers Howard The Duck comics, rather than RuneQuest (which officially introduced ducks into the roleplaying consciousness).

This is also why I have a copy of this issue framed and hanging on the wall in our lounge with other key comics from my years of collecting and reading. 

Not just because of the incredible impact it had on me as a nascent comic book reader, exposing me to the gonzo possibilities of the medium, but also for the influence it had on me as a fledgling gamer.

Whilst my anthropomorphic duck gaming ended rather abruptly with Staghind's retirement, the concept endured with the help of one of my mum's delightfully random fandoms.

Once I was of working age (and writing nonsense for the local paper), my mum somehow became a massive fan of the late '80s kids cartoon Count Duckula, so I used my salary to ensure she had an extensive collection of VHS tapes and annuals (as that was the only merch available at the time).

These days duck characters can be found roleplayng games such as Dragonbane (from Free League Publishing), where they are called "mallards", and Twilight Sword (yes, this was a deciding factor in me backing this game).

In the latter game the duck kin are also known as "mallards" and were available, in print form (as a set of cards), as an early bird sweetener to entice backers to get the ball rolling on the crowdfunding campaign.

I hesitated and missed out on this bonus "kin", but understand it will still be available to all backers as a PDF. I can't NOT have ducks as a playable race in my version of Twilight Sword!

The Only Live-Action Avatar I'm Interested In

After a bittersweet victory saving the Northern Water Tribe from the invading Fire Nation, Avatar Aang (Gordon Cormier), Katara (Kiawentiio), and Sokka (Ian Ousley) regroup and set off on a mission to convince the elusive Earth King to aid in their battle against fearsome Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim).

Their journey to the impenetrable city of Ba Sing Se, home of the Earth King, is treacherous but also fruitful — Aang discovers Toph (Miyako), an audacious young master of earthbending, and convinces her to help him add earthbending to his powers of airbending and waterbending.

But even the city’s mighty walls cannot keep the Fire Nation’s forces at bay. Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu) continues his quest to capture the Avatar — made even more difficult by his status as a fugitive traitor from the Fire Nation, and a nagging conscience that makes him question whether he is on the right path.

Even worse for our heroes, his formidable sister, Princess Azula (Elizabeth Yu) now joins the fray. But the most dangerous enemies of all may be those unseen, for soon the Avatar and his companions will learn: Nothing is as it seems in a city of walls and secrets.

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.

Moving House Never Went THIS Bad!

“Our house, our neighbourhood, our whole street has moved."

The End of Oak Street only in theatres and IMAX August 14.

After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighbourhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings.

Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, The End of Oak Street also stars Maisy Stella and Christian Convery.

CAMPAIGN AUTOPSIES: Will I Ever Learn?

Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash

When the Tuesday Knights came into being I was the de facto gamesmaster, running a deliciously vanilla fantasy campaign in my homebrew setting of Tekralh.

However, I don't feel my gamesmastering chops really began to take form until May 2014 when Pete handed me the reins of his nascent Chronicles of Cidri campaign.

Pete had been running this, for a few months, using the old The Fantasy Trip rules, but I updated that to a retroclone of the system, Heroes & Other Worlds.

I have to confess that the mechanics were rather too "dice pooly" for my liking, but they really worked well in the context of our campaign.

I ran Cidri for the better part of three years, building up to a delightfully OTT apocalyptic climax.

This campaign remains my personal gold standard, a target I now wish to aim for again - and hopefully excel - when I'm finally allowed to return to the head of the table.

The Tuesday Knights' membership has changed a lot since those days, we've lost some people and gained more members, which means tastes have changed as well, but I still feel these "revelations" hold water and I really should adhere to them.

I wish I'd had the foresight to conduct an autopsy on our Cidri campaign when it wrapped, dissecting my thoughts on why it worked, but I think I was just basking in the adulation of my players... and so it never crossed my mind to attempt the kind of surprisingly perceptive analysis that I had with these earlier efforts that hadn't worked out.

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights, but this time with a new rules set (Twilight Sword) and a superficially-familiar fantasy setting.

This will actually be my fifth or sixth attempted campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with my previous games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a large dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horses mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY I: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naïve dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s.

Almost from the start things went wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes had changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire!

I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

SHADOWDARK: I only ran this for one session. The players told me afterwards that they loved it, but something about it just didn't click with me.

At the time I was working on my overcomplicated Frankengame monstrosity of assorted houserules all stapled together with my own ideas from decades of gaming.

As it happened, "my" system and Shadowdark shared some similar ideas. It's just Shadowdark did them more elegantly, more streamlined. So I should have been happy!

To this day, I have no idea why I bounced off of Shadowdark so hard, when - upon initially reading the rules - it felt like such a perfect fit for my style of gamesmastering. 

However, I'm glad I didn't drag this game out and euthanised it before people got too invested in the campaign.

MORAL: If you're going to kill off a game, kill it quickly.

KNIGHT CITY II: Last year - before the osteoarthritis in my back knocked me off my feet for more than six months - I started a new V&V campaign (this time with some houserules to avoid some of the issues we'd encountered mechanically last time).

I provided the players with pamphlets before hand introducing the setting and - hopefully - suggesting the style of game I was hoping for.

