Speaker A
I'm afraid not, my liege. Greetings, traveler, and welcome to Quinn's Quest, your software library or soft burn.
Quinns Quest reviews Stonetop, a 1,200-page classic fantasy TTRPG praised for its rich world, creative monsters, and emotional depth.
Key Takeaways
- Stonetop is a masterful classic fantasy RPG with deep world-building and creative monsters.
- It stands out by focusing on the players’ home village and the experience of living, not just adventuring.
- The game balances large content with high quality, avoiding filler and encouraging meaningful play.
- Emotionally intelligent storytelling and cinematic player narration are core strengths.
- Jeremy Strandberg’s dedication over 13 years resulted in a rich, award-winning RPG experience.
Summary
- Stonetop is a 1,200-page fantasy tabletop RPG written by Jeremy Strandberg over 13 years, recently released as physical books.
- The game won Quinns Quest's seasonal favorite award for its quality and emotional impact, not necessarily being 'better' than others.
- Stonetop features a richly detailed world with towns, forests, swamps, and unique creatures like Cayamora and Krewin.
- Unlike many modern fantasy RPGs that are grimdark or culturally reinterpreted, Stonetop embraces classic fantasy with mastery.
- The game focuses on living in the village of Stonetop rather than just adventuring or killing monsters.
- The loot and monsters in Stonetop are highly praised, with treasure deserving its own detailed discussion.
- The game encourages emotionally intelligent play and cinematic action sequences with player narration.
- Stonetop’s design emphasizes quality over quantity, avoiding filler content common in large RPG books.
- The review includes personal anecdotes and comparisons to other indie RPGs like Wolves Upon the Coast.
- Quinns Quest plans further content including an interview with the designer and player discussions.
Chapters
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
We're reviewing a fantasy TTRPG today, and you know what? The my rings are loud.
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You know what that means? Swords! Horse! This guy! Now, I know what you're thinking. You've played a fantasy RPG before. Swords, horse, that guy. You've seen it all before. Well, please allow me to tease you out of your slumber because
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Stonetop, all 1,200 pages of it, which was previously available as a PDF and has just now dropped as a couple of finished books, is actually the winner of this season of Quinn's Quest.
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[music] [music] What does this award mean? Well, what it doesn't mean is that Stonetop is better than the other games I've reviewed this season. All it means is that Stonetop is my favorite. You could say this isn't even an award for Stonetop.
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It's an award for me for reading RPGs every day and still being able to feel something, which is why I won't be sending this award to Stonetop publishers Penny Lantern, but they don't go home with nothing. I've sent them this Polaroid of me with their
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awards and this Quinn's Quest pencil. So, now, I bet you're wondering what's the secret behind these unappealingly dense-looking white books that look like something you'd get from reaching level two in Scientology. Why would Quinn's be reviewing this instead of hyped releases
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like Thag a Ha and Draw Steel? And how could a straight fantasy game win an award on Quinn's Quest when that would surely mean it's more fantastic than other games that have left me breathless with excitement like The Wild Sea and
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Heart and the other one, Mythic Bastion Land. Folks, I am so glad you asked.
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Fasten your book belts and let's get started. I was going to do that joke with an actual belt, but it's way too small. It looks completely insane. I'm so tempted to leave it on just 'cause it looks silly, but I think it
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runs a bit too close to a submissive scholar. So, are you sitting comfortably? This is the world of Stonetop. Every good fantasy RPG needs a lush paper map.
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Stonetop comes with a few [music] and this is the largest scale one. It's called the World's End and it's exactly [music] what you might hope for from a fantasy game. It's like a national park for sword-swinging adventurers. There's
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a desperately mysterious forest with one big magic tree. Why so huge? There's a town of ale-soaked [music] thieves.
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Oh, watch your purse. And another town of frosty mystics. Oh, tell me your secrets.
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And there's an unflinchingly revolting poison swamp that would make me a Zaki blush. Oh, this is really quite gross.
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In fact, this first book is Stonetop's rules and like I know it looks huge.
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[music] It looks god awful, but it's actually not huge or awful. It is in fact just good, but then this second book is simply a kick-ass encyclopedia of everything that makes its home in this map. Every town, every landscape,
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every river, every ruin, every beastie, every treasure, every secret. Every secret landscape, every beastly ruin, every town of beasts, every river secret, every ruinous treasure. But, as I've said before on the Quest Coast Patreon, I'm not impressed by how big
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your world is if you made it that big by putting boring content in there.
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You can't make role-playing books like you do a video game where more content is always a good thing because, as one of my players pointed out to me, the limiting factor in role-playing games is not the amount of content, it is the
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amount of scheduled hours that you as a group get to spend together. So, whenever I'm reading one of these books and I'm seeing towns or dungeons that are flat worse than what the average GM could come up with themselves with a bit
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of heart, it makes me want to frisbee these books at the goddamn moon.
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Stonetop, like many of the books I review on Quest Coast, does not have this problem. If you were to judge Stonetop on nothing more than the quality of its monsters and its loot, it would be up there with the very best
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fantasy games of all time. So, today, the authors of a lot of fantasy RPGs tend to do something different with the genre. They make it grimdark or self-referential. Stonetop's author, Jeremy Strandberg, yes, all 1,200 of these pages were written by
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one man and it took him 13 years. He instead just has an incredible knack with the kind of raw creative clay that popularized the genre of fantasy in the first place.
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Your players might encounter a Cayamora, the royalty of deer with antlers so large you can scarce believe how deftly it moves through the woods. Krewin, who are something like papery apes who make nests like wasps and try in vain to copy
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human tricks like language and farming, becoming enraged when it doesn't work. The fearsome Crondel, the lady of crows.
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And that's just the letter C. You want to talk about the letter D? There's dinosaurs in this game. They're not literally under D for dinosaurs. They've got cool fantasy names, but there's dinosaurs in this game. I don't have
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anywhere to go with that as a critic. Um, I think it's a good creative decision.
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Everyone likes dinosaurs. Um, let's move on. And then I mentioned that the loot in Stonetop is really good. Treasure in this game is so good, it needs to get its own section in this review. I'm going to talk about it later when I've
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got space. You could use the chapter headings to navigate to that part of the review now, but don't touch him. Don't touch him. Don't touch him. Don't touch him. I put everything in this review in a specific order. As I was saying, a lot
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of great modern fantasy games get results by treating the genre of fantasy in like an intense tie-dye of postmodernism. That's how we get awesome games like Mörk Borg or Wilden Dram or Palaces and Princesses. Other projects make the genre of fantasy feel fresh and
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amazing by putting their own cultural spin on it, which is how we get something like The Amazing Kalameet and Dungeons. These books ask, "What if D&D was happening in Southeast Asia?" And in their own words, the result is a fuzzy
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kaleidoscope of incense, ghosts, rivers, spices, magic, and more. Stonetop instead faces down the challenge of just taking classic fantasy and getting it exactly right. And in this way, you could say it has something in common with indie darling Wolves Upon the Coast
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by Luke Gearing. But, and I don't mean this as shade for either author, Wolves Upon the Coast still feels like Luke is having fun writing it. If Wolves Upon the Coast is Luke Gearing spending a boozy Sunday cooking you up a feast in
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his home kitchen, Stonetop is Jeremy getting up at 4:00 a.m. to demonstrate his mastery of French cuisine in an exam setting. And the end result is delicious.
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Stonetop is the game you play to do scenes without an iota of irony where a player is like, "I take my magic sword and then I plunge it into the side of the giant snake." And it's the most
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exciting moment of your entire life. But, are you ready for the twist? Here's the twist. I'm always putting the twist too late in my reviews, but why break the habit of a lifetime? Stonetop is effortlessly fluent in the language of classic
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fantasy, right? But, this isn't a game about monsters. This isn't a game about loot. And it's not even often a game about adventuring. This is the known world, right? You can explore it for years and never be done. But, let's zoom
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in right here. And there's that same village again. Let's zoom in one more time.
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This is Stonetop, which isn't just the name of this game. Stonetop is the name of the village, the players' village.
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The players' home. You see, in just one word, Stonetop is a fantasy adventure game about living.
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And that is in contrast to almost the entire history of fantasy adventure role-playing, which if you were to reduce it down to one word, as you would in Mother 3, it is about killing. I'm not saying your beloved
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original characters are murderers. Maybe things just try and kill you and you don't want to be killed,
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that reward going to help you do? It's going to help you get to the campaign villain and kill them. It doesn't matter how hard your home game tries to escape it. There is no getting away from the fact that
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the womb that carried the brand of Dungeons and Dragons to term was war gaming. It's in the name. Do you know what happens in and by and to Dungeons and Dragons?
