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Casus Belli 40 |
| 2022-07-01 |
Casus Belli 40
Casus Belli, is the main francophone TTRPG magazine. It started in 1980 and its current iteration is the fourth one. I received my copy #40 and here are the things in it that caught my attention.
Here are the scenarii (modules) proposed by the magazine:
- "Sirca's quintuplets" Starfinder
- "The wine justifies the means?" Laelith / 5e
- "Join Nirvana" Modern CO
- "Hypnos awakes" Mutants and Masterminds
- "What's up Android?" Quantiques
The reviews that stood out for me are:
- Wastburg 2nd Edition
- Alice is missing
- Château Falkenstein
There is a small 3 pages game named Donjonzédragon (yes, the PDF has ten pages while the magazine version has 3). One of the players incarnates "the creature" and wields the six-sided dice, while the other players are "the guild". The creature wins the fifth time it routs a mercenary of the guild. There is a small exploration procedure with narrative hooks for the outcome of the turns. Looks like excellent fun.
The iteration of the "Bâtisses & Artifices" column presents Notre-Dame de Rouen on 10 pages. It focuses more on the context (archbishopric) around the building than on the building itself, and they give a few scenario hooks.
The interview of Jean Balczesak is quite interesting, as he was the translator to French of the first five versions of the Call of Cthulhu and he's thus part of the pioneers of role-playing games in France.
My favourite piece is written by a junior high school teacher and it explains how he manages the role-playing game club in his school. He had to overcome quite a few constraints, the biggest of them being that a session lasts fifty minutes. How to compress the startup time of each session? Also, the room allocated to his club changes each week... He ended up having each GM putting all their material in a box and each player their sheets, pencils and dice in a brown envelope, then there is a well-rehearsed routine of re-arranging chairs and tables to set up the game spaces. Not all members of the club participate in games, and with the popularization of actual plays, the young players are ok being simply part of the audience.
In the editorial, the head of the redaction team officialized the trimestrial rhythm of publication (four issues per year) and announced a price increase.
