Review - Barrows & Borderlands: Men & Mutants

As always I will not bury the lead, Barrows & Borderlands is the most stealthy NSR game I've come across IE it's got the trappings of the actual old school but does so like a hipster listening to 70s music on records.  On the face of it, it seems fine, but if you ask the hipster why they're listening to the music on records instead of their phone like everyone else the answer will be "..." and the real reason will be because records are kitschy/trendy/en vogue.  So it's not about putting thought into the medium, even the thought that vinyl sounds better than MP3s.  And that's were we're at.  Ex-5E fans are creating OSR games ironically or rebelliously for the approval of others.

And I didn't know this until I watched the author's YouTube channel for a bit and got the history of this game.  I read through it and something was very "off" about it, but I just couldn't put my finger on it.  And then the puzzle came together - like many other non-OSRs this game has no design work done by living men.  It's entirely copied off the notes of the dead, and indiscriminately so without any thought put into quality whatsoever.  There is maybe one piece of design in the entire game, and we'll get to that.  Starting with the format is ripped off straight from OD&D but that is generally fine as far as callbacks go.  What isn't fine is putting your name on the cover twice like an idiot.

Second sign this is a trojan horse - No thanks to Gary or Dave.  You're literally ripping off their trade dress and not thanking them?  Just calling them "those old Midwesterners"?  

So, is there some kind of fear from invoking the names of Gary and Dave?  You know they weren't very old when they actually produced the game you're shamelessly ripping off.  And they're dead now, so you could have been more accurate leaving out the "old" statement or saying the "dead" statement, or even better just saying their fucking names you child.

Another shameless ripoff of OD&D which was a product of it's time and hasn't been relevant since before this author was born.  They likely have no idea why this paragraph existed in OD&D and have never even seen a set of dice missing the d10.  Don't worry, I'm just getting warmed up.  These are the light taps before I start throwing haymakers.

First obvious as in even a baby gamer new into the world would understand: Why add Radiation Resistance as an ability score?  Why not just affix it to Constitution?  It doesn't even make thematic sense to be an ability score, it'd be more at home as a Saving Throw if it had to be a separate number at all.  

One of the reasons why this game initially nearly fooled me was the inclusion of Race.  The modern retard is so scared of Blusky that they are scared of using this word.  It's weird that this word is in the game but the author is scared of invoking the names of Gary and Dave.

More alarm bells, everyone knows ascending AC is better than descending AC. I will get into why very shortly, because the rules themselves are broken trying to trip over themselves with regards to bonuses and penalties later on: 

Here's the first time the cracks open up and we see piss-poor design shining through.  This game is a one-save system as popularized by Sword & Wizardry, but it pretends to not be:

I'm skipping all the world stuff.  I'm not here to judge creative writing, I'm here to judge mechanics.  Speaking of which, let's marry Radiation Resist ability score to the following mechanic: 

Does it make sense?  No.  There's another mechanic specifically interfacing with Radiation Resistance further along making the preceding entry completely unused and superfluous in regards to that score.  But I'm not done.  Not by a long shot.  Let's continue on to races:

First problem immediately apparent: there's no baseline race.  It should be Humans.  How you fix this is simple, apply -1 Cha and -1 Con to every race.  This will make Humans a baseline and mathematically keep their "bonuses" in tact.  This takes zero thought to notice and implement.  A lot of games get this wrong on a lot of fronts, even the much hated Weapon vs Armor AC tables from 1E don't have a proper baseline weapon (which should be the Longsword, and to that game's credit the Longsword is the closest to a baseline weapon).  I digress into better games designed by better men, who's bad elements of design I despise still have more thought put into them than the above table and what I'm about to express further on.  Kinda lame renaming Elves to Starborn but not giving Halflings and Dwarves the same treatment.  Kobolds mechanically seem similar to beastmen or apemen, and even those names are cooler.  Just bizarre choices abound.    

Next we move into ability scores.  And yes, there are bad design choices again:

OK, this is the surest sign there's no design at the wheel - the benefit of ranged weapons is that they are at RANGED.  Nothing should ever benefit the weapon's damage in a light system, getting bonus damage is the benefit of MELEE weapons.  Doing this makes there be no point to melee weapons mechanically.  I wish people were less retarded than "those old Midwesterners" and didn't require explanation as to why Dexterity didn't benefit damage in the original game or any of the TSR editions.  At least by necessity of this OSR Tourettes Design 3d6 in order was made to be the core mechanic which mitigates people dumping Strength for Dexterity unlike Dragonslayer, but I'm again digressing to... eh... games by eh... others.  

Second problem is Defense Modifier is listed with an ascending AC bonus, not a descending AC bonus.  Believe it or not Zeb Cook had this shit figured out in 1989 and AD&D2E's Defensive Adjustment chart starts with positive modifiers and moves on to negative for higher Dexterity values.  But that game isn't cosplaying as an old school game.

Lastly, we now know that Death saves have something to do with Radiation as well, and for some reason Constitution benefits these specific types of saves instead of the Radiation Resistance ABILITY SCORE which this section forgets exists.  So Radiation interaction at this point, seems to be being designed bad on purpose.  As such I feel less need to even point out via imagery from here on out.  Let me just start listing the bad or stolen design:

1: XP Progressions are awful on most of the classes  Half-Caster is probably the worst offender, because it's basically the Fighter progression and the Mage progression added together and divided by 2, which is not how you intelligently judge this.  If I was just winging it I'd say add both together and divide by 4, then times by 3, giving you the XP cost of 3/4 of both classes.  The others were probably mostly ripped from early editions without thought, these were mostly fixed later on.  I know the MU table was fucked back then, so I can't blame the author for information he mindlessly ripped off.  
2: Thieves - LotFP Specialists.
3: Gammas - probably Gamma World 1E or 2E.
4: Birthsigns - Dungeon Crawl Classics
5: Social Class & Origins - Appears to be Empire of the Petal Throne
6: Radiation Resistance Chart - Metamorphosis Alpha
7: Silver-based economy - LotFP, but lots of stupid games do this like it matters when it doesn't
8: Armor having both AC and Damage Reduction: This is just a bad mechanic that slows combat and robs the AC mechanic of it's abstract nature.
9: Firearms "ignore the first 5 points of Armor" which is vague on purpose, considering DR and AC are both in the mix.  And all firearms do the same 1d8+2 damage (+ more based on Dex I guess)
10: Pistol-whipping and rifle-clubbing stolen directly from LotFP. Guns probably were too.
11: On page 43 Armor Class is written as such, and likely everywhere else except the Combat Matrix on 51 where it's depicted as "Armour Class".  This is a copy/paste error.  This chart was copied from somewhere British.
12: Fighting Stances & Defensive Techniques: was half this game originally LotFP?
13: Dead at -10 HP: can't always ape OD&D apparently, gotta bitch out sometime.
14: Dueling Matrix: Not sure if this is stolen from Flashing Blades but doesn't make any fucking sense here.  Was initially in a musketeer game of some kind.

And that's it.  I'm not going to bother reviewing the rest, I grew tired of the rampant brainless design put forth by this dullard.  Whatever popularity this game has is a sign of how far the bar has sunk since the Simp Age began.  This is the opposite of a unified artistic vision.  This is several OSRs thrown against the wall to see what sticks.  

I'm not reviewing the rest of the boxed set.  I'm not looking any further into this trash game for retards.  My mind has been sapped enough by this one puny plagiaristic pamphlet.  If I didn't know any better I'd say the game was the first OSR completely generated by AI.