I have wanted to buy a copy of Crown of Salt for ages. Nova wrote a pretty glowing review some time ago. Months later Jason and Tom talked about it on Fear of a Black Dragon, and were both so euphorically enthusiastic I knew I needed to check it out. I came close to buying it several times, but getting it from abroad with shipping always felt too pricey and decadent. And then I saw it at the Melsonian Arts Council shop at Dragonmeet and that was that.

Crown of Salt is an adventure for Mork Borg, written, illustrated, and laid out by Tania Herrero. This is seemingly the first adventure she has written, which is kind of bananas. This is such a strong first showing. Update: Tania let me know this is their second adventure! I’ll have to check out their Bottle Rocket, The Pit of Blasphemy.

The book has these little cut scene moments. I love it. — Me on Bluesky

The intro to the adventure is prose and art, luxuriously spread over several pages. A nice bit of story telling that is very reminiscent of video game cut scenes. We learn about an arrogant king, cursed by the gods to become a monster. I wonder if he will show up later? Tania isn’t going to tell us right away. But if you’ve read a book no doubt you’re aware of foreshadowing.

I don’t think I’ve seen another module approach breaking up the various sections that make up the adventure in this way. It’s very dramatic: it really help demarcate the various points in the adventure. Each section has these pages of bridging art and text that reorient the reader for what is to come. I really enjoyed the graphic design of these sections.

A different sort of module would tell you if the crow’s master is lost in the rifts or not, rather than leave it as a hash tag no spoilers mystery for the GM. — Me on BlueSky

The module opens with a description of the small town of Saltburg, where the adventurers can meet some hirelings, the crow above, and get ready to venture out into the wilderness. There isn’t too much to this town, which is fine, it’s not the main event for this module. The hirelings are interesting and dynamic. They feel like the main reason this town is described at all. We also learn what makes them particularly interesting on the page after they are all described.

Tania’s approach to writing Crown of Salt reminds me very much of the work of Patrick Stuart, especially Deep Carbon Observatory and Silent Titans. Not so much in terms of the modules content, but more around how the module is structured. Patrick often hides details from the GM, so that the act of reading the module comes with a sense of discovery that is mirrored by the players. Some people find this annoying, they have a vision of maximum table utility that demands tidy summaries of everything that’s going on. Certainly one way to make an adventure, but I think it’s reductive to think a more creative approach won’t work.

In the case of the crow mentioned above, knowing its backstory likely won’t impact how the encounter is run at the time the party first meets the bird. (And if you read the whole module, you’ll perhaps recall its deal.) With the hirelings you are a similar position. Even if you slavishly flipped from page to page only when required, you could run the encounter where the party does their recruiting, not knowing the hirelings share a dark secret. Tania’s approach makes for a much more engaging read of the module, and in general I think she avoids some of the issues that arise from being coy with all the details.

We in the business might call this a Flux Space™. I can see why Jason enjoyed running this with Trophy Gold, it feels like a great fit for how that game works, and its vibes. The exploration rules remind me of climbing from Veins of the Earth, perhaps an inspiration. — me on bluesky

The start of the module shares d12 reasons to risk ones life, each pushing the players to search for the fallen king (the Cantigaster), his temple, etc. I generally don’t care if an adventure includes hooks or not. I think the only hook you need is the social contract, “I bought this module so that’s what we’re doing,” but the hooks included in this book are good all the same. They do a good job tying the party to the adventure, and also help speak to the larger world. Regardless of how it comes to pass, the party will venture from the town to the rifts, in search of the adventure.

The rifts are presented as a sprawling unmappable space. My friend Nick calls this sort of site a flux space. Tania shares her rules for exploring such a space, which are very reminiscent of the climbing rules from Viens of the Earth. I’m curious to see how they work in play. Reading them I like them. She manages to capture a lot: how much time passes while travelling, if the players are injured along the way due to the route, the loss of provisions, the loss of equipment, and random encounters. To reach the temple, where they should expect to find the fallen king, the players will need to experience 4 exploration events. This approach is meant to simulate travelling through a weird messy underworld.

The encounters here are all pretty fantastic. There are 4 types of events, and 6 possible encounters per event. When you explore you will roll a d4 and a d6 to see what the players encounter. The encounters are all really engaging. It’s hard to pick my favourites. Many will lead to fun situations during the course of a game. I can see how this adventure would work so well with Trophy Gold. The module’s loose structure lends itself well for the similarly unstructured exploration rules of Trophy Gold.

There are a few places where the challenge of the module feels like it veers into rocks fall you all die territory. For example, one of the monsters has a random power that increases gravity in the area: the players must pass a DR12 test or die. There isn’t really anything the players can do to prepare for this situation, it’s a random power that might occur on a random round of combat. There are a few places where it felt like the module was challenging in a way that might not be fun.

This section has some layout choices I found a bit confusing, or places where the placement of information is a hinderance. There is a mini dungeon within the rifts, the Tomb of the Promised Princess. Instructions for finding the tomb are included with the description of the temple, and those are found well after the instructions for exploring the rifts: “only reachable by the guidance of the Latrofax or by rolling a repeated result in an exploration event.” It’s not unreasonable to imagine someone running the rifts portion of the adventure, unaware they need to watch out for duplicate entries. (Earlier, there are instructions on the page following the instructions for exploring the rifts, “Roll a d6 before determining the Exploration Event. On a 1, skip directly to the Promised Princess event. The chance increases by 1 each time.“ Is the intention to use both? I’m not so sure.)

Crown of Salt concludes with a small temple dungeon. You are stalked by the Cantigaster. Tania suggests he shows up when convenient or interesting, but offers up some simple random chance rules if just having him jump scare the players offends your no quantum ogres OSR sensibilities. — me on bluesky

The adventure ends with a small dungeon. The cut scene that introduces this section explains more of the background for the whole adventure. One last twist: a primordial god! The adventure really leans into Mork Borg’s vibes. Like Deep Carbon Observatory, the players will be stalked by the main antagonist of the dungeon, the Cantigaster. This dungeon is flavourful, like the rest of the module. Tania switches to a more straightforward layout at this point. I find the keys a little long to my taste, but I am a fan of tweet sized room descriptions.

We have made it this far and I haven’t even talked about the layout and art. Crown of Salt is beautiful. A lot of people try (and fail) to ape Johan Nohr’s style when it comes to making modules for Mork Borg. Often books just look messy and half assed, they don’t have the graphic design chops to pull off what Johan accomplished with Mork Borg. With Crown of Salt, Tania’s made a really lovely book. There are are occasional missteps, but in general I think she’s made something where the graphic design contributes to the story telling. Her art is fantastic. Like Gus or Luka, it’s always impressive to see someone who can do it all.

I really loved Crown of Salt. One of the coolest modules I’ve read this year. I regret not grabbing it sooner. I wanted to make sure I talked about it before the year was done. Telling you about it feels like a good way to close out 2026.

I mail a lot of books to my brother in the UK. There were a few books waiting for me when I arrived in London this morning. One of those books was Chris McDowall’s latest war-game, MAC ATTACK. This is a 6mm scale sci-fi war-game, essentially Chris’s take on the venerable mech game. These sorts of games are typically quite crunchy, so it’s interesting to see how Chris distills battling mechs to its true essence. I had expected the book to be bigger. It’s a cute little thing. An A5 perfect bound softcover. You can pack this in your backpack without breaking a sweat.

The rules for MAC ATTACK are captured over four pages that open the book. The first introduces some core concepts of the game, in particular motion and heat, two attributes of each mech. (Or should I say MAC? I won’t, but these things are called MACs.) Motion tracks the sort of movement the mech has made: faster movement makes you harder to hit, but also makes it harder for you to hit other mechs. Heat tracks how hot your mech is getting. If it hits 6 you overheat! The second page explains how battlefields and terrain work. The third and forth page are effectively the rules for the whole game. He’s done it again!

A turn in MAC ATTACK is broken up in to 4 phases. An initiative deck is created with each unit being assigned a card. Draw cards to see who gets to activate. During the move phase you’ll move your mechs, and in the process assign them their motion dice. Depending on the sort of movement action they take, they might gain some heat. The movement phase is followed by the attack phase. The initiative deck is shuffled and the players once again draw cards to see which unit will activate and fight. To fight you will roll a number of attack dice dictated by your mech’s weapon. The target number to be rolled on each dice is determined by summing both units motion dice. The roll can be modified if the target is crashed, in cover, or inside a building. A 1 is always a miss, a 6 is always a hit. Hits are assigned to the various modules that make a mech, which will destroy them over the course of the game. Hits that would hit a destroyed module instead cause internal damage to the mech. This feels like a pretty elegant combat system. Once all the mechs have had a chance to activate in the attack phase, you will destroy any mechs who have taken more internal damage than their class. You’ll learn what a mech’s class is by turning the page and reading the rules for making MACs. Dealing with damage in this way means you’ll never have your mechs blown off the board before they have a chance to cause some damage themselves. The turn closes with a cooldown phase. The mechs all lower their heat score based on their mech’s class, modified by whether they have radiator or coolant modules, or are sitting in water. And that is that! The book concludes with pages and pages of advanced rules, variant ways to play, etc, if you want to expand on this simple base.

The next few pages cover building your mechs, buying the weapons and hardware that will make each unique. There are several factions described in the book. The lore for the setting is basically a couple pull quotes per faction, their example units, and the (amazing) art from Amanda Lee Franck. It’s impressive how you can get across within those tight constraints. Like the Doomed, the expectation is you’re kit bashing your mechs, taking Battletech minis and mixing them with junk you have laying about your house. The game also has rules for taking your little epic scale infantry and tanks, perfect if you’ve picked up Legion Imperialis like myself.

Rather than bespoke scenarios, Chris has a scenario generator like War Cry, where you will generate your deployment, victory conditions (for each side) and a twist. You could use the generator, and the advanced rules at the back of the book, to come up with interesting narrative scenarios.

I’ll need to figure out the simplest way to get this game to the table. Maybe I can find some mechs in the used bins at the Sword and Board? Maybe I can use some Tyranids as Kaiju? I’ll have to report back once I’ve played the game. (It does have solo rules, so you don’t even have to play with any other dorks.) This is the first mech game I’ve read that feels compelling enough to play. Most feel way too fussy. I think that’s the mouth feel most people want with these sorts of games, but this feels like it might be a good compromise. You have a lot of granularity still, but seemingly without a lot of the complexity. Will have to play and see if that is how it all pans out.

The Kickstarter for Wandering Blades is coming to a close. Wandering Blades is a new game from Daniel Kwan—who is notable for Ross Rifles, the Asians Represent Podcast, and living down the road from me. It’s an OSR game that swaps out your typical medieval-fantasy out for some wuxia vibes.

I wrote about Daniel’s previous game Ross Rifle’s back when I played it during BreakoutCon. The game is an interesting (and educational!) Powered by the Apocalypse game about the First World War. Daniel has also done a lot of freelance work, mostly in the PbtA or 5e space. Wandering Blades is interesting because you can see him bring those influences and experiences to the design of an OSR game. It’s interesting to see ouroboros of influences at play. Daniel mentions being influenced by games I would consider to have borrowed or been inspired by PbtA games. It’s all a bit of a circle.

The game has all the trappings of a D&D-like: attributes, hit points, character classes, levels, etc. There are some different names, but if you have played anything vaguely D&D-ish you’ll figure it out. The game has two core related mechanics: checks and saves. You try and beat a difficulty score on a d20 when making a check or a save. A save is reactive, you roll it to avoid a bad outcome. Daniel suggests some sample DCs so you don’t have to think too hard about setting them, the main thing I dislike about DCs. Where the game really branches out is when it comes to combat.

A lot of OSR games focus on problem solving. You will often hear this maxim that combat is a failure state. The rules for many OSR games often often produce grotty nobodies trying to survive long enough to become the sorts of powerful heroes you read about it books. (But I ask you, what campaign ever lasts that long!) Wandering Blades is trying to capture the mood of a very different sort of genre. The characters aren’t usually grotty nobodies, they are capable bad-asses. They might get hurt or die, but they are certainly taking a lot of people with them if that’s the case. The game does a lot of work mechanically to try and capture what makes a fight in those sorts of stories feel dynamic and interesting. This part of the game reminds me of 4th or 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, where the designers tried to go further than “roll a d6 for damage”.

The two core character classes in the game are Youxia (wandering hero) and the Outlaw. The Youxia belongs to a martial arts sect, and has access to a variety of martial arts techniques to use in combat. Daniel describes a few different techniques, each with a very different mood. Outlaws gain skills as they level, but also have access to a small set of combat techniques. Players manage an additional resource, Qi Points, to perform their combat techniques. There are actions and reactions you can perform on your turn in combat. You might parry a blow, or counter attack if an enemy misses you. There is a lot more detail to the rules compared to a lot of OSR games I typically play. I was reminded a lot of Break!!, which also feels influenced by 5e and more “trad” games.

Wandering Blades feels like a good bridge game, something that you could probably use to pull in players who prefer games like D&D 5e. The characters you create have a bit more detail and mechanical weight to them. The rule set isn’t too far off from the core of D&D. The vibes aren’t particularly dark and grotty. I suspect the game won’t be a big leap for most 5e fans. If you’re an OSR fan that gets annoyed at games that aren’t doing any heavy lifting when it comes to mechanics and design, you may enjoy what Daniel has tried to do.

You have 24 hours (after I post this) to go back the thing. Go do it! Gotta support Canadian content.

Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:

The power station on the moon Bodhisattva 2a is failing; without it, the inhabitants of Siddhartha’s Peace, the small Neo-Buddhist colony established there, will freeze to death. Abbot Benz-Shiroyuki requests aid. Print a new power converter at the Manufactory and as payment, receive salvage rights to the decommissioned Terraforming Tower at the top of the moon’s space elevator.

In his briefing, the abbot neglects to mention the tower’s AI has come to believe itself a manifestation of the deity Bishamonten. Pushed by Straylight LLC and the dire conditions in Siddhartha’s Peace, the AI is set on taking extreme measures to protect the colony, even if it requires feeding it to the flames of revolution.

I recall being sorely tempted by this book’s Kickstarter, the cover image is so bold and eye-catching. As usual, shipping was too expensive so I moved on with my life. This weekend I attended Breakout Con, where I saw the zine for sale in real life. Beautiful. When I went to pay, the lady working the stall said, “no pressure, but this also comes in a fancy box.” There is no world where I don’t buy the box.

The first party modules for Mothership are excellent and provide a strong template to follow when it comes to organizing your ideas for an adventure. Nirvana on Fire takes those lessons to heart. The module opens with a lot of information to help orient the GM to what’s going on in the scenario. The opening spread is a timeline of how the the colony on Bodhisattva 2a came to exist, how its problems have manifested. The following spread explains how you might use the module. David tells you how you could kick things off, and what “win” conditions might be. This is followed by an overview of the factions at play and the colony itself.

The graphic design of this module is top tier stuff: they should have put Eric Hill’s name on the cover. I didn’t recognize Hill’s name at first, but he’s the fellow that did the layout for Hull Breach. Of course this thing is going to look hot. Jéromê Berthier art is bold. Lots of reds and blacks. Thick lines. Together the pair take the book to another level.

There are two main adventuring sites in the initial version of this adventure. The first is the colony, Siddhartha’s Peace. It’s described in a single spread, with short descriptions for each of its 10 locations. The GM will roll on a corresponding random table as players move from location to location, which often make the locations a more dynamic. There is a revolution fomenting in the town. Some of the townspeople have become adherents of the AI Bishmamoten. A few encounters involve this tension. The last encounter on the table is “the revolution begins …”.

The “dungeon” in this module is a tower that sits atop the colony’s space elevator, the centre of their terraforming activities until the AI took over. This is 10 rooms, described over two spreads. I would have preferred if the map of the tower was less abstract: it is a simple flow chart, basically. Using the illustration of the exterior of the tower by Jéromê will help you picture the space in your head. As before, a random table provides encounters and colour as players move from location to location. The last encounter on this table is the sole monster that stalks the halls of the terraforming tower, the Spear of Bishmamonten. I was reminded of The God That Crawls or Deep Carbon Observatory, other adventures with a singular powerful monster hunting the party.

