Into the anomaly and back - a Mephisto review

In Back to Reality, the plot fits a typical Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. The crew of players is to explore an asteroid belt that is not only extraordinarily dense but also shows strange quantum signatures. Due to the anomaly, it is necessary to fly a shuttle into the asteroid belt and obtain samples by hand. What starts as an exciting field mission quickly evolves into a fascinating anomaly that comes up with a dilemma for the player characters.

Back to Reality offers a good mix of story and challenges for the players to solve with both dice rolls and the right decisions. Even if the location for the finale is somewhat vaguely sketched, the adventure picks up on typical TNG themes that have also appeared in episodes of the series. From my point of view, Back to Reality is a fitting and engaging adventure in the world of Star Trek TNG.

(Björn Lippold)

UPDATE on 4/15/2022: After finishing my run as a GM on this, I can safely say that unless the rules for Spread were misunderstood by myself and one of my players, shotguns are completely broken and your players who pick that and Gun Nut will wipe things out within minutes. Even when increasing the difficulty of enemies, my players had no time at all killing things. The game is not balanced very well in many ways and there definitely needed to be simplification. It does many things well, but it does many things poorly and I don't think I'll be playing it or running it again in the future. Everything else still stands below,

So having began a first session as a GM with it this past Sunday in a custom homebrew setting of New Orleans, and also as a first time GM, it's a hell of a game to try and run and for everyone to learn on the first go. However, everyone had a lot of fun and after working some of the kinks out, it's a lot of fun to run, too! I do have some quibbles with the book itself that keep it from being a full 5.

1. No published errata means that both the PDF and hard copy are full of errors (Glowing One's base stats for health are incorrect, as an example) and also some rules are seemingly made more obtuse than they need to be (NPCs have Wealth 1, Wealth 2 -- but there's one paragraph in the NPC section that mentions what wealth is and it's basically you roll a d20 equal to the value next to Wealth. Well, why not say that up front?)

2. When it comes to looting, there is no table within the book itself that gives you what sample values there should be for a generic type of location. An example is given for it but no where in the book is it listed. Instead, it has to be found in the GM Guide they sell, which is incredibly stupid and forces you to buy another product. Luckily, one of my players found a table online made in Google Sheets that lists these values and automatically calculates the dice rolls (and it came from Modiphius' own forums no less).

3. I do not like the emphasis it places on Fallout 4. While a great game and great frame of reference, the Fallout universe is wide and expansive with multiple locations that could have been mentioned to detail the lore of the world. As is, all you get is the Commonwealth. What about the NCR, Vault 13, New Vegas, the Capital Wasteland, Appalachia? Just including anything more would have added so much more to it.

However, I will say that the constant exchange of AP is very fun and has made for many great scenarios already. I have a guy playing a Luck based character, a Ghoul fisherman focused around strength, a slick-talking mercenary, and a stealthy ex-Raider turned town bodyguard and everything meshes really well. What worries me is that the Dune core book came out in 2020 and errata wasn't made for that officially until January 2022, so if there is anything for this game, I'm afraid it might be long off.

I´d given this book 4 stars alone on the setting and artwork. The game mechanics are, however, also great, so 5 stars it is!

Black Void scratches that old TES: Morrowind itch, that I have had since gamed that ancient classic religiously back in the middle ´naughts, with it´s mystical alien landscapes, vaguely middle-eastern to south asian inspired architecture, spirituality and cultures.

Spice things up with a good dash of cosmic and existential horror, with bronze-age humanity being cast in the role as cosmic refugees on the shores of Llyhn, a city that just might be the bastard child of Mos Eisley and R´yleh, and now has to struggle to survive in.

Throw in a facinating character creation system, that allows you to play as anything from a humble street-begger to a magical human-djinn hybrid, and I could not be more pleased!

Negatives: It´s a big book, and sometimes you have to flip back and forth between chapters for clarification on some of the more involved systems. Bookmarks are your friend here.

The Romanian Imperative

When a zeppelin of the Nachtwölfe appears in Romania on a secret mission, it's time for agents of Section M to investigate. So the player characters first travel to Belgrade and head towards Transylvania, where enemy troops are gathering. Not only should they find out what the Nachtwölfe are looking for in a dilapidated castle, but ideally, they should also destroy or capture the Nachtwölfe's zeppelin...

The Romanian Imperative is another adventure for Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20, telling its story in three acts. It begins with the journey and risky smuggling attempt across the border. After that, it's a matter of getting an overview of the situation, scouting out the activities of the Nachtwölfe, and making undetected contact with the recruited workers who are supposed to dig up something for the Nachtwölfe. In the finale, it is up to the players to decide whether to take the risk and target the zeppelin facing a dangerous enemy.

