You just can’t keep a good Gloom down
SHADOWS OF KILFORTH: A FANTASY QUEST GAME
Designer: Tristan Hall | Publisher: Hall or Nothing
Three years ago, independent designer Tristan Hall treated us to a complex but immersive ‘whole fantasy RPG campaign in a single game’ with his ambitious debut Gloom of Kilforth. As enjoyable played solo as with a group (in either cooperative or competitive modes), and packed with finely illustrated cards, each featuring a unique piece of art, this demon-battling quester came out of nowhere to land in Tabletop Gaming’s Top 10 of the year.
Like Hollywood, Hall couldn’t let a hit go without a sequel. So here’s Shadows of Kilforth, in which it turns out all the travails of those Kilforthian adventurers years earlier amounted to naught, and that nasty, realmchoking miasma is back, knocking the land out round by round, region by region, in preparation for more Hellraiser-ish Ancients to come and defile the world.
Lore-wise, it’s not so much an advancement as a remix, with a murky new corner of Hall’s world to explore, a little more diverse than the last one, now drawing more on East Asian mythology in its heroes and monsters. As before, each player creates a race/class combo and embarks on their own race-against-time saga to complete before taking on those hideous, all-powerful Ancients. But now they can be a Samurai, Ninja or Yakuza if they like, while Hall’s new races feel more Kilforth-specific than Tolkien-ripped: the winged Seraph, for example, or the Gloomresistant Veilborn. Your foes are more interesting, too, such as the Kuei, a mind-controlling ghost that allows you to nab another player’s ally, or the one-eyed, undead Buso.
Mechanically, however, there are fewer points of difference between Shadows and Gloom. It is still a matter of spending action points to move around the randomly assembled card-grid realm, encountering enemies and strangers to harvest keywords on cards and complete the chapters of your saga to level up. New players need no previous Gloom-y knowledge to get into it, but it will likely take them time to settle into the chewy rule-set, with its initially confusing differentiations between Actions (which cost an action point) and Deeds (which don’t), and Rumours (cards you hold in your hand) and Assets (cards you’ve played down).
Shadows is also no less dicerolly than Gloom, with each stat determining how many dice are tossed, and only a roll of five or six granting success. There is some inbuilt mitigation, via a limited supply of Fate tokens and the discarding of Rumours to add auto-successes, but it is still possible for a quest to be frustratingly scuppered by consistently bad rolls. It also remains a game that, despite its ticking-clock momentum, can stretch for hours, especially if you choose the cooperative mode, in which you have to contend with one Ancient per player (in competitive you’re all racing to slay a single demon), but hey: didn’t you sign up for an epic quest?
To be fair, Hall has tightened it by adding a setup rule where you cast a few regions into gloom before play starts, while there is some added flavour in making the players choose between two factions, getting different effects from certain events depending on which side they’ve taken.
He also includes a wealth of suggested variants, including twoversus- two team play, the swifter, Ancient-free ‘Gold Rush’ mode (great for first-timers), and versions which allow for greater randomisation of event and reward placement. This, more than anything, rams home why the Kilforth games are so enduringly entertaining: as well as mashing up D&D and Arkham Horror so elegantly, they are also built to be malleable, adaptable, utterly home-ruleable. This quest need never end.
DAN JOLIN
WE SAY
A second serving of questastic dark fantasy as accessible to Gloom n00bs as Ancient-battling veterans. Kilforth and multiply!
WHATS IN THE BOX
◗ 1 Rulebook
◗ 81 Encounter cards
◗ 75 Reward cards
◗ 26 Location cards
◗ 25 Night cards
◗ 24 Saga cards
◗ 24 Plot cards
◗ 8 Race cards
◗ 8 Class cards
◗ 4 Ancient cards
◗ 4 Ancient Abilities cards
◗ 32 Skill cards
◗ 40 Card dividers
◗ 60 Gold tokens
◗ 32 Action Point tokens
◗ 32 Health tokens
◗ 24 Obstacle tokens
◗ 16 Fate tokens
◗ 4 Hidden tokens
◗ 25 Night Location tokens
◗ 42 Loot tokens
◗ 25 Reward Location tokens
◗ 15 Enemy/ Claim tokens
◗ 1 First Hero marker
◗ 8 Hero standees
◗ 6 Six-sided dice
◗ 1 Loot bag
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED GLOOM OF KILFORTH…
Not least because it’s totally possible to mix the two games up however you like, and make your own Kilforthian cocktail.