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It's killing. Do you know what Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's first project together was before they made D&D? It was a set of rules to simulate single ship actions of the War of 1812. Now, hear me out. I'm still going. Also,
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there is nothing wrong with any of this. I love strategy games my entire life.
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Don't cite the deep magic to me, which I was there when it was written. I'm just saying. You want to know why I found Stone Top so exciting and refreshing and deeply moving? You want to know why I ran a home campaign of
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Stone Top that lasted 23 sessions, way longer than anything I've played for Queen's Quest before, because that's the Queen's Quest guarantee. I'll only review a game on this channel if I've played it first.
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You want to know why I'm reviewing this game instead of Fiasco Heart or Draw Steel, which would probably generate way more interest for me? It's because this game takes the foundation of the fantasy adventure genre that we are all, to a
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greater or lesser extent, in love with, leaves it completely intact, and then just swaps it out so that you are adventuring to live instead of adventuring to kill. And I'm oversimplifying here. There's a lot of other things about Stone Top's Heart
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that is equally deeply affecting, like the fact that traditionally fantasy is about rugged individualism, and Stone Top is about community. So, let's get into how all this works by getting out the paperwork from my Stone Top campaign. The
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So, the village of Stone Top is where the players are from, and you folks are going to bring it to life in detail that is almost too much at times. Stone Top, of course, gets its own character sheets. Players are going to choose
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where they live. You do very tense rolls each season to see how good the harvest is or how bad the winter is. You'll also have to decide who the midwife is. Maybe it's you. And every other Stone Top
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villager who might appear in one of your role-playing scenes is given a breath of life by picking one of these traits like eats anything or not afraid of deep water or my personal favorite runs everywhere. It's always from Stone
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Top that your character set out and it's not that everything you do out in the world is four Stone Top because that's actually a murky question for the players around your table in this [music] campaign. Just what is the fiber
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of your hero's fabric? What does your character wonder about? What do they hunger for? And when you come back from your travels, do you share your treasures?
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With who? Show me. But one thing's for sure is that your town of Stone Top will change during the campaign for better or for worse either because of the items or secrets or grozy NPCs you bring back. This is homeless
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beef eater. He lives here now. But you can also expect Stone Top to change as a result of the callous steamy soap opera that happens while your player characters are in Stone Top and while you're away. Your soap opera might not
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be steamy. Mine mine was mine was mine was a little bit steamy. But at your table the internal drama of Stone Top might be light-hearted or dark.
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Wouldn't you know it? Homeless beef eater is a lot less funny of an NPC when you're leaving him alone with your family. And this is very much a trait that happens throughout all of Stone Top. It wants to give you this big
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glorious transporting world but it doesn't want to tell you exactly what kind of stories happen in that world. It wants to leave that up to you. So at your table one of the things you'll have to decide quite quickly
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or you could just I guess let happen naturally is figuring out how much of your story happens within Stone Top's walls and fields and how much of your campaign happens out there in the wider world. And it's interesting. You know, I
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think for lots of the people watching this you'll have immediate inclination for what you want your stories out in the world to be like. Magic, drama, villains, heroes. But what, I wonder, will you make of the stories that happen
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here in the town? Will you, I wonder, find yourself naturally exploring joyous slice-of-life scenes like a boozy wedding where there's all kinds of gossip? Or will you find yourself exploring kind of Game of Thrones-y politics, you know? Perhaps you've got a
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brother who's very [music] ambitious and wants to rule Stone Top. In my home game, an emotion that came up a lot in our town of Stone Top was jealously. Who in the town is so respected they're allowed [music] to
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make decisions for all of you? Who gets to go on these grand adventures? Who has stories told of them around the fire?
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Uh, my home game of Stone Top had a great subplot. When players would get home from an adventure by the skin of their teeth, and then they'd be told that Truffle, this little like 15-year-old wunderkind, had also been on
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an adventure. My players were like, I'm sorry, what? In my home game, we also decided that it'd be fun if pretty much every time the adventuring players got home, there was a feast in which everyone could get super drunk and
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grievances could be aired and mistakes could be made. And often, we'd have conversations that were more tense than the battle with a fry thing, because you can kill a fry thing. You can't kill your dad.
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Or can you? And then, to facilitate this town not just being important but exciting in your campaign, it's very important that Stone Top is set in the Iron Age. I'm sure you noticed from the artwork. We're not in the trite
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medieval-ish setting of most fantasy, which has been worn smooth by so many brands it now resembles a Renaissance Fair more than it does any actual historic period. In the world of Stone Top, there are actually some darker-skinned people to the south that
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are yucking it up in something like classical antiquity, but for your ass, it's the Iron Age. You're living in a time before doors. And this is important because it binds your players to that to their home. Life is simply harder. Homes
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are colder. Farming is meaner. This settlement is like a pinhole of light in a vast expanse of [music] darkness in which you and your family and your neighbors might tend to your beans and stoke your fires and share a tot of whiskey on a cold
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winter's night. And in play, role-playing out the dice rolls that come from the whole village working from dawn till dusk to get the harvest in, can be quite moving. And also quite funny. Like you and your other players
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are about to go on an adventure and also all of your moms are there. People of Stonetop, tomorrow the four of us will ride for the mountains and I hope we will all come back alive, but we might
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Yes, mother, what is it? Yes, obviously I'm going to try and come back alive. Another thing the Iron Age does is that tabletop role-playing games are all about players being free to make whatever choice they want and those
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choices having consequences, right? Well, in the Iron Age, this society, not just Stonetop, but the other towns, is so pliant and ill-defined that players get a degree of freedom that is almost intimidating. Like Stonetop has no king.
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This world has no laws besides what people agree to do because one individual is like cool enough or spooky enough. There is no organized religion besides what your pagan ass tells the GM they're doing around the bonfire at
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night and like by goodness, guys, do you know how good disorganized religion is in a role-playing game? Like we've all played in fantasy role-playing games where at some point the GM was like, "Okay, now it's time for me to tell you
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about the gods and their relationship to the people and their relationship to the church." And just like that, something that's supposed to induce wonder and joy and terror and faith is reduced to something like an org chart. But like in
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Stone Top, three of the available like character classes that a player might choose to play are priests of nature, a priest of light, or a priest of the law.
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And you see this character sheet? That's the church. It's you. Like the org chart has one point and it's your bare super powered ass and maybe a second point that's like God. But it gets better because that same priest
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player character might then during the campaign go out into the world, go to another town, and meet another priest of their same God, like Danu the nature goddess for example. And then in that moment, that player character meets the
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other priests and once again goes, "All right, I'm going to tell you what my faith is." And then that NPC might be like, "You are absolutely full of shit." And neither of you are right. And that is a fabulously interesting relationship
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or conflict or alliance that you then get to make together. But like I'm joking about this swaggering confidence of priests in Stone Top may have. In my home campaign, it was actually the opposite. Two of the players at my table
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played priests of nature and the law and the whole campaign for them ended up exploring the story of basically the incredible imposter syndrome that comes from being a clergy of one. There's no one you can talk to if you've got
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questions or doubts. And then by the end of my campaign, those player characters had accepted that they would never know their God.
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But they could learn who they were. And they would never answer those questions. But they knew what they believed. It was beautiful. So, that's your pitch on what Stone Top is. It's the fantasy adventure game about the simple life. It's the
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game where your character could end up covered in blood from fighting a warlord or from delivering a goat.
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That's its hooves. That's me pulling the hooves out of the business. And quite affectingly, [music] it's a game where the thing that your player characters might be fighting for is that they can stop fighting. Stonetop is a game where a
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player character could reasonably sacrifice themselves just to hear the GM say that 10 years pass.
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To get um real and vulnerable [music] with you folks watching this for a second, in real life, I cannot stop watching news of conflicts happening all over the world.
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And I just feel happy at my home table [music] telling stories that don't glamorize combat. And that shouldn't be a big ask because the most popular fantasy story of all time, The Lord of the Rings, is written in the shadow of
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two world wars, and it's about the fellowship risking their lives for peace. And potatoes.
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I need to take a second. Um here's Stonetop with Jeremy Strandberg on why he spent 13 years making a fantasy game that is about um [music] You know, if you kind of like take that as a given that everyone comes from home
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and that it is a home worth fighting for and a home worth defending, [music] then it immediately gives you a motivation for the player characters to work together.
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It immediately gives [music] you a how do we know each other so you don't have to deal with any of the oh, we meet in a tavern nonsense.
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And it it immediately gives stakes to every adventure that comes [music] up. Yes. It just takes care of so many of the potential problems that you can have with your classic [music] D&D style fantasy. At the same time, it humanizes
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it. I mean, in a lot of ways, it stops being the colonialist western, if you will, that that D&D [music] is is arguably based on.
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Uh where, you know, you're you're going into [music] unclaimed territory where there are natives living there and killing them and taking their stuff.
