This is the second in my extremely infrequent series of not-reviews. I don't consider myself a proper reviewer, and I'm not going to talk about games I don't like. I will maybe give some idea of whether or not you might like the game too.

These games have nothing to do with each other, they are grouped into one blog post because of the physical proximity of the two in my zine pile.

1400

So I haven't actually played any 24xx game. I really want to, but I want someone else to GM it, so it might be a while. So take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

You might like this if:

• You're an experienced GM and your players are new to RPGs and want something simple and easy to learn
• You're an experienced GM and you want something that is very rules lite, but not necessarily ItO style
• You have been playing 5E but you "almost never roll the dice"

You might not like this if

• You aren't very comfortable improvising or making rulings based off of fairly sparse text
• You're a strict classic OSR type
• You want a lot of character options or tactical complexity

I got this mostly because I wanted a physical copy of a 24xx game, but I think if I had to run one, I would feel most comfortable running this, since I know what a fantasy game looks like, and you could probably run a lot of different modules based on it.

There are really 5 games in here, each of which cover a genre.

• QUEST - kind of generic, default fantasy. Feels like it's meant to be a replacement for mainstream D&D like 5E: the setting feels high fantasy, you ignore minor transactions. I feel like people might want slightly more variation in character ancestry - if I was playing with 5E players I would probbly borrow from PLANES.
• BELOW - more OSR-y, a focus on dungeon crawling
• SNEAK feels like it captures a lot of the essence of BitD - BitD is a complicated system, and I wonder how using this system to play in Duskvol would work. It dips a bit into what I think of story game mechanics: flashbacks in particular. I mostly thought of 24XX as being OSR-adjacent but I guess it doesn't have to be. Or maybe those two things aren't so different from each other. The implied setting is more classic fantasy though with liches and elves and all that
• MAGE - not totally sure what this is a reference to, but high powered, everyone-is-a-wizard fantasy seems like an obvious genre people would want to play
• PLANES - it's planescape . Well sort of. Whatever genre that is. It also feels kind of fresh. There is some inspiration from The Golden Compass series. It does not feel very much like Troika. There are some interesting planes in there.

All magic etc items, spells, etc are like 1-2 words. You'd have to agree together on what it means.

There are some interesting rules for mixing and matching backgrounds from different games - I think I personally would only do it to a limited degree.

There's an adventure in the back that is supposed to be playable with all 5 games. I feel like for some of the games though they would shine best if you took them in a different direction.

Tome of Tombs

You might like this if:

• You love worldbuilding
• You get a bit carried away with prep and you think going deep into the social background of funerary practices would be nice
• You want to find ways to add more interesting and complex lore to your dungeons

You might not like this if:

• You're looking for something super focused on gameability
• You're looking for what you might traditionally think of a dungeon generation tool

One big problem with books of random tables is that it's hard to tell if the random tables are good or not. Often they are generic, things you could have come up with yourself. The ones in this book are good: unique, interesting, and grounded in historical knowledge that I don't have. It's a book that helps flesh out a world and makes it more real; it's not 100% focused on what to bring to the table, as it says explicitly on one of the pages. It's also an enjoyable read.

There are a series of pages starting from how the tombs might fit into society, to how it looks visually approaching them, to the grave goods and methods of burial. Some entries on different tables mesh with each other better than others, you'll want to use your judgement in how many tables to roll on and which ones. I tried just doing one thing from each table and it didn't quite work.

I think the author did their own art and it's quite nice.

Putting together a tomb

The graves are in the center of the community: the town square where official government events happen. The path there is marked with statues of gods of the underworld. The plaza however is no longer in use: it was part of a system of government that is no longer relevant.

The gate to the cemetery is decorated with mythical figures representing the guardians of the land of the dead. The cemetery consists of orderly bodies in rows, unmarked, under the flagstones. If you were to dig them up you would find jumbled bones, stripped of their flesh before being buried. The area is behind tall stone walls, and it is always cold here. The sun shines dimly in the sky, as though from further away than normal.

On one side is a shrine, with small clay statues perhaps representing the deceased buried under the flagstones. Small bowls for offerings now stand empty. On the other is a mausolem whch is a small model of a palace which once stood in the city.

To enter the mausoleum you enter through the carved jaws of an enormous primordial snake. Inside are rooms full of jars of grain, chests of bolts of cloth, each sealed with a fading scroll: if you could read it, you would see these are tax records, the last year of taxes that were still owed to the king after death.

Continue further and it opens into a cave, a strangely natural structure, older than anything here. Wards have been carved onto the walls in languages older than the ones who built this cemetery - wards as a barrier between worlds - but some have been symbolically broken.

A single body is on an elaborate raised platform, decorated with gold and jewels. They were buried in a simple shroud, though, which is almost entirely rotted away. The head has been embalmed, however, and rests beneath a stone mask. They were buried holding a steel staff, it seems.

Spectres are often found around the complex, though they cannot pass through the outer gate so long as it is closed. This is a place where you can pass from the land of the dead to the land of the living, or vice versa.

Other interested parties:

• A demon who is here to round up some loose souls is actually pretty friendly, so long as you don't interfere.
• Some supposed heirs of the old royal dynasty are looking for the Staff of Command, said to be buried here, which will allow them to retake their throne.
• Cultists seek to break open the walls between the land of the living and the land of the dead