Two additional adventuring locations are included in this extended edition. They add more depth to the module. The shorter of two is an addition to the colony, written by Roy Leahy. Players can explore an abandoned Starlight facility, where the company was spying on the citizens and conducting creepy experiments. This location has a nice map. Once again the encounters table elevates the quiet space into something dynamic. The other adventuring location is Facility D-U8K81, written by Noora Masyk. This location reminded me of some of the first party adventures: descriptions are longer, keyed with bullet points. Unlike the other adventuring sites in this module, all the “monsters” to be encountered are described within the location keys. (In this adventure the random encounters table adds some colour.) Both adventuring sites are nice additions to what was already a solid module.

Nirvana on Fire has an amazing cover, and it’s honestly what got me to buy the book. But, contrary to popular belief, you usually can judge a book by its cover. This book is great: I would love to get it to the table. The boxed set comes with a pad of themed character sheets, a GM screen, some patches, and dice. I have zero regrets with my purchase, it’s honestly amazing, but it’s very decadent and certainly unnecessary. That said, these dice are great.

I picked up Constant Downpour Remastered when I spotted it for sale over on Ratti Incantatti¹. Constant Downpour is a survival hex-crawl for Mothership. The players crash land on Venus 3 during a routine mission. Unbeknownst to them someone had planned this crash as a hit. The players need to make it off the planet, before they go crazy or get beaten to death by the Venusians. The adventure was written by Marco Serano, and is inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story The Long Rain. David Simons is the main artist for the adventure.

There is a lot to love about this adventure. Exploring the wilderness is taxing. Marco links hex exploration to the Mothership rules for stress, to help capture the unrelenting nature of the rain, lack of sunlight, etc. There is a posse of mercenaries who crashed before the players, who will pursue them if they drag their feet. Giant Venusians who will try and kill them for being interlopers on their planet. There is the company the players are working for, who have secretly facilitated the crash, and a cabal within the company trying to bring it down from the inside. There are 17 keyed hexes, and some small dungeons. There is a lot happening on the world to draw the players in. The vibes are great.

There are clear procedures for play, something that if often lacking when it comes to running hex crawls. Characters gain stress for every two hexes they move through, forcing engagement with the panic system of Mothership. I like how simple and unrelenting the rules are. I had similar thoughts after I finished running Gradient Descent. There are additional procedures for crossing rivers, adding more depth to the activity.

There are four main factions. Potamo Major are the group that hired the party, and organized the crash. Poto Minor is a rebel group operating with Potamo Major trying to take them down. Crew 612 are another group sent to die on Venus 3—they are effectively a rival adventuring party. Finally there are the Venusians, the group indigenous to the planet. Each faction is detailed briefly, with key locations listed and the groups recent successes. There are descriptions of important NPCs following these descriptions. The Venusians or Crew 612 can be used to force the players into action when they get complacent or overly cautious.

There are 91 hexes in this adventure that have no descriptions. The GM will generate the descriptions for these hexes by rolling on random tables. For a jungle hex you roll a d10 to determine the type of jungle setting the players have encountered (dense foliage, natural walkways, complete darkness), and then another d10 for a random description of that location. There are 24 entries between those three tables. There are two d10 tables for descriptions of clearings, with 20 entries between them. Both types of wilderness have sounds and smells tables to add to their descriptions. Four rolls on various tables gives me: “A lattice of thick vines loop in the air. The vines look fleshier and bumpier than vines previously seen. The slap of large leaves echo in the thick sulfurous air. The vines ahead cross in near perfect plus signs.” I love these vibes, but this is more rolling than I want to do to generate what is effectively an empty hex.²

These tables could simply be used as inspiration, forgetting about all the rolling. Random tables are often used to communicate the nature of the world, even if you might only use one entry from the table in a game. Such tables encourages an open-ended view of the game world: there is nothing canonical. A prevalence of random tables is often a defining characteristic of OSR games and adventures. I worry people feel the need to include them where they don’t make much sense, or should be designed in a different way.³

One of the themes of the module is this idea of repetition, getting lost in the sameness of the world. In that way you could argue this approach to describing the wilderness reinforces that aspect of the adventure. If you roll up these descriptions you’ll see traces of what has come before. In Marco’s own words, “Weaponizing deja vu and melding grays work to reinforce the feeling of becoming lost to the environment.”

Travelling through these hexes in this game serves a purpose: they are a tax. Players gain stress as they move from hex to hex, and will always face an encounter. Marco has done a great job of using the mechanics of Mothership to feed into how the adventure works. There is always some amount of tension coming from each move through the wilderness the players make.

Marco’s suggestion for how to use these randomly generated hexes in play is also poor advice in my opinion:

When describing what is in front of players, it is beneficial to give two distinct descriptions. Example:

Warden: You finally see light as you break out of the complete darkness. Ahead is a clearing. The grass stands upright unaffected by the wind. It creates a mathematical curve .To the left the jungle continues and you see thousands of white orbs dangle from the branch extremities. Suddenly, the fruits fall, exploding on impact, hurling pebble sized seeds across the jungle floor. Which direction do you want to go?

It doesn’t actually matter which way you go! These are two random descriptions, and it’s likely you’ll move into a new hex with two random descriptions. Marco does a great job of placing clues, in-game maps, and geographic features throughout this module that will help the players put some thought into where they will explore in the game. This will make wandering the wilderness more meaningful. The advice given above undercuts the work he’s done.

If running this module I would generate all the hex descriptions and their encounters up front. I think seeing the encounters fixed in place might help create more connections between hexes. Where the players choose to go will be informed by what they’ve learned of the world so far. There is no need to roll two descriptions per hex. Marco has also included a lot of digital material that will help ease running a game. Every illustration is included by itself, making it easy to share with players as they encounter a Venusian Tank or a giant man-eating plant. There are six player facing ‘fog of war’ maps, and they can also be given to the players as the discover them through play. (By reaching certain locations or finding actual maps in the game.) There are even some recording you can play for your players, to make your game a little bit more immersive.

On the whole Constant Downpour Remastered is a solid adventure, and my gripes are minor compared to everything the adventure brings to the table. Constant Downpour takes some big swings. I didn’t even comment on the weird page numbering scheme or how cool the keyed hexes are! As I said at the start, there is a lot to love.

There is an expanded edition of Skorne, which came out some time ago, but I only noticed recently. Skorne is a very simple OSR/FKR game, available as a PDF, which I printed out like a booklet. Skorne was created by Samuel James, who writes the blog Dreaming Dragonslayer. I have discussed Skorne on the blog, in passing, some time ago. The game deserves more than a passing glance.

Skorne looks to take inspiration from games like Into the Odd and Maze Rats. Skorne is a simple rule set tied to a simple campaign conceit. You are a band of renegades, there are evil tyrants ruling the world, led by the devil prince Skorne. The game begins with the player characters awakening in the ruins of a village destroyed by a warband of Skorne. Like Mork Borg there is a bit of a ticking clock, where the world marches towards ruin as time passes. Classic. If only Final Fantasy games still managed to keep things so tight.

The rules for the game fit on a handful of pages, but ostensibly boil down to opposed 2d6 rolls. Characters have 3 stats: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower. Creating a character will take moments. You roll for your attribute bonuses, and roll for a starting set of equipment, attributes (like a missing eye) or magic spells. Characters have 10 inventory slots. Some situations may cause a player’s character to be fatigued. Like Mausritter, this is tracked by consuming an inventory slot. When a character has ten points of fatigue they die.

Borrowing from Into the Odd, there is no dice rolling to hit in combat damage. Players start the game with 3 HP, each hit doing one point of damage. If players or enemies have a good position, for whatever reason, they may be able to do more hits of damage, or negate some incoming damage. When a character reaches zero hit points they must make a Strength save to avoid death. The combat rules reminded me of one of my favourites, [Pits and Peril][pp], which is also minimal, and expects a lot of adjudication to come from “the fiction”. In that game, as with this one, you will jockey for position and advantage to succeed in combat.¹

The later half of the book is random tables and advice for running the game. Good random tables help sign post what a game is about, and Skorne has good random tables. The advice for running the game is clear, actionable, and to the point. There is a short bestiary, which will help illustrate how to make monsters a game where stats and numbers aren’t really that important. The game concludes with a short page about the history of the setting: loose and open ended to do with as you wish. When I first wrote about the game I commented on how it sort of jumps right to it, assuming the reader will know what’s up. A lot of the additions to the game help frame things more explicitly.

Skorne is a really well executed rules light game. It’s a great example to learn from for people looking to make something minimal. What rules and writing are here all funnel you towards a particular sort of game. It’s a quick read, and one you could get to the table quickly: just my sort of thing.

My copy of the Mothership Starter set arrived on the weekend. I love it. The box is dense, packed with all sorts of good stuff. What I was excited about was the new adventure, Another Bug Hunt. This will be the first adventure people new to Mothership will encounter. It’s quite possible this will be the first adventure someone new to gaming may run, period. The Mothership Kickstarter was wildly successful: I have to believe there are a non-trivial number of people for whom Mothership will be their first RPG. I assume the brainiacs at Mothership HQ realized how important this module would be, because there is a lot of talent tied up in its creation. It’s amazing to read such a fully realized introductory adventure.

Another Bug Hunt is split into four scenarios, the first a classic of the genre: players find themselves exploring an “abandoned” base, trying to piece together what happened to its MIA staff. The base is a small complex, a 10 room “dungeon”. There are two entrances to the base, the one around back leading straight to the big-bad monster. I love that you could start the adventure stumbling upon the encounter that feels like the end. This is the OSR nonsense I am here for.

Advice for running this adventure, and running games in general, is scattered throughout Another Bug Hunt. The adventure pairs well with the (wonderful) Warden’s Guide. A short prologue to the scenarios has the players make a fear save. The adventure explains the purpose of the save, when to make them, and how you might give players bonuses on the roll based on what they say their character is doing to cope with what is going on. This is an important part of Mothership, so it makes sense to have it be the players first interaction with the game. The fist scenario contains the most advice, and feels the most introductory. A lot of effort has gone it trying to highlight the invisibile assumptions of OSR play. (Of course, being seeped in this stuff, perhaps i’m not the best person to comment on whether they’ve succeeded or not.)

The next scenario in Another Bug Hunt involves working with three factions, each with their own plan for how to best deal with what is happening on the planet. One group wants to get the fuck out here—why wouldn’t you? The next wants to retrieve all the research they have done on the weird alien monsters they’ve encountered. The last wants to save their friends and make sure they have power to weather an incoming dangerous storm. There are three missions to tackle, but a twist after the first one will make the subsequent missions far trickier to deal with. Each also provides important information or benefits, so it will all play out differently depending on the choices players make. It’s a nice dynamic set up.

The third scenario in Another Bug Hunt is when the characters in the movie say the name of the movie. The players explore an alien mothership, in search of more of the missing crew and a better understanding of what’s happening on this world. This is a very deadly dungeon. Or could be, if players are incautious or overly bold. The third scenario reminded me of Gradient Descent, with complex rooms that are more alien. It provides a nice contrast to the first dungeon.

The adventure ends with players trying to get off the planet. Players earlier choices will factor into how easy or hard escape will be. This is another scenario that feels it’s a classic of this genre: escaping hordes of aliens. This scenario is very open ended. There is a timeline, some rough rules for how things will play out, but what the players do could be all over the place.

Another Bug Hunt looks to be another fantastic adventure from the Mothership crew. I am hoping I will be able to run it soon. I am very curious to see how it plays. Each adventure has advice for running it as a one shot, though they seem best suited to be run as a single campaign. Running through this zine will probably take several sessions. That feels like a good way to kick off your new career as a Mothership Warden.

I finished reading the rest of Demon Bone Sarcophagus this morning. This adventure is a big dungeon crawl, a tomb for the Empress of Fire, now resting in the titular Demon Bone Sarcophagus. The adventure was made by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, produced as part of a Kickstarter that concluded during the pandemic. I waited for the hardcopy to arrive before giving it a proper read.

The dungeon is a giant triangle, composed of smaller triangles. You can see the player facing map above. This layout feels a bit repetetive, because it is, but the choice is likely thematic and meant to evoke the fire triangle (ignition, oxygen, fuel). The choice also produces a dungeon that is very interconnected. There are lots of paths through the dungeon. There are tunnels made by a giant sloth running through the complex as well, which is another layer of interconnection. Players may break their way into these tunnels, or rooms may collapse into them during play. There are “glass girls”, acid golem monsters, wandering above the tomb that players can attempt to use to blast new holes into the dungeon, creating yet another layer of interconnection. The dungeon itself feels quite dynamic in this regard. I’m not sure I’ve read an adventure that expects the layout to change so much through play: can you think of any?

It’s a bit of a fun house dungeon, each set of 4 triangles that compose the larger tomb thematically linked. I’m not sure there was actually that much utiltity in reading the whole thing up front, versus quickly skimming things and playing a little bit by the seat of your pants, like god intended. I think being familiar with the factions and people that are wondering the tomb is likely more important, and they are presented up front.

The rooms descriptions are verbose. It feels like everyone nowadays copies what has become the house style for Old School Esentials, which likely originated with Courtney Campbell’s posts on writing room descriptions: terse, bullet points, information revealed in the order players will encounter it, etc. Silent Titans is written this way, and I think is a great example of how you can marry great writing with this more utilitarian style. Demon Bone Sarcophagus feels a bit old school in its presentation by comparison. That the typography and copy editing are sloppy does it no favours here either. There is lots of evocative stuff throughout this dungeon, but some rooms are hard to quickly parse.

There are some great pieces of art from Scrap in this module. I love the version of the Reductor, one of the NPCs in the book, that is featured on the back cover of the module. It manages to look backlit. If you like Scrap’s art you’ll like what we have here, if you don’t you won’t. There is a good mix of work from Scrap: simple B&W illustrations to full colour pieces.

Scrap and Patrick have a good eye for what will make for a good adventure. You can feel all the stored kinetic energy just waiting to burst on these pages. I love all the random encounter tables, each entry a monster or NPC paired with the action they are performing. Many entries feel like they might be the centre of a fun night of gaming. The opening of the adventure, like Patrick’s other adventures, opens with a bang: the players stumble upon the aftermath of a huge fight, characters from various factions lay dead and dying everywhere, while key members have fled into the tomb. Like everything this team does, it all feels quite unique, even though it’s just a dungeon crawl through a tomb.

These are just some quick thoughts after having read the module. I am keen to run this soon. It looks like it’ll be fun to play through. I’ll report back on how that all goes.

I have been reading the Mothership Warden’s Manual over the last week, the “DMG” for Mothership. I find a lot of dungeon master’s guides fall short. People manage to run D&D in spite of its rulebooks, not because of them. Mothership’s Warden Guide is superlative because it breaks down how to get the game you just bought to the table: it understands why these game master books should exist in the first place. There are very few books that pull this off well.

Mothership’s Warden’s Manual’s very first spread is a step by step breakdown of what you’ll need to do to run your first session. There isn’t any faffing about: you’ve bought this game and you want to play it, here’s what you should do to make that happen. There’s even pictures of an example notebook so you can see what sample prep (and how little you probably need to have fun) looks like. Mothership is a horror game, and so one of the first things the game master is going to have to figure out is what makes a horror game different than your typical game of D&D. Here Sean breaks things down in a very approachable way, with what he calls the TOMBS cycle. You can use Mothership to run all sorts of games, no doubt, but the Warden’s Manual helps frame the sorts of games that likely make the most sense, by walking you through prepping such games in its opening section. The advice on prepping a game also serves as an introduction to the game and genre itself.

The middle section of the book is what I think of as more typical when it comes to DMGs: what are the mechanics and logistics of actually running a game? (Here Sean also tackles what must likely be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for people coming to Mothership: when should you roll the dice?) Into the Odd has great advice on running the game and I think this section from Sean is of a similar pedigree. Sean also talks more about the sorts of scenarios that are likely to come up in a Mothership game: investigations and social encounters. Again, what he’s chosen to focus on in this book helps frame what the game is about.

Finally the book concludes with how to start and run a campaign. Like the opening of the book, this section is concrete advice to get you going. Sean’s goal is to have you running a campaign quickly, not fall into the trap of prepping instead of playing.

Reading this book made me want to play Mothership again. I could do it better now! This book is likely so good because it’s written as if it was going to be someone’s first RPG. This is probably a ridiculous assumption, but the book is all the more accessible because of it. I’m a very experienced RPG player at this point in my life, but the sort of guidance Sean’s put down in this book is useful for everyone. For experienced players who are bringing their own baggage to the game, a book like this helps clear up assumptions and gets you playing all the more quickly.

