Review: Svalbard

Sablemage

Demi-God
TLDR: Roguelike scenario drawing on the Cthulhu mythos. 98 page PDF by Two Starving Gnolls, price unknown at time of writing (it’s a Kickstarter reward for me).

Spoiler alert, this has a gimmick I haven’t seen before, which I will explain below, so if you intend to play this rather than run it, probably best to move on.

What’s This?


It’s 1993, and a secret Russian military base on an arctic island has emitted a call for help and a large gamma ray burst. The name Azathoth has been mentioned. The PCs are sent to investigate; time is clearly of the essence, so briefing and equipment are scant.

The scenario is essentially a series of puzzles, and could be run in any game system really; there is a very basic one included, but basically it allows players to say if their character is smart, dextrous or strong, and is more a guideline to how they intend to solve problems than anything. They are assumed to be competent spec ops soldiers, field agents, investigators, or whatever and can do anything such people could do.

The key resource the players must manage is time. They have a small number of ‘time units’ which are used up as they make their way through the underground base and deal with its hazards, and once they’re all gone, “rocks fall, everyone dies”. Oh, and the world ends.

Spoiler! Now the gimmick; when the PCs die, as they inevitably will, they respawn at the entrance to the base and can try again. Since they now know the answers to some of the puzzles, they should get closer to solving the mystery and saving the world each time, until they finally succeed. This is the RPG equivalent of Groundhog Day, and the reason for my impulse purchase of the title, as I wanted to see what the authors would do with the idea.

I also got the GM screen, which has some atmospheric artwork, a summary of what’s in each location, and all the maps of the site on one page. A useful addition.

What Do I Think?


This is not a scenario you can run twice with the same players, but then what tabletop scenario is? I think I could run it 2-3 times by carefully selecting groups of players with no overlap, and it might work as a convention game too; it should be possible to finish it in a single session.

I’m not sure how the players would react to multiple Total Party Kills in one session, especially the first time (which the GM is encouraged to surprise the players with), and I’m also not certain about how to handle situations where one PC dies and the others don’t – there are several places that can happen. This would probably work OK with OSR and Call of Cthulhu groups, as they are used to a high casualty rate, but other players? I’m not so sure. Maybe that’s just the folks I play with.

The authors are Norwegian, so there are some slips in the use of English, but nothing that would stop you using the product. There are also a couple of places where the equipment list is a bit strange; what party goes into an old mine without a rope, for example? But these are minor niggles.

Overall, this is an interesting experiment, one which reminds me somewhat of a favourite PC game, Half-Life, and something I would run a couple of times as a palette cleanser or a one-off. The authors suggest it could also be used as the introduction to a longer campaign, but I struggle to see where that goes after the PCs have literally saved the world from an Elder God.

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