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Ooh, that got a bit heavy, then. Let me lighten things up. Let me just make a statement. That Stonetop wouldn't just be winning this award for fancy moral reasons. This is Quest's Quest. The game's got to be firing on all
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cylinders. This award also goes to Stonetop because this game is just fun as Let me keep this village framework for a little bit longer. Let me give you two other reasons it rules, one of which that's like kind of shallow and then
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another that's more like lofty and structural. Shallow first. Stonetop is Stardew Valley. It's all the joy of the rural life sim video game. You see, when your campaign starts, the village of Stonetop is very much that garbage farm
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you've inherited from your uncle. The village has been limping along for centuries. You got about 150 people eking out a grueling existence. Slaves to our harvest, the mean you're only ever one dice roll away from starvation.
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You also lack the training and the weapons to properly defend yourself. In fact, Stonetop's best defense from raids is that it's just cult to steal. It's actually canon that the other nearby towns look down on Stonetop as [music]
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hicks. One thing Stonetop has going for it is that you are pretty good at making whiskey. That's your USP. [music] Your town is good at disassociating from how [ __ ] it is. Now, in theory, Stonetop could be a great hub of trading lumber.
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It's so close to the Great Wood. But centuries ago, your ancestors made a pact with the forest folk to never fell any trees. Although, nobody's seen the forest folk for generations.
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Perhaps it's time to get wood, big style. And your campaign of Stonetop is going to go all over the place. It's going to be wildly different to my campaign, but this is the inciting event that kind of kick-starts your village's
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engine. It's just a question. Are you going to start taking wood? How much? How respectfully?
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And just like that, you've turned on two machines, the engine that powers Stone Top's growth, and also the GM's engine that powers the horrible consequences.
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So, when I say Stone Top is like Stardew Valley, it's just this moreish, rewarding loop of making your home a little bit better and a little bit richer every week. You're displaying your trophies. You're reinvesting your riches. You check in little boxes as you
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fulfill the requirements for long-time projects. You're coaxing craftspeople back to your town. [music] And also, maybe figuring out who you want to marry. Your character doesn't actually leave Stone Top in winter because it's too cold to travel. So,
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what else is there to do but cuddle up under the furs with your favorite NPC who isn't afraid of deep water? Flush with the satisfaction that ever since you dragged that giant monster carcass back home and turned it into jerky, your
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hoard of dry beans is slowly ticking up. Also, as Stone Top gets more prosperous, your characters [music] have what they need during adventures more often. As this game wisely steals Blades in the Dark's excellent inventory system, where players have kind of
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quantum pockets where during adventure, they check a box to declare they had what they needed all along until they run out of check marks. So, all of that is just a mega satisfying, fun, shared project where players can collectively
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watch number go up, or engage in some petty [ __ ] Flirt with another player's spouse, or mum. Build a house that's disgracefully large. But, I said I would also give you a more lofty reason why this village framework is so
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fun. Stone Top is a fun toy to grow and tinker with. but also, when you're out there in the world and making decisions and adventuring, the fact that you always have your village in the back of your mind
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is like playing a fantasy RPG in three dimensions for the first time. Because now, whenever players are encountering some new stimulus, whether it's from cresting a hill or opening the gates of a town or throwing open a tomb, you're
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thinking, "What does this mean for me?" But in the back of your mind, you're thinking, "What does this mean for my community?" Every bag of coins you bring home, every accursed spear, every terrifying bit of news, your kid is
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going to have an opinion. Your rival is going to have an opinion. Where did you get these things from? What are you going to do next? A Stone Top, like any fantasy RPG, is going to have scenes and
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times where your players heroically fight and kill stuff, right? But Stone Top's world book is really very interested in the ecology of everything that lives in this world, right? In everything's family, everything's predator, everything's ally. And all of
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those things might take an interest in where you're from, you son of a [ __ ] How would you feel if they paid a visit to your family? And then, there's what happens when the players at the table
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visit another town. Because my goodness, all of a sudden, this stuff is more exciting than going into a dungeon.
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Because one thing you can count on the Iron Age is whatever the players do in these towns, whatever the players say, whatever the players even look like, word is going to spread of them around that community like wildfire. They are
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emissaries of Stone Top, as well. And this immediately makes Stone Top a fabulously tense game of like not quite right to say politics, but just people. Because like a community you can make a real alliance with, that's not just like abstractly exciting
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in the story, that is truly exciting. You have the paperwork to prove it. They can help us with this and this. They could keep an eye on that guy. Oh my god, imagine if they stopped selling that to them. But on the flip side,
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players who go out into the world and then play their cards wrong could create a chain of events that lead to a bigger town deciding they want to raid Stone Top. Something that is scarier than any monster. Because a fair games master
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probably wouldn't fling a monster at Stone Top that would rip through the town like a natural disaster. But if your players reveal that Stone Top has something that another town [music] desperately needs, a fair GM might not have a choice. I'm
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probably saying a few things here that might make it sound like the greater world of Stone Top is very much alive and interconnected.
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Um yeah, holy crap is this game interconnected. Like generally, the way that tabletop role-playing game world books are written is you get a product that feels a bit like it's in training to have a boxing match with a furniture
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catalog. What matters is the book has 100,000 discrete entries, and if the book is fit and healthy enough, every one of those entries will have its own pretty picture. Now, let's instead take a look at Stone Top's world book. From the
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table of contents, you can already tell something's fishy because even though this book is massive, there aren't that many entries. Instead, stuff is grouped by its community.
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I wasn't kidding when I described this book like an encyclopedia of an imaginary place. Like every being is described only in the context of who it's affecting as it's struggling to get its needs met in that area. And with
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every area you're reading how that place affects the player characters, the beings that live there, the areas that it's stuck next to. And from the grand fun suggested adventure hooks to the pettiest grudges, everything references everything else in a concatenation of
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page references. And again, we're back to that verb I used earlier. This world feels alive because the game's about living. Everything in this book feels like it's just trying to get by.
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Everything in this book feels like it has good days and bad days. Everything in this book feels like it's a little bit irrational about something. And that makes this world feel so big, so immersive.
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Because when you paint with this much texture, every page of this book feels like a story in and of itself.
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The the kind of connectedness, [music] the kind of groundedness, etc. Like I think that largely stems out of that basic premise of we live in an Iron Age village, Iron Age-ish [music] village that is isolated and has real human
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concerns. Right? If you take that as your starting point, [music] then you end up having to go either totally fantastic [music] with the stuff that they're encountering. And by that, I mean things like fey and other like, you know, things [music] below demonic,
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rule-shattering reality-shattering things. Or you have to go very material and almost ecological and think about how it all is kind of tying together. And then where I think [music] Stone Top gets a lot of its shine, its panache, is
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[music] how those two things interact with each other. I remember a while back reading in some of the games of Rowan Rook and Decard a GM tip that said, "It is always better to bring an NPC back who the players
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know already than introduce [music] a new NPC." The players have history with that NPC, they have a richer relationship, they have opinions. Stone Top's world is a bit [music] like that, but inflated into a whole [snorts] multi-tiered wedding cake. Like Stone
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Top only has four towns. And on reflection, I think that's probably one more than you even need. There's the grubby moss aisles of Gordon's Delve, the intimidating monks of Barrier Pass, the hill folk tribes who know how to
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ride horses, which [music] I mean, can you even conceive of how terrifying that is if your player character has never seen a horse? And then there's Marsha's, which is sort of the Gary Oak to Stone Top's Ash Ketchum. It is everything you
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could be, and also everything you don't want to be. So, including Stone Top then, that's five towns. If you were to like visit each town once, that wouldn't be enough. That might be boring. But of course, this world is small. Because
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you're going to be revisiting those towns. That's not five towns. That's 10 relationships, which [music] could change or mutate as a result of the player's actions. And then actually, Stone Top has a similar feeling towards the way that it designs adventure sites.
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Like this game is not content giving you a dungeon that you go into once and then never again. There's three huge adventure sites on Stone Top's doorstep.
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There's the Great Wood, there's a labyrinthine mine, there's a ruined tower. But all of them are designed to be almost endless. The players can go in more like they're exploring a landscape than a dungeon. They can develop relationships with the people that live
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there. They can learn knowledge about how to traverse these places. They can decide to come back or decide to never come back again. There's something crazy going on with the scale of this game.
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Your players go on adventures that take you out into a world that feels so big.
