Outgunned Adventure is a handsome digest-sized hardback from Two Little Mice and Free League. It’s self-aware and completely immersed in its chosen genre, and it’s built on a very versatile trope-driven engine. Indeed, perhaps the most impressive thing about this game is how completely that genre awareness runs through every level of the product. The text, the art, the character options, the mechanics—it’s all going in the same direction. It’s a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and if you like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Lara Croft, Uncharted or anything else in that pulpy action-adventure tradition, this book is for you.
There is, however, an intriguing design statement in the opening pages of Outgunned Adventure, almost like a motto: ‘these are tools, not rules.’ I’m going to keep coming back to this. It sounds good, but it’s quite a bold claim I think. As games go, this is not particularly rules light—but it feels like it wants to be?
Full disclosure: Free League kindly sent me a review copy of this book. As always, though, I don’t think this particularly shapes what I have to say about it, and what I don’t love, I’ll comment on. Also, this is a more of a read-through than a play report, so if you have more experience with running the game than I do, feel free to pop off in the comments below.
Production values
As an object, the book is just great. The cover is perfect, the colour scheme is spot on, everything is laid out on double-page spreads. The prose is readable, precise, but not overwritten, and nicely seeded with icons that cue you in. As for the art, they say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and that’s very true here; the art often helps to visualize what’s going on with the mechanics, teaching you faster than the text does. At several points in the book there’s a shift in formatting where the writing starts to feel like a sketchbook and typewriter aesthetic, kind of like Drake’s journal in the Uncharted series. It’s decorative, but it also makes the book a pleasure to read.
The wider product line
Outgunned Adventure is a standalone book—you absolutely don’t need anything else to play—but it sits within a broader Outgunned line that’s worth knowing about. The original Outgunned is a modern action-movie game, and there are expansion anthologies (‘Action Flicks’) which cover a surprising range of subgenres: everything for Stranger Things–style horror to Star Wars space opera to Harry Potter magic schools, and many more. All of this runs on the same basic engine. It reminds me a little of what the d20 System was like in the early 2000s, when I was first getting into tabletop RPGs: flexible enough to take the shape of whatever pulp you pour into it. If you’ve played other Outgunned games, you’ll notice minor terminology shifts (heroes are now adventurers, for example), but everything is pretty much inter-compatible, which is great.
The default setting is the interwar period—1920s and 30s, the era of The Mummy and Raiders of the Lost Ark—but there’s a nice sidebar that offers 1999 as a plausible alternative, opening the door to late-90s Tomb Raider-style play without needing a another product. This kind of light-touch versatility is something you see throughout the book, and one of its biggest strengths.
Character creation: vibe, not optimizing
Before you make any decisions about your character, the book gives you three key rules: take risks, look for treasure, do the right thing. I like this a lot. It’s the kind of thing a lot of RPGs fail to communicate, and it’s why a good session zero is often so important: you need to align everyone’s fiction before the game begins. In three sentences, you’ve set the tone. This is not a game for edgelords or antiheroes, and those characters won’t fit. It’s refreshing to have it stated so confidently.
From there, things are perhaps ‘rules-loose’ rather than rules-light. Unlike 5e, your background doesn’t come with feats or stat increases; instead opens up contacts, knowledge, and story fuel for the Director (what this game calls the DM). You pick a role: the Daredevil is your Indy, your Lara Croft, your Nathan Drake; the Heart is your Sallah or Marcus Brody; the Scoundrel is Short Round or Beni from The Mummy, and so on. There’s a nice range of influences here: thus, the Star is mainly Willie Scott from Temple of Doom, but the book cheerfully suggests Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park and even Nicolas Cage (!) in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. One rule here is that the party can’t have two of any given Role, which makes complete sense, and if none of the archetypes fit, there’s a Fortune Seeker option that works as a kind of ‘make your own’ option. You also choose whether your adventurer is young or old—Short Round or Henry Jones Sr—with mechanical consequences we’ll come back to.
My recommendation would be to come to the table without a fixed concept and let your choices do the work. The character emerges from the decisions rather than from some misplaced attempt at ‘optimization’.
