This is one of those games that's fun to play and inviting to write extra modules for. People talk about using it for GM prep but to me it's really its own thing, something for a doodly afternoon or two. I've tried playing with more people but I feel it just gets bogged down that way.

There are cards available for purchase, but I have hand-made cards instead, with extra monsters and villains copied off the wiki.

Shawn Tompkins went above and beyond on this crowdfunding stretch goal, and made something even better than Starforged.

This is going to be a negative review. However, I want to preface it by saying I had a lot of fun. I just feel like there are a lot of sticking points in the game for me, and I know that those sticking points could have been designed out. The prompts are long -- one page long. They generally consist of two parts, the broad part and the narrow random table(s). So they're offering the player a choice between a very vague prompt (for example, "you steal an arcane secret") and a very concrete option off a random table (for example, "you steal the detailed description of a ritual lost to time, which you are now unwilling to act due to its dire cost"). This sort of option sounds like a good idea, letting the player be as creative as they feel like; but generally speaking the vague prompt is too vague and I want something in between the two. Before I dig in further, let me explain where I'm coming from here. I think Thousand Year Old Vampire as a game has many similar goals to Lichdom, and gets things right in many places where Lichdom does not. TYOV has short, evocative prompts which ask similar sorts of leading questions and aim for a similar level of despicable actions from the main character. But as I say, they're short! They pack a lot of punch for their size and hit that perfect balance between abstract and concrete. The main axis I'd like to compare TKYOV and Lichdom along is how the games approach tying existing threads back into the narrative. Lichdom advises the player in the intro to tie threads together whenever possible. The game itself throws random stuff at the player, and it's essentially up to the player to decide that the noble mentioned in one card is the same person who they blackmailed in another. The only mechanic in Lichdom that explicitly ties events together is at the end, when the player relates the several Secrets of the Universe together in order to become a lich. TYOV has at least three mechanics for tying threads together. First, prompts will say "A character..." which always means, pick a living character from your character list or make a new one if you have to. Similarly, it can say "a resource" referring to your resource list or "a memory". These explicit connection points to past events are great. (Lichdom already has character lists, so this kind of approach would work In the game as-is, they're only used as a mechanical response to prompts, sacrificing a friend in order to avoid calamity.) Secondly, in TYOV every thing that happens gets placed in one of five "memories", forcing the player to relate events to one another (or if they don't, forget old memories as a consequence). Third, TYOV structures its prompts in a clever way, having them change when you return to the same prompt (ie, you go to part b or c of the same prompt). The altered prompt can of course reference events set up on the first visit, allowing for continuity. Arguably a fourth mechanic is the ordering of the prompts. TYOV prompts know approximately how long you've been playing, because you start at 1 and you add and subtract dice rolls. This lets TYOV get away with assuming you've killed someone and have regrets by prompt 15 or so, and assuming by prompt 30 or so that you'e lived many centuries at this point. TYOV is its own game with its own mechanics of course, and I wouldn't force a complex memory system or multi-part prompts into Lichdom. However, TYOV gets a lot more continuity. And the thing is, I end up caring about the prompts. Lichdom has some good stuff in its deck, don't get me wrong. But there are a few reasons I'll draw a card and not be very interested in figuring out what happened. The 2 thru 5 of each suit are "events", which explicitly don't mechanically matter. From 6 up, cards have various mechanical effects. By focusing on satisfying their assigned role, the prompts inherently only do one thing. Contrast that with TYOV, which might have a prompt ask you to "if you wish, leave a Character for dead to gain a Resource" or such. Most prompts have both a mechanical consequence and a narrative one; and these mechanical consequences always generate narrative, since they interact with the character list and resource list. And they easily slide in decisions that mechanically matter. And, they get away with all this despite being very short. Playing Lichdom, I have to flip back to the beginning to see, for example, how Scheming and Scrying works. TYOV embeds the rules within each prompt, and manages to get more out of it despite the prompts being shorter. Not that Lichdom's mechanics are bad. When I say "get more out of it" I'm referring to getting narrative threads to connect and getting me to care about how each prompt affects my character. Again... I had fun. Lichdom is good stuff. When I find myself not caring about a prompt, I just have to ask myself why and remind myself to tie the fiction together more. It's just that when I do ask myself why, I end up realizing just how clever TYOV is, so I thought I'd share.

This is a cool setting well suited to the concept of the game. It's also very flexible, leaving us an infinity of "prime worlds" which are left undescribed, the option of bringing in extra planes, minor planes and plane shards, and leaving the actual history of the 'verse shrouded in rumors too. Oh and each major plane, being itself infinite, contains an unknown number of additional divine beings and/or races of people.

But I do think the book ends up a little light, especially on description of the city Sig itself. Being a crossing point between the planes, Sig has the potential to be a truly amazing city, a distillation of what it means to be metropolitan; the archtypical city on a scale beyond even what China Mieville's books do. And there are some nice descriptions of what that's like, at least in broad strokes. But we are given only 4 major districts, each with a bare sentence of description; nothing on the key politicians and community figures within the city.

Sig is an ever-changing place, whose very rules and appearance shift when planar alignment changes. Players can roll the initial planar influence randomly, or choose from 5 suggested "common combinations" given names like "The City of Secrets" (planes of Wind, Freedom, Dreams), "The City of Power" (Flame, Destruction, Lore) etc. But here again I would have liked a little description; what were they picturing that made them call that combination the City of Secrets?

Also - and this last point isn't really a complaint - the book sometimes took the approach of listing evocative names without saying what they mean. For example we're given a full page of various job categories common in the city, some of which are less than self-explanatory (what's a bloodwatcher?). And we're given names to two or three shard planes, and a handful of otherwise undescribed races and peoples from the Plane of Earth. I would have liked that approach for more things. Each plane could have used a list of other races, places and Powers (godlings, deities, whathaveyou).

So - overall, a very cool setting, which cries out for more worldbuilding, in a good way, but also kind of in a bad way.