Flying Circus is a heavily customized Powered by the Apocalypse game about being a dashing flying ace and also being a queer as hell kid in a fantastic interwar Europe inspired by the soft apocalypse aesthetic of Studio Ghibli films. It's clearly a labor of love, with design, writing, and art almost entirely done by Erika Chappell (other artists did a handful of the pictures), and is physically a gorgeous book. I backed it on Kickstarter ages ago, and I'm quite happy with the final product. The game is fantastical, creative, and hits its themes square on. So how about we take our shirts off and play some volleyball, Iceman?

There's a lot to love about this game. The art is great, the writing has a wonderful level of snark. One of my favorites is an aside that pilots, like babies, lack object permanence, so feel free to have threats disappear and reappear as needed. The setting is eminently playable, a hostile wilderness surrounding isolated towns in the wreckage of a Great War which smashed all the nations of the world with poison gas and autonomous superweapons. Magic is real, and fae ask for cruel bargains while dragons patrol the skies. The old is dead and discredited, and the young are picking up the pieces. Flying Circuses are mercenary bands who shoot trouble and carry out jobs of relative morality. The arc of the game is divided between flying missions and on the ground drama, blowing off stress with wild parties and brawls until they burn through the good will of the locals and have to move on.

That said, this is also a solo project, and there is a little turbulence. To have an aside for a moment, my typology of RPG player motivations breaks down to Explorers, Masters, and Dramatists. Explorers want to experience a cool story, with plot twists, interesting characters, and fantastic vistas. Masters want to choose cleverly, picking the right options and tactics to crush their enemies and earn victory. And Dramatists want to experience emotional states which are risky or inaccessible in mundane life. Any pbtA game is heavy on Explore and Drama, and Flying Circus has enough new mechanics to make it at least medium on Mastery.

The twin beating hearts of the game are clearly Dogfight and Indulging in Vice. There is a whole detailed subsystem of altitude, speed, ordinance, maneuverability, and damage, but it mostly boils down to Dogfight and some ancillary moves around Dogfight. Tactical aerial combat is very hard to do well, and admittedly it might play better than it reads. I don't expect the game to break out a full X-Wing tactical dogfight subsystem, and while it seems like both maneuverability fighters and energy fighters are possible in the system, I was hoping for a little bit more depth along the lines of John Boyd's Aerial Attack Study . As with all narrative games, it comes down to the creativity and skill of the GM, which can be hard if combat is supposed to be a regular thing. The best escape from this trap are missions with a focus other than downing the other side.

Indulge Vice is one of those ideas which I have mixed feelings about. It's a core part of Blades in the Dark, where it's a d6 used to replenish a Stress track. Go over, and you overindulge with a consequence. In play with BitD, I tend to abstract out downtime more than I should, so Vice doesn't get centered properly. In Flying Circus, you get up to 5 chances to Indulge Vice, and each chance gives a flat 1d20 roll, where results above 10 remove stress, and 3 or more results below 10 results in a consequence. Removing stress gives you XP, which can be spent on advances. Since there's more involved mechanics on Vice, it's harder to skip (good), but it's also less reliable than BitD's Stress, and it's tied to advancement (bad). And from a historical note, the life expectancy of World War I pilots was measured in days. Your PCs are much more durable, in fact they won't die without explicit permission. While one of the ptbA Agendas here is to show that glory and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, mechanical support for that theme is on the lighter side.

One of the strengths of ptbA is the system's laser focus on the Conversation At The Table (caps intended). The 2d6+k system, and the outcomes for each move, structure how the game works and gets the system out of the way. Flying Circus uses 2d10+k, and there are a lot more Hold X Forwards and special cases than is typical in the genre. The system is definitely more; I'm not sure that it's better.

I had a ton of fun reading Flying Circus, and I'm definitely more likely to play it than Night Witches. If you're willing to buy into the premise, it's looks like a solid game. But there are spots where I look a little askance. And I recognize it's not entirely fair criticism, I Have Opinions About Game Mechanics and air power. My favorite pilots are the jet-propelled renegades of The Right Stuff and When Thunder Rolled, not the barnstormers of WW1. I wish I could say Flying Circus is perfect, but very good will have to suffice.

How many years have we been adventurers? Delving into darkness, slaying found fiends and retrieving treasure to increase our heroic power. Sure, sometimes we might be more mercenary murderhobos than actual heroes, but roleplaying games are about adventure. Well, not any more!

Wicked Ones is a Forged in the Dark game about being the monsters. You are creatures of unusual ambition and intelligence, ruling over a dungeon populated by lesser minions and imps. You argue, scheme, develop dark plans, and venture out onto the surface to raid and corrupt the forces of Light that are prevent you from fulfilling your monstrous destiny. As your dungeon grows, you attract adventurers who murder their way towards your sanctum. But if you survive, you'll topple the whole region into chaos, claiming it for the forces of darkness.

