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Author: Ava Islam
Publisher: Kill Jester Games

I've slipped on doing write-ups for TRPG 'zines and books. Time to get better about that, starting with one of the most recent releases I read through - Errant, by Kill Jester Games.


Errant describes itself as procedure driven, not rules driven and that's dead-on accurate. Nearly every "rule" in the book is laid out as steps to follow. It gives the impression of a quilt, where patches of mini-games are stitched together to form an entire rulebook. Those mini-games stretch from the expected, like spellcasting and combat, to the novel - there are procedures for resolving legal disputes and rolling to determine how far your character can move in a combat turn.

Reading it, the book is a lot. I really need to make the time to run a session or find a group to play in, because I can see where all the complexity of the procedures might fade into the background of the actual play. After spending the summer running Old School Essentials, where there are strict procedures for how combat and exploration "turns" play-out, that sorta thing does work well. At least for the kind of D&D-derived games I run.

The big value of the game for me in the short term is how it collects, refines, and builds-off of a decade-plus of TRPG blog postings. I've only spent a relatively short time following blogs in OSR and OSR-adjacent spaces, but I can spot where some systems came from. And Ava Islam, the author, is open about this - there's an entire appendix full of blogs and books she pulled from while creating Errant. Spellcasting has the whiff of Dungeon Crawl Classics about it. Equipment and inventory is handled as a mixture of Knave's item slots and "Five Torches Deep's* supply. It effectively is an encyclopedia of practical distillations and applications of pushing two-decades of writing and publishing.

And I can use that! My Beyond the Wall game recently moved to slot based inventory and encumbrance. Just one session in, I already see where things are still a bit messy. If it doesn't work out for me, I can open up Errant, grab its rules for this, and give that a try to see if it works better.


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