Fan Club “Blog” #30: Summer Reading 🏖️ pt 3 (Patreon)

How's my summer going? "Mixed bag," as we say in England.

On the one hand, I'm spending easy nights tossin' dice and crackin' jokes with some of my closest friends. On the other, I recently touched my kitchen wall and found it covered in slime.

There I was, roleplaying, when I noticed that the wall behind me looked oddly glossy. Being a man to whom little that is substantively bad has ever happened, I mashed my whole palm against it, greasing myself in something like ectoplasm. With a shriek of disgust, the players at my table were yanked out of the fictional danger we were imagining together in the game, and now real danger was coming for us in the real world

Long story short, it turned out that none of us were under threat of being sludged to death, or whatever I feared might be happening. England was just so hot and humid that when the day's breathy air entered my cool basement kitchen it was leaving condensation on the walls, and this water was reacting with something in the latex-based paint.

Or at least... that's my friends' theory. We never actually checked if the paint was latex-based, so it's still possible that I am being haunted by some kind of slippery spirit. 👻

Anyway, let's get into some more SUMMER READING. Following on from Part 1 and Part 2, you guessed it-

It's time for Part 3.

HEART: DAGGER IN THE HEART

I've spoken before of the peculiar grief of Quinns Quest. Because there are always new games that need reviewing, I can never revisit the worlds that I fell in love with.

Ordinarily, that feels like a kind of quaint, store-bought nostalgia, but HEART, which I reviewed back in Season 1 Episode 3, has recently received a couple of heavy-duty expansions. There's Ways & Means, a thick sourcebook adding enough new classes, delves, items, rules and adventures as to make you feel like you're starting the game for the first time, and then there's Dagger in the Heart, which is something neither HEART or Spire (check out my review of Spire here) have ever had! An entire grand campaign.

Written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, king of the campaign (pronounced like "king of the slams"), and with dozens of crumbly, freaky illustrations by Sar Cousins, Dagger in the Heart is... I could say lots of good things about it, but maybe its strongest attribute is that it's transformative.

HEART is ordinarily this trippy but deliberately disjointed one-way dungeon delve, right? It's like a dream you might have after breaking up with your spouse, eating an entire brick of stilton and falling asleep in a wet basement.

With Dagger in the Heart, Gareth has instead designed a plot that's a little more ambitious. The players' mission to capture a runaway digging machine is genuinely exciting. There are multiple, nuanced recurring villains working against you. The locations you travel through have more fibrous connective tissue holding them together. In fact, Dagger in the Heart actually does a fantastic job of connecting the games of Spire and HEART, and there's even a suggestion in the campaign that half-way through (and this made me grip the book in excitement) you could play out an entire campaign in Spire where another group of players try to get the Dagger in the Heart party the help they need.

And because Gareth is a beast when it comes to following a brief, all of this is achieved while maintaining Heart's signature psychedelia. Dagger in the Heart has a great many moments and locations that are quite simply enterprising in how screwed-up they are. Comparing Dagger in the Heart to the campaign of Heart that I ran for my own players, I'd say that this book is not only more consistently batshit, it also achieves higher peaks of batshittery than I was able to muster.

I want to move on to talking about other books from my summer reading, so I'll just close by saying this:

If I was running a campaign of HEART again, there's no universe in which I wouldn't run Dagger in the Heart. And if you were running HEART for the first time, you'd probably have a lot of fun buying Dagger in the Heart just to read it. Maybe you'll choose to run it, maybe you'll just enjoy the contact high as this world osmoses through your fingertips.

THE ONE RING: HANDS OF THE WHITE WIZARD

It's a Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan double bill!

The One Ring: Hands of the White Wizard is another campaign-y book by Gareth of six linked adventures for Free League's new Lord of the Rings roleplaying game, all of which see you working as agents of Saruman the White, Lord of Isengard (Christopher Lee in the movies), in the years before Frodo leaves the Shire.

It's just such a fun set-up for a campaign. Not only does this make the most of the kind of goofy tourism you get to do in a game like this, quaffing ale in the home of someone who feels like a celebrity, but the players are told upfront that depending on their actions in this campaign Saruman's choices will deviate from what he does in the books. You could save him! Maybe! Or make him even more cynical! There's a complicated whole point system! MmmmMMMmmm!