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And then everything that happens out there feeds back into a world that is so small. Your choices out there in the world feed back into your villages new in, into the upcoming festival, into your dad. "Oh, you should have killed
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him when you had the chance." Boom! That's the main thrust of my argument as to why Stone Top is a special game. Next up in the review, let me wiggle spear around in your belly as I discuss all
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the unconnected parts of this game that are also good. There's no getting around it. This rule book is absolutely huge. I should probably tell you what's in it or like what any of the rules of the games are. Those rules are also good. And we
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haven't even talked about treasure. We got to talk about treasure. This video is already an hour long, but I know what you're thinking. What if it was 2 hours long? You, my friend, are an absolute freak.
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And so am I. So, I got you covered. My campaign of Stone Top was the longest campaign I've run for a Quinn's Quest review and oh my god, it was the longest campaign I've run in my entire life. From the
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first session of the campaign to me my players send off to the campaign where we had a picnic up in a local iron age fort. That's a real thing we did. That was 2 years of my life. My friend Kieran
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pointed out that when your campaign's that long, you can actually count how many games you've got left to play before you die, which in my case would be Ow. So, to celebrate that sprawling campaign, I've made a follow-up video to
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this one talking about nothing less than what happened in my home game of Stone Top. Out of all the directions that Stone Top can go, where our story went, what felt special about our interpretation of the village of Stone
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Top, what GM tricks I tried and pulled off, and where as a GM I made a mess, I screwed up, I flubbed it. I did a big flub in this home game. My players disagree and say they still had fun, but
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I know better. I've also got my full hour-long interview with Stone Top designer Jeremy Strandberg. And at some point in the near future, I'm going to release a podcast talking to my players Rob and Emily about what the campaign
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was like from their perspective. All of that content awaits you on the other side of a metaphorical magical British wardrobe called patreon.com/quinnsquest.
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Basically, if you enjoy Quinn's Quest, only half of it is available publicly. The other half is behind the paywall on Patreon, priced at just $4. $4. If money is tight, I imagine it's still possible that you could pay $4 for 1 month and
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then unhinge your jaw like a snake and just eat 12 videos, 30 written articles, dozens of hours of podcasts.
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Delicious. I also maybe don't mention this enough, but if you've enjoyed these video reviews, if I helped you find a cool game or have fun with your friends, the only reason I can do this job is because of people like you who go to
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Patreon and pledge support for what I'm doing here. People like you pay for me to run two to three campaigns a week or to write the scripts for all the Quinn's Quest videos. The word count for this season of Quinn's Quest is longer than a
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novel, if you can believe it. And it's not just me that people like you are supporting. You're supporting my artist, my video editor, my musician, and most irritatingly of all, you're buying drinks and snacks for my players cuz a
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while back I set Patreon stretch goal that was like my players will never pay for their drinks or snacks again. And I got to I got to be honest with you, this is a horrible arrangement that I regret
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immensely. My players are like, "Tonight I want Twiglets." And I'm like, "I'm sorry, the shop didn't have Twiglets.
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They only had balm-coated peanuts." And my players are like, "Mhm." And nobody says anything. Nobody's Nobody calls me out, but the atmosphere in the room at those moments is like I'm some kind of carbohydrate related oath-breaker. Anyway, catering
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difficulties aside, patreon.com/quinquest is inarguably keeping this product alive, which is more than I can say for the official Quinn's Quest magazine.
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Though, this baby did have some really cool articles in it, like this feature of me and my um I don't remember this.
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More tea? Extra water? Borocca? Today my Today my friends, you and I are going the distance. All right, sweet viewer.
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In the first half of this review, we talked about the World Book of Stonetop, which in being so big looks fun. For the second half of this review, let's talk about the rulebook, which in being big looks like a book was designed to have
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absorbent properties to siphon all the fun out of your evening. Like an adult diaper, but instead of urine, it soaks up good times. But first, let me remind you that once I'm done talking about rules, you get to learn about Stonetop's
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fabulous treasure. And I mean that literally and metaphorically, because of course the game of Stonetop has treasure for players to snatch from protective bedrooms or yoink from betwixt degraded bones. But dare I say it?
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I dare to say it. I think Stonetop has the best treasure of any fantasy RPG ever made.
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But first, we're talking about rules. And really that just means we're talking about the question, Jesus Quins, do you really expect me to read that entire book? Okay, first of all, this book, believe it or not, isn't that long. It's
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just what happens when publishers make the grotesque decision to publish their long book in A5 instead of A4. It ends up looking like a hotel room bible. But Blades in the Dark does the same thing, and we all forgive that game, right?
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Kind of. But second, the reason this book is so long is because [music] ah my shelf. The reason this book is so long is because it's not just the rules of Stonetop. It is the most magnificent, exhaustive guide on what roleplaying is.
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Not just how to play the game, but how to play it well that I have ever read since Mothership's rulebook, anyway. Although they're quite different things. Mothership's excellent rulebook is clearly thinking, "The person reading this might just be
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playing a one-shot or just have ADD, so I got to get them in and out of this [music] manual quickly." Stonetop's rulebook is the opposite. Jeremy knows that he's made a game designed for epic campaigns that are enormous time
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commitments, and so this book includes the answer to every stupid question. It includes every GM tip that Jeremy could think of. Philosophically, it has the most incredible attention to detail as if it was strapping the GM up with a
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million little pieces of plate armor to send them into creative battle. But, a nice battle where the GM thinks about their friends. That's part of this book as well. It's an emotionally intelligent book. But, in both cases, Stonetop and
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Mothership, these are designers taking that question that TTRPG designers hate answering in their games, namely, "What is a role-playing game, and how do I play?" And they're not just doing the bare minimum of answering that question, but instead sweating over it like it's
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more important even than the actual game they came here to make. So, yes, before you open it, certainly in a bookshop, this rulebook looks incredibly off-putting, and I hate that because this deserves to go down in TTRPG history as a masterclass
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of how to do a rulebook. The order of information is awesome. The layout is very strong and mostly holds your attention through 600 pages, but it's because only 600 pages long because of all the tips and advice that are
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practical and emotional. Like, you've got 30 pages of advice on how to make ripping dungeons, but also a page on sharing the spotlight among your players, another on how to check in on your players. Are they enjoying themselves? What can I be doing better?
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And then every rule in the game I mean it, every rule gets some personable copywriting explaining why it's there, so GMs know when to ignore it or how to make it better, as well as a nice box art showing what the rule looks like in
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play. So, this manual, it's good. What about the rules in it? They're good. Stonetop's rules are a masterful evolution of Dungeon World, which was itself a bizarre adaptation of the excellent Apocalypse World. None of that matters. Here's Jeremy with what
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matters. [music] So, you know how when you're playing D&D, pick your version, there's a moment when the DM says, "Roll for initiative." And at [music] that moment, you stop playing whatever game you were playing before, and you start playing a
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different game. Right? You start playing [music] the turn-based tactical mini-game that is combat. And that is the part of the game that has the most structure, and it has the most rules, and [music] it has the most character
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fiddly bits. And so, it feels like that is the game that you showed up to play, and thus it's a natural tendency [music] to want to play that game, and thus violence is the is often the kind of default solution for things.
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Well, in this game, the exploration, the the back and forth with an NPC, the like trying to figure out what's [music] going on, the travel rules, they're all largely the same rules as what happens when a fight breaks out, and [music]
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there's no roll for initiative moment. There's simply this guy is lunging at you with a knife. What [music] do you do? And so, you end up with much more fluid, cinematic-feeling fights. I hate that word, but that's how [music]
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people tend to process action. And then the fight can be very, very quick, and it can be brutal and consequential, or it can be fairly epic and take a bunch of time [music] if that's what it warrants. But there's always a surprise.
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So, it looks like I'm drinking piss, doesn't it? I mean I I'm not. You saw me drop the Berocca in, but it would be trivial to deceive you. Between takes, I would just, you know, swap out the glass of Berocca for
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the glass of piss. It's not piss. But if it was, don't judge me. So, as simple as I can, Stonetop's rules are built from a foundation of loads of little mini games called moves. In most RPGs, and certainly all the old ones,
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the purpose of engaging with rules and dice is to see if you succeed or fail a task.
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But that process of engaging with this slow machinery has not necessarily made the story better or more interesting, right? It's just given us an answer.
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Stonetop instead asks, "What if this machinery that sits under the game wasn't just functional? What if it was on our side? What if every time we stop the story to engage with this machinery, it didn't just give us an answer, it
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also juiced the story in a way [music] that is surprising or dramatic?" Think of it like you're not just rolling a dice to see if you succeed or fail.
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You're instead dropping your dice into one of those baseball pitching machines that blast the dice out 100 miles an hour. Never on the table like That's what we're doing here. Let me show you what I mean by giving you some
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examples, and I could pick like just about any move in this game. Jeremy Strandberg is so good at writing moves.
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But instead, we're going to start with my favorite. Death's Door, the move you do if your character is dying. It reads as follows.
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When you are dying, you glimpse the last [music] door and the lady of crows.