As I said at the start, I think there are very few DMGs that are actually any good. LotFP’s Grindhouse Referee book was my previous high watermark for these sorts of books. Raggi wants you to play his game and its infectious. For all the edginess of the line, the Referee and Tutorial books are so weirdly welcoming. Raggi’s online persona has some real wrestling heel energy, but his books for new GMs are written from a place that feels really friendly and inclusive. He really included everything you’d need to understand what a Weird Historical Horror RPG was about. (There is even a section on how to recruit players for your game—weirdly dated in this age of online game.) Brindlewood Bay is another game that is written with such care for the player that will run the game. It goes into great detail about how to start playing the game as quickly as possible. What your first session should look like, exactly. That these are all horror games is interesting. A coincidence? Something for someone else to discuss.

If you didn’t back this Kickstarter what were you thinking? Be sure to grab this game when you can—like now.

Patrick and Scrap are currently running a Kickstarter for the follow-up adventure to Deep Carbon Observatory, Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, so now seems as good a time as any to talk about their work. This is easy to do, as I’m planning on running Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered) tomorrow, it made its way from the UK to me via my brother after a good long while. When I first reviewed DCO it was simply from having read it. I have more thoughts now as I prepare to run the module and talk to other people about their experiences doing so.

Deep Carbon Observatory came out in 2014. It featured a layout that be called serviceable at best. My friend Alex ran the module a couple years later, using that original version of the game. He wrote about the inaugural session on his blog. Our conversation about how to run the game transitioned into one about the game more broadly.

From a “usability” standpoint [the original DCO] is middling to poor. The maps are hard to read, the info design is unambitious. But Patrick knows that good storytelling is a way of organizing information by sheer virtue of being interesting enough to remember. Honestly I think it’s a shot across the bow of most conventional wisdom on module writing. — Alex Chalk

I have written about how Patrick reveals information to the reader seemingly at the same pace it would end up being revealed to the player, something I think makes his books as engaging to read as to play. It’s a very unusual approach to module writing, one I don’t think anyone else follows. The remastered edition of DCO does more work to help orient the reader, but for the most part you are thrown right into the deep end.

Patrick instructs you to read the whole god damn book before you run the adventure. Maybe this is actually a really obvious thing to do with a book, but I think a lot of thinking around information design in modules is rooted in the ideas coming out of the one-page dungeon contest: you should be able to look at a particular spread and have all the information you need to get the job done. The remastered edition brings this sort of thinking to DCO, but like Silent Titans, there are key facets of the module that won’t reveal themselves to you till you get to the end of the book. In DCO Patrick coyly describes the backstory for the module with the sub-heading, “in case of Speak with Dead, use this.” This timeline is exactly the sort of thing that you’d find in the introduction to a typical OSR module.

Patrick wants you to approach understanding a module the way he does: by reading the whole thing. You’ll need to read it all at some point anyway: why not at the start? And so I did, and then felt some panic about how I would even run all of this. There is so much going on in DCO: there are the Crows, the Witch, a cannibal cult¹, so many NPCs, the dam and its golem guardians, the actual Deep Carbon Observatory, etc, etc. Jesse Abelman told me to chill out: he ran the module straight from the book!²

The layout of the [new] book was great, I could easily find anything I needed so I barely did any prep between sessions. That said, I’m not surprised it was easier to run from the first edition than expected. I had the same experience with Silent Titans. I think Patrick is so good at creating juicy gameable situations and encounters that everything else almost doesn’t matter. Whatever difficulty there may be in stitching those things together because of how the book is designed is balanced by the actual content. — Jesse Abelman

Jesse’s experience mirrors my own using Silent Titans. DCO feels like there is a bit more going on across the whole module, so I’m curious to see how it plays tonight. With Silent Titans I would lean on Patrick’s writing a lot to describe the scenes, sometimes reading his prose straight to the player. (Some real OSR blasphemy, I know.) Alex mentioned doing the same to me when he was running DCO: “Another thing I’ll say about DCO is I often struggle to improvise description, but I felt I was able to tune into its voice and channel that in describing situations.”

Patrick and Scrap’s books are sometimes maligned for being more art project than gaming artifact.³ I asked Patrick about this and he felt while Scrap and him can sometimes be quite out there and imaginative, they are both keenly aware that what they are making is for a game. If one of them forgets, the other will remind them. Reading their works you can see they are fixated on the game, in a way I sometimes feel other OSR writers forget: things are gonzo, but in the service of nothing.

Judging by my own bookshelf, a lot of adventures are written, read, and never played. As someone writing modules, it’s likely important to appreciate this fact, and try and make something that manages to be compelling even if it only ever sits on a shelf. But there is more going on here: solid adventures inject their ideas into your head as if they were your own. DCO is easier to run because its elements are so compelling. The writing is not simply fanciful or an attempt at post-modern storytelling: it’s all in service of the game.

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Certainly. Luke’s latest work for Tuesday Knight Games is Gradient Descent, a megadungeon written for the sci-fi horror game Mothership. The braintrust at Mothership HQ asks the question, “can you fit a megadungeon in a small zine?” Yes, apparently you can.

I may have been the first person to run the module who didn’t help play test. It has a compelling premise: a giant space station, an evil AI, Bladerunner nonsense, etc: all the good stuff. I read it and was enthralled. Brendan and Evan played a game I ran online, starting in media res, trying to flee the space station with an artifact they found “off camera”. It was a fun game. Months later I picked the module up again and started a longer campaign, which has been running for several months now. As it winds down I have lots of thoughts about this adventure.

Gradient Descent is a 64 page full colour zine: it’s a very dense 64 pages. Like all good OSR books it opens suggesting how you might use this adventure, from the basis of a campaign to something to simply hoover up ideas from. Luke explains some basic procedures of play and how the module works and then we jump right into things. There is an AI, Monarch, that controls a massive space station called The Deep. This is a huge factory complex, abandoned by its corporate overlords. Next we learn about what orbits the Deep. My Mothership campaign had the players begin in The Bell, a small retrofitted thruster that serves as a safe haven for people exploring the station. There they met a small coterie of NPCs who can help kick things off. As part of a larger campaign I would have had them try and cross a blockade to reach the station, and perhaps make friends with Commander Kilroy, another NPC with goals they might help achieve. Along with some “monsters”, these are the things outlined first. Then we move onto the “dungeon” itself, which makes up the bulk of the adventure. The Deep is huge. There are several floors, many sections, and a web of interconnections. It’s a complex and interesting dungeon. In a twisted way you can almost picture what the factory would have been like in the past. Finally the book concludes with a table of random artifacts, some super science. The back cover of the module is an “I search the body” table.

The art by Nick Tofani is wonderfully moody, often creepy. A perfect fit for this module. I would share it with my players often. Jarret Crader, the man behind all your favorite RPG books, did development editing. With a module such as this, I suspect no easy feat. Finally, Sean McCoy did the layout, and it’s a real chef kiss emoji.

The book continues a long tradition of really strong graphic and information design that feels like the most standout feature of the Mothership line. I see a lot of the design cues from one page dungeons at play here. The adventure is laid out with the two page spreads of the zine in mind. You can likely run each section of the dungeon with minimal page flipping. When I was running the adventure, from a PDF, I would normally only need to jump to the sections about the androids, ghosts in the machine, or monarch. If I had the zine in my hands I’d put some post it notes there and that would be that.¹ There is so much information this book is trying to get across, and it does a remarkable job at doing just that.

The descriptions in this dungeon are terse. On the whole I think this is a positive, and is what allowed me to run my games straight out of the book. It takes you seconds to read what’s going on in any room the players have walked into. For example:

The square in the title indicates this is a large industrial scale space: you should imagine a large factory or warehouse. In my head when I read this I pictured something akin to rows of corn. To avoid being licked would take some dexterity or creativity. The scene is both horrific and cold: there heads on stakes, but everything is artificial.

What now? Again this is a huge room, but I found it harder to imagine what its deal might be, where the loop of glass was going, and what it might be for. I know you might use sand for cleaning or scouring in a factory, perhaps for making glass, but I couldn’t quite picture what Luke wanted me to take away from this scene. I do like the phrase, “a whisper magnified to a roar,” though. In a space where you maybe expect to hear the clanking and crashing of a factory, this suggests a different sort of noisy space.

Most of the time there is enough for you to improvise on top of, especially for you pro-star GMs. I’m not sure i’m quite there, so I found myself describing rooms as “large industrial spaces” a lot, or falling back on analogies of Toyota factories. I should have watched some old films and made some dungeon dressing tables. I think if there was more space that would be a nice addition to the book: examples of what these alien industrial spaces might look like. A small table of ideas might be all it takes to help cement a space in your head. I would not want to see the descriptions of the rooms themselves expanded: improvising poorly is better than discovering well into play you forgot something important buried deep in some multi paragraph description of a space. I suppose the module is really trying to get straight to the point with everything it presents. We don’t have pages and pages of backstory about The Deep. If you read the module you’ll have a good sense of what’s up, with enough space for you to inject what you want. The module is flavourful: it paints a real picture of this strange alien space, certainly at the macro level.

Gradient Descent declares itself a sprawling sci-fi megadungeon. “But Ram, what does that even mean?” I would have shrugged my shoulders, but thankfully many years ago Gus wrote a blog post musing about what makes a megadungeon both mega and good. I regret not re-reading this blog post before running my games because I think it would have informed my GMing and improved the campaign.

The Deep is split up into 11 discrete interconnected sections. This doesn’t feel like a dungeon where the intention is to fight your way through it, so level 6 isn’t more ‘difficult’ than level 1, just different. The levels vary in size, but playing online most of the meatier ones took a few sessions each to explore. I initially tried to runs the game like a traditional dungeon crawl. I was going to think about rations and light and all that nonsense. I drafted up some houserules for overloading encounter rolls to track more aspects of play, but in the end I dropped it all.  I found it awkward. I am not sure that you can simply map that D&D style of play straight onto Mothership. Stress seems to be the resource you want to worry about in the game. Occasionally room descriptions in Gradient Descent will suggest players gain stress or make stress saves, but I think something more systematic that encompasses the whole module would have been a good addition. Dungeon exploration rules that tie into the stress mechanics of Mothership would be excellent. This is certainly something I will think much more about the next time I run the game.

The Bell is presented as an obvious home base. When I ran my Carcosa campaign the players generally ended each session back in the safety of a town. This way we could rotate new players in if needed week to week, which is generally what happened. The tone of this Gradient Descent campaign would have felt different if I also required the players end each session retreating back to safety—to the Bell or some particular sections of the Deep. This feels more in line with the ethos of a megadungeon campaign, as Gus outlines. You push into the space as far as you can until you must finally fall back. You are hunting for short cuts, trying to understand the geography, making friends with factions to find new safe havens, etc. With the short online sessions I was running I didn’t think this would work. The lack of a clear resource management side to the game also has some impact here: there isn’t a need to return if you don’t really need to resupply. The sessions we played ended up primarily being about exploring the weird space. We would pick up where we left off each session. And that’s perfectly fine, to be honest. There is enough there for it to be a fun experience, but you can do that and much more!

If I could go back I would have certainly prepped more! I am out of practice running games. This module is so well put together it fools you into thinking you can pick it up and just play. (And to be clear, you can, as I have just noted. Ha!) I just think I could have run a more compelling campaign if I had put in a bit more effort. I can picture something stronger! Mind you, no one is or was complaining: the players seemed to enjoy themselves and I certainly did. But maybe there are some lessons for you to do better than me:

• I kept the antagonist AI Monarch in the background for much of the campaign. I figured a creature such as it would see the players as ants, and largely ignore them. Which is all well and good if it was behaving like a god. But I didn’t really do much there, so they didn’t face much conflict from the game’s primary antagonist. I could have made its presence more known, indirectly in keeping with my original vision. Ominous messages, security androids giving the players cut-eye, and all that.
• There is a whole element of “am I a human or am I a robot” that I didn’t lean into. If you are running the game I would have some coterie of regular rival NPCs who are also exploring The Deep, and who may or may not be the mysterious infiltrator androids. I had NPCs I had drafted—and then didn’t really use! But why?
• There is a lot you can layer on top of the dungeon and its contents. NPC parties and factions are a big part of megadungeon play, and to get the most out of this module, I really recommend you think about these things up front, and as the players encounter the various factions of the dungeon. Luke has several factions called out explicitly who are adversarial with one another, like the Android groups on the second floor. There are a few other big groups that aren’t called out as factions, but could be treated as ones. (Off the top of my head the Androids hidden away in the Dis/Assembly floor.)

This sort of advice would have been good to include in the procedures of play that open the book. I think a much longer section on how to use the book most effectively would be great for new DMs, and honestly old ones like me. I’m not sure running a megadungeon is quite the same as running a normal dungeon, and so a few words discussing how you might approach things differently would have been great.

Overall my gripes are far outweighed by the creativity on display. In these Covid-times I had lost my energy when it came to playing RPGs, but reading this adventure really grabbed me and got my excited about gaming again. Most importantly it did what it said on the box: I ran this giant dungeon crawl for several months with the most half-assed of prep. This is the stuff dreams are made of: truly wondrous.

[ed. This review originally appeared in my friends’ review blog Bones of Contention.]

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Perhaps. Luke’s latest book for the Melesonnia Art Council is Acid Death Fantasy, and it’s kind of hot. A setting book for the award winning Troika. Luke asks the question, “can you distill a setting down to a list of backgrounds, a list of monsters, and a really boss cover?” Let’s find out!

This book describes a fantasy world reminiscent of Dune, Dark Sun, Carcosa, or your other favourite fantasy desert pastiche. A short introduction, a little over a page of text, sketches the world for the reader. It’s enough to give you a sense of what’s going on: there is an opulent mega-city, smaller sultanates orbiting it, water is rare, nomads stalk the desert, there is a jungle full of sentient apes, lizard men, rotting giant mecha, basically all the good stuff.

All the Troika backgrounds help shape the world. Some are brief moments of specificity, like the Coated Man, a knight of sorts, doomed to an early death while covered in a sheet of plastic armour. Others hint at the nature of world, like the Refugee of the Past, a person waking up in this post-apocalypse. Many will help shape your particular game or campaign, like the Deposed Sultan, whose possessions included an adversary, and the title of one of The Thousand Sultanates. Almost all the backgrounds ask questions of the player in a way I think is both simple and useful when starting an open ended game.

In the monster’s section we learn of a world where Freshwater Grub’s plot grand schemes and criminal enterprise, giant worms like in Dune travel the desert, Warflock stalk the desert committing banditry with laser guns, and the husks of great ruined mecha mark the land. Once again the world is detailed in broad strokes, sometimes with strange specifics, sometimes with elements that are very open ended.

But then it all ends! A small list of things to do with this setting and a simple sultanate generator and we are done. I would have liked to have seen the map of the setting described more, like the hex map of Carcosa. More random tables to flesh out hte setting, perhaps. But the approach he took is clearly purposeful, mirroring that of Troika itself.

David Hoskins’ art in this book is really great. I wish like Troika proper all the backgrounds were illustrated! I would would have loved to see art for a Coated Man, Dune Rider, or Narrowman Nomad, to name a few. The same can be said of the monsters. This is a terse book, so more art would help flesh out some of the details of the setting, though perhaps that would calcify things that were meant to be up to the GM to think about.

This book was £26 to my door—that’s like a million Canadian dollars. Honestly, for 36 Monsters and 36 Backgrounds it feels like a lot of cash. Right? But, it’s a full colour hardback book. And it’s good—hard to put a price on that. I mean, at this point I would get anything Luke makes. He’s a safe bet. I enjoyed reading this book. Now I have got to play!

I bought the Rad Hack in April of 2017.¹ Ben Milton posted one of his videos flipping through the book and I was hooked. Karl’s art is killer. The game itself is a hack of another game, The Black Hack by David Black. For reasons I don’t really recall anymore I was thoroughly disinterested in the Black Hack, despite it being everywhere in the OSR at the time. I was probably busy running my Carcosa game and obsessed with OD&D to pay it much attention.