I don't have a ton to say about this book aside that Gareth has once again risen to his brief. There's a lot less of his colour and flair than this is in Dagger in the Heart, though it's hard to know how much of that is him trying to chase the tone of Free League's own The One Ring adventures, which are themselves trying to hover near to Tolkein's prose.

Really, the reason I wanted to write about Hands of the White Wizard is an excuse to say that it feels like Swedish company Free League has been upping the quality of its books even further recently, and that just makes me feel like TTRPGs are heading in a great direction.

Free League is something like a bridge between the indie RPG scene and the mass market, with licensed games like The One Ring, ALIEN and Blade Runner along with left-field releases like Vaesen, MÖRK BORG, Forbidden Lands and Coriolis. Side note here: Coriolis is cool! I was so sad to read that the writing in the new redesign it is still a little dull for how lush the art is.

The point is, if we wanna disrupt D&D's control over what people think that roleplaying is, it's going to be harder to do it if D&D's competition is a hundred auteur designers publishing via Backerkit and itch.io. We need a few bigger companies like Free League and Modiphius who have marketing budgets, store presence, and the willingness to write a lot of content for popular but unexciting licensed games. I'm eagerly anticipating the first game from either company that I can wedge Quinns Quest's full support behind. For a while there I was looking at Mutant: Year Zero - Genlab Alpha. I'm still looking at Genlab Alpha. What a campaign that is!

(This would be a lot easier if I liked licensed games, but I don't. I'd just rather play in a new world with new ideas than take my players into the unavoidably marketing-tie-in-smelling world of Fallout or Dune. I'm sure this is alienating for some of you. I'm sorry!🫤)

DEADLINE: A CLOCKWORK PRESS

When I'm walking around a games convention I'm wary of accepting review copies. I'm always calculating, not unlike a rocket scientist. To wit: the more review copies I accept, the heavier my backpack gets. The heavier my backpack, the sooner I will become grumpy. The grumpier I become, the higher % chance of me making an off-colour joke when I meet someone. The more off-colour the joke, the more likely that person is to think "Wow, I wondered what Quinns is like, and now I know! He is a true bell end"

So sometimes turn down the review copy (which I guess makes me a bell end anyway)

The point I'm making is that I have never walked past a booth at a convention and unzipped my bag faster than when I saw Deadline: A Clockwork Press.

This indie storytelling game has a fab hook. In the manner that A Quiet Year asks you to draw and update a map according to events in a fictional place, Deadline asks you to first sketch out a fictional city, then collaborate and create front pages of a newspaper from that city. In fact, not only are there printable front page templates for you to fill out, the physical version of the Deadline rulebook is literally a newspaper.

I'd have SO much fun playing this with a table of journalists! Or so I thought.

I'll admit, when I finally read Deadline this month I was pretty disappointed. It's a similar story to when I read Wanderer's Tome's previous game, Flabbergasted!. Both games pulled me in with a great concept, professional art and a strong layout, but then the content is just a bit... lo-calorie. With Deadline, the game design is functional, the writing is perfectly readable, but there are zero risks, zero jokes, no fat, no sugar. I need the writing to be more exciting, is what I'm saying.

People talk a lot about The Quiet Year's game design, but part of the reason that game sticks to your bones are uncomfortably personal prompts like "A project fails," "Who is unhappy with the sleeping arrangements?" or "The children and animals are crying and won't stop." Deadline often just... elides your attention with prompts that all feel like a first draft.

All the same, I'm writing about Deadline here because it's such a cool idea, and done right it could be such an amazing minigame to play to build a world together, or during a timeskip of a campaign like Blades in the Dark.

PLAY UNSAFE

Play Unsafe is a slim little book on making your roleplaying better and easier by Graham Walmsley, who created some scenarios for Trail of Cthulhu and went on to write Cthulhu Dark, the inspiration behind Trophy Dark. I haven't read any of those games. I have read Trophy Gold, though, which is the version of Trophy Dark meant for campaign play? I like it a whole lot. It's cooooooooool

That's a lot of links and I'm not talking about any of that!! I'm talking about Play Unsafe! Jesus!!!

