Mythras Classic Fantasy Imperative

I loved Mythras, this is probably the best mechanically designed d100 rule sets in the double-zero gaming hobby. The original hardcover's font was too light and too small for my eyes, so the game never got played. The newer releases thankfully address that, and we have full ORC licensing of the rules, so it is a win-win for the community. The "Imperative" books are the ORC-licensed ones, and they update the key parts of the rules, make improvements, and bring the system forward with patches and fixes.

But the books still rely on the older volumes, and this is especially apparent in their Classic Fantasy line. We have the new ORC-licensed Fantasy Imperative, which instead of Bronze-age role-playing is the more familiar Middle Ages to Renaissance period. So, to play Classic Fantasy...

We need the original book, since the treasure tables for lower level items are here.

There is an expansion book, too, with the Classic Fantasy Expert Set.

Now, we are in the ORC era, so we need Classic Fantasy Imperative.

And there is a new book (in the ORC era) with more rules updates in the Classic Fantasy Unearthed Companion. I get it, they need to sell through inventory and they are a small company, and it is tough to survive unless you can ship already-printed products. You also want to update rules and get the licensing issues worked out for third-party support. The earlier books have font issues and are hard to read.

To be fair, if you are starting today, base everything on Classic Fantasy Imperative to start, and pull select things from the older books. Pull in fixes from Unearthed as you need them, but use Imperative as your "core rule book" for play. The Imperative books have solved the typeface issues, so they are solid, but not 100% complete.

Mythras is sort of a similar issue, where the older hardcover is still referenced, you have a number of expansions, and you have an ORC-licensed Imperative book that should serve as your "core book" while the other books are the ones to pull from.

I would love to see "one book to rules them all" from this system with a complete reference of all material. As it is, we have books under two licenses spread out over several books, with the latest ones being the definitive and patched sources. But this is still one of the best implementations of the d100 fantasy gaming rules, and many still say this is the set of rules to play by.

Black Lodge Games has recently put out The Cults of Zahak, a mature-themed (yet still tastefully done) book of evil cults and Diabolism for any d100 system, such as Mythras Imperative, Classic Fantasy Imperative, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, or Basic Roleplaying. Yes, I had to edit the cover there since this is an all-ages blog, but the art is still not terribly salacious.

The book is sort of like the old Book of Vile Darkness, but done much more tastefully and presents evil cults and a sample campaign setting they exist in. This is a detailed "bad guy" book, explaining the evil cults in detail, their powers, how they corrupt and operate, and gives a wealth of detail and NPCs in the setting - some to trust, and many you wonder who's side they are on.

BoVD was more "emo evil" and trying to be extreme for shock value, so it was a bit juvenile "look at this" feeling for my tastes. Zahak is far more mature and far less salacious, and is more mature in a metal state of mind than it is presenting "raw nekkedness" for shock value. The art is mostly all public-domain classical pieces and beautiful, with some newer commissioned works of equal skill and beauty.

I have not seen an "intrigue and darkness" setting done so well, with plenty of figures to interact with, random encounters they can appear in, and the players need to figure out why the terrible things happening happened and who is responsible for them. The cultists can employ plenty of misdirection, so they could lay blame on an innocent, so careless players who jump at the first evidence could be acting on the wrong information and punishing the wrong person.

A terrible, yet strange, accident could happen (like something out of the Omen movies), and the players could investigate, the inquisitors could be there, innocents could be blamed by cultists trying to misdirect, seemingly innocent people could be feeding both sides false information, cultists will be setting up more accidents or turn monsters loose on the investigators, and there could be corruption within the ranks of the inquisitors trying to confuse the entire situation.

The players need to be crafty, sneaky, use their heads, make notes, find inconsistencies in statements, and use their heads to figure out who is on what side, who can be trusted, who is being falsely accused, and who the guilty are. All while trying to survive being attacked and set back every step of the way.

For very character-driven mysteries in a fantasy setting against cults of darkness, there is no better book than this. this is almost like a book that could setup a very cinematic game world and adventure that feels like a movie. This is not your ordinary "5E adventure" with keyed locations and CR-appropriate combat encounters. This is a thinking person's book filled with darkness, corruption, and intrigue.

This is great fantasy role-playing campaign material, and provides a unique campaign rife with opportunities for interaction, investigation, and combat without needing a lot of the "fantasy monster and dungeon tropes" - but you could still integrate those for a more fantasy flavor. Rarely have I seen an evil faction book done so well and laid out.

Mutant Epoch

Mutant Epoch is another fantastic d100 game, and this one is a post apocalyptic game with so many d100 charts each one is a rabbit-hole waiting for you to roll a result on it and be pulled father down into the options. The best part about d100 system is the design freedom that allows designers to create wonderfully massive random tables, and control odds and probability to a tighter extent than a d20. You can put an overpowered 1% option on a table to be rolled every blue moon, and it won't destroy the game. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses a d100 very effectively in this regard for many of its tables.