Games like Rad Hack felt like they were coming out every week. Everyone seemed to be making a “Hack”. Just like the early days of the OSR where people were all publishing their own character classes for Basic D&D, you also saw a lot of people publishing new classes for the Black Hack. I asked David what he thought made the game so compelling to the rules hackers out there. There are so many rules lite OSR games, what made this one standout so much? He had two thoughts. First, the rules were short and to the point. The core game was 24 A5 pages long, and these pages are far from dense tracts of text. Second, Bruno Bord converted the game to plain text and put the results of his efforts online as the Black Hack SRD. The barrier for entry when it came to making your own tweaked hack of the game was certainly low. The game feels like a true viral hit.

The Black Hack is on my mind because I helped Kickstart a new edition of the game. You can now get the second edition of The Black Hack as a dope-ass hard cover book, one that marries the simplicity and terseness of the original rules with pages and pages of tables and advice on running an old school fantasy game. A smaller booklet version of the rules still exists, clocking in at 20 pages. So, anyone worried David was going to bloat up his game should relax. This second edition feels like a gentle refinement of the earlier edition of the game. I suspect only the most ardent of Black Hack fans will notice the changes that have been made. (What did he do to armour! That crazy man.)

Black Hack is a mechanically simple game. Players have 6 attributes recognizable from D&D. To accomplish any task you must roll under the appropriate stat. Almost all rolls are done by the player. You roll under your STR to attack with a sword, and you’d probably roll under your DEX to dodge a dragon’s fire breathing, for example. I want to say that’s basically it, because that’s basically it. There are small rules included that make sense for a game designed with the game play of D&D in mind: a simple encumbrance system, rules for exhausting your supplies, etc. It’s all very well done and intuitive.

Compared to the first edition of the game, the second feels rounded out with an eye to helping new players to D&D get oriented. It begins with a page about role playing games and how this game works, followed by an example of play. The rules for the game then follow, those that both players and GMs will care about. A lot of what is often left unsaid in various versions of D&D is made a bit more explicit in this version of the Black Hack. David talks about the structure of the various phases of a D&D game (in the dungeon, exploring the wilderness, being in town, etc) and tries to break that all down into a common structure of play with a common language to describe what the players and dungeon masters are up to.

For old-hands of the OSR the Black Hack feels like it has a lot to offer. The rules are simple and get out of the way. They are easy to hack and tweak as needed. Some bespoke classes and new equipment lists you’ve taken your art-house D&D setting to the next level! The larger hard cover book is also packed to the brim with all sorts of little tables and advice useful when running a D&D game. Poison! Panic & Light! Rival Heroes! Drugs! What’s on the Corpse! Etc! If you can conceive of it coming up in a D&D game it’s likely David has made a page about it in the book. There’s a sample wilderness, dungeon, and tavern, so you likely could get quite far with this book alone.

Something else new with this edition is the inclusion of a small bestiary. Mechanically a monster is some HD and a bullet point or two about how they might attack the characters. It’s funny how small the entries are for these creatures compared to something like the entries from the Second Edition Monster Compediums. Each entry features some random tables that cover what the monster is up to when the party encounters them. (These things aren’t just standing around waiting to fight.) This bestiary isn’t exhaustive, but is likely good enough to get you going. It’s also instructive to see how simple it is to make a monster.

I normally run LotFP when I’m not running OD&D. The Black Hack feels like a nice alternative to both games, being simpler and a bit more of a blank slate than LotFP. I think if I was to pick up my Carcosa game again I’d run it using the Black Hack. (Maybe write up my own Carcosa Hack, borrowing from the Black Hack and the Rad Hack.²)

Hopefully it goes without saying you should buy this game. It’s available as a PDF if your means are modest. You can grab the box, dungeon screen, booklets, folders, and hardcover book from SquareHex. I regret not getting the box. Don’t make the same mistake as me when you’re doing your shopping.

I have lots more to say about this game, but I think i’d like to play it a bit more first.

[ed. I fucked up and accidently deleted this post. This is it mostly recovered. One day maybe i’ll fix all the links. God damn it. — Me, July 18th 2019 ]

I’ve been slow to go through Frost Bitten & Mutilated because I want to read it in print, rather than PDF. The book follows a format that seems common to many LotFP books, front loading the bestiary as a way to explain the world and what its crazy deal is. (Something to write about another time.) There is a small (8x8) wilderness map in the middle of the book with short descriptions for each region a party can visit—a hex crawl minus the hexes.

Zak’s writing in all his books is what I would describe as evocative and terse. (Terse being the real key to his style, I think.) This wilderness crawl is a good example of his style. Zak is able to jam the descriptions of the wilderness on the map of the wilderness itself because he keeps things short. What you sacrifice in a dope looking map, you get back in one that is more functional while playing.¹

When organizing the Gygaxian Democracy Hex Crawls (Hexenbraken, Kraal, etc), Zak forced everyone to follow some rules about how to write the hex descriptions:

1. 2 sentences per hex.
2. References to other hexes make a hex map good. Do that when possible.
3. You don’t have to prove you’re Grant Morrison in every hex, just make a usable map. It can say “Small inn. Well is empty.”

These constraints force you to be creative with what you write. You end up distilling your ideas to their core components. You’re forced to drop anything tangential, pushed to hint at your ideas through a liberal use of adjectives and open ended descriptions. Linking hexes together to tell a story about what’s going on is another way to build up an evocative setting while still keeping your individual descriptions short.

From Frostbitten & Mutilated:

Five crates rest on a cliff edge high above the sled that pulled them. One contains salted cod, one contains 650sp worth of aquavit, one contains an occult text with the names of 4 drowning demons and a map to the entrance to the Dim Fortress, one contains a sleeping snow leopard, one contains beets and Ribboned Jenny the champion rat. Her swarm is nearby

There is so much going on in this brief paragraph. How did the sled topple of the cliff? Was it the swarm of rats trying to retrieve Ribboned Jenny? What’ll they do when the players enter the scene. As the DM you can decide if the party come upon this scene from above, next to the crates, or from below, next to the toppled sled. Knowing the names for Drowning Demons might save your ass later, and of importance to this module, the location of the Dim Fortress is hard to come by.

This rat, Ribboned Jenny, is mentioned in the first wilderness description:

Tumbledown inn overrun by wharf rats in search of Ribboned Jenny, a fancy-rat from Rottingkroner (see H5).

A simpler wilderness blurb, but there is enough here for adventure and excitement. Will the party help the rats, be harried by them, etc. Tumbledown Inn itself is notable for being the only inn mentioned when describing this winter wasteland.

Both descriptions can be read in a few seconds. When playing the game you don’t need to root around trying to understand what’s going on in the hex. There are trade offs with having descriptions that are this short, but I much prefer short descriptions to long ones when running a game.

Frost Bitten & Mutilated is a good example of a simple functional wilderness adventure. Zak has learned the good lessons from Carcosa—easy to grok evocative description—and skipped over the bad lessons—easy to grok super boring descriptions. LotFP has a big stable of solid wilderness adventures at this point: World of the Lost, Qelong, Carcosa, and now this one.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

The Cursed Chateau is a fancy book. Released by Lamentations of the Flame Princess early last year, I finally picked it up at the tail end of 2016 as part of a huge LotFP order. Written by James Maliszewski—of Grognardia fame—this version of the adventure is a new deluxe printing with layout and art by Jez Gordon.

The central conceit of the adventure is that players are magically trapped in a large haunted chateau by its former master Lord Joudain, a perpetually bored and tormented spirit. Joudain’s soul is trapped within the chateau, so he in turn traps passer bys to torment them for his entertainment. If the characters manage to be entertaining enough his otherworldly boredom will pass and he’ll be freed from his self-inflicted curse, freeing the characters as well.

This is a reasonably large adventure. The adventure site is quite big: there is a hedge maze that leads to the chateau, the grounds, and the chateau itself. There is a cast of NPCs, the former staff of the chateau, who now all haunt the place. Each is described with their backstory, a small stat block, and an illustration. (I should note here that my wife and I ended up being transformed into evil spirits by Jez: I’m the photo reference for Hervisse, my wife for Mondette.) There is a d100 random events table that helps drive the action during the adventure. As you enter rooms you’ll roll to see what weird thing is happening within, if one of the NPCs happens to be doing something within, etc.

The book opens with a discussion by James on funhouse dungeons, which one could imagine being posted on Grognardia in days gone by.

In a fun house, there’s often no way to determine what lurks behind the next door or down a nearby corridor and that fact irritates some players who value naturalism and rationality even in their fantasy. Without it, they argue, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to plan ahead or think strategically and thereby minimize the likelihood of their characters suffering some terrible fate. I’m sympathetic to this perspective and, in general, my adventure locales are fairly reasonable, even orderly places that “make sense”—which is precisely why a place like the chateau makes for a good change of pace!

I think how you feel about this adventure is going to depend on how you feel about funhouse dungeons. This adventure offers some clues about the nature of why the characters are trapped in the mansion, but it’s not particularly obvious. The means of escape isn’t really fleshed out to the characters either. I suspect most players will stumble about till they accidentally rack up enough misfortune to appease Joudain. Now, the adventure site isn’t completely arbitrary. The NPCs all have pretty clear motivations, and characters will likely learn of their various allegiances and squabbles with the other NPCs. The house is still a house, and laid out like one would expect a manor to be. Still, it’s a haunted: expect things to be creepy and confusing at times.

The interior art and layout is by Jez Gordon. I know I gush about Jez’s graphic design chops, but this book is another example of just how next-level the work he puts out is. The front end-papers feature all the maps in the module. The back of the book lists all the rooms with creatures within and reprints a few useful tables. This is a fairly text heavy adventure and it’s been laid out expertly by Jez. Everything is presented with an eye to what the two page spread will look like. Long room descriptions never spill over to the other side of a page. Some room descriptions in this module are very long, several paragraphs at times, so this is really a very impressive feat. This might be one of the best layouts i’ve seen of a D&D module, considering just how dense the text is. (Maze of the Blue Medusa, which I haven’t written about yet, is another good example of strong design and layout.) Jez’s work gets better with each adventure he puts out.

The book has a new cover by Yannick Bouchard, who has been doing a lot of work for LotFP recently. A fellow¹ sits on a sofa, clearly bored, his arm draped around a skeletal ghost. A blood stained sword leans against a blood stained wall. It’s a great cover, very evocative.

I know most everyone involved in this books creation so calling this a review seems like false advertising. I generally only write about books I like, and I like this book. It’s one of the most beautiful RPG books I own. It’s been printed with gold as an accent colour: the pages shimmer! LotFP continues to put out solid books: they have one of the most interesting and diverse catalogs of modules of any OSR publisher.

Broodmother SkyFortress: Buying any other adventure is just throwing your money away

Alongside Broodmother Skyfortress, the brains at Lamentations of the Flame Princess also published Blood in the Chocolate. Rebecca Chenier did the writing, layout, and maps. The art is by Jason Thompson, notable for his Family Circus style maps of adventurers exploring infamous dungeons. The premise of the adventure is quite simple: you are a group of adventurers tasked with breaking into a mysterious chocolate factory run by a Spanish countess and absconding with details about her operation and samples of her ingredients. The most obvious inspiration for Blood in the Chocolate is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and there are nods to that story throughout the adventure.

If you have read any of Rebecca’s other adventures I would say this one is more or less exactly how I would imagine a Rebecca LotFP adventure might look like. There is violence and horror and sex, but it all comes off as fun and a little bit goofy. Also there is a hot fat woman.

I helped Rebecca play test the adventure several months ago with his regular D&D group. We met up again shortly after the book was released to play the now completed adventure with the Toronto OSR posse (#torontOSR). Both games I played involved some amount of scheming to break into the factory, followed by sneaking about in search of clues for how this countess was producing her chocolate. In the second game a few of us were poisoned (a likely outcome in the factory) and so we spent part of the adventure trying to find a way to cure our compatriots of their creepy affliction. We managed to win over one of the pygmies, who was so enamoured with us he ended up helping us explore the factory and find a possible cure. (There are rules for how to win over the pygmies presented in the adventure.) Both times playing this adventure were a real blast.

Rebecca produces well laid out adventures. This book continues that trend. Rebecca’s books are great examples of what people should be doing with the works they produce. Like The Hell House Beckons, this adventure features cheat sheets for the rest of the book. The front end papers are basically the one page dungeon version of the adventure. The back end papers feature important random tables, and stats for the monsters you’ll encounter. There is also a handy pygmy tracker you can use to keep track the 150 pygmies the adventures may kill. The book opens with an overview of the module, advice for how to run it as a one-shot versus as part of an ongoing campaign, and an overview of the main villain and her army of pygmies. This makes up roughly half of the book. The second half is the adventure proper. There are cutaways of the map scattered throughout this section. Room descriptions are bulleted lists, and generally strike the balance between being terse, but not too terse. I do have the same gripe about room descriptions as I made in my previous two reviews: occasionally they spill over to subsequent pages. If you aren’t careful you might assume a room description is complete and not flip the page to see there’s more for you to read. That said, this is a small complaint and the layout is really is well done. This book feels designed to be picked up and run straight out of the book.

I like Jason Thompson’s art. The stuff that is going on in the book could be presented in a very graphic and gross manner. Thompson’s works convey it well but manages to do so in a way I think better suits the book. Many of his pictures are gross, but also not so gross. It’s a tricky line to walk and he does a great job. The PDF of the adventure also comes with one his walk through maps, which is, as always, fantastic.

Buy this already. It’s a good book and Rebecca needs to eat. LotFP continues to kill it with their recent releases and this is really no exception. If you are bored or annoyed by some of the more avante garde adventures LotFP puts out, this is a nice solid dungeon crawl to win your heart back. Raggi is curating a solid set of adventures.

Towers Two is the work of David Brokie, completed posthumously by Jobe Bitman (writing) & Jeremy Duncan (art). Brokie is perhaps most famous for being a member of Gwar, the death metal band from outer space. (That the guitarist from Gwar was also a big D&D fan should come as no surprise.) Like Broodmother Skyfortress, this project was also started back in 2012 as part of James Raggi’s (crazy) crowdfunding project of that summer. As someone who helped fund the few adventures that made the cut, this arrived at my doorstep a few months ago. So, about 4 years late. James isn’t good at getting his Kickstarter projects done on time. He is good at getting them done well, though. This module was slated to be a 32 page softcover booklet. I ended up with a 120 page full colour hardcover book. That’s crazy, but seemingly everyone involved in this project was a little bit crazy too.

The first thing you’ll notice as you flip through the book is all the amazing art. Jeremy Duncan’s work in this module is really quite inspired. (I recommend you grab the physical book because I don’t think the PDF does the art justice.) Jeremy’s art is bright, colourful, messy, detailed, crude, psychedelic, cartoonish, gory and intense. It’s in the same vein as the few pieces of art from Brokie that made it into the book, but ratcheted up. (I do love Brokie’s cover: it’s a shame we didn’t get more of his art in colour as well. Don’t do heroin. That’s probably the bigger tragedy here.)

I didn’t think I’d like Towers Two: it sounded kind of cheesy and juvenile. It is in fact both of those things, but it’s also a very well done sandbox adventure. There is no real overarching plot to push the players through, but instead plenty of factions to interact with and a couple obvious villains to harass. Wandering the region around the eponymous Towers Two will likely provide enough excitement for several gaming sessions.

The adventure is aggressively “R” rated. The super villain is an alien creature who controls people by sticking tentacle probes up their butts. Two magic items described in the module are the Death Phallus and the Cunt Whip. There is a “rape table +4”. It’s pretty easy to drop or tweak all of this stuff from the adventure and still have it be coherent, but you should probably know this stuff is there if it’s the sort of thing that will bother you.

I liked the overall structure of the adventure. It opens with a great overview of the whole adventure, describing some background information and detailing all the factions and characters the players may encounter. The information is all presented up front so when you encounter these things later in more detail you already have a sense of what’s up. The adventure is ‘wordier’ than I generally like. Some descriptions of dungeon rooms or wilderness areas are quite long, and at times repetitive. Nothing here is boring, though. It’s all pretty bonkers. I don’t think this module would be quite so easy to run as Broodmother Skyfortress, but it’s far larger in it’s scope. The book concludes with Brokie’s original draft, which is interesting to read as a gaming artifact. Jobe Bitman stayed true to Brokie’s original vision, but a lot of the truly gross or out there ideas came from Jobe not Brokie. I’m not sure if Brokie felt he had to reign his crazy in, while Jobe felt he had to let his out to live up to his idol.