Mechanics as genre
The core resolution mechanic is genuinely clever. You roll a pool of d6s—attribute plus skill, capped between two and nine dice—and look for matching faces. Two-of-a-kind is a basic success, three is a critical, and so on, all the way up to six-of-a-kind, which is the ‘jackpot’, at which point you become Director for a turn! I loved this. You can also push your luck with a reroll, and it’s almost always worth doing. You can even go all in, which is much more desperate: roll every unmatched die, better or bust. If you improve, Lady Luck smiled on you, but if you don’t, you lose everything.
Essentially, the game is built around a gambling mechanic, and it feels just right for the sort of fiction it’s trying to emulate. Pulp action heroes take wild chances because that’s what the genre is all about.
Failure, Grit, and the Death Roulette
As the rules go on, there are occasionally things that make me scratch my head a bit. There’s a two-page spread that says in bold type, ‘when you’re playing Adventure, failure doesn’t exist.’ Sorry? At first this got my hackles up. If you can’t fail, what’s the point? Then you realize what it’s really talking about is failing forward, and there’s a whole page on failing with style and how this actually works.
One of my favourite mechanics is the Death Roulette, kind of like 5e’s death saves. When the Director calls for a spin, you roll a d6. If the result beats the number of lethal bullets currently loaded in your roulette chamber, you’ve cheated death again and add a bullet for next time. The character sheet renders this as an actual revolver cylinder with a skull in the centre, and older adventurers start with more lethal bullets loaded. It’s imaginative and thought-through.
Then there’s grit—the game’s equivalent of hit points—which is tracked as a set of boxes rather than numbers. The penultimate box is the Bad Box, which is when the Director picks some kind of condition to inflict on you (see below), but the final box is the Hot Box, which grants two Luck points. I’m reminded of the ‘dark night of the soul’ in Save the Cat: the hero’s lowest moment is also when they start to turn things around. It’s cool to me that even the damage tracker is doing some kind of work to emulate the fiction.
Conditions are similar. 5e always makes me turn to the reference page (‘what does “incapacitated” do again?’) whereas Outgunned Adventure does it in more natural language: ‘you look tired’, ‘you look scared’, ‘you look hurt’, and so on, plus a few less common ones like ‘frozen’ and ‘poisoned’. In general, it feels like vibes over book-keeping, which is probably right.
Later chapters
There’s another chapter on gear, where prices are sensibly abstracted to a simple ‘cash’s core—a knife costs 1, a machine gun costs 3—and the equipment list is exactly what it should be: lanterns, climbing axes, binoculars, revolvers, machine guns, hunting rifles. There’s a nice little concept called ‘the Key,’ which covers those artifacts your adventurer simply cannot lose: the treasure map, the Grail diary, the puzzle box to Hamunaptra, etc. The concept is great, but I’d quibble with the name perhaps. That’s splitting hairs.
The Temples chapter is maybe where the book peaked for me. The formatting shifts to that journal aesthetic I mentioned, and the trap catalogue is a real love letter to the genre: snake pits, blade tunnels, rotating walls à la The Last Crusade, and, of course, a rolling boulder trap. How can you not?
My enthusiasm started to cool a bit by Section 6, which covers supernatural threats. There’s a thoughtful bit of framing where the book asks you to decide where your campaign sits on the ‘is-the-supernatural-real’ spectrum, but the bestiary that follows is disappointingly thin. You’ve got a mummy, a yeti, a snake-woman, a Temple of Doom–style warlock—and that’s basically it. For a game immersed so completely in pulp adventure, four supernatural enemies feels like a bit of a broken promise. I think the book either needed more content here or a follow-up companion to fill the gap.
The problem with rules creep
Section 7 is effectively the DM’s Director’s guide, and it’s decent. It covers things like McGuffins, points of no return, the pros and cons of running one-shots versus short campaigns, adventure hooks, recurring villains, and so on. The treasure examples—the Templar treasure, the water of life, the Book of Anubis—are evocative in the right way; they feel like things out of Uncharted. The rival archetypes are similarly well-chosen, (and the decision to illustrate the Nazi rival without swastikas was probably the right call).
