I’m on a study project to improve my understanding of roleplaying games. To this end, I already have two reading projects, A Game Per Year and An Adventure Per Year. This is the third, with the goal of reading or playing 52 games made in the last few years. Originally I considered making this “A New RPG Per Week” and that’s where the number 52 comes from, even though a weekly schedule is probably not within my abilities.
Lair of the Saurians is a supplement for the Swedish roleplaying game Mutant: Year Zero. It’s a slim booklet containing four short scenarios the player characters can encounter as they explore the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the game.
One of the pillars of Mutant : Year Zero is exploration. The characters leave their home community to brave the dangers of a foreboding world to build and develop their community. They bring back knowledge and artifacts from the world that used to exist before the catastrophe.
The four scenarios included in this book slot into this basic gameplay model. Since the characters explore, it’s good to have something interesting for them to find. These are not really stories or adventures but more like interesting locations. I’m reminded of the kind of things you find on the map in a Fallout game.
The scenarios include lizard mutants lairing in an old submarine, a prophet living in a spaceship, an evil tree and that classic of classics, the cannibal family. I’m spoiling it here but any player who has ever seen a movie will guess where things are going anyway.
The booklet is slight but it’s utility is undeniable. It’s easy to see a Mutant game eating up material like this at a brisk pace.