Another Dahn Sarf and another venue. Reasonably priced, quiet central London RPG venues are becoming tricky to find. As it was, we headed to Holborn, home of the ghost of Mrs Adkins, who emitted impetuous groans and allegedly belched flames of fire.

No such worries at Penderel's Oak, a well-established Wetherspoons. It was 11 am, time for a pint and a bacon butty, before I ran through Assassins, Demons and Dying Gods.

The first hour we were upstairs, gathering and observing whilst I set out the setting- turn-of-the-last-century St. Petersburg, but in a different dimension, oh and ant people. At times, I was distracted by the Large Wetherspoons Breakfast™️ and multiple pints that different groups had lined up - “All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.” It was the perfect juxtaposition to a game set in a totalitarian regime, where a glass of potato vodka with a crust of bread was the highlight.

It’s hard to provide a complete review of this game, as there are many spoilers and surprises. I think it is fine to say that it begins with a vision from an entity called Guardian; the Player Characters (PCs) share this vision. The vision showed an ex-priest, Arkady, pouring poison into a cup, offering it to his disciples and then disposing of the bodies. Guardian intones that the PCs have three days to kill Arkady, who is possessed by a demon; otherwise, they will die.

I’d set up two such demons in advance for the PCs to kill; you have a choice of thirty-six in the game. This is a very good recommendation; there are a lot of tables to use to procedurally generate aspects of the city - Game Master Characters (GMCs), Streets, Bars, Events and one such table suggests a random demon to hunt, but choosing in advance enabled me to prep a map of Arkady’s mansion, along with leads and GMCs relevant to this mission.

As it was the group was incredibly diligent and hunting out clues to identify Arkady and his locale. An excellent opportunity to visit each district in the well-fleshed-out city of Ashengrad. Each district has a list of key features, and it was fun to print out the map in the book and then get the players to annotate it with the locations important to them, some from the book, some randomly generated.

We were probably an hour over schedule when the PCs made it to Arkady’s mansion and through derring-do, and luck took him out, but not before they were exposed to some extra-dimensional entities… and that is when things started to get stranger. Kerim in particular did a double take.

This meant that the second demon hunt had to be scrapped, but we did some interesting investigations in the Asylum that bridged the gap between Act I and Act II. Lots of improvisation at this stage, and running it over a longer period, i.e. six hours, gave us time to get to know our PCs: Kerim the journalist, Bella the bare-knuckle boxer and Yustin the librarian.

We moved on to Act II and Act III, perhaps slightly more conventional, but with their own challenges and opportunities to improvise, a very strong campaign, and it was only a shame we didn’t have more time to travel further afield and to meet more of the denizens of the Polaris Empire.

I’d definitely spoil things if I went into too much detail on these acts; suffice it to say, the Ant people did play a part, and there were definitely revelations, battles and a relatively happy ending - at least for the PCs.

Overall, I had a wonderful time running this and big, big thanks to Carl, Ed and Graham for making it so. A smaller group really brought up the details of the characters and allowed us to get into the mysteries that connect each act.

The more I read and run this, the more impressed I am; there is a template here for creating a campaign setting with minimal moving parts and adding procedurally generated elements to enable a lot of replay.

One aspect of running I took from this was The Fates, a very simple way for the GM to “trick” themselves into being more varied in their improvisations. As a GM, you always have a view of how a game will go; when players ask questions, you can tweak the answers in the direction you think a game should go. The Fates is a simple d6 table which returns: Yes, No and various Yes/No, but/and combinations. Simple, but so, so effective. It definitely got the game moving down surprising avenues that I hadn’t envisaged and was all the better for it.

Many thanks to Simon Barns for organising another excellent gaming day, my players and of course Koboyashi for putting so much into making this a very special RPG experience.

Venue Review:

I enjoyed gaming in Penderel’s Oak. The first hour split was a bit discombobulating, and the downstairs table was a bit uncomfortable, but I don’t mind standing, and for a tall table, this worked well. Noise levels were on par with Bad Moon Cafe, perfectly tolerable for me, though not on a par with Chancery Lane - lest we forget 😢.

We were sharing the downstairs with a D&D group, who seemed to have dibs on ¾ of the downstairs, but then only used half of it; we could probably have moved to a lighter, less noisy area.

Food and drink were good - a massive choice and service, one order mess-up aside, was quick and friendly.

Around 5.30 pm the downstairs started to get much noisier, due to overflow from above, so a 6 pm finish was just about right.

I’d give the venue 7/10; I’d play there again. It’s not perfect, and maybe some of the crowded, five, six or seven(!) player tables struggled more with noise and space. It certainly didn’t stop us having a great day of gaming.

Toilets: An impressive array of urinals and cubicles, plenty of soap and powerful hand dryers, though you had to twist and turn to get into the toilet area itself.