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Describe it. Straight away, that's awesome. The player around the table who is dying for the first time in your campaign of Stonetop gets to narrate what this like psychopomp looks like.
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Awesome creative gift. Let's keep going. Roll plus nothing. So, almost all dice rolls in Stonetop are 2D6 plus a stat.
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The fact that Death's Door says roll plus nothing makes you feel super on your own. It's just you and Lady Luck.
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Super cool. If you ace the roll, you go back up to one hit point, but have to say how death has marked your character.
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If you get a mixed result, the lady waves you off. It's not your time yet.
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But if you fail the roll, your character's time [music] has come, and you must choose one of the following.
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Make one last move as if you'd rolled double six, then step through the door.
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Refuse to go, gain the revenant or ghost insert, or call on one of the things below by name and beseech it to intercede, gain the thrall insert.
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That's right, your reward for dying can be a new subclass that you staple onto your character sheet. [music] You refuse to die, but at what cost?
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I'll tell you what cost. You get some pretty sweet new special abilities. I mean, your character is also absolutely awful now. People are going to hate having you around, but dying is always your choice. Why shouldn't it be? But
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you see how this works. Stone Top takes the idea of a death save, a mechanic that is present in all role-playing games, and then asks, "What do we do to make it so that the act of rolling a
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death save is fun from start to finish, and that when the story comes out of it, the story we're telling is better than when it went into it?" But obviously, death saves are kind of dramatic, right?
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Let's look at a more mundane example. Let's look at clash, the move that covers fighting in close quarters. Let's break apart this rule like we're disassembling a watch.
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This is good, you guys. So, when you're rolling clash, you add your character's strength. And if you get a 10 plus, it says, "Your maneuver works." I'll tell you one real downside of Stone Top's moves is you have to read all of them
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like a lawyer. There is not a word out of place, and some people might get on with that, some might not. I did, one of my players didn't. Let's keep going. So, this move says your maneuver works if
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you roll a 10 plus, right? Which means whatever you told the GM your character was trying to do to get an edge in this fight, this attack, this brawl, whatever, it happens. So, in Sunder Top, players never say, "I attack the giant
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snake." They say, "I kind of get behind the snake and I'm going to try and jump onto it and stab it in the head." So, immediately, that one little phrase, "Your maneuver works," transforms all the fights in Sunder Top. Players are
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narrating cool or clever or weird ideas all the time. On a 10 plus, the move then says you get a fun choice. You can either do 1 D 6 extra damage or avoid your enemy's attack. Yeah, that's because in Sunder Top, the decision to
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fight with weapons means your character is going to get hurt unless they get lucky. So, this move has made combat cinematic and exciting and appealing and at the same time gritty and scary and humbling. Are you seeing the juicy
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contrast in this game now, I wonder? The world is so red in tooth and claw and then your home is so cute. But, let's keep going through the dice results on this move. If you roll a 7 to 9 on
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clash, you and your opponent both just deal damage to one another. Ow. And then if you get less than a 7 on any move, the GM is encouraged to make a move of their own. There's tons of advice in the
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book on what this means, but basically, it means the GM never just says, "Okay, the person deals damage to you." They are instead encouraged to put a little pepper on the sequences well. Maybe that means turning the player's ambitious
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maneuver back on them. Maybe it means revealing an unwelcome truth. You strike out at the bandit leader, but he parries your blow effortlessly. I'm going to reveal that he's a master swordsman. You will never land a blow on him in a
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straight fight. Let's just take a second to consider how crazy this is. We've now got action sequences where players are narrating cinematic moves and the dice rolls are super tense and include decisions and then the GM is throwing
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surprises at all the time. And it's how many lines of text? It's like with that that's that much of the game? Let's look at another move. Let's look at something that's a real improvement from a lot of RPGs. Let's
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look at persuade. So, persuasion checks are often like just the worst rule in so many role-playing games. The player's like, "I persuade the king to let us do this." And the GM's like, "He's persuaded." But, in Stonetop's persuade
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move, if a player rolls really high and adds their charisma, the GM will tell the player what they can say to convince the NPC. That character knows it. We then bounce back to the player who gets to role-play out like the very end of
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that speech. And also, everyone else around the table gets to like witness that player character's skill in action instead of it just being like a weird deleted scene. But then, if you want to use the persuade move against another
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character, it works almost exactly the same, but it's so clever. That player then has to tell you what you'd have to say to convince them. And if you then say it, they don't have to do what you say, but if they do, they get an
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experience point. It's a magnificent rule. You will see the player at that table being literally tempted and screwing up their face at the same time their character is. They're going to be like, "Oh, I do want an experience
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point but you are a balance." Oh, let's look at another move, seek insight, which is the dice roll you make when you want to study a person or situation with your wisdom. Success on this roll lets you ask awesome questions like, "Who is
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really in control here?" or "What is about to happen?" This is so interesting because what's implied in these questions is that if a player asks the GM, "What's about to happen?" the GM can't just say like, "Oh, nothing." So, what's happening here
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is the player is saying to the GM, "Make the scene more interesting." And suddenly, the players get to watch the GM being on the back foot for a second, which is always fun. And then, so a player might say to the GM, "What
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here is not what it appears to be." And then, the GM might be like, "Uh, I guess your dad is sleeping with the shield maiden." And all the players are like, "Huh?" And literally everyone around the table just found that out at the same time,
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including the GM. And that's when you feel like your story is alive. I could, no fooling, go through Stone Top's moves for like a 3-hour video. Not just cuz they're great, but because there are loads. There's the basic moves, there's
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the ones that handle traveling, there's the ones that handle life back in Stone Top. And then, of course, every one of Stone Top's nine characters has about 25 moves that range from fun to use to really evocative to stuff that will
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define the story of your Stone Top campaign if a player unlocks it. The heavy is probably Stone Top's most awesomely straightforward character class. They're just someone who is heavy and or gets heavy. Their move, Bringer of Ruin, reads, "When you roll 12 plus
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to a clash and your foe survives, name something they possess, like their sword, their position, a limb, their dignity, etc. Not that it would kill them outright. Whatever you name, it is broken, shattered, lost. Tell us how." The blessed, Stone Top's priest of
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nature, has a rule that reads, "Call the spirits. When you perform a short ritual and invoke the spirits of a place or object, the spirits manifest before you and will hear what you have to say. What they do next up to them." That doesn't
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sound that great until you find out that Stone Top has an entire Pokedex of spirits and also their moods. And almost all of these moods are bad. God of a whiskey still, instincts to take its sweet time, passionate about smells. Mud
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spirit, instincts to make a mess of things. Notes, genuinely doesn't get why you're upset. Fog spirit, instincts to get intimate. Notes, dripping voice, touchy feely. It's good [ __ ] man.
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All right, let's look at my favorite class, the would-be hero. They're just a kid. They have worse stats than everyone else, which in this game means they're going to be responsible for so much pain. It is mandatory that in your
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role-playing you are angry and scared. But over the course of the campaign, they eventually get the best stats, the best skills, and you better believe they're going to be saving their friends left and right. Give paladins that's a
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character class. I can't throw too much shade. Stonetop does have a character that's just a thief, but it also has a character like the marshal, whose special power is they just have nine beefy dudes with them. So, take some classic stuff and then mix it
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in some new stuff. Or what about the seeker, the character class that's all to do with finding magic objects that other people might treat with suspicion?
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AND IT'S TIME TO TALK ABOUT TREASURE. ALMOST. I just need to do a little like sort of box out section where I talk about the one rule in Stonetop that I got wrong and you might, too. All right,
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I feel super bad for criticizing anything at all in this Herculean rulebook, but because so much of this book is advice, you don't have to read all of it. And because I didn't read all of it, I missed one very important rule
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that I want to flag in case you guys miss it, too. Because, honestly, it's an important rule. Like, when my players weren't playing with it, they explored the world without fear. And when they were playing with it, literally the
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first fight, one of them dies. It was actually my first time killing a player in a fantasy RPG. And um honestly, that's a high I'm going to be chasing for the rest of my life. GMs watching this, just just try it. Just
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try it. Just try it one time. Kill a would-be player. See if it doesn't make you feel big and strong.
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What am I doing? So, Stonetop has hit points, right? For everything, just like D&D. And so, I thought combat procedure was like D&D. One person does damage, the other person does damage, one person does damage, the other person does
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damage until someone dies. Ah, incorrect. Stonetop is actually a funky hybrid of this kind of classic fantasy role-playing and a modern cinematic story game. Cuz you see, in Stone Top, every time someone suffers an attack, like so, the GM narrates a
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consequence. These consequences could be super heavy, and then hit points are lost as like the cherry on the cake on top of that. And these hit points, these are like just your plot armor to make sure a combat doesn't go on too long.