This game has characters of nearly infinite variations, and each major type has a "complexity level" the designer rates it at, so beginning players can gravitate to the easier and more straightforward character types, and advanced players can dig into the meat of the harder classes and character types. There is something for everyone, and that "design complexity" that makes for a long-lived game is baked into the rules.

Game play-wise, this is classic Gamma World on radioactive crack. You do not know what character you will play, their background, or current situation. You could start out with a war-cyborg with a fusion gun, or an indentured farm worker wearing shackles with no shoes and a wooden spear. You really don't know, and you make the best of your starting situation and become a hero no matter where you begin.

The game world builds through its character creation process, much like Traveller, but to a far greater extent since it defines your starting position, equipment, situation, and role. If Traveller went this far, you would be rolling, on an exploration mission, crash landed, on a planet of hostile aliens, working in a local bar, never allowed to leave, with no equipment.

Go.

This is the ultimate "anti pet character" game. You are not endlessly redesigning your idealized "you" or your favorite "online identity" in this game. I swear, self-insert and these over-protected pet characters damage our mental health, we create such a fake persona for us to live in that our real self is seen with disdain and scorn, and we begin to hate ourselves in comparison. My life could never live up to "idealized me." I swear if there is one thing that makes me leave the fantasy genre entirely it is this culture of self inserts and identity gaming.

Identity branding damages mental health. Putting yourself in the game, seeing yourself as an extension of your game identity, or living this "fake life for real" makes who you are inferior. All you will have left in the end is who you are, not a game's version of you. Love who you are. Not a paper character sheet version.

Who you are and what you get are random in this game. There is zero chance you self-insert. You need to deal with what you get. The story organically happens from there. Every new campaign start is a challenge, and you could be playing a series of characters who constantly get killed, but creating a new one is so fun that you do not care.

Mutant Epoch is the best post apocalyptic game on the market,. easily beating out classic Gamma World and Mutant Crawl Classics, and I still love the latter one since it is DCC-infected madness.

Highly recommended. 

Call of Cthulhu and Folklore

Another granddaddy of the d100 dungeon genre is the amazing Call of Cthulhu. Though this is not a dungeon game, it is technically a horror game, there are moments when haunted houses, lost crypts, caves used by cultists, abandoned estates, trails through a twisting gorge, and wandering through the woods seeking a missing person all quality as a "dungeon" in a sense.

I love that this game keeps the traditional "monsters of folklore" in the game, with a warning against mixing genres, allowing us to tell classic horror stories from the original comics of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the issues before the Comics Code that got creepy. These are non-Lovecraft monsters like vampires, mummies, werewolves, ghosts, and other things that go bump in the night. They aren't the gentrified D&D versions meant to sit in a room on top of a treasure chest of 5,000gp, but terrible reflections of humankind's fears and weaknesses.

I love the game has such a large tent and includes these classic creatures, as this post-Lovecraft era is just as important to the horror genre as Lovecraft's works. They are not as great as the classic mythos, but their influence on the genre is just as important. Also, I feel these comics and stories are forgotten these days, and it is important to revisit them to rekindle our imaginations and place these monsters in proper context.

D&D has this tendency to make us culturally stupid.

Let's head to the 5.1 SRD. Oh, werewolves are not a threat, CR 3, 58 hp, AC 12, bite attack (+4, d8+2) or claw (+4, 2d4+2), and DC 12 CON save versus lycanthropy. Lycanthropy can be cured with a remove curse spell, a 3rd level spell both wizards and clerics get. By the time you encounter lycanthropes, you likely have this "required spell" and it is never a threat. Weak. Werewolves suck.

That block of stats is fake. All of D&D's monster stats reduce the primal myth into a "video game sprite" to rub against you in a rogue-like video game and reduce your character's health bar. Our fears, the ones embedded in our DNA, are reduced to a few numbers that trivialize them and make them jokes.

I keep telling people the D&D monster stats are garbage and should never be put on a golden pedestal. I take a lot of heat for this. People love using these stats and converting them into other games, like they are some sort of authoritative source. 

They are not.

They are just one game's "video game-like" view of these folklore monsters. They are reductive, multiple generations removed from the original source, and put the monsters somewhere on a "monster challenge list" that players progress through in the video game to reach maximum level.

D&D is not an authoritative source on anything, and this goes from zero-edition all the way to five-point-five. It reflects a specific video game played on the tabletop. It is not a great source of information on folklore or some book of rules for how to live your life. D&D is one game, nothing more.

Go back to the original sources and make up your own mind. Read the classics, instead of these modern-day fifth-generation muddled and confused reflections. 

A mummy in a classic comic or movie from the 1950s could take dozens of bullets from a group of gangsters with tommyguns, pistols, rifles, and pistols and keep on walking towards them.