Alex Mayo, who did the layout for Broodmother Skyfortress, also did the layout for Towers Two. This book also does a great job of showcasing the art within. There is art on almost every page, and everything is quite visually interesting. In this book the text is set in a smaller font and split over two columns. In an A5 book I find this sort of layout can feel a bit tight. (It was easy enough to read casually while I wasn’t playing, but perhaps would be trickier to quickly scan in the middle of a game.) I have complaints about room descriptions being split over pages, but on the whole this is a very pretty book. This book is far denser than Broodmother Skyfortress. It feels like there is far more text to read.

Towers Two is a fun book. It’s worth grabbing just for the art. The fact the adventure itself is also really well done is a nice bonus. There is lots of gaming material here, and it’s all really quite unique. It’s interesting how all over the place LotFP can be with their modules. This adventure is nothing like Broodmother Skyfortress, and nothing like Blood in the Chocolate or the Cursed Chateau, which I will write about soon.

Broodmother Skyfortress has been in the making for the last four years. I discussed my plans to back it—indirectly—as part of James Raggi’s crazy “Summer of Adventure” back in 2012. This is the final book that was funded as part of that campaign, the others being Forgive Us, Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions, and Towers Two. This module was perhaps the most hotly anticipated of the lot. Now that it’s here what did we get? Broodmother Skyfortress is a dungeon master’s guide in the form of an adventure.

The actual adventure takes up the first half or so of the book. It’s about giant shark elephants and their giant shark elephant broodmother that live in a floating skyfortress—hence the name. These monsters are riding through your campaign world fucking shit up. The players will presumably want to stop them: because they are invested in that world, because you’ve hidden some McGuffin in the Skyfortress, or for some other nonsense reason. The actual “adventure” portion of this book is a pretty small subset of the whole book. The Skyfortress is 20 rooms (12 above ground, 8 in tunnels underneath). It’s not a particularly complex dungeon, but there are lots of things for the players to interact with and perhaps use to stop the giants. Stopping the giants will be tricky: the giants are giants. Players will need to get creative to defeat these monsters and save the day.¹

The book is written in a conversational tone. As you read the adventure Jeff interjects with words of encouragement, advice, and humour:

There are times in the course of a good role-playing campaign when it is important as a Referee to have one’s crap together. Like, if you spring a riddling sphinx on the players then you need to have some riddles and some solutions ready. But sometimes it is important that a Referee propose a problem to the players with no preconceived idea of the solution. Your players want to get to the Skyfortress. How the heck are they going to do that? Hell if I know. Don’t worry, the players will figure something out.

There’s lots of great advice about running games throughout the whole book. The second half of Broodmother Skyfortress is full of some of the best posts from Jeff’s Game Blog. Taken together the book is probably one of the best getting started guides to running games. (Certainly for running games in an “old-school” style.) Jeff said he took inspiration here from the old basic modules In Search of the Unknown (B1) and Keep on the Borderlands (B2). This module does a far better job than both at teaching a DM how to run a game. It’s advice is far more clear and direct. (We have chapters like, “Yo Jeff! What if I don’t have a campaign?” and a whole section about what you as the DM need to work out before you play, because this adventure should be tailored to your campaign.)

This is one of the bigger LotFP books, clocking in at 160 pages. James published this softcover adventure as a big colour hardcover book—as he is known to do. The layout was done by Alex Mayo. This book feels like a high point for his work.² Outside of the room descriptions, most of the sections of the book occur in one or two page spreads with matching art. The layout does a great job of showcasing all the excellent Ian Maclean art. There is so much art in this book. In addition to being great to look at, it also helps you orient yourself in the book and find particular sections of the text. The borders are done in this Kirby-esque style that looks great. They are coloured differently between the two portions of the book, making it easy to jump to the advice section. There is lots of love here.

Broodmother Skyfortress is fantastic. It’d make a great gift for any dungeon master, certainly someone just getting started. Everyone involved has done a really great job. This book can hold you over till we get a real LotFP Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Patrick Stuart’s most recent effort is False Stories, a series of short stories (and fragments of stories). There are twelve in total. If this collection was screening at the Toronto International Film Festival I’d place it in its Wavelengths programme: “Daring, visionary and autonomous voices. Films that expand our notions of cinema.”

An aggressive move, opening with The Possessing Verse. The story is told in the second person—who does that?—and the narration bounces between prose and poetry—or that? At first I thought to myself, “seriously, man?” Once the story gets going it feels like less of an art piece and more straight up enjoyable—and at times quite funny—fiction. The format ends up helping narrate the action in an interesting way. The world hinted at in this little vignette feels straight up D&D in a good way.

The second story, The Isogyre, is excellent: short and to the point. A heist, a betrayal, and then we read of the revenge from beyond the grave. The way magic works in this world is wonderfully creepy.

What follows next is a series of stories about the Snail Knights. A twist on Arthurian tales, instead featuring knights that ride snails. Patrick had posted about the snail knights on his blog, and I remember skimming the post and quickly moving on with my life. I didn’t think i’d like these stories, but then I finished them and am now heart broken because the rest of these stories are incomplete, and because the stories themselves are so sad. They are also lovely and sweet. Illustrated I could imagine this being a really nice children’s book. (Well, at times its quite gruesome, so who knows?) These stories are my favourite in the book, and make the whole anthology worth owning.

The next story is fiction produced out of Patrick’s D&D work. We are told the first of a four party story of how Ghar Zaghoun from Deep Carbon Observatory got his magical bow. This was the first story in his collection whose style never really grew on me. The tale itself is enjoyable, and I enjoyed its conclusion, but I think an editor’s help could make it better. (I’m not sure how, though. Help the author find their voice or something like that, right?)

The rest of False Readings is incomplete unfinished stories. Most of these stories I skimmed or skipped. I think I need to be in the right mood to read and enjoy them. I liked Susjinn, the first story for Thieves in the Empire of Glass, but couldn’t get into the second. The last story in this collection, The Death of the King of Ants could probably be some good doorstop fantasy if Patrick had the time and inclination to finish it.

Patrick writes something I buy it: a man has to have a code. I bought this collection because I like to support the people who put out cool stuff in this scene. Patrick’s posted fiction to his blog that I haven’t bothered reading, because I don’t really read blogs to read fiction. I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy this collection of writing as much as I did. That was a pleasant surprise.

The Perilous Wilds by Jason Lutes is a supplement for Dungeon World that expands upon that games rules for wilderness travel. This is the part of D&D I enjoy the most—it’s the bulk of my Carcosa game—so the book was of interest despite the fact I don’t play Dungeon World. The best RPG books are those that are useful beyond the games they are intended for.

The book borrows from what I would call the Vornheim aesthetic. There are random tables galore. The writing is terse, but evocative. The layout is smart: spreads are assembled with care and thought as to what rules, writing, and images appear together on each set of pages. This sort of attention to detail is rare in RPG books.

The art work is all black and white line art by cartoonist Keny Widjaja. The art is very retro, reminiscent of the sort of art one finds in old Basic D&D and early AD&D modules and rule books. There are lots of small illustrations throughout the book.

The book introduces new rules and mechanics to Dungeon World games for travel, making camp, scouting, etc. These could be moved whole hog into a game of D&D. My plan is to do just that in my Carcosa game. The mechanics of Dungeon World are quite simple: roll a 2d6 and you either succeed, succeed with a complication, or fail and face a tough complication. You could model all reaction rolls in D&D on this formula, I suppose. The rules taken together add a structure to wilderness travel that feels lacking in vanilla D&D, and is apparently glossed over in Dungeon World.

There are rules for using retainers that are interesting, with lots of random tables for helping you quickly roll some up. I am also thinking of using these rules in my D&D games to differentiate PCs from their hired help. Often times retainers in my game end up being extra attacks for the PCs and someone to suck up damage from monsters. The rules here would turn interacting with your retainers into a little bit of a mini-game, I suppose, in the same way wilderness travel becomes its own mini-game.

There are pages upon pages of tables in the book to help you come up with a wilderness encounter. Their are tables for generating settlements, monsters, dungeons, discoveries, etc. I plan to use them in a game I am sharing DM duties with here in Toronto. (In my Carcosa game the results for many of the tables don’t make as much sense.)

An additional supplement produced as part of the Kickstarter that resulted in this book, Freebooters on the Frontier, may get me playing Dungeon World. It looks and feels like OD&D Dungeon World—the characters are more fragile, your choices for classes pared down to the core four, and the goal of the game is straight up looting treasure. It seems like a pretty straightforward game to play: my favourite.

Also pictured in the photograph above is A Book of Beasts, which uses the monster generation rules in The Perilous Wilds to produce a small bestiary. The monsters are neat, but it’s probably more useful as an example of how to best use the tables from The Perilous Wilds.

I have been looking forward to this book since it was first announced. I had pretty high hopes for what would be produced, and i’m quite happy with the results. If you are interested in hex crawls and the like this book is well worth grabbing.

You should do a post … having DMed several sessions, about what you find Carcosa brings to the table and what you’ve done to make it “yours?” — Cole Long

I write reviews for gaming books I never actually use to game, which feels kind of dumb but what can you do? Now with Carcosa I can actually comment on the book with insight from using it to run a D&D campaign.

I’ve ran 7 games of Original D&D game set in Carcosa. The original idea for the game was to mix in elements from Masters of the Universe into the Carcosa settings, but that hasn’t quite happened just yet. I’m really not familiar with most of the literary references that inspired Carcosa, which makes running the game “interesting”.

I wanted my campaign to start in a Lawful settlement. I had catalogued all the settlements in the game as a byproduct of working on my Random Carcosa web application. The highest level Lawful leader in Carcosa is 11th level and can be found in Hex 1011, along with a crazy robot.

Village of 270 Bone Men ruled by “the Swift and Silent Beginning,” a lawful 11th-level Fighter.

The unwary may fall prey to a deranged, spherical robot (AC 18, MV 180′, hp 25) with treads and retractable appendages, nets, self-repair, infrared, and long-distance vision. It will seek to abduct stragglers and take them to a small, hidden outpost to be shackled in close proximity to radioactive waste. Each hour spent thus requires a successful saving throw to avoid mutation.

I printed out some hex graph paper and drew the region around this hex, marking down the settlements and their allegiances to the battle between Law and Chaos. The official Carcosa map in the book is missing this information, which would have made it about a million times handier. Zak Smith drew in his Carcosa book, but I just can’t bring myself to do that.

There are slavers nearby in Hex [REDACTED] terrorizing the region, and so I made them the main threat in the game. I decided the town of Invak would offer refuge to former slaves. This would explain why a party of PCs would likely include people from the various races of Carcosa. Chaotic villages close to the slavers were likely to supporters, as were Neutral villages nearby. Villages closer to Invak would be against slaving. Invak would be a bastion of egalitarian and progressive thought, in another wise terrible world. The town to the South of Invak became a trading hub, liking Invak with a few other towns near by. In this way I fleshed out the relationships between the various villages in the area.

I answered Jeff Rient’s 20 Quick Questions about your Campaign, which helped me think more about what my game would be like. From an older blog post about Carcosa I knew “the Icon of Judgment” was the strongest sorcerer in the world. I made some rough notes about what his deal might be, but thus far it hasn’t really come up in play: mostly because I haven’t brought him up at all. The castle of Chaotic Orange Men North of Invak became a crazy cult running bizarre gladiatorial games.

I drew a map of the hidden outpost. It seemed like a good dungeon to begin the game with. Players would start shackled in the radioactive wastes. I introduced a small group of Bone Men, who were hiding out inside this outpost. They had imprisoned one of their members for [REDACTED]. The robot would only be ‘active’ at night, and would only travel through the wilderness, so the players wouldn’t have to worry about it unless they specifically tried to instigate a fight with it. There were also lasers, spawn, and other things that felt like Carcosa.

This was enough to start playing. I ran a session with Gus and Eric, two of the regular players from my Monday night D&D group, and things continued from there. I am constantly underprepared for each session we play, but things usually work out—for the most part.

Eero Tuovinen has done an amazing job with the layout of Carcosa. Carcosa is a well laid out book that works well at the table. I flip through it often looking up monsters, hex descriptions, and the like. Most everything is easy to find, and more importantly easy to read. McKinney has a very terse and direct way of writing that I like. He manages to be evocative without wasting too many words—usually.

In terms of helping you build a campaign, Carcosa brings barely any information to the table. The book succeeds in selling the idea of Carcosa, without really telling you that much about it. Are all the races identical besides their colour? Do they all share the exact same culture? Are their multiple languages in the world? What are the towns and villages like? What do people eat? What’s a GP in Carcosa? There are so many questions about the world that are unanswered. Explicit relationships between hexes are few and far between. This encourages the sort of brainstorming I did to get things going, but is also one of the big criticisms of the book: it all feels so random. I would have loved for some discussion from McKinney on how he explicitly organized and ran his game.

The big win for Carcosa is that I never feel like i’m doing it wrong. I never have to look something up so-and-so important NPC, or double check the date such-and-such event took place. Carcosa is a loose framework for building your own Carcosa. I’m not sure I have done that great a job of build my own Carcosa, but i’m hoping that I am not too far off.

Wonder & Wickedness was released at the end of 2014, within a week of Zak releasing A Red and Pleasant Land and James publishing his new zine The Excellent Travelling Volume. December was an action packed month for gaming. I had been following along on Brendan’s blog as he published early versions of his “Spells Without Levels”, and read an early draft of what would ultimately become Wonder & Wickedness. What was finally published is much grander in its scope and vision.

Wonder & Wickedness re-imagines magic for Dungeons and Dragons (and its ilk). The primary conceit of the whole supplement is that spells are not subdivided into levels of progressively more powerful spells. Spells are broken down into schools of magic, arguably a more evocative arrangement. Each spell is designed to be used from first level onwards. They either scale in power, or posses a utility that goes beyond hit points. We have 7 schools of magic—Diabolism, Elementalism, Necromancy, Psychomancy, Spiritualism, Translocation, and Vivimancy—each with 8 spells, for 56 spells total. The book begins with the original magic spells from OD&D’s Men & Magic booklet as its primary influence, and recreates them in novel ways. This initial list of spells is then expanded upon so that each school of magic has an equal number of spells.

For some spells, their original inspiration is clearly visible, though I find the re-writes more fantastic. In Men & Magic we have Read Languages:

The means by which directions and the like are read, particularly on treasure maps.

This becomes Comprehension in Wonder & Wickedness:

The meaning of obscured or indecipherable communications is laid bare. This spell may be used to understand the words of any language or read the true intent of a cyphered missive. Even spirit or animal speech, such as the groaning of clouds or the howling of wolves, may sometimes disclose their secrets.

The reworking of Light, which becomes the Diabolism spell Gleam, is great. Ones natural inclination is to assume Light would be some sort of holy spell, not the result of demon worship.

Conjure a hovering magical spirit of radiance that does not shed heat, does not require air, and is not doused by water. A gleam per level may be summoned and the illumination of each is similar to torchlight.

Gleams may be directed to bedevil enemies, which will cause temporary blindness if a saving throw is failed as long as the spirit remains engaged.

I find the magic presented in Wonder & Wickedness is flavourful in a way much of the magic in most editions of D&D is not. The edges around each spell are looser than they are in later editions of D&D, in this way staying true to their roots. Spells here aren’t simply cheat codes for various game mechanics. Brendan remarks on his philosophy in designing the spells in the books foreword:

I attempted to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. This is in the spirit of the original game, and means that the text cannot foresee every possible outcome. The Referee will be required to make rulings. Can poltergeists be damaged by magic? How are they permanently banished? I prefer to think of the spells here as a point of departure, not a voice of authority.

Following the spell descriptions are magical catastrophes. Each school has 12 corresponding catastrophes, giving us 84 catastrophes total. These are all over the place when it comes to their effects and severity. They are one of my favourite parts of the book.

Several lesser air elementals are imprisoned within the sorcerer’s body. Each time the sorcerer casts another spell, one is released and must be dealt with (standard reaction procedure applies, and there is a 1 in 6 chance that any such elemental released will be the last). These elementals may steal any words the sorcerer attempts to speak, and the sorcerer will naturally float atop water as long as any such elementals are contained.