Wicked Ones gets a lot of points for the reverse dungeon concept, but it's also a really nicely tuned version of the FitD system. Monsters are resilient, so they clear stress and harm automatically. There's a new level of consequence, Shocked, which imposes a penalty to the next roll using the relevant ability. Downtime and the loot cycle have also been reworked to be more monstrous, and you can bank Dark Hearts to get bonus dice by playing into moments when your monstrous appetites harm you. Resistance rolls have been reworked into a static cost. In general, having read a fair number of FitD games, Wicked Ones is one of the better implementations of the system, a clear and stripped down FitD 1.5!

The book comes with plenty of material, with three schools of magic, alchemy, and goblincore mad science to flavor the usual abilities. There are four sample regions to corrupt, lots of tables of weird items and spells, four advanced monsters with powerful abilities, and plenty of incredibly stylish artwork. The tone is horror-slapstick. You're encouraged to commit atrocities, but fiction and your base appetites will implode your plans in a funny way.

There aren't many games in this vein, and Wicked Ones is a cut above. My only problem is that it came out after my Monstrous Revolution campaign was in full swing. Maybe next time!

Personally, I run hot and cold on ptbA games. I love the simplicity of the system and the clarity of design that a good execution of pbtA enforces. But Apocalypse World 1e had some rough edges and some fuzziness about its version of the wasteland that made it hard for me to see how I'd ever play it. Dungeon World is alright, but if you want to have high fantasy adventures, why not just play D&D, or 13th Age, the best version of D&D? And while Night Witches is absolute masterpiece of design, I'm never going to find another person to play it with. Comrades is the antidote to my all my problems with pbtA.

Comrades distills both pbtA and revolution down to their essences, and what remains is as close to a utopian ideal of an RPG as I can imagine. This is a game about your revolutionary vanguard, about a small band of comrades who are willing to dare everything to bring about a better world. You'll throw down with thugs from across the political spectrum, out-manuever splinter factions in your own movement, suffer under the oppressive tactics of the secret police, hear a dying comrade's last words, raise a mob, and strike a blow for revolution.

The moves and playbooks are wonderfully calibrated to revolutionary action: I especially appreciate the inclusion of a universal Start Something move to incite a mob, and the perceptive list of questions on the What's Going On Here? move to read a situation. The GM advice helps develop the ideology of the comrades, and put them under pressure from adversarial fronts, which work through a series of steps that cause the world to crumble. I particularly like the Pathway Moves, end of session rolls which describe how the comrades are advancing towards revolution on five tracks, ranging from a democratic victory at the ballot box to assassinating the head of state.

Nearly a decade on from the release of Apocalypse World, designers have a good sense of how pbtA works. W. M. Akers has written one of the best examples of the ruleset, perfectly calibrated for telling a thrilling tale of revolution, with plenty of examples on how to make the game the your own. Comrades includes a fully-fleshed out setting for Khresht 1915, a fictional country inspired mostly by the Russian revolution, and thumbnails settings for New York 1776 and Callisto 2219. You also get 10 playbooks for comrades from Artist to Worker, and great advice on running the game, and building your revolution. The visual design is spare and evocative, with well-chosen black-and-white prints standing out against a red and yellow color scheme. Comrades is inspired by the radical leftists of the 19th and 20th century, but there's not a set ideological stance in the game. This game is about anybody who is willing to die for their ideals, to fight bravely for a better world, and bring down the evil SOBs in charge.

Winterhorn is an incredible game that does for LARPs what Papers Please did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real.

You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.

Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recruits and using "bad jacketing" to destroy the cohesion of the group by planting rumors suggesting some members are informers for the secret police. At the end of the game, the seven tactics that you chose in the last round are used to create a final report drawn from paragraphs in the rules, which describes how well the group succeeded in its mission. Then you debrief and discuss the ethics of the secret police.

Winterhorn is a shining example of rules-light design. Key game information like character roleplaying notes, OOC roles, and the results of operations, are contained on playing cards. The system of choosing seven of twelve options forces the group to evaluate and select tactics, but it is possible to over-commit and blow the operation. It's a brilliant piece of game design which creates an emergent narrative without getting tied down in complex rules or props. Twelve alternate operation cards provide a smidgen of replayability, but Winterhorn is mostly a one-and-done experience. The graphic design is top-notch, with bureaucratic memos describing Winterhorn, and a samizdat zine describing the secret police. You can choose to print-and-play the cards or buy them (mine are in the mail, and I full expect them to be excellent). A brief essay on the history of subverting political enemies rounds out the materials.

With the caveats that this is a read-through review rather than a playtest review, though I can't imagine the rules breaking, and that I didn't comprehensively crosscheck the cards to see if nonsense outcomes could arise, I love this game. Education and LARPing are two flavors that should go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but making a good EduLARP is surprisingly hard. As a tabletop gamer and professor, I've been only moderately impressed with the games put out by the Reacting to the Past (RttP) consortium. RttP may beat the standard rigmarole of lectures and essays, but the game design is not particularly sophisticated, and my time in the RttP facebook group suggests that most professors have similar problems about students not reading background material, not getting involved, and the game system giving nonsensical answers about how the siege of Athens proceeds. My own efforts in this area were a near-total failure of design goals saved only by brilliant improvisation on the part of my co-instructors. So believe me when I say A) this stuff is hard and B) Jason Morningstar has cracked the code.