In the Call of Cthulhu rules, bullets only do one damage (maximum) to a mummy, and the referee could rule no damage at all for smaller calibers. The folklore is intact. Somebody at Chaosium understood this, and we also can rule zero this.

The mummy is something to fear. The cops walk in and find a dozen dead gangsters and tons of shell casings, and nobody knows what happened.

That is my mummy. That is the real lore. That is true horror and fear.

Palladium SDC Games?

Okay, are the Palladium SDC games, and I mean everything except Rifts, d100 games? Should they be covered here? Why exclude Rifts?

Rifts is power gaming and a massive game, that is easily dozens of books and out-of-scope of a fantasy blog. It is an amazing game, but I am currently "of Rifts" and not collecting the books. I had a Rifts habit in the 1990s, and I don't really want to go back. Plus, I find the Palladium SDC games to have the game play and balance I desire, and they don't have MDC causing one-hit-kills everywhere.

I like games that are realistic and down-to-earth. The Games that do not have MDC are a great collection of games, and every one of them is a classic. Ninjas and Superspies, TNMT, After the Bomb, Palladium FRPG, Dead Reign, Beyond the Supernatural, Nightbane, and even Heroes Unlimited are all incredible games.

While Palladium games use a d20 for combat rolls, all the other skill rolls are d100. This technically makes them d100 games. I have always saw them as more d100 based, since most of game play will involve skill rolls, and combat rolls are sort of done on the d20 to speed play. The game also uses d4, d6, and d8 dice, so this is more of a polyhedral game, but those, again, are used mostly for damage rolls. Plus, it gives us a reason to use all our dice.

Still, this feels like a d100 game at its heart. But given the other dice and that d20 in combat resolution, it is hard to call this a pure d100 game. I am on the fence about this, but this is still a great game, along with all of its SDC counterparts.

That, I suppose, is a maybe. Depending on the hits of this post will determine if it gets coverage here.

The fans decide. 

Unboxed: Against the Darkmaster

Saved from garage storage is Against the Darkmaster, admittedly, a solid game, and a d100 Rolemaster and HARP adjacent game of Tolkien-style adventure, although in this game, the "Darkmaster" is randomly generated and has a different plot to destroy the world each time. I never seem to get a chance to play this, so I put it in storage. Since my d100 games are coming back to my shelves, I decided to add this to the fun one that I play and shelve it alongside the others.

AtD is a d100 game that did Kin, Culture, and Vocation long back in 2016, when 5E was still in its floundering phase and everyone was still playing Pathfinder 1e. I guess you steal from the best. This game was so far ahead of its time it is not funny.

And the art beats most old-school games to this day, it is amazingly consistent, beautiful, striking, inspiring, and amazing in every way. the only game that compares to this in regards to art is ACKS II. Too many games these days pull out that tired, AI-looking, Supercuts dyed hairdo, no-helmet, Steampunk-adjacent, too modern, cosplay art that is pure visual garbage. Games should be beautiful and inspire us to play them.

I have too many games that are "passable" and "at least the art is unoffensive" that do not meet the mark. Into the donation box you go. I have higher standards these days.

AtD is a visual delight in comparison to today's games. Never change.

Like Rolemaster and HARP, this is a classic homage to the days where if we wanted Tolkien, we played Tolkien and ignored D&D, Vampire, Rifts, and all of the 1990s games. These days, Tolkien has moved on to a new set of rules and publisher, but we still have this and HARP and AtD, the original and classic games.

Sorry about keeping you in the garage for a year, I had to get over a 5E problem. The problem with 5E is that we have to keep telling ourselves we can make it into something we really want. Most of the time, what we really want will be found in other, better games.

Against the Darkmaster is one.

It took a while to learn to stop lying to myself, but at least I came around. 5E will never be the best game for anything, it is the McDonald's of tabletop gaming. We keep having to tell ourselves, this is the best we can do, we have no other choice, when better options are out there and waiting for players to pick up the torch.

There are better games. Be brave enough to give them a chance. 

Rolemaster Core: Creature Law

This is new since we last met, the Creature Law I book is out for Rolemaster. The creatures are designed using the game systems instead of being guesswork (in previous editions), so a lot of different. Some are mixed on the changes, but in general, I like designed creatures that are consistent and the numbers worked through and solid. I get why "guessed at" creatures feel better, since those were massaged with play testing and years of use. So in a way, these are a fresh start.

There have been recent formatting changes with the title too, which caused a few negative reviews. So if you have an earlier edition, please update and see if that fixes the problems some reported.

I still have this game out, it survived the last garage push, and it sits along RM-FRP and HARP on my shelves. I don't have a hardcover for this title yet, since that has not been setup yet, but I am eager to get one once all the issues are ironed out and the updates made.

