Overall, Sean Preston does a good job of bringing Lovecraftian horror to the Apocalypse/Dungeon world system, and I really like Tremulus. The moves translate well and the physical and mental harm systems are at just the right level of detail. The character Playsheets are well done, with a delightful amount of individual specialization for the 1920s period. I was skeptical about the Ebon Eves adventure framework, which presents dozens of possible settings, but I turned to it in a pinch and was very pleased. It’s a fast, ingenious way to jump-start the game.

There are a few places in the game where we had to make adjustments. A few sections appear to contradict each other on specific rules. For example, the sanity check section states you reduce mental harm by 1 if you succeed, but other text seems to imply that a success avoids all harm. We settled on the second interpretation, with mental harm as a negative modifier. The wealth rules appear to be logarithmic, similar to other systems that use wealth as a modifier, but the implication here is that it is just used as simple currency – I can sell my house and buy seven flashlights, or sell 3 sawed-off shotguns and buy a house. We stick to the logarithmic interpretation and allow free access to any items a level or two lower on the scale. These issues are relaitevely minor in the grand scheme of things and just require a rules consensus to get past them.

The only reason I was a little disappointed in the overall game was the author’s move toward a more mechanical feel in some areas – more reliance on special moves and modifiers where simple narrative could suffice. Many special abilities provide +1 or +2 modifiers instead of special narrative power, and mental disabilities are described in terms of negative modifiers in specific situations, rather than being strong narrative tags. The Damage roll made to determine additional narrative effects of damage is backwards – a success means worse effects, and a failure (6 or less) means no adverse effects. I think the author did this in order to make reasonable use of the level of damage as a modifier, but it feels strange – like the monsters or GM now have a roll, but the players make it for them.

There’s some work to do to find your own interpretation of Tremulus, but it’s worth it.

---EDIT -- After some more play time, the lack of narrative energy in the moves sucks a lot of the life out of the game. Downrating to 3 starts. Note, the Ebon Eves section and game master story development sections are still very useful.

I was eager to read tremulus (yes, the title appears to be officially a lower-case-t) for a number of reasons. First, I am a fan of both Call of Cthulhu and Apocalypse World games, and so I was eager to see how the two were married in this one game. Second, I have seen a number of reviews with wildly differing opinions. Most of the reviews that dismissed the game were notably by people who had simply read the game and not played it. I wanted to see how the game worked for myself, and specifically, I wanted to see if a Call of Cthulhu game could be played with little to no prep, and if so, how that could be done.

There’s a lot that I like here and there are several things that I don’t.

The real difficulty of marrying Lovecraftian horror with the pbta engine is that pbta games do two things really well, and those things are not elements of Lovecraftian horror. Pbta games excel at tapping into tropes of genre and turning archetypes into characters. The narrators in Lovecraft’s stories don’t really have a variety of type, and their character tropes don’t lend themselves to story games. The second thing is that pbta games allow you to ground a narrative in the lives and actions of the characters, so that the characters drive the plot and not the other way around. Plot and the Mythos are what is king in Lovecraft’s world, and the characters are merely vehicles for showing the limitations of human beings in the face of such cosmic horrors.

The playbooks are rather uninspired, but that is pretty true of Lovecraft’s narrators too. Since there aren’t archetypes to draw on, Sean Preston opted to use occupations as the main determinant in each playbook. Because occupation is a much weaker category than archetype, the choices players get to make when designing their characters are not very exciting. The moves are functional, but a player will hardly chomp at the bit to advance and gain a new skill. In the end, though, I think this is fine because Lovecraft characters are born to die or go insane, not become super-competent investigators.

The book gives great rules for creating threads, frameworks, and playsets, which make up the mystery the characters embark on. I’m excited to give them a go and see how they compare to the mystery creation methods in Monster of the Week, which I love.

As a reference book, tremulus could have benefitted from a professional layout designer. The sections are not easily discernible and visually everything kind of tumbles over everything else as you move through the book. And a professional editor would probably have been able to pull like things together, either in presentation or in a reference section at the back of the book. For example, the Harm and Shock scales are unnecessarily in two different parts of the book (Preston does not want the player to see the Shock scale, but players are unlikely to be reading the book—or if they are, they are unlikely to stop in the Keeper section as a forbidden area). Some information is mentioned only once in obscure places in the book. For example, when players roll a natural 12, the character gains a point of Lore and a situational benefit, but you would only know that if you read through the Lexicon section on page 9. Something like Dark Insight should be mentioned elsewhere in the book as well.

I purchased a softcover of the book instead of the PDF because I wanted a hard copy. But since I purchased it, I learned that the additional character types available through DriveThruRPG are supposed to be better than the basic playbooks, but each of the three additional sets are $5.00. Additional playsets and expansions for the included playset are also available and also costly, so I kind of wish I saved my money to get all the extra stuff. Alas.

The next test is to take the game out for a real spin and see how it plays.