The adventure tells an exciting story in several well-staged scenes. The freedom of how the players may proceed in the latter part of the adventure - especially since a frontal attack is certainly not a promising idea - is also a great element. The fact that the Mythos elements remain in the background does not detract from the tension at all. The Romanian Imperative thus offers an exciting adventure for a few evenings of gaming.

(Björn Lippold)

I’ve always been a big fan of Modiphius’s 2d20 system, and have played and loved games like Fallout and Conan. I’ve been meaning to check out A!C for a while, but have always been turned off by the price. I’m not sure why, for this game out of all the 2d20 games, they chose to make the barrier of entry so much more expensive. Not only do you need two books instead of one to actually run this game, but those two books are usually much more expensive than any of the other single core books. It doesn’t make any sense considering: A. All of the subject matter here is public domain stuff and B. this game is inherently going to have a smaller player base than something like Fallout or STA because it is a much more niche setting. You would think Modiphius would want to make the A!C books cheaper because of this, not more expensive. While this criticism has nothing to do with the quality of the product itself, it is something that really irks me.

But of course, we should talk about the actual game itself. All of the 2d20 games have varying levels of complexity, and I would put A!C somewhere on the upper end; closer to the high crunch of something like Conan than the low crunch of something like Dishonored. Overall, this is a pretty standard take on the 2d20 system and there’s nothing here that really changes up the formula, but I think that’s a good thing. The 2d20 system works really well as-is for this kind of subject matter. And I absolutely love the subject matter. The whole dastardly-occult-Nazi-cults-fight-two-fisted-pulp-action-heroes setting is just fantastic.

If you like the 2d20 system, you’ll probably like the gameplay of this game. If you don’t like it, you probably won’t, as it doesn’t do anything to shake up that system at all. If you’ve never played a 2d20 system before, I’d recommend you go into it with an open mind. Concepts like “truths” and “zones” might seem a little weird at first, but they start to make sense as you play the game. And, as a side note, I think this book does a better job of explaining what exactly truths are than any other 2d20 book. Which is ironic because some of them, like Dishonored, rely on truths in order to function much more than this game does. But I digress.

That said, I have some issues with the content of the book. The layout and asthetics of the book are all pretty solid. The art that is in here is really good, but I wish there was more of it. The book does a generally good job at explaining the 2d20 ruleset, but drops the ball when it comes to certain mechanics like extended tasks. That whole section is badly explained and really needs a re-write. There are some minor typos throughout, and unfortunately, this book contains one of the most glaring typos I’ve ever seen in an RPG book. It tells you at one point that melee attacks are made using “Agility + Fighting,” and then later says that melee attacks are made using “Brawn + Fighting”. While it is true that technically your GM could have you roll with agility for melee attacks, 9/10 times you’re going to roll with brawn, so this is a pretty glaring error and I don’t know how it made it into the final product. Overall, really not the best explanation of the 2d20 rule system, but not the worst.

The character creation section, though, is quite good and provides a lot of neat options for players to choose from. The combat and magic sections are pretty good, too. One of my favorite unique mechanics to this system is the stress track, and the way that physical damage and mental damage (insanity) are basically combined into one type of HP.

So, overall, while I wasn’t exactly blown away by this book (which, for the asking price, I feel like I should have been), I think it’s a very solid 2d20 game with a very fun theme. If the idea of pulpy WW2 Cthulhu mythos antics appeals to you, I think you’ll like this book.

The preliminary research on the land was difficult, but we had a fun game.I enjoy being able to feel the shadows of multiple factions. It is a very attractive stage. After playing, we were immersed in the memory of "hidden world" Glencoe.

I feel as if I have made a sightseeing trip to a distant place, which is not easy to do nowadays. It was a very magical trip.:）

For 40 years, Old Time Radio cranked out thousands of mysteries, crime dramas, and supernatural thrillers without any cursing in the scripts. This is just as good as those, so there's no need for that "...S.O.B.!!!..." two minutes in.

Keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to buying the 10 part series when it's released.

This is an absolute must-have for any Year 5 fan, or anyone running an Original Series game. I love that they brought in Gary Seven and Isis, and the Tholians as a playable race is brilliant. The art and graphic design are top notch as always. Even if youre not a fan of the comic, or not running TOS, a lot of these options are availablem for all eras.

five tribbles out of five.

