Introduction
I haven’t illustrated this review with a picture of the cover of the game itself but rather with an old Radio Times cover from the 1980s depicting the BBC docudrama ‘Threads’. I’ve done this for a very good reason, British apocalypse fiction is very different, very downbeat, very depressing and very, very British compared to our American cousins. This is in no small part because while they were being told to duck and cover, we were being told ‘You’re all going to fucking die’ by everyone except the government who sort of half-heartedly told us to built shelters out of doors in the event of the four minute warning but basically threw up their hands and admitted that we were screwed.

My entire generation was traumatised by documentaries like this, by novels, newspaper articles, documentaries like Horizon and even cartoons like When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs.

If you want to understand the British take on the apocalyptic you need to read The War of the Worlds, all of John Wyndham’s works, you need to watch the original Survivors and the 80s series of Day of the Triffids. You need to take all that in, perhaps as well as dipping into history to understand what Britain was like in the 70s and 80s and then you’ll ‘grok’ Hot War and it’ll be worth it.

This is a huge preamble but it’s necessary to understand, I think, both where I’m coming from in the review and where the author is coming from on a cultural basis.

This is no Fallout or Mad Max, it’s quintessentially British and a product of the resigned attitude to the end of the world that was prevalent in the years we were growing up.

Here’s a link to Threads on Youtube, it’ll screw you up. You’re welcome.

Background
Hot War is a follow up to Cold City, the Cold War game by the same author and group (Contested Ground Studios) and in the same setting. Where that’s an investigative/spy/supernatural game centred upon the cleaning up of leftover Nazi fringe-science and occult experimentation, this is the result of those same technologies – along with nuclear weapons – gone hot. The superpowers have gone to war and along with nuclear fallout, contamination and the near total collapse of society you also have to contend with fringe science and supernatural threats, genetically altered soviet supersoldiers and even stranger creatures, along with people gone feral, rebellions and rogue military units.

Perhaps I’m being pretentious but I see these monsters as physical embodiments of the invisible dangers of the apocalypse, the radiation, disease and contamination. The monsters are metaphors, they’re something that a group of players can fight and overcome, representations of the threats you can’t fight so that the protaganists of the game can feel that they’re actually accomplishing something.

As with Cold City a central structure of Hot War is the internal struggle between the various surviving wings of the military, police and government and their competition over decreasing resources. Unlike Cold City this is more a matter of survival and who gets to control what remains of the country, rather than mere political manouevering, the stakes are higher. I’m not a huge fan if internecine battling and conflict within PC groups, but for me it sits better in Hot War than it did in Cold City, perhaps because those higher stakes make for better justification.

Mechanics
Hot War is a very narrativst game that places a huge amount of control in the hands of the players, rather than the Games Master. In addition, while the system has some traditional aspects – the use of equipment and the invocation of character traits – the driving force of the system isn’t so much how difficult something is but rather how meaningful it is to your character and how much you’re willing to risk for it. Equipment and traits (character descriptors) are minor modifiers compared to relationships and secret agendas that you are working towards behind the scenes. This characterises the game much more as a cooperative story session, rather than an RPG per se.

The mechanics are pretty loose, depending on the skill of the Games Master and the players to interpret from the dice results quite what happens. Dice pools are created from the various factors and rolled and the number of dice that score higher than your opponent (or the difficulty) determines your degree of success and, from there, the winner dictates the outcome – moderated by the Games Master.

Atmosphere
Hot War is a grim, gritty little book. Where I normally bitch about grey-page backgrounds making things hard to read, in this case it works for the book as it turns it into a grubby, unified, whole. The book is full of little fictlets and posters that also help create the appropriate atmosphere but it’s hard for me to be completely objective about how successful the game is in creating this atmosphere as it’s tapping directly into the nightmare television of my youth. I’m not as sure how successful it will be in creating the right mood in someone outside that background.

