The newest issue of Codex, called Codex – Time, features a Dungeon World piece by Ray Otus. Here are the details on what’s inside the whole issue…
Timegasm
I’m not going to go into too much detail here because part of the fun in Timegasm is reading it for yourself and just letting it sort of…wash over you. BUT, I will say it’s a committee LARP by Wendy Gorman about a group of lawmakers and educators trying to solve a particularly troubling side effect of time travel. If I ever decide to run something at a convention, this is probably what I’m going to run. It’s a delight. Also: it features an illustration by Sean Poppe
Reset
This game is SO COOL. It’s a two-player game by Kyle Simons inspired by the film Memento. The GM creates an underlying mystery and a set of starting information which, in the fiction, are Polaroid pictures, tattoos on the protagonist’s body, and personal notes. The player takes the role of the protagonist, a character with anterograde amnesia. The player does their best to solve the mystery before the protagonist “resets,” meaning their short-term memories are wiped. This short-term memory loss is cleverly replicated in the game by the fact that a player never gets to play the game twice, but the GM can continue the story with a new player at the point of reset. Recording of play sessions is encouraged.
Turning
Turning, by Slade Stolar, is the first setting creation tool to be featured in Codex. It examines a major aspect of society which is usually glossed over in RPG texts: a society’s core values. It then asks: “How do those values change over large timespans?” When we’re talking about futuristic settings or time travel scenarios, we tend to use things like technology or biology as the lens through which we understand how such a setting is different from our own world. We rarely look at things like how much they value freedom of speech or how they treat their poor. It’s a fascinating tool that can be easily added to any game that deals with large timescales.
Overlooked
This is a microgame, also written by Slade, designed to be used with Turning. In it, you play androids who are trying to discover the origin of their memories. During play, their memories can be corrupted, and sometimes the androids are forced to power down and may not wake up again until hundreds of years in the future. It’s a slim, bleak design, and I’m rather fond of it. It features a lovely piece of art by Per Folmer (see below).
The Iron Tyrant
This is a fantastic Dungeon World starter by Ray Otus. It’s about a god-like golem from another time, the fanatics who have taken to worshipping it, and a mysterious woman, Sadra, who seems to be a little unstuck in time herself. Ray took his inspirations from Zardoz, the Iron Giant, and the destitute villages you find outside Dracula’s castle in old films. It’s a fresh take on the Dungeon World starter, with an emphasis on a regional mystery rather than dungeon crawling and features an illustration by Randy M.
Miscellany: three dozen in medias res starters
This miscellany is different from those in previous issues in that it’s not organized around a theme. It’s a set of situations for beginning a game in medias res, which is a really neat interpretation of this issue’s “Time” theme (with thanks to +Christo Meid for the idea). Like all the miscellanies, it is absolutely overflowing with cool, evocative ideas.
The cover illustration for Codex – Time was done by Vandel J. Arden. Editing was done by myself and David LaFreniere. Layout was done by Oli Jeffery.
To get Codex – Time, just make a $4+ pledge to the Gauntlet Patreon by June 30th!