I'm a GURPS guy and not terribly fond of the d20 in general. However, this game seems quite interesting. My group is going to, after our current game goes on its break, give this a try. It looks interesting. It has a lot of similarity to D&D 5e, but, really, in a good way. The short description is 2d20, roll low, success-counting. Each die is read separately and can generate its own successes. Successes are counted compared to a required number of Successes. Extra Successes build up Action Points which can be used to do other things. Damage is handled with specialized d6’s, but, they’re easy enough to emulate with normal d6’s. It’s like every other 2d20 system out there. Just a bit more crunch added. But, honestly, not enough crunch. But, take that with a salt-mine, I am a GURPS guy, after all.

Mechanically, the only thing I really have a problem with is the horrible "area-based" combat. It barely worked for FASERIP Marvel back in the 80's, and it doesn't work for this game. In one scene, you can shoot across a city block, in the next, you can't shoot across a room. Areas are bad. It doesn't fit for Fallout--they need to spend some time and get an actual movement/range system. Me, I'm going to be cribbing from D&D. I thought about cribbing from GURPS, but other than using hexes, D&D is a better fit.

Beyond that, the book has a bunch of errors that have been reported, but haven't been corrected yet. I did reach out to the publisher and they told me that since the game hasn't gone into full release yet, they haven't updated anything. I deeply appreciate that they took the time to answer the question of internet guy. But, the decision to not update is a bad look for the developer. If they're asking for money, this shouldn't be selling the play-test documents. At least, not without saying “hey, these are the playtest documents, if you go here you can give us feedback.” At the very least, they should have an official errata document bundled with this indicating that they are aware of the error, and will be correcting it in the future. One of the best “source books” I can suggest is getting the Fallout 4 GOTY Strategy Guide and using their cost/weight information for anything that seems hinky (because it’s probably typo’d or two columns in a table have been swapped! I’m looking at you Powered Armor table!).

All in all, the game looks interesting. Experienced GMs will have no problem fixing the bugs in this game. Much like the CRPG Fallout 4, this game will be made much better with community-provided Mods.

ETA: I'm docking my review by two stars as they said, in September, that errata was due to be out by the end of September, and nothing came out. They've been radio silent here for five months. The book is more than six months old, and looks like there is no, further support for it.

This book is horrible. For a start, it's not a Fallout roleplaying game, its a Fallout 4 mimic that supports role playing. Just before I continue, I wanna say I have nothing against Fallout 4, I hundreds of hours in it. The game tries to stick to the vibe of Fallout 4 to the point of which it shoots itself in the foot. The skills list is missing essential skills that need to exist, it looks like it belongs in a vido game, not a TTRPG. The 2d20 system initself is agressively meh, i didnt enjoy it but this is a review on this book not the system in general, but, its way too simole and just feels small. Also, as per standard with Modipheous, the editors are useless, at least in regards to explenations and layouts, however, I will admit that this is a gorgeous book. Like serious eye candy, but as much as I love the looks, its edited poorly and thease things cancel out. This game does nothing origional whatsoever in the Fallout universe, I already have hundreds of hours institute interaction, popegun use and crafting. If you've played Fallout 4 you do not need to own this book, if you have not, go buy that instead of this book. I hate this book so much, I paid like 30$ for it or something ridiculous, and am prob gonna delete it permanently from my library, just so I don't have to be reminded that it exists.

A departure from the typical structure of a Modiphius 2d20 game, with several new features added to give a dynamic narrative flow.... and every single one of these features and their uses are copied directy from the FATE:Core. In many cases they did not even rename the mechanics. The entire book has the feel of a Frankenstien creature; with the crunch-focused mechanics of 2d20 stiched clumsily onto the abstract, fluid, and cooperative narative mechanics that have been published in FATE for years.

Another great adventure for the Achtung! Cthulhu line. It gives several possible scenarios for PCs to complete the adventure which includes a battle aboard a zepplin. I always felt that zepplins were one of the iconic symbols of the WWII era and am happy to finally see one included in an Achtung! Cthulhu product.

Superb quality book, sharing in depth details of Arakis and its culture. Plenty of background across the possible eras of play. Artwork as always is fantastic and whether you like the main rules or not, this is essential source material for running a dune game.

I have ran this adventure when it first came out and it is a very well designed adventure. It is easy to run for those not familar with the Dune Universe or for those who have read the book. The adventure is written that you would be apart of house atredies and takes place as the atredies take control of Arrakis. The adventure could be played in a single session and helps if you have played the 2d20 system before. I gave it a 4 and not a 5 star because I felt the errata changes were not needed and added nothing to the game that people could not have done on their own.

Adventure is written for any house and takes place on Arrakis before the movie Dune. Plot deals with helping another house bring back a scion of that house who thinks he is a messaih. The best part of the adventure are the plot hooks and major npcs and hoiuse to use them. the adventure has multiple ways that it can conclude depending on players choices. Well worth the price.