fantasy – Page 7 – PopCult Reviews

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Wanderhome Part One

Wanderhome (Possum Creek Games)
Designed and written by Jay Dragon
Book design by Ruby Lavin
Art by Sylvia Bi (cover) and Letty Wilson (interior)

Purchase this book here

Read Part Two here.

“Life is about the journey, not the destination.” This would be an apt blurb for the game Wanderhome, which is all about characters traveling across the land on their way home. This is not a journey of combat; this is after all of that. This is what happens after a war ends or a disaster strikes. Or this is just what your character does; their job entails that they are wanderers, delivering messages or attending to the shrines of forgotten gods scattered about the landscape. This is a pastoral fantasy game whose most apparent inspiration would be the films of Studio Ghibli. The land of Haeth is full of small communities across a variety of biomes, and your character can visit them on their long journey back to their home.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Into the Odd Part Two

Into the Odd Remastered (Mophidius)
Written and designed by Chris McDowell
Graphic design by Johan Nohr

You can purchase this game here.
Read Part One here.

The treasure hunters feel along The Coral’s spongey-smooth exterior, careful not to slice a hand open on the jagged bits and edges of the cracked shell. Edmund holds out his hand and helps Poddin step onto the outcropping of sand between the Coral and a gray morning tide sloshing in and out. She points out a large opening they could use to enter the structure and step closer. It’s a sandy slope that likely fills up at high tide. It’s dark down there. Poddin goes first, sliding down on her bottom, reaching the Pit, and turning her lantern on. Edmund comes down shortly after that.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Into the Odd Part One

Into the Odd Remastered (Mophidius)
Written and designed by Chris McDowell
Graphic design by Johan Nohr

You can purchase this game here.
You can read Part Two here.

Into the Odd is another in the OSR subgenre of tabletop roleplaying games. See my first post about Mork Borg for a more detailed definition of what OSR is, but the short one is it is a throwback to the original way of playing Dungeons & Dragons mixed with more contemporary elements. The result is gaming experiences with the nostalgic familiarity longtime players enjoy, with fresh takes that can help bring in new players. Into the Odd is a game I have heard a lot about since it began development in the mid-2010s. Chris McDowell hasn’t sat on his laurels and continues to refine the system with additions like Electric Bastionland and the recently funded Mythic Bastionland. Into the Odd has also inspired further hacks like Cairn and Knave, which have inspired more games. These come up fairly often as solo-friendly systems, so I decided to start at the source and, over time, try out the others to see which one I mesh best with.

Patron Pick – Wonka

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Wonka (2023)
Written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King
Directed by Paul King

Why? Why was this movie? Yes, I know it was made because a series of corporations made legal acquisitions of the film rights to Roald Dahl’s writings, and so they made the movie to recoup the costs spent on purchasing the rights with the idea of also turning a profit. What I am asking is why, from a creative perspective, does this film exist? What does this add to one’s appreciation of Dahl’s original novel or the character of Willy Wonka? Nothing about this film feels like it has anything to do with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory besides Wonka and Oompa-Loompas. I would go so far as to argue that not one of the three live-action appearances of Wonka on film does the book character justice, as much as I love Gene Wilder.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Blades in the Dark Solo Part One

Blades in the Dark (Evil Hat Productions)
Designed and written by John Harper

Purchase Blades here
Purchase Alone in the Dark here

Read Part Two Here

Blades in the Dark was a huge game. I backed it on Kickstarter. But that was when I “fell out of love” with the hobby because of some very toxic personalities I had encountered. There was so much social media drama at the time that soured what made these games fun for me. Blades is also a very dense text at the start. There are no accusations of these being rules-lite, though once you get a flow of how it plays, it feels straightforward. I remember reading one of the Kickstarter drafts and not having the bandwidth to parse it all. Since then, Blades has helped birth a whole new subgenre of game, Forged in the Dark. When I started playing solo games, I noticed how many FiTD titles there were and decided I should probably see if Blades could be played solo. And it could.

Comic Book Review – Klaus

Klaus (2016)
Reprints Klaus #1-7
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Dan Mora

So many origin stories have attempted to explain Santa Claus’s roots. I just reviewed a middling Netflix animated film a few weeks ago, also titled Klaus, that provided its own explanation. I’ve always been a fan of writer Grant Morrison and their genre-reinventing work in comics. From devouring their run on JLA in the 1990s to going back through their catalog to read Animal Man and more modern work, like Seven Soldiers and Morrison’s extremely engrossing Batman work, I am a fan. Not an uncritical one, though. Some of Morrison’s work just doesn’t click for me, but I always know they will do something interesting, and at least the kernel of fascinating ideas will be in there.

Comic Book Review – Dark Knights of Steel

Dark Knights of Steel (2023)
Reprints Dark Knights of Steel #1-12
Written by Tom Taylor
Art by Yasmine Putri, Bengal, and Nathan Gooden

DC Comics has always loved a “What If?” story. The Silver Age, from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s, was rife with covers that teased variations on your iconic superheroes. That trend revived itself in the Elseworlds imprint in the 1990s. The Silver Age stories often gave us alternate histories, while Elseworlds placed the heroes in new situations from space and time. Red Son saw Superman’s rocket landing in the USSR instead of Kansas. In Darkest Knight, Bruce Wayne receives the Power Ring instead of Hal Jordan. Batman: Red Rain showcased a world where Batman and many of his allies & enemies became vampires. With the big push for the new Multiverse, DC has recently rolled out more of these Elseworlds-type stories. There is DC vs. Vampires, which I previously reviewed, Jurassic League with humanoid dinosaurs, and this medieval set mini-series.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Dungeon World Solo Part Four

Begin with Part One here

In my last session, I managed to develop the mysterious purple orc that randomly came up. My thinking behind this character is that I dislike the Tolkien orcs as actual characters. They work as mindless hordes to throw at the heroes, but orcs, as characters in fantasy stories, have a lot of potential. I’ve always liked Warcraft’s handling of them much better, giving them a richer & more complex culture, showing they are not mindless savages but have a whole society of their own. I also liked the idea of Ukrom being an ancient mage (I rolled prehistoric on an Age table) and a reminder of what orcs used to be. While they will pop up near the end of this session, I do have ideas for the species when I continue this Dungeon World solo campaign in the future.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Dungeon World Solo Part Three

Read parts one and two first

During the last session of Dungeon World solo, two random elements came up that I immediately flagged as important parts of the story going forward. The first was the band of pirates along the Mondeo coast. It made sense to connect them to the Larcenists Society danger. They are the naval branch, and their leader, Captain Molly Rhys, feels like a decent bad-guy boss to face off with at the end of this series. The second was the magically infected orc living within The Sunken Tower. I had no idea he would be in there when I used the Perilous Wilds tables. One descriptor from my rolls stood out the most to me, and that was “primitive,” which made me think not of “unsophisticated” but “prehistoric.” What would a prehistoric orc be doing in this Tower? I had some ideas.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Dungeon World Solo Part Two

Make sure to read part one before this and part three next.

During my Dungeon World solo playthrough, I extensively used Perilous Wilds. While Parts Per Million’s Dungeon World Solo book is helpful, it only looks at Dungeon World. Here’s the thing about DW: it’s a fine game, but I have always felt it was underbaked. There’s very little about dungeon crawling in the core book, and some of the mechanics (Hirelings in particular) are confusing and not fun. Perilous Wilds feels like the missing portions of the game, providing revised rules for hirelings and tools to build dungeons as you play and even create monsters on the fly. These tools helped make this playthrough fun; I never knew what lay in store for me next.