Wolves on the Rhine from Dark City Games

Well, I certainly didn’t expect to be writing another entry into the blog this soon, but I have something special to share with you.

While on vacation in San Antonio in 2006, I stopped by Dibbles Hobbies during my usual whirlwind tour of shops. I had recently bought in to the excellent Tunnels & Trolls system and found a little pamphlet sized game named The Little Black Book on the counter by a company that I’d never heard of named Dark City Games. The back of the booklet promised lots of solo fun and leafing through the book showed that it is constructed in much the same manner as T&T solo adventures. I bought, took it home and put it on a shelf where it lay forgotten.

Now, it 2007, I discovered The Fantasy Trip. A simple game like T&T it had several solo adventures published for it. As it turns out, my best gaming buddy was a TFT fanatic in school and has every singe bit of everything ever published for or about TFT. I had the essential elements of TFT too. In my case, though, they were simply part of my Metagaming collection of OOP game collection. After listening to Ed go on and on about how much fun he had playing it, I decide to give it a go. I read everything an I was about to play one of the solos when Christmas got in the way.

I went to San Antonio to visit family and friends and once again found myself at Dibbles where I found The Crown of Kings from Dark City Games. This time I knew that I was looking at a solo game that had its own set of rules that were fully compatible with The Fantasy Trip. It was at that point that I remembered the game I’d bought the year before. I bought this one as well.

After the holidays, I visited DCG’s website and bought two more adventures, Wolves on the Rhine and The Dark Vale. So now I have four of the games published by DCG. This is my experience with Wolves on the Rhine.

Wolves on the Rhine is a solo (but could be GM’ed) adventure using DCG’s own Legends of the Ancient World rules which have been tweaked for Wolves on the Rhine. Most of the difference between the standard Legends and WOR Legends is the elimination of magic, WOR is an historical RPG, and the weapons, pilum instead javelins for instance.

I don’t want to give too much of the story away, so I won’t describe what happened to my party in detail, let’s just say that the game setup allows you to use a party of four to six PCs. I took four—I should have taken six.


As far as the story goes, it reads smoothly form paragraph to paragraph. I’ve found that the hardest thing for writers of these solo adventures is to make the story smoothly transition from one paragraph to the next. This author does a fairly good job of that. Of course the fact that it’s an “historical RPG” is also interesting. Though my play through the booklet ended quickly and brutally, it was fun and the nice flow allowed me to get into the story and feel the surroundings. When my party, which consisted of two legionnaires and two auxillia stepped into the cold dark woods in Germania, I was feeling it. The author spent enough effort setting up the environment in the opening paragraphs, that my imagination was fully engaged by the time I got to the meat of the story.

Note that each of the games from DCG stand on their own. They each come with a tactical map, rules, and a counter sheet. Some, like Wolves on the Rhine, have downloadable standees. The standees are drawn so that they can be cut out and assembled as tents. However, I’ve got a bunch of plastic stands for Steve Jackson Games Cardboard Heroes standees, so I used them. The plastic stands provide a little more weight and stability.


Well that’s it for this posting. I heartily recommend these Dark City Games offerings. They are a lot of and have enough replay value (I’ll be trying WOR again soon—with a bigger party this time) to make it worth the cost.

P.S.

I couldn't believe it! I was rolling the first encounter. I tossed the die into the tray. It bounced off the wall and stopped dead center in this position! I had to take a picture of the ultimate cocked die!