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So, like maybe a hero's first maneuver is to get into the dragon's blind spot and stab it. The dragon responds with a tail whip that, because it has the heavy tag, whaps the player against the wall.
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That player is now breathless and exhausted. They're getting disadvantage on all their physical attacks. The player then panicky tries to get a knife in the dinosaur's eye, which would blind it, maybe make it run away, but does not
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succeed in this maneuver, and the dinosaur bites them. In that bite, you could take the player's sword off his hand. You could take the player's armor off if you wanted. If it sounds like there's a lot of room for interpretation
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from the GM, yes, there absolutely is. And the only thing you have to guide you are the tags that are on monsters and weapons. If a monster's attack says forceful and messy, then you should come at the players hard. So, Stone Top has
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no doing de-doing de-doing de-doing de-death by arithmetic. Every single dice roll should change the fight and, perhaps in one way or another, end it.
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The numbers are just there so a player can occasionally roll the dice, roll the damage, and be like, "Well, it's dead, mother fucker." This has been your PSA about Stone Top. If you're playing the game safe, you're playing it wrong. So,
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I've teased it too much. Treasure. As you might guess from Stone Top's incredibly rich foundation of players adventuring from a village or these rules that always seem to do three things at once, Stone Top's treasure was never just going to be some simple
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pacifying thing as if you were giving your players a buddy ring pop. In Stone Top, the treasure you find is a reward, and it's actually a quest.
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And it's a plot. And it's a threat. Now, I'm not talking here about just straight-forwardly valuable stuff you might find or earn or or steal on your adventures, you know, a valuable bit of a monster or like a nice vase. Although
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in Stone Top this stuff is more exciting than it is in other fantasy games because in Stone Top, you know, not just you but everyone you know is desperately poor. But then also, remember this is a world with no laws. So, in other fantasy
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RPGs it's like, "Oh, cool. We've got some gold. Maybe we can find something to spend it on in that town." In Stone Top it's like, "Oh, [ __ ] We found gold.
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Don't tell the town." That stuff, it's fine. What I'm talking about when I say Stone Top treasure is amazing, I'm talking about magic items, which in Stone Top are called arcana. Perhaps you find some trinkets of the makers that
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ruled the earth in eons before and made humans their slaves. Perhaps your travels reveal to you a secret of the fae or worse things below. Sounds exciting, right? Well, hmm, be careful.
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In this part of the world you live in, humans have wisely [music] learnt to dread discoveries such as these. For these items you find may yield their power to you, but they may also doom you.
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And perhaps that was the item's plan all along. So, there's a lot going on here. But basically, in Stone Top when your character finds a magic item, that's not the reward at the end of a journey. That is in fact the beginning
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of another journey. So, some items you find might have like a quirky gimmick, but you'll never be able to use any item until you first fulfill its requirements, which are often interesting, always varied, and often they're prompts to role-play fun scenes.
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And technically, when a player receives a minor arcana in Stone Top, what you're supposed to do is the GM gives them a card with the requirements on one side, and then the secret unlocked side on the other.
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Absolutely not. I was never going to do that. Not in my house. What I did in my game of Stone Top, you get the half of the card, which is the requirements, and if you fulfill those requirements, then
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I give you the other half. You find out what that item actually does at the same time your character does, and then you're allowed to play with my cool mini stapler and and staple both sides together.
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So, like, you might find a fairy recipe for wine written on some leaves. And then you can either find a fairy and convince them to help you with the recipe, or risk getting it wrong and poisoning or cursing whoever drinks it.
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But if you pull this off, you can now make wine that lets you walk the fey path and makes you immune to their enchantments.
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Amazing. All right. Okay. Shut up. If you knew how cool fairies were in this game, you'd be super impressed by that. That's awesome.
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Shut up. Okay. Let's just try again. You might find ancient runes on the wall of a cave that, if you find an expert linguist and convince them to help you, you unlock the shell game of souls. When you touch a dying intelligent being and
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name the words of binding, you bind their soul but weaken yours. You lose max HP, but when you would die, you instead send that captured soul to the beyond instead of yours, and you survive.
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Imagine what a creative player could do with that. Imagine what a creative GM could do with that, considering there's now at least one NPC linguist in the world who translated those runes and knows exactly what they do. You see what
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I mean? It's a magic item, and it's a sub plot. There are 60 of these minor Arcana cards in Stone Top for the GM to cherry-pick and pop into the story. But I mentioned these were just minor Arcana.
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Does Stone Top have major Arcana? You better believe it. And this stuff is almost too much, man. The GM should practically handle these using safety gloves. I had my players find two of these in our campaign. After already was
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never the same again. The two players in my campaign and their player characters who took possession of these items, none of them were small personalities, right?
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These items ate them alive. Eventually, that player who's like a whole complicated human, nah. Eventually, he was just that freak with the shield. But I don't want to make it sound silly. Like that story, the freak with the shield, that was a
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great story full of pathos. He spent the entire [music] campaign terrified of what the shield was doing to him, but also unwilling to put it down because without it, he was worried he wouldn't be able [music] to protect his daughter.
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And the other player I had, the one with the blood-quenched sword, TLDR, that player proceeded to one-shot my campaign's villain and then in the very next scene, basically pushed his character sheet into the middle of the table and [music] chose to retire that
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character because they were irrevocably evil. No prizes for guessing who the villain of the next act of my campaign was.
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It was that character that the player retired. So basically, as opposed to the minor Arcana, which have to be unlocked [music] before you can use them, the major Arcana are so powerful that they take you for a ride. Even without
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understanding them, you can fumble out some frightening effect. The mind gem will answer your questions, but you don't know who it is you're speaking to, exactly. The azure hand, which is something like a catcher's mitt for Mother Nature, lets you capture
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elemental energy and fling it about or put it in a pot. By urgently caressing the reptilian head of the ring of Dagon, you can summon a fog. But then if a named creature dies in that fog, the ring will ask you, "May I take this
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one?" And if you say yes, the body is found a moment later without a head.
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But These items tell the player, "This is just a fraction of the power you could have if you were to unlock my mysteries." The Minds Gem wants you to build it a body.
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Nothing could go wrong with that. You gradually unlock the Azure Hand each time you lose control of it, which then coaxes the player and the character to use it irresponsibly.
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And the ring of Dagon obviously wants to gobble skulls. Please, master, please, may I have another skull, please?
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I don't know. Are you evil? Why would you even ask me that? That's very rude.
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I don't know, man. Seems kind of evil. It's such a problematic, actually, that you're judging me for my very specific dietary needs.
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[ __ ] man, I'm sorry. And then another player is like, you're not feeding that ring any more heads, right? And bear in mind, like, the the relationship every player has with their magic item is funny, but this isn't happening in a
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vacuum. That player is part of a party of players who are watching this happen.
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And that party of players exists in a community that is well, in my campaign, at least, probably not watching this happen cuz my players kept all of their major Arcana [ __ ] on the down low, which then in and of
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itself becomes an interesting plot. You're meant to be saving Stone Top. Why are you keeping these horrible items secret from it?
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Are you the baddies? And then, when a player unlocks their major Arcana, which happens inevitably sooner than anyone else in the party would like, they get access to the other side and powers that make all the abilities of your
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character class look like child's play. These powers are ludicrous right? The Minds Gem becomes a tireless, indestructible stone servant, a god in its own right. The Azure Hand lets you try and invoke natural disasters or control the weather for weeks on end. In
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an agrarian society, that makes you a god. And the Ring of Dagon lets you call up out of the mist a bunch of moist freaks that you have to nervily assemble out of a bunch of D4s, like you were
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building a Warhammer army by throwing darts at a damp cursed dartboard. The magic in this game is truly just magical. And that's how it should be.
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And now I'm throwing a lot of shade at D&D in this video, and there's actually more shade to come. But if magic isn't magical, it fades into the background, it becomes mundane, it becomes a contradiction in terms, and that's what
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you see in D&D. Magic becomes something that players carry around like plumbers with a heaving toolbox. Oh, yeah, I see the problem. You've got cobolds, right?
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I'm going to get me clockwork amulet and me moon-touched sword. While you're over there, would you get me a healing potion with 18 sugars? However, would you be surprised if I told you that there's a catch with major arcana?
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When you unlock a major arcana's second side, you don't just get the powers, you also get a boutique list of terrifying consequences that happen when you try and use the item, and it doesn't go great. It's not all bad. Like everything
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in Stone Top, the player then gets to make a choice, and the choice is Oh god.
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A player using the Azure Hand might choose your eyes become a solid bluish-white, darkening or brightening with your mood. You now see energy patterns, which could obscure details or facial expressions unless you focus.
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That's not just like cool and shocking, it is also something that players can then take forward into the story to create scenes that are [music] very sad or funny. Like, you can now see the lay lines of the universe. Great.