I was hard pressed to pick an example catastrophe. There isn’t any one that serves as a good example of what the others are like. They are each quite unique.

The book ends with a listing of 50 magic items. Like the spells presented earlier in the book, these magic items are far more interesting than what you find in a typical D&D book. There is an implied world suggested by these items, and the spells, that is lovely and creepy. I won’t spoil any of them by reprinting one here. They all manage to convey a lot of ‘magic’ without a lot of needless verbiage—something I have noticed in a lot of the magic items I see shared on G+.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire book was illustrated by Russ Nicholson. Perhaps i’ve buried the lede by mentioning that here? Anyway, hells yes. His new drawings for the book are straight-up amazing.

The books layout and design is beautiful. The book is A5 in size, with single columns of large text on each page. It’s nice to read on my iPad mini. I’m sure it’ll be twice as nice as a physical book. As noted, most everything in the book is prefixed with a number, making it easy to randomly roll for magic items, spells, or catastrophes as needed.

Wonder & Wickedness was one of my favourite books from 2014—and there were lots of great books in 2014. If I ran a fantasy D&D game i’d definitely use this book as the basis for how spell casting works: it’s better than the original. What!

Wife is now fooling around on the tablet I bought so I have email access when traveling. It has the Alice in Wonderland books preloaded on it and she is amazed.

Me, I’m suddenly struck by the idea of putting a young blonde in a blue dress on the cover of an adventure I’d call “Eat Me.” — James Raggi, August 23rd, 2012

A little over two years ago James Raggi mentioned in passing this idea of doing an Alice in Wonderland Adventure. Zak S replied with a phrase that became a bit of a joke on G+: “For a modest advance…" Presumably there was a modest advance, because here we are.

Zak would occasionally share bit and pieces of the book he was working on on his blog: artwork he had finished, or a table or set of rules he had written. I helped play test the module a few times: once with my OD&D group, a couple times with Zak himself, and most recently with Rebecca just as the final layout for the book was wrapping up. Zak used a photograph of me as a reference for the Knave of Hearts, after asking for photographs on G+. I have been watching in real time as this book slowly came together. I bring this all up to try and highlight just how much I have been anticipating this book, how completely unrealistic and unfair the expectations I have placed on the final product are, and to suggest that I am perhaps too emotionally invested in this book to review it properly.

A Red and Pleasant Land is a setting book that describes Voivodja, the Land of Unreason. Rather than using the travel guide gazetteer format commonly used for these sorts of things—which, if we are being honest with one another, suck—A Red and Pleasant Land presents its world primarily via elements that are all usable at the gaming table: dungeons, monsters, new rules, and random tables. A Red and Pleasant Land is more about helping a DM build their own version of Voivodja than presenting some canonical version of the place. In this way is reminds me of Carcosa.

A Red and Pleasant Land begins with a brief overview Voivodja. It’s 18 pages long and is probably the only part of the book you’d be expected to read beforehand if you wanted to run things by the seat of your pants. The book starts off with a discussion of what makes this place different than your typical fantasy setting. The history, geography, and culture of Voivodja is examined at a very high level. Mixed in with all of this is advice on how to use the book and run a game in Voivodja: this is something more books should do. Much of this section of the book is adventure hook fodder. (Croquet, a staple of Alice in Wonderland, is presented as an obvious source of adventure: players might play to get an audience with the queen, be hired to track down a obscure wickets, etc.) Voivodja is a strange land where a king and queen have been waging war upon one another for time immemorial. Two other factions have decided to enter this fray, both deciding who to ally themselves with as the adventure begins. The setting is designed to support a game built around the conflict that comes from the players interacting with various NPCs with conflicting goals.

To go along with the new setting is a new character class, the Alice. The character is an interesting twist on the Specialist from LotFP. Every time the character gains a level a percentile die is rolled: this may lead to new powers or bonuses inspired by the events in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland rather than simply gaining more skill points or saving throw improvements. The Alice also has the ability to get exasperated. Doing so lets them roll on an exasperation table, which may lead to the sorts of strange events, again clearly inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: a door appearing out of nowhere, something that normally wouldn’t be able to talk suddenly starts talking, etc. I played an Alice during the play test for A Red and Pleasant Land, but didn’t take advantage of this power—i’m boring I suppose.

A look at the new monsters and NPCs of this world is up next. There are 4 factions in Voivodja, led by: the Heart Queen, the Red King, the Pale King, and the Colourless Queen. Beyond your typical stat block, almost all the creatures in this book have relationships or alliances that could lead to adventure and conflict. This also helps present the setting to the players. Most of the monsters in the book are quite interesting. I particularly liked the Guests, which are basically demons. A Red and Pleasant Land features a great random demon generator that you could steal for any fantasy game. There is also a Brown vampire: trés fantastique! There is an illustration for almost every creature presented. Hopefully you know what a horse looks like.

There are two dungeons presented in detail in A Red and Pleasant Land: the Heart Queen’s palace, and the Red King’s castle. They are both fucking bonkers. Of the two I love the Heart Queen’s castle the most. The games I have played exploring that dungeon have been some of the most fun I’ve had playing D&D. I think they are both well executed and interesting: big enough and weird enough to support multiple sessions of play.

The book concludes with some new rules and then some random tables. (Of course it does.) As I mentioned in my last post about A Red and Pleasant Land, Rebecca used these tables to generate an adventure for us to play more or less on the spot, without anyone really noticing what was going on. That seems like high praise for this portion of the book. My favourite title in the whole book is found in this section: “Idiotic Voivodja Filibuster Conversation Openers”. There are lots of great tables, many of which would work in other settings. All games need a “where have you been?” table for when a player shows up late or misses a session, and a good “I search the body” table can tell the players a lot about the world they playing in.

Like Vornheim, A Red and Pleasant Land is as much a book about a particular setting as it is a treatise on how one should go about writing and presenting a setting in general. Zak has clearly approached this problem from the perspective of someone sitting at a gaming table. How much information does the DM need to successfully run a campaign set in this world? How do you best present it all? What things need to be quickly referenced? These are questions that seem to be rarely asked by most authors and publishers, including Wizards of the Coast. This book is worth buying as an example of good graphic design, even if you aren’t interested in Dungeons and Dragons.

The two large dungeons presented in the books are a perfect example of this attention to detail when laying out a page of text. The map of the outer defences of the Red King’s castle, along with the descriptions of the rooms on the map, all fit on a two page spread. Most sections of this palace have cutaways maps along with descriptions that fit on one or two page spreads. Occasionally you will need to flip back a page to see a map, but this hardly feels onerous compared to the typical presentation of dungeons in most modules. Room descriptions are all bullet point rather than long paragraphs, making it easy to quickly figure out what’s going on. There is no superfluous text. This is true throughout the book. Blocks of text that might need to be looked at during a game are usually presented as bulleted lists, while sections of the book that will likely be read before or after a gaming session are often longer and more flowery.

This level of thoughtfulness permeates the whole book. There are next to no tables that don’t fit neatly on a single page, or aren’t part of a tidy two page spread. (The few tables that are too big for a two page spread are clearly marked as spilling over to the next page.) Beyond the dungeons and the rare monster, there is basically nothing in this book that would require you to flip a page to get all the information you need.

The layout of this book is really stunning. Jez Gordan has done an amazing job here. In addition to being so throughly functional the book looks beautiful.

This book is great. The artwork is amazing. The layout is amazing. The content is amazing. The physical book itself is amazing. I’m not sure why I even bothered writing this all up now. When it comes to gaming purchases this is a safe bet. Even if you have no interest in a D&D version of Alice in Wonderland, there is enough creativity here to steal or twist into something else.

Zak Smith made an art book that doubles as a D&D module. If nothing else it’d make a good coffee table book.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

I started writing what follows weeks and weeks ago. I have been waiting—impatiently—for A Red and Pleasant Land, the new D&D supplement by Zak Smith. It’s here now, which makes dragging my feet to post this seem particularly dumb.

Several weeks ago I attended OSRCon 2014. I saw some familiar faces and met some new people. The event was low key and a lot of fun. There are lots of old school gamers in Toronto, but we rarely meet up.

I started the day with a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Rebecca, of Dungeons and Donuts fame, ran an adventure using Zak Smith’s new module, A Red and Pleasant Land. This is Zak’s D&D take on Alice and Wonderland. The adventure is due out very soon. There is no other RPG book I am more excited about.

The game began as many do: a rich and mysterious benefactor promised the party riches beyond their wildest dreams if they would perform a series of tasks:

• Clear out the knothole dungeon (an abandoned hangman’s post).
• Map as much of Castle Cachtice as possible.
• Ruin the hatter’s trial (“not guilty”).

The characters could make sense of the first task, as they were aware of the the location of the dungeon. The others were confusing: there is no Castle Cachtice and they had no idea who the hatter was. Still, what player is going to say no to tremendous wealth—especially when you are playing a one-shot?

Since this was OSRCon we began the adventure by carefully searching the area surrounding the entrance to the knothole dungeon. A dice roll later and the specialist had discovered a tiny key. Satisfied we were safe enough, we ventured down into the dungeon. We moved cautiously, coming upon a room with 3 dead bodies: two man sized, and one halfling sized. A few more dice rolls and we had discovered a few more curiosities.

As players we quickly realized that this module featured a pretty great “I Search the Body…” table. As the game progressed we could see that a lot of the work Rebecca was doing as a GM in this game involved working with random tables and interpreting their results for us. Since she didn’t have an actual book, but a giant ream of paper, this would sometimes slow things down as we waited for him to find his place or look up a result.

This sort of thing can be a lot of fun if the players understand what’s going on, and the delay adds something to the game. Rolling for random treasure is enjoyable because there is some anticipation about what you might find. We were making the rolls as players, so the flow of the game rested with us. By the time we finished futzing around with our dice Rebecca would be ready to read off the results of our roll. On the other hand, when Rebecca was rolling on random tables himself she doesn’t have this wiggle room and any delay stands out. I suspect she would have been fine had she added a few more post-it note bookmarks to his binder of paper. There seemed to be a few tables she was using regularly in the adventure. (An actual book is also much easier to flip through.) Depending on what tables were being consulted, rolling results before the game or simply reading the tables as lists might work as well to speed things up. I don’t think anyone found the delays particularly distracting. Most of the game moved smoothly so anything that didn’t is noticeable.

Re-reading the above, I was curious just how much or how little preparation work Rebecca did for this session. So, I asked him: “I actually ran that adventure with almost no prep. The first knothole dungeon before the castle was randomly generated on the spot.” Impressive! I thought Rebecca was using a table here or there, that I was catching every instance of him looking stuff up. Apparently I was just catching those moments where she wasn’t looking things up fast enough. Amazing. I’d have never guessed that first dungeon was something she hadn’t written up ahead of time. Of course, this books isn’t going to automatically make you better at improvisation and ad-libbing, but it certainly seems to be a good game aid to support that style of DMing.

We explored the dungeon, ended up “through the looking glass”, briefly met the Red Queen, and did manage to sabotage a trial—mostly, anyway. A lot of crazy stuff happened in between, but I really don’t want to spoil this setting for anyone else. There are a few elements of A Red and Pleasant Land that are so much fun when you first encounter them I would feel bad if I ruined that experience for anyone else who plans to play in this setting. I participated in the play tests that were happening when this book was in development, and it was a great experience because I knew almost nothing about what Zak was working on beyond the fact it was set in an Alice in Wonderland world. There is another big literary influence on this work, but I feel like not knowing what it is makes that reveal in the game all the more fun.

Rebecca ran a great session. It felt very much like something she would run crossed with something Zak would run—which makes sense I suppose. Zak has a very distinct style to his conception of D&D, and it really shines through in this setting. It’s a testament to the work she has done here that the adventure Rebecca ran and the adventure Zak ran during the playtest both had a similar vibe to them. Zak’s game didn’t feel anymore genuine or official than Rebecca’s.

All in all I have played 4 different sessions set in this world. As a player I have nothing but good things to say A Red and Pleasant Land.

I can read Zak’s book right now. I’ve already started doing that. The thing has a lot of hype to live up to. Perhaps unrealistic levels of hype. I don’t want to write about any of it till I can flip through the paper pages of this wonderful book.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

Zak from D&D with Pornstars suggested another way to use [The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time] that would work quite well: “Like Tomb of Horrors, it could be considered a ‘go in, get killed, make a new PC, act with metagame knowledge, do it right this time’ situation.” To take this idea a little further, you could have characters killed during the course of the adventure simply wake up again somewhere in the valley. This would keep with the spirit of the module and makes a lot of the screw-you traps seem less harsh. — A footnote to my review of The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time

Thulian Echoes is the latest adventure Lamentations of the Flame Princess, written by Canada’s own Zzarchov Kowolski. The adventure takes place on an island, its central feature a crazy death-trap dungeon. In an attempt to make the death-trap dungeon less of a screw job, Thulian Echoes is meant to be played through twice by the same set of players. The second play through will hopefully be more successful than the first, as players will know the lay of the land.

Why would players run through the same adventure twice? The central conceit of the module is that the characters find a journal outlining the travels of a band of adventures who all (probably) died horrible deaths within the island’s dungeon thousands of years ago. Assuming players decide to investigate this mysterious dungeon they are given pre-generated characters and play through the events of the journal. It’s the D&D equivalent of a flashback in a movie, I suppose.

The dungeon itself is a weird small complex created by a wizard—of course. There are lots of moving parts and puzzles for the characters to mess around with. There are plenty of ways for player characters to die. A giant machine is central to the whole dungeon, and will likely be a source of fun, confusion, or death for the players. A passage from the main dungeon leads to an underground wilderness that the players may choose to explore as well. This portion of the dungeon is run completely abstractly: there are no maps. There is a destination the players can reach if they venture ‘downwards’, their route to this place will lead them to have several random encounters. This is a pretty simple way to do an exploration of a vast cave system. It could probably be fleshed out more if your players were into fighting Devolved Elder Things. Another passage leads to the wizard’s laboratory and sanctum, where the players may encounter the wizard himself.

Another layer of twists make the second play through hopefully as fun as the first. The present day setting will change based on what the players do during their flashback adventure. I was reminded of Chrononauts a little bit: if this happens and that happens then in the future the world is run by dinosaurs. (Well not quite, but that’s the general idea.) The adventure presents each named location as it exists in the past. This is then often followed by a section for Consequences, which lists what the things the players might trigger in the past, and Present Era, which lists what the location may look like in the present day. I’m curious how tricky all of this stuff is to keep track of during a game session. I suspect a DM would want to split up the past and present run-throughs with a short break at the very least. This is probably an adventure that works best printed out and marked up as the game progresses.

Art is by Kelvin Green, who has illustrated several LotFP modules (including his own). He has a cartoony style that is often at odds with the images being depicted. This module isn’t particularly “gross” as LotFP modules go. I enjoyed all the artwork. The cartography is by Jason Thompson, notable for doing all those cute map walkthroughs of famous D&D modules. (I actually would have loved if the official map for the module was such a walkthrough, but I suspect that wouldn’t work printed in an A5 book. Those drawings are massive.)

Thulian Echoes is good. I am a fan of the stuff Zzarchov Kowolski puts out. He’s a creative fellow, and this adventure is a good example of that. It’s available as a PDF and is well worth checking out. (If you wanted it in print you missed the boat: it was a bonus during the LotFP referee book kickstarter.) His last module for LotFP, Scenic Dunnsmouth is also excellent.

Deep Carbon Observatory is an adventure by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. I bought it the day it was announced because it’s an adventure by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. I’ve been reading it on and off while also reading the adventure found in the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set. The contrast between the two adventures is so stark.

Gus has written a thorough review of the nuts and bolts of the module. My opinions more or less mirror his so I’m not sure it’s worth repeating them in too much detail. Instead I will say this one thing: Deep Carbon Observatory is wonderfully written.

The sight is without sound and stinks like an airless tomb burning in the light of an unwanted sun. But, in the silence, movement worms. The whole place has the feel of a terrible revealing. Like a black sheet pulled back from a naked corpse.

Deep Carbon Observatory is thoroughly unrelenting its bleakness. There is a sadness that permeates the whole work. The players march towards the observatory passing all sorts of horror on their way.