Rolemaster survives into a new era! And I can't wait for the second volume of this book to be released.

Basic Roleplaying

Basic Roleplaying is every bit of a playable game without the "game design work" some claim this game needs. The most "game design work" you will need to do is deciding what optional rules modules to include. The vast majority of the work will be like any other generic game, in picking a setting and establishing the game lore.

If you want a 3d6 system that covers any time or genre, play GURPS.

If you want a d100 system, play this.

I admit, I am a huge fan of GURPS for these sorts of games, but the Chaosium d100 system is a strong second, and gives me that instant Cthulhu vibe. GURPS also has the advantage of having done a ton of research with its source books, so for historical gaming there is no equal to the 3d6 generic gaming champion.

One place I see this game doing very well in is the Pulp and Noir settings that are Cthulhu-adjacent. Why not use Call of Cthulhu? Well, with this game, there is no pressure to add any of those monsters into the game, as they are not in the book. This game would be excellent for a Gangbusters recreation, World War II spy thrillers, and 1950s detective stories.

Another area this system would do well in is the modern era, serving as a role-playing engine for spy and espionage games from the 1960s to today. BRP could easily for any James Bond or Mission Impossible adventure imaginable from any era of the franchises, and cover the ground that other games in the genre covered, including Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes and the Top Secret game. Since both Top Secret and the 007 RPG were d100-based games, BRP would feel right at home and replace those systems easily.

Another area this game would do very well in is with 1980s and 1990s action movies, Vietnam war stories, adventure TV shows, and commando style movie and TV games and books. Rambo, Commando, The A-Team, Baywatch, Platoon, Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Chips, Full Metal Jacket, Able Team, Mack Bolan, and many other films, movies, books, and other adventure stories are easy to run using BRP, and they retain that d100 feel that fits these games so well.

And d100 characters can be made quickly, by hand, and far easier than GURPS. The toughest part of character creation is picking skills, and that is just allocating a pool of points to different profession skill picks. BRP gets you playing instantly, without needing to mess with advantages, disadvantages, skills based on difficulty, and character designers.

If you are selling a quick idea to a group to play "Something: The Roleplaying Game" and your players are new to BRP and GURPS, like they are coming from 5E, I would choose BRP in a heartbeat. There is a reason Call of Cthulhu is the #2 role-playing game in the world (by a huge margin), and it is because of the ease of which players can pick up d100 mechanics.

BRP is a pure, pencil-and-paper, universal role-playing game with no software required to play.

It is a winner. 

We're Back, Redux, Again

I like my d100 games, and in the latest round of garage reorganizations, I pulled them out and I am working on space to shelve them. I enjoy these games too much to store them away, and I want them back.

The big losers this round are 5E (except for Tales of the Valiant), Shadowrun, Mechwarrior, Pathfinder 2, and a bunch of other games I don't have time for. I may come back to them, or I may not.

The big winners this round are my OSR games, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, my 2d6 games, my d100 games, and a few others. GURPS and Dungeon Crawl Classics are solid and staying on my new display-style shelving.

Specifically, Runequest brought me back, again. This game is not that large, and I was only missing one book to have a complete set. I ordered that and I will be back in these lands and exploring. Runequest has this established lore, and it has not been invaded by the stereotypical nu-fantasy tropes, planar beings, or all these 5E variant lineages. Runequest has a wonderful set of its own, established within lore, each with a wonderful lore and history, and the game isn't constantly porting in new things.

Runequest is diversity, history, homeland, plus culture, and that is the perfect mix.

5E is "bland options galore, all the same" like fruity pastel marshmallows in a breakfast cereal. It is lazy diversity with no world, talent, place, sense of home, culture, history, or effort put into it.

It is good to have Elemental Lords as a race, right? What do I do with them? I dunno. Where is their home? Greyhawk? The Forgotten Realms? I dunno. Did they come here from the planes and are looking for a home? I dunno. Corporate wants them in here. They are in the setting.

Sure, "use your imagination" is how they are intended to be used, but I can buy games that do that work for me and give me a higher-quality experience. I can read about them, learn about them, live in their culture, and think about how it would be to play one of them in the campaign. Runequest did the work. D&D doesn't, and to be fair, many games don't. Even some of my OSR games.

ACKS II is an exception, that game is an amazing OSR game that does put in the work, and it covers a similar bronze-age world like Runequest. There is something about these myth and legend games that is a step above the generic pseudo-Renaissance fantasy slop we get these days.

With all these generic fantasy games coming out, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, Cosmere, D&D 2024, Nimble 5e, and so many others - they all feel like they are treading the same ground. Everyone is doing this cosplay fantasy genre, and one game can't be told apart from the other. The only difference is the type, number, and size of dice you roll. Many of them are Powered by the Apocalypse clones with different dicing and narrative mechanics.

Runequest?

That is its own thing.

That is what makes it special.