But, once again, it didn't take long to realise that we had four players all pulling in different directions. This meant, for instance, that the opening scenario - which should have taken one or two sessions to wrap up - was heading into its fourth month when I had to retire from the field.

At its core, the problems with this iteration of Knight City were exactly the same as before, even though the make-up of the group at the table was different.

Superheroes are such a broad genre that they can mean diametrically different things to different players, no matter how well you think you've spelled out your personal vision.

And a central element of that clash of ideologies lies at my own feet. Over the decades (I've been reading comics since I was a wee nipper, and a collector since I was a teenager), my personal beliefs about what makes a good costumed crimefighter have become so embedded in my psyche that I'm not only unable to clearly explain my "vision" (surely everyone else sees superheroes the same way, right?) but I get frustrated when my players don't automatically share the same "vision"!

Just because it's a beloved reading and viewing genre for me doesn't mean I can run it as an open-ended, forever campaign. In fact, I'm probably too emotionally invested in the genre for me to brook any deviation from my perceived "one true way".

To top that off - again ignoring my mistakes from previous failed campaigns - I'd gone full "Game of Thrones" on Knight City and obsessively detailed every borough, with hundreds and hundreds of locations. Most of which, the players bypassed when creating their character backstories. 

It's almost as if I'd totally ignored every single misstep I'd made previously as a gamesmaster and was trying to crash on regardless.

MORAL: Learn from your past mistakes. Pick a game genre that everyone understands.

Supergirls Just Wanna Have Sun

When an unexpected and ruthless adversary strikes too close to home, Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, reluctantly joins forces with an unlikely companion on an epic, interstellar journey of vengeance and justice.

Supergirl, DC Studios’ newest feature film to hit the big screen, will be in theaters worldwide this summer from Warner Bros. Pictures, starring Milly Alcock in the dual role of Supergirl/Kara Zor-El. Craig Gillespie directs the film from a screenplay by Ana Nogueira.

RPG REVIEW: Hero Kids by Justin Halliday

With the beta release of Twilight Sword drawing ever nearer, I thought I'd share some of my old reviews of "simple" roleplaying games that I really liked... to see if there is any commonality, anything that I might be looking out for in this new game that I'm investing a lot of hope into.

We start with Hero Kids, from 2013.

As the cover states, Hero Kids is a "fantasy role-playing game for kids aged four to 10", and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

The print edition, a compact little digest-sized book, is basically divided in two with the first 40 or so pages explaining the very straight-forward rules and the balance of the book being made up of single-page pre-made player-characters and monsters.

Although the rules are very simple, using only basic math, they are clearly intended to be read by the designated adult who has decided to introduce a group of youngsters to our hobby.

As well as the rules there are some brief pointers on issues to take into account on how running games with young kids are different from the normal 'adult' gaming environment. These are neither patronising nor preachy, just a sensible reminder that some things we take for granted in our games may not be appropriate for youngsters.

After a bit of scene-setting - giving the characters a base of operations and a reason to hang out and adventure together - the book cracks on with explaining how combat works.

The initial level of the game is geared towards combat, to get the players used to the idea of working the dice, co-operating with each other etc

Characters - as well as monsters - have four statistics (melee, ranged, magic and armour) rated on zero to three dice (this game, sensibly, only uses six-sided dice).

These are then rolled in opposed checks.

Characters also have a special ability, some of which are triggered by the actions of friends, other allow multiple attacks etc (for instance, one character, a female hunter, has long hair she can as a lasso to drag monsters closer to her).

All attacks (generally) cause one point of damage, with heroes able to take three strikes before being knocked out (again - kids game: no killing!).

The rules are scaled so that as the players become older, and more confident, additional twists can be brought in to keep gameplay lively and varied (such as introducing skills and exploration).

There's a short section on creating player-characters from scratch - rather than using the pre-made archetypes - and while the allocation of dice for statistics remains straight-forward, the rules are very vague on giving character's special abilities and skills.

The best thing is, obviously, to crib them from the pre-made characters, but then you might as well stick with the pregens.

Written by Justin Halliday, and published by Hero Forge Games, the core rules book of Hero Kids is available in print or PDF format. The PDF comes bundled with an adventure (which includes character cards, stand-up counters to represent the player-characters and their foes, and a grid map to enact the adventure on) and a number of other adventures are available (all with maps and counters, I believe).

The book is gorgeously illustrated with hero and monster art by Eric Quigley, which has a very 'easy-on-the-eye' smooth cartoony/anime style about it.

This eye-candy carries over into the game's great use of props - the stand-up markers (easily cut out and assembled) and the large, gridded maps for movement and combat- which means the players don't have to contest with the "theatre of the mind" elements of the games that some of us older kids play. It gives them something to relate to and means they can see where their characters are and get a better understanding of what's going on in the adventure.

Hero Kids manages to model the core aspects of more adult games in a very simple fashion and looks like the perfect game for young wannabe gamers.

Of course, the most crucial ingredient is finding a patient, and creative, adult to explain the rules and then guide the kids through their first foray into roleplaying.

Justin also has a blog dedicated just to Hero Kids, which sadly doesn't seem to have been updated for several years, but was worth keeping tabs on for the latest developments in the game (e.g. there's an expansion on the way with more heroes, more equipment and the addition of pets for the characters).