The Roc’s bowed wings make a beautiful but alien bridge across the churning water. The body of the bird twitches slightly, devoured by whatever lies beneath. Looking down, you see leeches, sized like men, feeding on the bird. Not yet fully dead its head lolls half sunken and gasps. The ‘bridge’ will be consumed in d4 hours. It may be possible to save the Roc. It will not be grateful if you do.

So much of the adventure makes me feel uncomfortable: there is this dread that builds and builds as you move from page to page in the book. These little vignettes all do a great job of showing the players the terrible aftermath of the flood, hopefully filling them with that same sort of dread as they play. The adventure feels like it would be at home in a Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign.

Things don’t get better when you make it to the Underdark.

Hidden under the dirt of the far wall are slave survival spells in a simple tongue, decipherable by any mage. All the spells count as level one, are not very powerful and can be cast without being noticed: Reduce Scars. Lessen Pain. Minimise Thirst. Hide Sorrow. Avoid Notice. Ease Grief.

Scrap Princess’ illustrations contribute to the overall tone of the book. I find her work is so frenzied and terrifying. Maybe that’s not the right word, but there is something about how she draws that I find really visceral. I don’t know anyone else that draws like her.

I own no other adventure like this one: I liked it a lot.

Scenic Dunnsmouth by Zzarchov Kowolski was released a couple weeks ago. It seems to have been in the works for ages now. It’s a location based adventure taking place entirely in the mysterious town of Dunnsmouth. What sets it apart from modules of yore like Village of Hommlet, The Veiled Society or Against the Cult of the Reptile God is how its town is described: it’s generated randomly. Scenic Dunnsmouth is a book about how to make an adventure in scenic Dunnsmouth.

The module is broken up into several sections that outline the town and its inhabitants. You determine the contents of the town by rolling some dice, which will indicate the homes of families and perhaps other places of note. The NPCs that inhabit the town are determined by drawing from a deck of playing cards. As such, 52 families from 4 larger extended families have been described. This section of the book was very reminiscent of Village of Hommlet. Each home is described with a little detail, always mentioning where the jewelry is hidden, where weapons might be stored, and what the various family dynamics are within the home. Unlike Hommlet, the people of Dunnsmouth are a lot more twisted and terrible on the whole. The town may have some additional special locations or people present, depending on how the dice fall. There is a lot of variety in what might turn up. It’s all creepy and weird and in line with what you would expect from a module from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. When I tried generating a random town myself it took a little over 15 minutes.

During the generation of the town each home can become corrupt in some way I will skip discussing because that might be a spoiler. (Can you spoil a randomly generated adventure?) I will say that while none of the writing in the book is particularly gory or gratuitous, I found these extra descriptions hard to read because they were grossing me out in a way I didn’t think descriptions of ████-people would. Outlines of what the resident serial killer is getting up to also move the module firmly into LotFP territory.

The book itself is quite nice, similar to the recent softcover adventures from LotFP in its presentation: perfect bound, rough matte paper, etc. The interior art is two tone: the extra colour is used really well. Jez Gordon has done a wonderful job with the art and layout of this book. I had originally thought the layout of the NPC section was a bit spartan, with one family described per page, but it actually makes looking up who is part of the town a breeze. If you have the PDF you can also just print up the pages that pertain to your town. It’d be straight forward to generate your own mini-Dunnsmouth booklet. It’s nice to see some extra thought going into how these things are laid out: they aren’t just books, they are meant to be used to game with.

Scenic Dunnsmouth is a very strong release for LotFP. Along with Forgive Us, I think it really showcases how to run an RPG game in the ‘real’ world. If you have been waiting for someone to write a really creepy Village of Hommlet look no further. (Now we just need a randomly generated creepy moat house.)

I really like Kelvin Green’s Forgive Us.¹ The module is well written and looks like it’d be fun to play. The thing is, there are lots of adventures I could say that about. Almost everything LotFP puts out is well written, at the very least. In my mind what makes Forgive Us really stand out is its smart use of page layout and illustration to effectively present the adventure.

The early modules from TSR are pretty terrible when it comes to something you could use to actually run a game at a table. It’s insane how dense they are. I find them hard to read leisurely. I can’t imaging flipping through them in the middle of a gaming session.² Lots of DMs I know re-write them to make them easier for play and to help them memorize the key parts of the adventures. Most adventures I buy today continue to ape design choices made in the 70s and 80s, by people who probably were constrained by the printing technology of the time and their own knowledge of graphic design.

Green on the other hand has clearly thought about what this adventure would look like printed in a book. There are no wasted two-page spreads. Maps for relevant sections of the adventure are presented alongside their keys. Each map is illustrated with a level of detail that lets Green avoid overly verbose room descriptions. The heavy lifting is done by the maps. That’s not to say the module is bereft of any words. There is still a fair amount of writing, but it’s more useful and interesting than tedious description. Each section of the lair is discussed at a high level, with a mix of pertinent backstory, information, and jokes.

So, all of that said, you’re probably wondering what the hell this adventure is about? Green summarizes things thusly:

Forgive Us is the main and largest adventure, and is the closest to a classic dungeon crawl. The dungeon in this case is the lair of a gang of thieves, abandoned after an unlucky encounter with mutant shape-changing monsters. Said mutant shape-changing monsters are still there when your players arrive. Although the format was inspired by the Marienburg articles in White Dwarf – back when it was good, etcetera – in terms of plot it’s more or less John Carpenter’s The Thing mixed in with John Carpenter’s Escape From New York; I hope one of your players is Kurt Russell.

Who doesn’t like the Thing? That’s a rhetorical question. The adventure is an exploratory puzzle. How you explore the lair is pretty open ended. Because much of it is locked up, part of the adventure will involve tracking down keys or breaking down doors. There aren’t too many monsters to encounter, and I think many could be avoided by smart players. The adventure feels very much at home under the LotFP umbrella.

Forgive us is the 2nd module I’ve received for participating in the LotFP crazy summer adventure kickstarter bonanza thing. Thus far I’ve been quite happy with the results. If you’re going to ship late, it helps that what you ship is really good.

James George, one of the authors of Pits & Perils, emailed me out of the blue to let me know I got a special thanks in his new book, Fear! Fire! Foes! He appreciated my enthusiasm for the game he had written along with his wife. I thought it strange that despite loving Pits & Perils like it’s no ones business, I’ve somehow managed to avoid talking about it here on my blog.

Pits & Perils is another Original Dungeons & Dragons retroclone, but one that is trying to copy the spirit of the game rather than its rules. When reading other retroclones I’m constantly trying to figure out what has been changed, often unfairly judging them on how close they can get to the game they are attempting to recreate. I find Pits & Perils quite refreshing in this regard.

Pits & Perils uses the roll of a 2d6 to resolve most situations in a game, from fighting monsters to making saving throws. The various character classes from D&D all make an appearance in this game, and are for the most part very similar to their D&D counterparts. One thing I really like in Pits & Perils is the magic system. All the magic spells in Pits and Perils have four letter names (cure, glow, pass, ruin, etc), are described with a handful of sentences, and are usable at any level. I was reminded of what Brendan at Necropraxis is doing with his spells without levels writing. The game as a whole is much simpler than Original Dungeons and Dragons, and the rules are presented in a much more straightforward fashion. I think it’d be a great game to introduce someone to RPGs with: there is just enough stuff going on, and no more.

There is something about the game I find thoroughly charming. Like Original Dungeons & Dragons there are lots of little throw away rules scattered throughout the booklet that add colour to the whole game and its implied game world. I love this entry about demons from Fear! Fire! Foes!:

“DEMONS above 10th level are individual (named) demon lords. Ambitious referees can assign names to each and have these written in books or musty old scrolls with a slight (1 in 1d6) chance of accidentally summoning them when their name is spoken aloud. A terrible fate.“

The introduction to Fear! Fire! Foes! does a great job of capturing the overall mood and goals of the game.

Many old-school games attempt to recreate a time when role-playing had already become a separate hobby (the early 1980s). Pits & Perils, on the other hand, goes back to when it was still just emerging from the historical simulations it came from. Everything we now call “old-school” owes much to the hobby’s war-gaming origins:

Historical war games emphasized movement and maneuver over special powers and abilities. In fact, most were tables of movement rates, ranges, and modifiers for achieving tactical superiority, like flanking enemies or seizing the high ground, etc. The underlying mechanics were otherwise extremely simple, often little more than “you hit on a 6.”

This was the early 1970s. Fantasy had not yet become mainstream, and inspiration was limited to the real Middle Ages, mythology, and the smattering of books, movies, and television available at the time. This lack of sophistication lent the rules an innocence missing in later, more advanced, role-playing games. It was homemade fun.

It’s interesting to compare the original three Dungeons and Dragons booklets to most everything that followed them. You can clearly see their war-game roots. So much of Original D&D isn’t even spelled out, the authors assumed you had played enough Chainmail or other war-games to know who goes first in combat or what to do about morale. With Greyhawk you see the game move in a much more modern direction: it starts to become its own things independent of the war-games that proceeded it.

Pits & Perils is such a solid piece of writing. In 74 pages you have all the rules, spells, monsters and treasure you’d need for a great campaign. It’s well worth checking out. I’m also a big fan of its first supplement, Fear! Fire! Foes!, and not just because my name is in the book! This is some good stuff, people.

I picked up ██████ a few months ago from Noble Knight Games. The ███ asks that the module not be discussed online, but I bought it and that’s what I like to do: ███ isn’t the boss of me.

The idea behind ██████ is quite interesting. Each page in the book is titled with an event, and what happens when that event occurs during a game. Events are situations like, “a player lights a torch”, or “a players visit an inn.” To add some variability here, events are only activated in a particular sequence. If “a player lights a torch” is not the current trigger players can light as many as they want with no fear of reprisal. This module is all about the reprisal. Like most ███ modules ██████ is very much a ██ ██. I suspect this module was released in such a limited edition fashion to avoid █████ and █████ from the ███ ███. This book is filled with harsh unforgiving challenges. This module isn’t fair, in the least.

To call ██████ a module is a real stretch: it isn’t an adventure in any traditional sense of that word. There is no goal beyond surviving the encounters presented. There are no rewards for the characters to be found in this book. (I suppose survival is the reward.) The adventure would require some very creative play in order to come out the other end in one piece.

Looking past the specific events discussed in ██████, the general idea behind the book seems like a good way to (impartially) inject extra action into your game. Has anyone seen any other adventures or supplements similar in style?

Isle of the Unknown is another campaign setting book written by Geoffrey McKinney, of Carcosa fame, published by Lamentation of the Flame Princes. Both books are similar in how they present the game world to the player: short descriptions of the regions in a wilderness map that has been sun-divided into hexes. The similarities really end there. The art and general tone of the two books is quite different. They also seem to serve contrasting purposes: Carcosa is a complete—Hah!—setting in and of itself, while Isle of the Unknown is meant to be placed within a campaign setting. It is purposefully light on details that would suggest what the larger world of the island is like. It is up to the dungeon master to decide this for themselves. The hex descriptions in Isle of the Unknown are broken down into the following categories: cities & villages, statues, magic users & clerics, monsters, and “the weird”.

0410 A rumour is spreading through this town (population 1,500) that a detachment of men-at-arms is several days late in returning. The town’s lord had sent out men to slay the horrid dragon (see hex 0409) that has plagued the town. Unfortunately, the men entered the cave in hex 0411.

The city and village descriptions are the most pedestrian. Rumour or events that have transpired in the settlement usually direct players to other (more interesting) hexes. Each description includes the population so you have a rough sense of how big the town might be. Beyond that there is little said about these villages.

0505 Each of eight 75 lb. porcupines (Armor: as leather, HD 9, Hp 32, 37, 31, 51, 41, 42, 22, 49, move 130’ [swimming only], 1d6/bite) has four poisonous asps growing from its body instead of legs. Each round a porcupine itself bites, as does one of its asps (10 points of damage, save avoids). The gaze of a porcupine drains 1 point of strength (which returns at the rate of 1 point/ hour). They can also shape-shift into swordfish, which doubles their movement rate

The monsters on the Isle of the Unknown are supposed to be evocative of the sorts of creatures found in Greek mythology: the chimera, the sphinxes, that sort of thing. To my modern eyes they feel like something silly out of Pokemon. It seems like they could have all been replaced with a series of random tables for generating chimeric creatures. (And I think if you tried you could reverse engineer such a table easily enough.) The monster illustrations are nice, but also what lend the monsters their air of Pokemon: they are bright, colourful, and cartoony. One thing very impressive about the book is that every single monster is illustrated in full colour.

1209 In the midst of a 100’ diameter circle of strangely-colored nature (bright orange stones, purple and yellow grass, red foliage, etc) stands a life-sized statue of a nude woman made of an unknown, sky blue stone. She holds a rainbow-colored harp. Anyone plucking the strings will notice that random objects (including himself) within 50’ turn other colors for nearly a minute before returning to their previous color. …

The book could be used solely as a giant random statue table. There are so many scattered about the island. Most of statues will try and kill you if you mess with them. Some provide interesting benefits, depending on your alignment or class. Other are just strange things to confound your players. Most of these statues would be right at home inside a dungeon.

1803 A perpetual spring blesses a forest of ash, cypress, fig, apple, and pear trees. The sweet perfumes of roses, columbines, daisies, and violets mingle with the odor of cinnamon and cloves. A herd of 49 milk-white cattle is kept by a young woman in a dress of pastel blue, pink, and green She is a 6th-level magic-user (Armor: none, HD 6, Hp 22, move 120’) armed with bronze spear, long sword, and dagger. If accosted, the seven bulls (Armor: as leather, HD 4, Hp 17, 7, 23, 15, 17, 24, 14, move 150’, 2d8/gore) of the herd will protect her. On the other hand, if treated with courtesy, she will magically create green moss agates (worth 10 gp each) and bestow one upon each courteous person.

The magic-user and clerics of the Isle of the Unknown all have atypical powers. They often have some small amount of treasure on their person. It is generally not a good idea to fight them. The magic-user described above would probably be friendly to the player characters, but many of the descriptions of the clerics and magic-users aren’t quite so clear. The descriptions are terse: there is a lot of leeway in how they could be used. There are full-page paintings of several of the magic-users by Jason Rainville. If there is one thing LotFP does well it’s art. There are some beautiful pieces in this book.

2405 An opulently furnished mansion overlooking the sea is the erstwhile home of a powerful enchanter. Therein stand the immobilized bodies of fifty young woman of surpassing grace and loveliness, their youth unnaturally made perpetual by the magical arts of their captor.

Finally we have some straight up weird encounters. Some, like the one above, could be fleshed out in to a whole adventure. Others are small strange situations that provide some colour. For the most part none of them really jumped out at me as zany-crazy-awesome—unlike Carcosa.

At the back of the book are a great set of indices that categorize hexes in to the types of encounters found on the island. It would have been nice for similar work to have been done for Carcosa. Being able to quickly look at where all the towns in the world is very handy. The monsters are organized by hit dice and include a smaller version of their illustration. This makes the book useful as a mini-monster manual.

As a physical book the Isle of the Unknown is incredible. Lamentations of the Flame Princess hit their stride with the release of this book and Carcosa. They have few equals when it comes to producing books. (And I am including the big publishers Wizards of the Coast and Paizo here.) There is a neurotic attention to detail in their books that I love.

Should you pick up this book? I’m not so sure. There is less that appeals to me here than in Carcosa. For a weird island of wonder the Isle of the Unknown often feels quite muted. I think that’s where it really falls down. In an attempt to make a supplement that would function in any campaign world, McKinney has produced something that often feels quite flat. It’s a much less cohesive body of work than Carcosa.

With my review of the Rules and Magic hardcover, i’ve reviewed all the books in my giant shipment from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I thought it would be handy to have a single place that collects them all together, so here they are once more:

• Fuck for Satan
• Monolith Beyond Space and Time
• Qelong
• Rules & Magic Hardcover
• Tales of the Scarecrow
• The God that Crawls
• The Magnificent Joop van Ooms
• The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions

Here are my old reviews from the order that got me into LotFP:

• Carcosa
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying (Gridnhouse Edition)
• Vornheim: The Complete City Kit

And all by itself, a review of Better Than Any Man.

Update 2013-12-27: I recently picked up Isle of the Unknown.

I do have two small complaints about the [LotFP Grindhouse] books as objects: the three books are quite nice, but I think they would have been nicer with thicker covers and softer paper; the title font, while appropriate for the contents of the book, is a bit hard read. It’s a very nice boxset, but after seeing Carcosa I can imagine a future edition of the rules that will truly be epic.

