Part 1 Carry and Never Going Home both have unusual systems—especially for games set in the midst of a war. There is no detailed tactical combat, though each has specialized rules for fighting. Never Going Home takes a more traditional approach, offering skills, attributes, even spells. (The latter are evocatively named Whispers, which is nice and creepy and suits the game’s foreboding portrayal of magic.) Still, it allows for a pip-shifting D6 pool that is meant, I think, to weigh training and expertise against decision-making that is necessarily urgent and impulsive.

“Work! Intoxication! Brain-racking! Chewing, eating, gorging, rooting up! Rapturous birth pangs! Jabbing of the brush, preferably right…

I just finished a 9-session mini-campaign of Hearts of Wulin. It is a wuxia-melodrama RPG that is Powered by the Apocalypse. Despite the fact that it was published by The Gauntlet, it seems to maintain a very low profile online. It’s unfortunate that it hasn’t been discovered by more gamers. It really is an exceptional game, and a very solid toolkit for the emulation of wuxia television and cinema.

A few weeks ago, I started a short run campaign of Wicked Ones. My group set up a sandbox and are playing through it until we’ve had enough of it, or until our dungeon is maxed out or destroyed by adventurers. Yes, we have a dungeon—mostly they do, as one part of my GMing duties here is to attack their dungeon and to push them to fight to make it better and more secure.

I should mention that, while I have GMed Kult several times, I’ve always been ambivalent about the system. Generally, I love games that are Powered by the Apocalypse and run them quite often. I think I’m pretty good at separating good hacks from bad ones, and, well, Kult isn’t pretty, mechanically. Among other issues, it suffers from a flaw that is common to PbtA knockoffs—the designers don’t seem to have given much thought to really exploiting what a PbtA setup can do for the kinds of stories that they want to tell.

The following is a deposition drawn from many days of working with Kult. It mostly deals with things that I don’t like about the game. There are good things about Kult as well, but, mostly, I think these things can be found in other games that don’t share Kult’s mechanical and stylistic problems. Also, I think that superlative reviews are easy to find elsewhere.

Three-player Star Crossed has been one of the most requested features since I first started playtesting the game. I’m very pleased to offer some solid (and relatively simple!) r...