Review: Black Leopard, Red Wolf & Dirge of Urazya

When it was first announced, Black Leopard, Red Wolf was billed an “African Game of Thrones”. The go-to byline for any fantasy series with epic scale promising grit, violence, and realpolitik in contrast to the “pastoral” popular perception of mainstream fantasy. A wrongheaded comparison on multiple levels that we don’t have time or space for today (catch me on the Discord). That sales pitch missed the mark even though it drummed up interest in Black Leopard, Red Wolf prior to release. What arrived was far stranger, denser, wondrous, and more surreal than Game of Thrones and most fantasy novels on the shelf.
What starts as a straightforward testimony from a simple spoken narrator paints a lurid picture of the Kingdoms, their struggles, and the violence in all the spaces in between. Nested narratives lead to a Rashomon labyrinth of perspectives and conflicting account. Planting and watering seeds of doubt regarding Tracker, the protagonist, and his veracity even though he says from the beginning: “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.”

Know this: Tracker has a dog’s nose and won’t lead you astray.

Dirge of Urazya is a zine by Jack Shear of Dolorous Exhumation Press and Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque fame. After making a splash in the RPG scene with his 13 Flavors of Fear, Jack has built a reputation for the lurid, the blasphemous, and the weird with each subsequent release from demonic Western to Gothic blood opera. While most of his work runs 100+ pages, Dirge of Urazya is on the opposite end at a sleek 24 and I love its brevity.

While Umberwell details an Industrial urban hellscape rich with grime, Dirge offers a lean set of prompts so your whole group can create the Gothic, Western, post-apocalyptic, science fantasy world promised by Netflix’ Castlevania (which I swear is Warren Ellis’ Vampire Hunter D fanfiction) and Into The Badlands (Danny Wu’s post-apocalypse wuxia western also available on Netflix). The PDF is only $4.00 (currently on sale for $2.68) and offers far more in value. I recommend pretty much everything he’s written, Jack’s name on a title is a stamp of quality and weirdness you shouldn’t overlook.

Jack provided a good overview of Dirge's development and assembly here and I'll similarly follow that roadmap with my own creative projects in the future.

Review: Codex Dark 2 and Doom Patrol

 Codex is a monthly pdf zine published by The Gauntlet, a roleplaying community and podcast network. Codex is an anthology of small RPGs, supplementary materials, and miscellany centered around a particular theme that has been tied together with use of a color palette and clever graphic design. The free sample issue rotates, and this month's issue is a really good one, so grab it while you can because the games are delightful.

The star of the current is Ghost Drums, a short horror game by Gerrit Reininghaus inspired a Guatemalan ghost story. I can't really say anything else about it without giving away too much, but I am hyped to run this with the Minions in the future and, hopefully, turn it into a limited series podcast. This issue also has the rules for Trophy and a sample adventure, a dark fantasy game about flint-eyed scoundrels plunging into a wilderness that doesn't want them there and won't let them leave. Think of it as what might happen if your OSR play-through of Keep on the Borderlands turned into the Texas Chainsaw Massacre about two-thirds of the way through. Trophy also echoes the thesis of our current limited-series, Tales from the Old Man's Bar™, Don't be surprised if you see Trophy show up on our feed down the line as well.

Both games highlight a subtle shift in design philosophy: rather than playing to find out what happens, the party is playing to find out how it happens. The ending is never in doubt - you're all going to end up turned into sausage; however, the shape and texture of the grinder is flexible. Do you end up bratwurst or chorizo? I expect we'll see more horror games take similar approaches going forward because a strong framework provides a solid foundation for play.

UPDATE: Codex Dark 2 is no longer the freely available issue. Now it's Codex Gold which contains the rules for Trophy Gold. Also an excellent game, which can be found here.

In a similar vein, our present saturation of superhero stories reveals a rhyming pattern - the heroes will triumph at the end but how they'll triumph is the real question. Do they lose a loved one? Do they sacrifice themselves? Does a city get leveled? Do they find family along the way? DC Universe's Doom Patrol takes advantage of our foreknowledge to get weird - like really weird. If you're familiar with the Patrol, then that shouldn't come as a surprise to you. However, if you're new to the team, buckle up.

The show makes nods to the larger DC Universe, but quickly leaves the familiar world of flying strongmen and billionaire vigilantes behind in favor of extra-dimensional snow globes, doomsday prophet cockroaches, boys from Brazil, and a sentient street. Despite the high weirdness, though, the show doesn't divorce or alienate the characters from their humanity. If anything, the intense contrast heightens their all-too human frailties resulting in a satisfying drama.

Anyway, I know people hate spoilers so I'll just say this - Doom Patrol has consistently been one of my favorite comics and the show does not disappoint.

Check it out when you get the chance!