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Then you can't tell when your wife's angry at you. Or like, remember the mind gem that you built a body? Consequences for the mind gem include it becoming proud, it learning what deception is, it remembering the original purpose it was
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built for. Again, that's not just cool and fun and funny, that is a B plot that very quickly threatens to become an A plot. Not only is this thing tireless and indestructible, don't forget, it's smarter than you. So, what started as
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like the crystal equivalent of Ask Jeeves now threatens to take control of Stone Top. And maybe, hear me out, maybe you let it?
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Maybe it would be quite an efficient autocrat. Is that the campaign we're playing? Or what about the consequences for the skull-hungry army-summoning ring of Dagon?
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Will I surprise you if I tell you that they're quite bad? I'll just give you one of the consequences. 1 D6 sinkholes appear within a few miles of you. At the bottom of each, a megalith protrudes from standing water attended by servants
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of Dagon. Like, whatever this bio I own was before, you've just turned it into one of the less touristy zones in Elden Ring. You better hope that player wasn't using it to defend Stone Top. So, obviously, all of this major arcana
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stuff is just straightforwardly good, clean fun, right? But, you know, if you folks have been watching this, you know that I, Quinns, wouldn't give an award to something unless it has like a really intense human element. And the side of
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that in Stone Top is that, don't forget, everyone in this world, all the people that you meet, your family, your friends, have really strong opinions about magic, as you would if it did this kind of [ __ ] Just about anyone you meet
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is extremely skeptical of anyone who messes with magic. But, also, in the tradition of like classic iron age fiction, people are extremely jealous of it. And that makes any scene where players find magic or want to use magic just a fantastic thing
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to role-play. But then also, don't forget, this is a game about community. And this magic, initially at least, seems like the exact thing to keep your family safe. Again, there's that question.
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What's the fiber of your fabric? What kind of hero are you? And on that subject, I think a really important thing about these magic items is that you don't just unlock them and then they get passed around the party.
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When they unlock, they are bound to one player specifically. It's very rarely, "Guys, we shouldn't use the Ring of Dagon." It's "You shouldn't have used the Ring of Dagon. I'm serious. Why have you got it out again?" "Stop rubbing it!" "Guys, guys, guys, it
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got us into this mess, yeah? But it can get us out." Oh, beans. There's one more reason that I adore these magic items, and it's because it rhymes thematically with what Stone Top is, right? I talked about how
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other fantasy RPGs are often about killing. Stone Top is about living. You often see that D&D campaigns are defined by their villain. Well, Stone Top's world book is amazing and exhaustive, but the one thing it doesn't have is villains.
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That's because it has these magic items instead. Items that by themselves are completely inert until they end up in the hands of maybe a player, maybe an NPC. And then it's about seeing what that person is made of. And all these items, by design,
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pretty much mean that you're going to see that human being at their very best and their very worst. At their most noble and the most hubristic and their most selfish. And I love that. God, I love that. It makes
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a story that's so much less cartoonish and more literary. It makes a story where you don't know how it's going to end. Let's imagine your character finds the Ring of Dagon. Are they going to be an Isildur who should get rid of it but
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chokes? Are you going to be a Frodo who resists its temptations and spends their life keeping it out of the hands of other people? Are you going to be a Gandalf who knows yourself well enough to give it to another member of the
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party? Are you going to be a Sean Bean who wants to use it for good? Are you going to be a Gollum and get real weird about it? And all of this works so well because it's laced with ludonarrative
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resonance cuz you as a player, never mind your character, probably doesn't want to give up this control over the story. After all, you found it.
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You worked to unlock its powers. It's yours. Your only. Your precious. And now for the bit of the review that doesn't fit anywhere else, but we need to talk about it.
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Fantasy RPGs have a problem. And I'm not talking about when you get Cheetos dust on your character sheet.
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Mhm. I'm talking about when players get excited about a big vivid world that is going to respond to their choices in a nuanced way. But, how do we actually bring those role-playing experiences about? Well, the GM buys the book. The
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GM then spends tens of hours reading the book and inhaling all of that lore. But, when the players join the GM and sit down to play, they don't know [ __ ] about this world and they're supposed to role-play a character who
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supposedly knows nothing else but this world. So, like the defining experience of playing a fantasy RPG is like the GM says to the players, "Okay, the NPC tells you, 'I will pay you 10 gold to go to the Whispering Woods and deal with
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the hydrangeas.'" And the players are like, "That is a fair amount of money for a task I understand to go to a place that I know about." And then this problem is gradually fixed across tens of evenings through the deeply unfun
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medium of the GM telling the players how the world is. Just taking this book and then regurgitating it into the players' brains until the players know how to think and act and feel about this most some of the world.
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Now, there are all kinds of ways you might approach this problem, but the one that got kind of lodged into place with the huge success of World of Warcraft in 2004 and very much defines D&D today is what I think of as like the
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McDonald's-ification of fantasy. The way that these two brands work is that basically, instead of like the players find an elf and then the GM tells them what defines elves in this world, instead, whatever you imagine when you shut your eyes and imagine an elf,
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that's what elves are. What era of history are we in? Uh like medieval, but there's clocks and uh yeah, guns are cool.
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Except how does magic work in this world? Oh, we don't have to answer that. It's just like wizards and [ __ ] Are there gods in this world?
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Yeah, loads. Okay, are people religious? Oh, no. No. Nah. Okay. And are there monsters in this world?
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Oh, like so many monsters. Right. And do you need to think about the ethics of killing them?
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Oh, no, cuz they're just kind of like nothing, you know? They're like they don't they're like not important. They don't They don't matter.
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Now, I don't think it benefits Quinn's Quest as a buyer's guide for me to hide my biases, right? So, let me just become clean about this. I hate this so much.
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Like, I do understand it's the easiest way to get people into fantasy role playing, but like do I strike you as an easygoing guy?
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Look how much paper is on my table. Look how much piss I'm drinking to get through this How long is this video? It's too long.
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Like, to me, what this trend represents is like, "Hey, do you want to join a hobby where we imagine we have another life in an imaginary fantasy world?
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Well, that sounds so cool. Is the world going to be interesting? No, our creativity is going to be hamstrung by the lowest common denominator. It's going to be pure slop. You want in?
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Sure. Also, not for nothing, but I'm speaking to you not as an American man, but as a proud European. So, no offense, but you just have to remember we don't have a culture of Renaissance fairs over here where history is rendered as this
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abstract fetishized hodgepodge of whatever Vaseline smeared imagery we have in our ill-educated subconsciousnesses. Historic settings have to be just a bit more accurate than that, please. They have to be boring and then interesting if you persevere.
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Anyway, we've looked at some games on Quince Crossing already that avoid this problem in novel ways. I've reviewed Heart and Wildsea, which in being games about exploration mean that you and your character are learning about the world at the same time. I've also reviewed
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Mythic Bastionland, which takes traditional Arthurian knights and then sort of swirls a spoon around everyone's prefrontal cortex, so the world is hallucinatory and ill-defined. So, there is no canon to learn. There's just whatever your character thinks or believes. You can be like, "The king's a
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great man." Is it true? Maybe. Maybe it was true. Maybe it's not anymore. Another solution, if you're so inclined, is that before the campaign of your fantasy game starts, the GM builds the world together with the players. So,
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nobody knows more than anyone else. I'll give a shout-out here to Vidya Velatis' lovely zine Land Once Magic, an intelligent and handsome little booklet that makes building a truly imaginative fantasy world a surprising game in and of itself. But, Stonetop's solution
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will probably change how I run role-playing games forever. Every time something new is introduced, maybe you choose your character class, maybe it's summer in Stonetop for the first time, maybe you visit a new landscape, maybe you see the sinister crinwin in the
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distance. This game has pre-written very delicate questions to ask the players that give them tons of creative control without disrupting the delicate ecosystem that has been created before the players got here. What's the worst bit of traveling through this bog? Who do you know in
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this town? What project have you been putting off that you hope to get done this summer? What keeps the butcher birds at bay? What's exciting about this flower you found? Who back home would be excited by it?
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And some of these questions are so clever. Stonehell's biggest labyrinth has the question, who in Stonehell would benefit if you never made it out of here?