Play Unsafe is a small book, almost pocket calculator sized. It's a big bigger than a pocket though. Maybe that's a good thing. Can you imagine cutting around with this in your shirt pocket? You'd get beaten up! And they'd probably accidentally punch you in the chest where the book is, compacting it into your heart and then you are killed

Anyway, on Quinns Quest I'm always experimenting with giving my audience tips for being a better GM or player. Play Unsafe makes me feel like the storyteller equivalent of an unevolved Pokémon.

It's not just that the tips in this book are wise, the writing is also expertly terse, and the whole thing strides across the sum of roleplaying expertise in less than the wordcount of a Quinns Quest video. Honestly, if you wanna be a better GM, I expect you could re-read this book twice a year and internalise something new every time.

Like, at the end of a chapter on roleplaying high status and low status characters, there's this little boxout titled "Realistic relationships":

For a natural, lifelike relationship, try keeping your status slightly above or slightly below the other person. Be slightly superior or inferior.

Change, frequently, so that you go from slightly superior to slightly inferior and back again.

You'll find that, if you do this, the relationship between the characters feels a little more real.

That is genius.

It's nuts that this book was first written 20 years ago. That said, it's the new 20th anniversary edition I've been reading, and I'm not sure how many revisions it has. This new edition doesn't look like it's for sale yet- if you're interested in Play Unsafe, I'd wait just a little longer for the 20th anniversary edition to drop.

STORYBREWERS' GAMES IN GENERAL

Storybrewers is just a fucking great publisher, and I want to give that team their flowers. 🌷🪻🌺

I walked away from UK Games Expo this year kicking myself that I hadn't included Saltfish & Almanacs in my boxed game special. It's such a perfect antithesis to Desperation. It's a boxed game about travelling merchants setting off on a year-long round trip, watching changes in the landscape, bickering about wares and struggling through hardships, before finally returning home and re-uniting with your fellow players. That's right, you're actually not travelling together! This is the master stroke of this game, for me- the players are from the same town, working for the same operation, but they're always staffing two caravans on different circuits, so all of your stolen moments of beauty and irritating setbacks aren't shared.

It's such a sweet, wistful packet of wanderlust and nostalgia. I can't recommend it enough. Also, you couldn't ask for a better antidote to Desperation's "Today I cut the throat of my horse had to be done the animal was afflicted with the miseries and chawed her own hooves off"

But Saltfish & Almanacs isn't the only Storybrewers joint that I (grumpily) trudged away from UKGE with in my (heavy! so heavy!) bag! There was Decaying Orbit, an earlier game of theirs about being an AI who wakes up moments before their spaceship is destroyed, which is just enough time for them to absorb the entire story of what went wrong (but not do anything about it), and Fight With Spirit: A Sports Drama RPG, a hefty box designed to take all of the heavy lifting out of living out your very own sports anime.

What sport? Whatever you want. Cycling, roller derby, wrestling, soccer, bung it in the future and play Cyber-Hydro-Megaball for all they care. The whole genre operates more on moments like this:

Can you connect with your joy when you play??

Can your hearts and minds connect under pressure??????

So good. I've spoken before (somewhere? to myself, maybe?) about how nice it is to be working in TTRPGs in 2026 because the whole scene feels mega ill-defined. As soon as you exit the zorb bubble that is the heroic fantasy RPG you're absolutely adrift. What's popular and hyped are a constant demonstration that there's no go-to ruleset or genres, there is no right way to play, and great designers feel more excited by new ideas than they are about anything else.

Even in this environment, Storybrewers feel like they're obsessive about pushing the envelope, putting them in the company of great experimenters like Bully Pulpit and Jay Dragon.

And with that, I can shelve the last of this summer's physical review copies. "STACK DEFEATED" appears across my vision in the Dark Souls font.

I'll see you folks next time for what could be the final instalment of my Summer Reading series! It's all of the .pdfs I've been sent.

Time to cyber up. 👨‍💻

-- Quinns