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Xas Irkalla
[978-0-9986746-2-9]
$11.00
Publisher: Atramentis Games
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by Ty A. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/08/2018 18:49:56

Did you see this book's cover and think it was a logo for a black metal band? Yup, me too, and I think that's exactly what what the designers were going for with this ultra bleak (and ultra awesome) new tabletop game.

In a nutshell, Xas Irkallla is the RPG equivalent of the terrifying esoteric oddity of a Deathspell Omega album colliding with the blackened violence of any given USBM band. Its dark and grim and mind bending and unpleasant, like being trapped in a Gustave Doré painting.

Rather than your typical d20 open game license entry, Xas Irkalla features a unique ruleset, and it is woven very well into the fabric of the game. The rules are simplified and fairly easy, but show off the theme quite well. While a good deal different than players may be used to if they stick to Pathfinder or a system like Modiphius' 2d20 rules, the mechanics here are easy to pick up and flow well.

Loads of character advancement options are available that reflect the dark insanity of the setting, but don't get too attached, because characters are going to die frequently and messily. You are squishy like a Call Of Cthulhu character, and in a universe that's more actively deadly, like an even more horror-focused Warhammer.

While there are a couple of minor nit picks in the layout and formatting where you can tell this is more of an indie affair, overall I'm pretty impressed with the quality of everything on display, from the art to the design concepts.

Xas Irkalla is an incredibly disturbing version of roleplaying, and that can't be said enough. As a vast intersection of wildly different worlds and realities pulled together by the dreams of dead psychics, things get deliciously weird.

You might have a qliphotic, tentacled sorcerer in a wheelchair next to a spear-wielding gladiatorial slave next to a soldier from an ultra-advanced space-faring society next to a mischievous trickster god in the party.

The setting is just relentlessly grim. As someone who writes apocalyptically bleak grimdark fantasy novels, I'm down with that, but obviously a group who wants to play the heroic paladins saving the peasants from evil will not be on board with this setting.

What you get here is a radically different experience than the typical RPG. Xas Irkalla ends up somewhere at the cross section of survival horror, esoteric U.S. black metal, the Cthulhu mythos, a nightmare wrapped in an acid trip wrapped in a sweat lodge hallucination, and even darker, more dreadful things.

After a successful crowd funding campaign, Xas Irkalla is now available digitally, but this is the sort of game you want to hold in your hands, and I'm eagerly looking forward to a physical edition landing soon.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Xas Irkalla
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