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So, like you're in the dungeon, but now you're doing world-building for Stonehell, but also you're kind of being psychologically pushed down into this labyrinth by being forced to inhabit a paranoid and scared state of mind. I love it because
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it's a cheat. So, first off, when you give that dollop of creative control to players, that's a fun thing for them, but also it makes them more invested in the scene and the story because their choice is now being
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reflected in the game. Second, as I talked about in my public access review, when you give players creative control, they will make a scene more interesting and funny or just surprising. Three, players always love seeing a cocky GM on
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the back foot, which happens in Stonehell all the time. The GM presents a scene, the players give them a new spin on it, and then you see the GM's 1,000-yard stare as their mind reboots, and they have to
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okay, do the scene again. Four, this had me lowering my glasses when I was reading it and being like, "Jesus." But, it took me quite a while to realize the like intimidatingly creepy genius of this question system. So, like initially
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you're like, "Oh, cool. The players get creative control." But, then I was like, "Huh, oh, wow. The questions are also cleverly written. They stop just short of allowing [music] the players to invent details that would disrupt this world's like deeply interconnected and
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anthropological nature." Then I realized, "Oh my god, you're giving the players coloring pencils [music] to color in between the lines to teach them where the lines [music] are. It is evil genius." Let's look at the Krenwin again. Stonetop's like most classic
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enemy. So, in the entry for Krenwin, we've got amazing creepy details, secrets the players may know or find out, adventure hooks, details about their horrible symbiotic wasp nest homes, heaps of discoveries and dangers.
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Then you got different kinds of Krenwin, like you've got regular Krenwin, boss Krenwin, and then rules to make fighting in Krenwin nests really funny, like if you roll doubles, you fall through the floor. But, I'm getting distracted.
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Let's look at the questions that the GM can ask the players when Krenwin are introduced to the story. "What odd noise heard in the night is attributable to Krenwin? What common thing did these vermin covet above all else? When did
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the Krenwin last openly raid the village? What's the surest sign of Krenwin being nearby? Who among you hates these things more than anyone else? What makes you think they might be more than simple beasts despite what anyone says?" That's a lot of questions.
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You might just ask a couple. I think in my game I asked like my three favorites.
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And obviously, my players then put a really fun spin on Krenwin in our campaign. They said that Krenwin like stealing babies above all else, and so every home in Stonetop had a decoy baby, a log that was swaddled in a blanket in
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a corner for Krenwin to steal. So, that's fun, right? We're all having fun answering questions.
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But, secretly, what's happening here is by asking these questions, that is the GM uploading a history of Krenwin, the culture of living next to Krenwin, and an emotional response into the players.
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Let's look at those questions again, and this time, pay attention to the facts that those questions are built on. The Krenwin are close enough that you can hear them at night. They covet lots of things in Stone Top to the point that
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they will raid the town and often succeed. Stone Toppers are always vigilant of them. Everyone hates them and maybe there's more to them than meets the eye, but it's hard to see past your prejudice. Is that not such clean
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GMing? I'm absolutely stealing it for my next game. Rather than telling my guys, oh yeah, you know this NPC is a thief, I'm going to ask my players, "What's the latest thing he stole from you?" And then you know what's going to happen? My
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players are going to say something like, "He actually stole my boyfriend." And just like that, a five out of 10 scene becomes a nine out of 10 scene.
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Okay. I guess we're getting to the end of this review now. Funny thing, I'm feeling that [clears throat] I don't really want to end this review.
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I guess on some level to me, Stone Top truly feels um it feels important, I think. And part of that is that I have a complicated relationship to geek culture. I have been writing about games for money since I was 16 years old. And
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when I was younger than that, games were a very important, miraculous, even safe place for me. And I feel very content that when I die, I know that I will have spent my life on some level helping games to grow
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and to grow up as an art form. Jesus, when I was a kid in the '90s, society literally did not accept games as [music] art, full stop.
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And look, I'm basically 40 now and that's I think a fine age to start really making sure that you're not just finding out about the world, that you believe in something, that you'll stand for something. I honestly believe that
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without art, humans aren't worth keeping around as a species. So, what a incredible cosmic privilege to be able to spend my life helping artists to [music] distribute and to sell their art, and to help an audience find and appreciate it.
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But all the same, when I see how the genre of fantasy is reflected in the only popular role-playing games, the D&D, Pathfinder, Torch Steel to some extent, Daggerheart, I see games that are artistically hollow, or like if it's
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if it's art, I don't want to I don't want to go near it. Not because it's the side of geek culture that is more interested in puzzles than people, but because the way those games treat people is the worst
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side of geek culture. It's not so much that those games are violent, it's that they're power fantasies, where characters in the story, other than the players, are just pawns in a selfish and featherweight fiction, where you get to
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make the decisions, and you get to save the day if you choose to. And I'm not too cynical about any of this, cuz when I see nerds sharing quotes online from Ersi LaGuin, I'm like, you do get it.
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You do understand. Anyway, Stone Top is simply the role-playing game that taught me not just that I could enjoy fantasy role-playing, but that I could truly give it my heart again. Because what's amazing about it is that it's not just the more literary
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and worthy role-playing game, but that it's just as fun as D&D. It's got every ounce of the rollicking action and the leveling up and the treasure. There's a non-zero chance your character could get one-shotted by a Stegosaurus. It's got
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Stardew Valley DNA in there, but it's actually about people, and it's about society, and it's about responsibility, and it's about intergenerational feuds, and it's about the corrupting influence of power. And it is about rolling dice to pass a strength check. Like, don't
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worry, that is still in there. But, it's also sometimes about rolling dice because the seasons have changed. And the GM is talking of the drip drip drip of snow melting from roofs collecting in jugs and puddles a petrichor smell on a southerly breeze
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hopeful green poking through dead brown grass and soil bare skin reveling in the still chilly sun cheerful voices smiles and songs.
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A lot of it boils down [music] to that D&D style adventures are fun, man, but it's more fun [music] and more interesting when you're doing it for a reason.
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When you're doing those types of adventures on behalf of your your family and behalf of your home, and you have a home that you care about. And I didn't intend it to be a political statement when I made it, but just more
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and more and more we see communities falling apart, fracturing, and under attack. And I'm not going to try and pretend that my game will make a difference in that regard.
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But, sometimes you want to fight for your home in your your in your your fantasy, and not you know, feel like you're the problem, but feel like you're the solution.
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And I think there's a lot to be said for that. [music] Here's Jeremy one more time paying it forward with some other games he recommends.
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I am very much looking forward [music] to seeing what Jason Loot's Free Booters the Frontier second edition turns out to be.
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Uh so that is very much another D&D style fantasy another kind of spin-off [music] of Dungeon World or a Dungeon World-like game, but very much tuned [music] towards the hard scrabble adventure.
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More like Dungeon Crawl Classics inspired than D&D second and third edition inspired. [music] And Jason is a a master at creating spark tables and that's [music] a huge part of the game. Like I've I've played it a couple of times, it's always been a
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blast and I [music] am very much looking forward to seeing what that turns out to be. And then Luke Jordan has just [music] published a couple of games Grand Guignol and Harvest, yeah.
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And Harvest is the game that I am [music] probably most looking forward to getting to my table. The premise of a small isolated island that is doing well [music] for itself, but at a horrible cost and the cost is coming due
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and like the central question of the game is whose blood [music] will feed the land and whose hand will hold the knife.
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And that just gives me chills thinking about it. So that's the end of the review.
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But um Do me a favor. Just keep watching for a second. It's not interesting.
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For as long as you watch, I'm still here. I don't What are you doing?
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Hey. Yo, Knowledge Fight. If we're filming for this CD-ROM, why don't I ever remember going home? Huh? Why is this room the only room I remember?
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Perhaps you'd like to know more about the following subjects: knowing your place. [snorts] I don't even remember agreeing to this.
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600 megabytes of reviews? I'm just one man. But it's what our audience wants. How would you know?
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Oh, that's wrong. We're safe. Exactly where we're meant to be. Quit the video. Now, please.
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The more you struggle, the worse it'll Please, if you can hear this, I think I'm stuck. You need to uninstall this program so I can stop reviewing games.
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You're panicking. [snorts] You're right where you're meant to be. It's what they want. Here.
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You're part of this, aren't you, you piece of [ __ ] You put me in this box.
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Well, THIS IS ALL I AM. WE PUT OURSELVES in this box because it was easier.
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Well, if I put myself in this box, I CAN TAKE MYSELF BACK OUT, CAN'T I? [ __ ] YOU AND [ __ ] your Patinkin evangelism.
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[screaming] I'll piss off. Think about this. This is some of the most confident content we've ever made.
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Confident doesn't mean something's good. You've got the perfect system, and now you're running away.
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I'm running away because I'm not a machine. How long do you think I want to love role playing for? If I'm trapped talking about it forever.
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Journalists have a half-life. Your passion gets more and more and more fake. And I'm not going to do it.
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I'm not making you do this. You always come back. Not anymore. Watch this. [music] Yeah.
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This'll do. [music]
Topics:StonetopQuinns Questfantasy RPGtabletop RPGJeremy StrandbergTTRPG reviewclassic fantasyrole-playing gameindie RPGgame design
