Review: Adventures of the Moss Babies
The Adventures of the Moss-Babies is a #rpg #zine writing up the adventures of a group of players who are notionally playing the #Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords campaign.
It is a mixture of in an out of character material that both serves as a kind of game scrapbook and literally as a fanzine of the players to their characters and I guess to themselves as a group.
I haven't read anything quite like this before. Aslan used to have in-character game reports but the mix of different perspectives seems different. Here the celebration of the game is held as being of equal importance to the game fiction.
The mix is stranger still because one of the members of the group is an internationally celebrated artist who has drawn mainstream comics like Batman as well as her own fantasy romances (you should totally read The Mire if you haven't already).
This naturally leads to a level of finish and quality that is ridiculously top-end for a "fan" product. Cloonan's contributions clearly stand out but its an egalitarian mix of content from all the group.
The Moss of the title is essentially a marijuana reference with a page dedicated to the effects of various herbs and moss along with the exhortation to "Smoke moss everyday".
This combined with a character called "Bardley Cooper" sets the general tone of light-hearted, meta, pop-culture referencing. This is not really about world building or a shared fiction but instead a communal comedy set inside the framework of a published campaign and ruleset.
This means you probably already know whether you are going to love this or not.
Cloonan fans are going to want it, vicarious gamers will find an openness that connects here. People who game rather than reading about games are not going to get much out of this. Those into the ephemera of roleplaying will get a kick out of such a well-executed window into a group and their game.
