Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures – World Walkers’ edition

Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures – World Walkers’ edition by John Josten is a role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is part of the Small Bites series and is the “World Walker version. Normally the full version, which is close to four times the length of this edition, is only available to Patreon supporters. However, this is part of the Endless Dungeon series and the Game Masters’ edition, which contains an adventure, is also available to buy.

The supplement is available for free as a 17-page PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover.

The Introduction explains that this edition is about adventures that are different in some way.

The Fletnern Wiki section duplicates entries from the wiki. This one explains that because of all the Endless Dungeon and Brinston editions in the series, there are few entries that haven’t been used, so instead this edition has more unusual things from Fletnern. It covers one artefact with the rest being sites.

The Sounding Board duplicates blog posts. Why Shadowrun Sucked explains that the first two editions had a problem; deckers and mages could both do stuff that didn’t involve the rest of the party, and that instead it should have been something that could be shared.

Aliens in Fantasy explains how several alien races the author created and never used were instead used as fantasy monsters.

Switching Genres starts by explaining that Westerns of a certain type are the best genre to borrow ideas from, then looks at why others are not so good, in particular those with a single-character focus.

How to Steal Ideas and Not Get Caught is on repurposing ideas from different sources so that players don’t recognise where they came from.

How to Play… Non-Standard Adventurers is aimed at players whose GM throws something a little different at them

Optional Rules suggests that a GM, where possible, uses normal rules in non-standard adventures and, if they need new rules, make them really simple; the more complicated the reason, the harder it is to easily determine if the players’ off the wall solution should work or not.

Monsters & Other Menaces looks at two monster types used in the adventure, golems and conjured creatures. The adventure in particular uses toy golems.

The Dark Sides says that when stories are used as a non-standard adventure, such as fairy stories, these stories can (and often used to be) told as horror stories. Fairy tales were not pleasant.

Mass Market Magic looks at Fairy Lights, doll house sized magical lights.

Small Towns and City Neighbourhoods looks at Brinston and how the delta is crossed, which to the south of the city is often by ferry.

What’s Missing? is about two and a half pages long and details what’s in the full supplement.

In Conclusion warps things up and also has various links, followed by a Patreon ad.

The final page is a simple map of the Brinston region.

Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures – World Walkers’ edition in Review

The PDF is bookmarked with major sections linked, though some point to the wrong place. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of depth and is hyperlinked. There are also some external links to relevant material. Navigation is okay. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a number of tock black and white images. Presentation is okay.

This is another collection of loosely-connected articles, not a coherent whole. Though the full edition has an adventure in it, it is really only mentioned in passing in this version, with some mentions as to content in the adventure. The articles are generally along the concept of non-standard adventures, but perhaps diverge from that overall topic. Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures – World Walkers’ edition is a decent collection of articles and it can be found by clicking here.