I recently stumbled across this intriguing looking game on my Facebook and it caught my eye enough to click over into the campaign. This was probably in no small part due to the incredibly evocative art by Charles Ferguson-Avery that the game is using from his 2017 book World War Occult. As of the time of writing this article, the Kickstarter is over halfway funded with $4,607 pledged out of a $7,000 goal with 33 days left to go. With your help they have more than enough time to reach that goal and beyond and bring on some new writers to produce mission folios to challenge and threaten the soldiers at your table.
The Kickstarter is being published by Wet Ink Games. Now, they’re a fairly new company, and I wasn’t at all familiar with them when I stumbled across the Kickstarter, but they were founded by industry veterans Brandon K. Aten and Matthew Orr who have worked for companies like Palladium Games and Third Eye Games. 2017 saw the release of their first game, Wild Skies, and they state that their design mantra is that roleplaying games should be “collective storytelling games for the enjoyment of all involved.”
The year is 1916. The Battle of the Somme has just begun and something happens that finally weakens the veil enough to let… them through. Solders in the trenches begin to report hearing whispers in their ear. These whispers promised them power, telling them how they could win the war. Some soldiers resisted these whispers, and they were driven mad by the Others, the beings that were allowed to come through when the veil weakened. But, others accepted, gaining arcane powers in the exchange that allowed them to do great things. But there is always a cost to such power. That cost might be their very humanity.
Never Going Home: World War Occult Role Playing is stated to be loosely based on the Compass System that was used in Wild Skies. It uses a number of d6s based on the soldier’s skill rating and you try to obtain a number of successes (5s or 6s on the dice) to surpass a task’s difficulty. A simple enough system, but lots of room to add complexity and deepen the game mechanics. One of the wrinkles here is the ability to manipulate the dice results, or even add dice to your skill rank based on your various attributes. But these attributes are also tied to your overall health and well-being, so if you spend too aggressively, you can get seriously hurt at a very inopportune time. It also means as you face the horrors of war and the Others, that is reflected in your character’s capabilities and proficiencies.
But you can’t just call a game World War Occult without including magic. Magic appears to be represented by the Whispers that the player selects for his soldier at character creation. These Whispers appear to cater to a very “high risk, high reward” play style by offering big payoffs at the expense of increased difficulties. And risking too much and failing means terrible things might happen to these soldiers. The power of the Whispers might just become too much for them to carry in their bodies.
The final aspect to this game is an interesting one – playing cards that represent the characters’ humanity. As the battles around and within them rage on, they will find it necessary to sacrifice some of these cards in order to complete their missions, power occult ceremonies, and even avoid injury. These cards are also said to serve as the experience of the system of the game, being traded in for new powers and abilities. The balance that must be struck here is obvious – if your humanity runs out, you become no better than the monsters you are fighting against. But then again… you’re probably never going home.
The reward levels are very pocketbook friendly, with as little as a $10 pledge getting you the PDF materials of the book and any digital stretch goal. The softcover of the book will run you $20 and the hardcover $35. But the deluxe bundles have the largest bang for your buck. A $45 or $65 pledge (depending on whether you want the softcover or hardcover version of the book respectively), gets you a copy of the book and PDF, a set of Kickstarter-exclusive dice and playing cards, as well as any digital and physical stretch goals that are unlocked over the campaign. And if you really like the idea of this game, there is a chance to get a very limited edition custom leather bound edition of the game’s softcover, designed to look like a soldier’s diary.
You can find many more details over on the game’s Kickstarter page and make a pledge if this piques your interest like it did mine.
Ben Erickson
