I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to do yard work today, but it’s 38 degrees outside so I’m going to read Beecher’s Bibles (words by Noora Rose), because of events happening of late and I’d like to drop a little positivity into the shark-infested waters that can be the roleplaying game scene. A year or two ago, I was playing Boot Hill (first edition), and thinking how much Mothership’s Panic Engine (I don’t think it had a name back then) would suit Boot Hill so well, and I began writing something along those lines, then stopped (because the list of unfinished projects of mine are far longer than the list of finished projects), and a few years later this Kickstarter popped up and I was like “Woah! Cool! This is exactly what I wanted!” Today, let’s see if it was.

This is a 30-odd page double column layout presented neatly as something written in the 1800’s, complete with cute hand-drawn manicules. I don’t have the physical version, but it looks like it’s intended to be printed as an A5 zine, and it’s not especially readable. A glaring problem is that on non-titled pages, the headers are consistently Beecher’s Bibles and Noora Rose, which, while thematic and reminiscent of contemporary layout, actually makes it hard to recognise when the page is a Critical Effects table or whatever when you’re flicking through the book. The equipment tables are both nigh illegible and look exactly like a Sears catalogue from the same time period looked like. Overall, the layout is stylish as heck and its vibes are impeccable (complete with what I assume are period black and white photos), but there are trade-offs to that which make it a wee bit more difficult to use than I’d like.

The rules themselves are the Panic Engine rules, with minor changes: Stat names are more flavourful (I adore Justice replacing Combat here), a new skill list (which is, to be honest, due to the layout choices, far less intuitive or nuanced than the original), and an elegant combat difficulty systemand hit location that reflects the way you’d likely play a Western game without all the absurd complexity of Boot Hill 1st (or any, really) edition. There are lots of aspects of the expanded rules that I really like and that say a lot about the intended pace and setting of the game. The list of real diseases strongly suggests these are going to happen to you, drugs are likely to be a part of the game. Sometimes this is undermined by a reliance on traditional structures — the hunting rule suggests a very slow, day-based approach to travel, but the travel and foraging rules base things upon watches. Movement is handled in miles per hour, rather than using either the watch-based or day-based timelines. I’d need to put together a table to figure out what all these things actually mean. One thing that I don’t love is that it’s not as lethal as I’d like – you can take twice your Fortitude in wounds, and that is a lot of bullet strikes. I want every time you draw your gun to be tense; that goes back to my desire to retroclone Boot Hill 1st edition to the Panic Engine.

All of this really lends itself to a Red Dead Redemption feeling game — with the exception that the pleasure of Red Dead Redemption II is in the small moments, the pleasure of fishing, the vistas and the feel of the horse underneath you. I recently read Atop the Wailing Dunes, and it does a really good job of giving its neolithic fantasy world which I have no guidelines for and making it a world I could describe as a walk through one mile hexes, one mile at a time. Beecher’s Bibles doesn’t try to do this, but the way the rules point suggest a type of gameplay that would benefit from this approach. To be fair, Pariah, the system that Atop the Wailing Dunes is written for, also fails to support that type of play. But, as you’ll see when I Bathtub Review that in a few months, that’s a significant criticism of Pariah in my opinion, and a fair criticism as well of Beecher’s Bibles, as I don’t think I could run the game that this game points to without a bit more support.

This goes to a few of the rules, as well. I referred to those disease rules that I really like, but the game talks about what it means to have the disease, but now how to catch them or how you’re likely to be infected with them. If I’m going to beat around the bush learning a set of rules, I want a little more support in how to use them, especially (and maybe it’s my non-American-ness here) given how I can’t rely as strongly on the tropes of the Western as I can the tropes of generic elfgames. Unlike Gary Gygax, I wasn’t brought up on John Wayne and western pulps, I know the tropes from a few videogames and spaghetti westerns.

The book’s climax is a module to run a scenario during the Wakarusa War, what appears to be a real world event. I have no familiarity with 1800s state history, so I can’t judge as to how true-to-life this book is, but it certainly seems well-researched. This set up, harking back to the previous section, doesn’t feel like the kind of adventure the rules are written to support: It’s a battle, a stand-off, and the rules are violent and deadly, and are concerned with wandering through the wilderness and catching diseases at brothels or dockyards. I wonder to what degree it’s meant to stand as an example of what you should do with the game, rather than provide an actual scenario: The encounter table is neat, and hits some of the notes I wish the game hit as a whole; the chase rules appear here and not earlier, but are the first example of how skills would be used. I’d love for the key NPCs to have a clearer direction rather than just a description of their recent history and notoriety.

How do I feel about Beecher’s Bibles as a whole? I think it’s very good, but the parts of it that spark my imagination, don’t appear to be the same ones that sparked the author’s imagination, and so those aspects are underdeveloped in my opinion. I play rules-lite games, but for that very reason, if I play a new game, I want it to support the type of play I want, or I’ll just write or hack a new game myself. This one doesn’t give me the Kansas generator I want, so that wilderness travel won’t have the juice of seeing a herd of Bison in Red Dead Redemption 2 and detouring from my goal to go hunting and claim a perfect pelt, or of seeing a storm rolling in or an abandoned hut. This doesn’t support the interesting play directions it implies, like its diseases and travel giving nice, slow timelines, and suggesting the exact ramifications of high-speed travel like rail would have on this world. I don’t like how durable your characters are.

Does that make it a bad game? I don’t think so. It’s fine if your picture of a western roleplaying game is different from what mine is. I’m a little disappointed, though, because it showed a lot of promise to be exactly what I wanted. This is a game which feels like it could have been though, it’s just not fully baked. I’m aware that I can make all the content myself, but I could have written the game myself, writing rules isn’t that hard, particularly using someone else’s engine. What has been added here is good, even when it’s not to my taste, and I could tweak those thing easily to be to my liking. But there is so much that isn’t added, that I’d want to make running my 1800’s Kansas campaign an ease and a pleasure, that isn’t here.

So, in conclusion, Beecher’s Bibles: A good western game, that feels incomplete. It’s $6.99, a price at which I wouldn’t expect perfection. It’s better than pretty much every other Western game out there, because they are better kept simple, in my opinion. I’d recommend picking it up, if it’s your jam, but I warn you that unless you’re from Kansas, it’ll take a bit of effort to pick up and run.

Idle Cartulary