The horror genre is not one that I'm much into, but I am a fan of the Apocalypse World engine for RPG games, so I had to give this game a try. From reading it, it looks like a solid implementation of the system. Character generation and making moves, while tweaked for the setting, will be familiar to anyone who is familiar with Apocalypse World. Where the game innovates is with setting creation.

The game defines a number of hazard types with their own moves, then shows how to take those hazards and combine them into threads of related hazards, and then take multiple threads and weave them into a framework that makes up a scenario.

The book then presents a playset called Ebon Eaves to demonstrate how it can all work. With the playset, the players pick a number of things that they want to be true about the setting, and then their choices determine the two threads that will make up the scenario.

This is very similar to the system used in Durance to create the setting in that game. I'm not sure if one game influenced the other or not, or if the systems were developed independently. The system is a good one that presents a wide array of possibilities.

I have a couple of quibbles with the playset, but both are minor. The first is that the Keeper (gamemaster) might have to tweak some of the combinations to make them work. For example, most of the location based threads are set in the traditional Lovecraftian setting of the northeastern US, but a few are not. That's nice, but some of the "town lore" threads are such that they don't make a lot of sense if not set in that location. One such has tropical fruits growing locally as an example of something strange going on, but that's maybe not so strange if the location is in the Florida Keys, as one of the location based threads is.

The other quibble is that there appears to be some anachronisms here and there for something that's supposed to be set in the 1920s. It's also possible that my own sketchy knowledge of the period may be at fault rather than the game.

Neither of these issues would keep me from wanting to play this game, and I may possibly even do so despite my lack of interest in the genre, just based on the strength of the design.

Seems like a quick and simple system for running table top games on the fly. I think it probably lends itself more toward one shots and convention play, but this may be because I do not care for killing and replacing characters often in my long running chronicles. But if you are looking for something quick and fun that may run once or twice I would give this a go.

Warning: If you are a GM that is big into writing story and worlds, the Keeper section may be a bit off putting. It seemed to both complicate and over simplify story building as well as discourage tinkering with the system. This also played a part in my assessment that it is likely better suited to short term runs.

I am contemplating running this at a con in November.

I honestly CANNOT wait to get started on this. This is a perfect gift for Lovecraft fans who also happen to play tabletop rpg.

I was looking for a Lovecraftian horror game that seemed more workable than my old standby Call of Cthulhu and stumbled on tremulus. I downloaded the pdf, started reading it, and read it through in a day. It's good stuff. I need to actually run it (in a few weeks) to see how it works in practice, but I like a whole lot of what's in it, and it's firing my brain nicely. It's a Powered by the Apocalypse game (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, others) so it is easy to play but hard for people who have gamed a lot to get used to the changes it presents. I need more practice with PbtA games, and I'm glad some of it will be running this one.

An indie horror RPG that has the potential to be any flavour of horror your group can imagine - cerebral, gore, creature, thriller, whatever.

Elevator pitch:
Very little prep work for the Keeper (GM), lots of potential for mind-bending horror for the players, and a simple, easy-to-learn 2d6 system.

What more can you ask for?

How about:
- a ready-to-go setting with 1250 play combinations?
- eleven different player archetypes (playbooks) to choose from and customize?
- a set of creatures from mundane to horrific to get you going?
- instructions on how to create settings, playbooks, and creatures of your own?

TL;DR version:
About half the book is dedicated to the Keeper's (GM's) section, which makes sense given the amount of information handed over for the included setting of Ebon Eaves. It's not complicated or heavy; there are a lot of combinations and each is given its own blurb, that's all. The basics of the game are just that, basic and easy to grasp. Players need two 6-sided dice to play, while the Keeper doesn't roll dice at all. Damage tracks are dual, with physical and mental stresses counted separately on 6-step increments. (Well, 5. Take 6 steps along either track and you're very likely going to be a bloody smear or a gibbering mess in very short order.)

The character sheets are pre-fab archetypes that each player customizes (think Apocalypse World playbooks), and the setting is a small town the group fleshes out minimally by answering a dozen yes or no questions. There are no duplicates allowed in play - you cannot have a party of three Journalists and a Dilettante, for example. Each player has access to a basic set of actions, along with 3-4 archetype-specific actions. Play is much less rules-driven than it is story-driven, and as such allows for quite a bit more creepiness.

There isn't a huge selection in the way of pre-generated "creatures", but there are more than enough to get you going and the ASHES system makes it very quick and easy to make your own - even in the middle of gameplay.

Overall, an excellent addition to your gaming library. Highly recommended for Lovecraft fans and/or horror aficionados, even if they've never played an RPG.

Seems like a quick and simple system for running table top games on the fly. I think it probably lends itself more toward one shots and convention play, but this may be because I do not care for killing and replacing characters often in my long running chronicles. But if you are looking for something quick and fun that may run once or twice I would give this a go.

Warning: If you are a GM that is big into writing story and worlds, the Keeper section may be a bit off putting. It seemed to both complicate and over simplify story building as well as discourage tinkering with the system. This also played a part in my assessment that it is likely better suited to short term runs.

I am contemplating running this at a con in November.