Artwork
The posters, typography and presentation is all perfect. I’m in two minds about the CGI artwork throughout. On the one hand it jarrs slightly with the grubby presentation of the whole, on the other hand the ‘uncanny valley’ effect ramps up the unsettling nature of the book. In an ideal world I think I’d like to see it done with staged photography and make-up effects, but there’s little chance of that.

Conclusion
For people of my generation this is many of our childhood nightmares brought to vivid life. I’m not 100% sold on the system, though I can see its strength, I prefer to let story emerge from character actions and meaning to be their investment in what’s happening, rather than a mechanical advantage. This is all down to personal taste though. I also don’t like intra-party conflict but, of all the settings I’ve seen it in, this one – perhaps – makes the most sense. It’s an evocative piece of work and I congratulate all those involved on a job well done.

Buy it.

On the plus side:

• Disturbing.
• Evocative.
• Innovative.

On the minus side:

• The story/meaning system won’t be to everyone’s taste.
• CGI isn’t entirely suited to the presentation of the book.
• A world-guide to post nuclear Britain would be a good addition.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 4
Overall: 4.5

Introduction
As with Mars Colony I’ll admit that the main reason I bought Barbarians of Lemuria is that I’ve been working on something of a similar character myself and I bought it largely to reassurce myself that my own project was sufficiently different to be OK. Which it is, another sigh of relief on my part. Until now I’d avoided BoL for this very reason, not wanting to be influenced by it but I’ve been missing out because of that.

Background
Barbarians of Lemuria is derived from the pulp fantasy barbarian mythos, that of Conan, Thongor, Kull, Bran, Brak and many others. It takes place in a mystical continent, ‘Lemuria’, largely lifted from Lin Carter’s books but also developed along its own lines and incorporating other, newer and more individual ideas. This is a world that ticks all the usual boxes for the genre, ancient sorceror kings, dancing girls, ape-men and everything else one might expect. This game revels in the usual stereotypes of the genre and that’s a good thing.

Mechanics
The game has a very simple system that involves the rolling of 2d6 aiming for a target of 9 in order to succeed. Higher difficulties modify this by +1 for easy to -6 for extremely difficult. Boons or flaws allow/force you to roll an extra die and either take the lowest or the highest rolled to affect your outcome.

Hit points or ‘lifeblood’ in this instance are limited to quite few in number, which makes combat relatively deadly. Combat skills are fairly conventional but where the game shines is in its careers system. Rather than having lists of skills your character is defined by the careers that they’ve had in the past and their origin. If your career has bearing on something you’re trying to do – EG: hunter tracking a wolf, then you use your career level as a roll modifier. This is a great way of keeping the system light while still allowing it to be versatile.

The other shining part of the rules system is that for magic and alchemy which is an excellent freeform system that keeps the character of the relative weakness of day-to-day magic in a low fantasy setting and the terrible demands of high powered magic, the very thing that turns most magic users evil if they have any true power whatsoever.

Atmosphere
The world is fairly set if sparsely described. This is a little out of character with the freewheeling nature of the rules, tying you into this particular setting. The setting of Lemuria is open enough for you to give everything your own spin but the career and background packages are tied into the cultures of the setting. This is the one place I think the game lets itself down, neither leaving things loose enough for you to use it as a toolkit, nor defining the setting enough to be particularly inspiring to you.

Artwork
Much of the artwork is the excellent work of John Grumph, the artist who also worked on Mantel D’Acier, the french version of Cloak of Steel for John Doe games. His work suits the setting well and his clean lines and ethnic and imperfect people humanise the work and help lift it to a much higher level.

Conclusion
A great little game for some barbarian action without being too rules-heavy to bog you down. A touch too simple for my tastes – at least when it comes to combat – but a gem nonetheless.

On the plus side:

• Great, evocative artwork.
• Freeform, simple system.
• Innovative career and magic rules.

On the minus side:

• Defined too much to be a toolkit, too little to be a setting.
• Combat rules could do with more depth.
• More bestiary illustrations would be helpful.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 3
Overall: 4