Sure!

The short version is, Mutant: Year Zero does a few things right that they failed to replicate in their other games. The big one is the overarching MYZ campaign. It spools out really smoothly and organically, and takes nearly no prep at all beyond seeding your city map with the “special zone” locations. Once you’ve done that, you just start playing. They’ll stumble across the various campaign bits in a number of ways: by wandering into a Special Zone, or rolling up an encounter in the Zone, or randomly drawing one of the campaign-relevant artifacts while exploring. It just happens and it’s really sweet.

The other thing MYZ did right was the Ark game. The Ark development projects aren’t perfect (one of my players built out a gorgeous spreadsheet of what every project did and how the interacted, and he revealed some … problems with the RAW). But the projects, combined with the Ark Crisis deck (or roll, whatever), set a very different tone for the game when they’re home, versus the procedural, technical grind of exploration. We put that division to very good use in MYZ. Less so in Genlab Alpha, and I didn’t really like the tactical minigame that was supposed to provide a similar campaign scaffolding.

Coriolis failed for us in a number of ways. Darkness Points are just flat busted; I’ve written about that at length. That’s the biggest and most painful problem with Coriolis, and it would have been so easy to have done something different. I’ve even thought about hacking out my own solution and playing again, because I ADORE the Coriolis aesthetic. I also love, love, loooove the space combat system. Terrific, top marks. But DPs, nope. They also changed the die-rolling odds to make simple success more difficult (presumably to drive players into the DP economy via prayer, but it’s busted, so that’s A Bad Thing). I would have greatly preferred it if they’d stuck to the normal rich-dice system they use everywhere else.

There’s a lot to like about Forbidden Lands, at least on the system side. No complaints about the system. It’s entirely about the setting (super weird and nonsensical when you start digging), the campaign (I despise how they organized the setting information, breaking everything into three sections makes it completely unusable to me), and ultimately the play premise. D&D style “we adventure because We Are Adventurers” is just not something my players can engage with, as I mentioned in the post. System-wise, though? It’s hot. I would strongly consider doing my own setting and premise and strapping FL to it.

Hope this helps, Robert.