But this section is also where the book’s biggest structural problem becomes undeniable: the rules for how to play this game are spread all over the book. ‘The basics’ ostensibly end at page 83, but Grit is in the Dangers and Enemies chapter, Heat (a ticking clock mechanic) doesn’t appear until page 220, and character advancement is buried at page 228. And in each section, another subsystem appears: Help and Hindrance, Spotlights, Assists, Runs, setting up camp . . . On their own, each is elegant and nicely handled, but collectively, they accumulate past the point where I can hold them all together in my working memory, and the Director is probably the one who really has to do this.
This is why I’m a bit sceptical of the ‘tools not rules’ slogan. There’s more cognitive load than there probably needs to be, and it’s not as fairly distributed as it could be. Take Luck, the main meta-currency of the game: it feels like one more thing the Director is expected to track and dole out, and Directors are already the busiest people at the table. I much prefer the approach in games like Tales of the Valiant, where the equivalent currency is managed by the players. There’s rules-creep across the book which weighs it down a bit. It feels rules-light but actually isn’t. I think it could have been a fair bit shorter, or perhaps been split into a very compressed ‘core’ (Nimble length) with optional rules added on in a separate supplement.
What it’s crying out for, and what it does not have, is a cheat sheet, kind of like the ones Justin Alexander has provided for games like the Cypher System and Blades in the Dark.A double-page reference spread would have been so handy. Even better, put it on the inside covers! They’re currently unused! To the book’s credit, Two Little Mice do at least offer a free quickstart on DriveThruRPG, which goes some way toward getting new players up to speed, but an easy reference page still feels conspicuous by its absence.
The sample adventure and the final pages
The book closes with a sample adventure running from roughly page 236 to page 251. I won’t spoil it, but it features a Viking longship frozen in a chasm of ice, a puzzle, and a cypher disc, and it’s good: tight, evocative, perfect for the genre. It’s also somewhat linear and structured in scenes, which might not be to everyone’s taste. This isn’t a hex crawl or a dungeon crawl; players get a few interesting choices within scenes, but no real agency. And I suppose that’s pretty defensible within the subgenre—Uncharted and Tomb Raider both run on rails—but it can get a bit heavy-handed at times, and if you’re the sort of player who needs genuine freedom and open options to stay engaged, this might get frustrating.
The final page of the book is one of my favourites. It’s a filmography, and alongside the obvious inclusions—Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tomb Raider—there are some genuinely surprising ones like The Last of Us, Sherlock Holmes, Titanic, Jumanji, even DuckTales. But they also make sense. You could show the list to your players and say ‘this is the sort of game we’re running’, and they’d get the pitch.
The verdict
Overall, I think the biggest single issue with Outgunned Adventure is that it can’t quite decide how crunchy it wants to be. Without meaning to labour the point, when a front page says ‘tools, not rules,’ you don’t expect the book to then accumulate so many mechanics and scatter them across multiple chapters—and you certainly don’t expect the Director to have so much to do. It’s particularly odd given some of the key content is rather thin in places—four supernatural enemies, a handful of treasures, compressed stat blocks—which perhaps limits the book’s usability in the long term. But then, ultimately, maybe that’s not what it’s going for. It’s for short-form cinematic adventures, not a grand campaign. So long as you sign up for that, you’ll be happy.
Reading back, I’ve maybe been a bit tougher on this book than I expected to be. If that’s the case, it’s only because I like it so much that I don’t want to gush. So let’s reset. Bottom line: this is a fantastic product, and if you want to run an action-adventure game in the Indy/Mummy /Uncharted/Tomb Raider lane, I honestly couldn’t recommend anything better. The design is solid at every level. The mechanics fit the genre in a way few games do. The book is a pleasure to read and a pleasure to hold. With the right group of players, who understand the genre and want to lean into it, you are going to have a really good time.
The hardback retails for around £30–35 in the UK, and there’s a PDF on DriveThruRPG for roughly £14 (plus a free quickstart). At either price it’s easy to recommend.
Just maybe write your own cheat sheet first.
★★★★⯪
What did you think? Have you run Outgunned Adventure at your table, or are you tempted to pick it up? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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