This was more or less the only complaint of note in my gushing review of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role Playing (Grindhouse Edition) box set. James Raggi was clearly one move ahead as my boxed set arrived in the middle of an IndieGoGo campaign to produce the Rules and Magic book as a hardcover. I ended up backing the project despite having just bought that box set because I was really impressed with LotFP. I figured I could use another rule book. My new book arrived a couple weeks ago along with a ton of other LotFP books. Let me say this up front: the new Rules and Magic rule book from Lamentations of the Flame Princess is amazing.

As I mentioned in my review of the Grindhouse Boxed Set, LotFP builds on top of Basic / Expert D&D. It’s not quite a retroclone, but its also not a huge departure from the source meterial. Even if you aren’t interested in “Weird Fantasy Roleplaying Games” LotFP would make for a great ruleset to play D&D with. I am a fan of all the tweaks Raggi has made to the game.

This books contains all the rules you need to play a game of LotFP. The book is split into two parts, which you can probably guess from its title: rules and magic. Rules covers the rules for adventuring, of course. The magic portion of the book is the pretty extensive spell list for LotFP. The two halves of the book are about equal in length, about 70 pages each.

The rule changes make sense within the context of the sorts of adventures Raggi writes. Fighters are the only character class that improves at fighting. They, along with Dwarves and Elves, also have a few additional tweaks that make them more versatile when fighting. This helps better differentiate the Fighter from the Cleric, for example. In most LotFP adventures, fighting is probably not going to get you very far, so the fact other classes are going to have a hard time hitting things really won’t have much effect on the game. Raggi is trying to encourage a style of play that doesn’t lean to heavily on killing everything. The encumbrance rules in LotFP are much more straightforward, and the official character sheet makes tracking encumbrance very simple. In a game where you get most of your experience for treasure, tracking how much you can carry out of a dungeon becomes interesting and important. Do you weigh yourself down? Do you leave this treasure chest behind? These were the two biggest rule changes that first sprung to my mind, but there are lots of little changes like this throughout the book.

When I bought the Grindhouse boxed set I skimmed through the magic portion of the rules book, there was so much to read. This time I thought i’d read through it all to really see what was changed. Briefly: a fair bit. The changes to the spell lists in LotFP give the game much of its colour. They are doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making the game “weird”.

The spells available to Clerics have been changed quite a bit. Several spells typical to the Cleric in D&D end up being Magic-User spells in LotFP, like Hold-Person and Speak with Animals. Several spells were dropped from LotFP, like Sticks to Snakes and Raise Dead. The tweaks better cement the Clerics position in the world of LotFP as agents of Law, demon hunters, healers, etc.

Magic-Users in LotFP have a pretty huge list of spells available to them. (20 spells per level for the first 7 levels of spells, and then 10 for level 8 and 6 for level 9.) There are lots of small tweaks and changes to the flavour text that give most spells creepier overtones. Mirror Image pulls versions of the caster from alternate timelines that then distract opponents as per the original spell. Charm Person works as it does in Basic D&D, but the charmed creatures explicitly remember what they did while charmed when the spell ends. Animate Dead brings people back to life, but they have vague memories of their former life, which drives them mad and makes them destructive. Summon is a first level that lets the caster summon a demon. Failure to cast the spell can result in a TPK at the very least and wreck serious havoc on a campaign if dice rolls go the wrong way. Magic-Users and Elves are generally treated as “evil” when it comes to spells like Detect Evil, Protection from Evil, etc. They are Chaotic and this has some concrete effects on the game. This all works together to create a vision of magic that is decidedly less high-fantasy than your typical D&D.

There are several new pieces of art in this new book, and they are some of the best yet from LotFP. The two new colour Magic-User pieces are particularly good, and really stood out to me. One for its cosmic level of awesome, the other for its gleeful violence. Another piece I like is that of the infamous Alice from the Tutorial book armed with a blood soaked musket, herself drenched in blood. As with the latest LotFP releases, the graphic design and layout of the book is excellent: it is such a marked improvement over the older Grindhouse rulebook.

So yeah, I can think of no good reason not to own this book. As I said to start, the new Rules and Magic rule book from Lamentations of the Flame Princess is amazing.

Tales of the Scarecrow by James Raggi is a little adventure module from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Like the The Magnificent Joop van Ooms and Fuck For Satan it was produced as part limited edition print run. The adventure was published for sale at Dragonmeet 2012. I ended up with a copy because I backed the LotFP Hardcover and July Adventure crowd funding campaigns, and the books from those projects were running late. (So it was a, “I hope we can still be friends,” sort of thing.) I probably would have bought it regardless: it has a very cool cover.

The module, if you can call it that, is very short. It describes an adventuring location, a small farmhouse surrounded by a corn field. The set up is generic enough it would be easy to fit on most game maps. It would probably make a good entry on a random encounter table. There are a few NPCs, magic items, and a creepy new monster the players will have to deal with. That monster is the crux of this adventure.

The players will no doubt wander towards a farmhouse in search of treasure, traveling through the cornfield. It’s a trap, of course. A horrible creature lays under the house and field. It has some stats, but trying to fight the thing will probably be a giant suck. The players will likely find themselves trapped, alongside another adventurer whose friends are all dead. He has been in the farmhouse for days and has turned to cannibalism. (The corn is poisoned, as is the available water.) He has some treasure, and needs the players help to escape.

The Tales of the Scarecrow also includes a couple of interesting magic items. In true LotFP fashion they give as much as they take. There is a sword that appears to be quite handy in a fight until it starts hitting your friends as well. There is also a spell book full of such blasphemous magic the PCs will be hunted down once it is discovered they know about it, let alone have it in their possession. Finally there is the titular Tales of the Scarecrow. The book grants experience points to the player who writes up the best stats and powers of the scarecrow that sits out in the cornfield near the farmhouse. If the players make the creature too soft, they will lose out on a chance to win experience points. If they make it too hard they’ll have to deal with difficulty they create in the game. It’s a prisoners dilemma of sorts. James Raggi seems to enjoy including these sorts of “post-modern” magic items in his game.

The interior artwork (and layout) by Jez Gordon is really nice. The module is well written and clear. Sometimes Raggi can be a bit too wordy with his writing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Each of the elements in this adventure could be taken apart and used individually. Tales of the Scarecrow is available for almost nothing as a PDF. I think it’s worth the price of admission.

The latest limited edition module from James Raggi is Fuck For Satan. You can pick up a hand numbered copy from his online store. I got the 35th copy, apparently. There are 666 in total, of course. The cover art is awesome. This adventure features missing children, a haunted hill, a cult, aliens, and some fucking. This thing has it all. If only it was good. This review is full of spoilers.

In Fuck For Satan the players are tasked with finding some missing children. This will lead them through a small, but tough, dungeon, one that will be a real slog to get through. There is a warning telling the players as much before they even go in, but who is going to heed that warning? There are no wandering monsters, so players will have all the time in the world to screw themselves. And they probably will.

The dungeon is quite linear. There are basically three spokes to explore. I can appreciate the reason for this: the dungeon is a big red-herring, the children aren’t there. If this dungeon was obnoxious to map and navigate players might spend far too long trying to look for that one spot they haven’t checked out yet. They might never clue in to the fact the children aren’t here.

A couple traps in this adventure trigger when the characters see them. As I mentioned in my review of the Monolith Beyond Space and Time, that’s kind of a boring way to trigger a trap. If you want something to happen all the time you should just say “this thing happens all the time no matter what the players do,” because most players aren’t walking through dungeons blind folded, led by charmed retainers or some such thing. Since players are looking for these children, and are likely to explore every nook and cranny of the dungeon, they are probably going to encounter both of these traps. One of these traps requires the players sacrifice someone to escape the dungeon. The other summons a monster that I am guessing is meant to poke fun at people who get worked up about objectionable content in books.

A portion of the dungeon is a sort of prison for creepy monsters and I thought that was done well. The whole double door “air lock” type passageways were neat. There are two monsters to fight, though this being an LotFP module you are best off avoiding both.

Fuck For Satan feels like it’s trying too hard. It’s supposed to be a funny fuck you to people who get worked up about the stuff James Raggi puts out. I mean, it’s called “Fuck for Satan”. There is a walking alien penis monster. There is a giant gay orgy. There is a monster that forces players to shit themselves, and then they have to fight their shit. The adventure feels like a parody of an LotFP adventure. I’d skip this module unless you are a collector of LotFP books. Compared to all the other recent releases from LotFP this one seems particularly weak.

Update 2013-10-28: This is an interesting little tidbit from James Raggi over on G+:

The Twinkly bit from Fuck For Satan, continues to get a lot of response, and I can only assume the occasional group of players sending me character sheets is indicative of the adventure being used for actual play.

Interesting how few of them are actually using LotFP stats. :D Lots of 3.x/Pathfinder, some DCC, and then a bunch that could be whatever old D&D.

Even though I feel the adventure is far more gag than functional, it is still being used in the wild. I’m curious to see how much, if at all, people tweak the adventure.

Qelong is fantastic. The book describes a sandbox setting, a place to have a horrific wilderness adventure. This is the model to follow if you want to put out a setting book. Though only 48 pages long it provides more than enough information to run a campaign in the Qelong River Valley.

Qelong gets right to the point. First we are introduced to the place this adventure takes place, a devastated region that is the site of a war between two elder beings. There is one obvious adventure hook, a magic weapon cast off by one of these creatures is a much sought after treasure. A rumour table helps the DM introduce the rest of the world to the players and provides a quick glimpse to the DM of what Qelong is all about. From there we get detailed descriptions of the various terrain features found in the Qelong River Valley, along with some example encounters. Each terrain type also has it’s own random encounters table, a nice touch. Along with some new monsters this all works to help paint a picture of what this place is like, better than your typical travelog style settings book. In many ways this book is reminiscent of Carcosa in how it presents the game world, though unlike Carcosa the presentation is much less obtuse. The book concludes with a few named encounter sites. These are a bit more detailed, describing the bases of important factions or places of interest to the PCs. A DM would need to flesh these out more for his game.

The book is very well organized. This is one of the few campaign books I could imagine pulling out and using at the gaming table. It’s the antithesis of all those Dark Sun books I have. Most of those books are needlessly wordy to the point of being boring. They are often so detailed they are stifling. Qelong provides just enough information and no more.

The encounters, the monsters, the factions: it’s all good stuff. Kenneth Hite has done a great job bringing to life this creepy fantasy version of South-East Asia. Nothing feels boring or recycled. As written it seems like it’d be a very difficult place to adventure in. It’s a place ravaged by war. There are no friendly faces. Most everyone is disease ridden. The land itself is poisoned, and as characters adventure in Qelong they are going to get poisoned themselves. The rules for this are presented early in the book. They seem like they might be a bit too fiddly to track, but what do I know? They certainly would make adventuring in the region much more interesting.

The art in the book is by Rich Longmore, who did the art for Carcosa, and is some sort of god damn art superstar. I feel like the cover by Jason Rainville isn’t doing this book justice. I wish they used some of the bigger black white art by Longmore for the cover. There are some amazing pictures in this book. It also goes without saying that the production quality of the book is top notch, like all the recent Lamentation of the Flame Princess releases. This is a softcover A5 book sporting a great layout by Jez Gordan.

So, to reiterate: Qelong is fantastic. I hope it’s selling well amidst all the other stuff Lamentations of the Flame Princess have put out recently, because it’s probably the best wilderness adventure I’ve ever read. I’m actually curious to hear what modules people think are better, because this book sets the bar very damn high. Does it sound like i’m gushing? Well I am fucking gushing. This book is a must-buy.

The God That Crawls was produced at the same time as The Monolith Beyond Space and Time, both products resulting from a crowd funding campaign run early last year. The God That Crawls is a much more traditional module. There a church. Underneath the church is a labyrinth full of treasure. Guarding that treasure is a monster: The God That Crawls. This being Lamentation of the Flame Princess, things aren’t so neat and tidy. The God That Crawls is one of the smartest takes on the dungeon crawl I’ve read in quite some time. This review is full of spoilers.

The module opens with some backstory about the church and the creature that lays trapped below it. Like most recent LotFP modules the adventure takes place in a fictional version of Earth. This module takes place in 15th Century England. Of course, you can drop that dressing easily enough. The players will probably end up in the catacombs below the church, because that’s what players are about.¹ Once in the dungeon they’ll need to find a new way out because the way in will be barred to them. There is only one monster stalking the halls of the dungeon in The God That Crawls, and that would be the titular God That Crawls. The players will need to avoid the creature while trying to escape with as much treasure as they can carry.

The God That Crawls will be a challenge for any party of low level characters that attempt to fight it directly. Though easy enough to hit the monster has plenty of hit points and can regenerate a few hit points per turn. The creature moves quite slowly, so fleeing the beast when it is encountered is going to be the party’s best bet. So, for the module to be interesting and terrifying DMs will need to handle a couple things I suspect most everyone hates to deal with: time and encumbrance.

There are two ways suggested for tracking the monster in the dungeon: the first is simply to track exactly where the players and the monster are located; the second is to make random encounter checks each turn that change based on the parties actions. In each case, you need to be mindful of where the players managed to move in a turn at the very least. (I think it’s probably easier to track things exactly rather than run the God as a random encounter, since for that to be interesting you need to know roughly where the players are located anyway.) The module will be more fun if you are also tracking when torches are spent and rations are eaten. If players aren’t careful they can end up trapped underground without light or food. I haven’t played a game of D&D where the rations on my adventure sheet have mattered at all, or where I feared I’d run out of torches before the adventure was done.

LotFP has pretty great rules for tracking encumbrance. I’m not sure if most DMs playing LotFP games are better about keeping track of how much junk their players are carting around. In this module it seems particularly important to pay attention to how encumbered a player is. If the players are loaded down with treasure fleeing the God might prove too difficult. This is the first module i’ve read where the encumbrance rules are called out specifically as a way to ratchet up the tension. Players will need to decide if they want to lug around that extra treasure, or stay nimble so they can flee from the God when he jumps them.

One more thing that’s been on my mind with this module is using it as a board game without a board to teach people about dungeon crawls. In this game the goal of the DM is to kill all the players, while the players need to flee the dungeon with as much treasure as they can. (You could ignore all the atypical encounters that are mentioned in the book.) I think you could run the whole adventure only using a handful of rules from the LotFP game: basic combat, fleeing, pursuit, encumbrance, and movement. I’m sure you could generate similar style crypts randomly if you wanted to run the adventure again and again.

If I have one complaint about this module it would be its cover, which is really boring. And that’s really about it. This is genuinely great module. I read through the book and I instantly wanted to grab some people and play it: sadly my wife and toddler don’t play D&D.

I had placed a few orders and backed several Kickstarter campaigns from Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the last year, asking that everything ship together to save me some money. And so it came to pass that I ended up with a giant pile of books to read a few days ago. I thought i’d start with The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time, James Raggi’s ode to H.P. Lovecraft. There are no giant Cthulhu monsters, but there is a lot of existential woe. This review is full of spoilers.

The module is split into three parts: first we are told about the random encounters that occur in the valley that surrounds the Monolith; then we learn about the Monolith itself, the area immediately around it, and the monsters that guard it; finally we learn about the bizarre interior world of the Monolith. I’ve never read another module like this one. This is both a compliment and a complaint. The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time is an interesting read because it’s full of zany ideas and encounters. The problem is that a lot of these zany encounters are, in my estimation, straight up dick moves.

A lot of the encounters in this module feel like they are sprung on the players without giving them any recourse whatsoever, and no clue they’re about to get screwed. Simply looking at the Monolith is the trigger for one ill effect, and the only way to end the effect is to venture into Monolith to destroy it—which is a pain in the ass, trust me. The Guardian, an invisible monster located just outside the Monolith, is for all intents and purposes completely invincible, and the DM is instructed to make sure the players don’t realize this is the case so they may waste their time fighting the thing. A portion of the adventure written by Kenneth Hite called “The Owl Service” is probably the worst offender when it comes to all of this stuff. It is a random encounter in the valley that surrounds the Monolith in which players stumble on some owls, have to hang around them till they are sufficiently creeped out, and then their characters are haunted by owls till they die. Yeah. For a challenge to be interesting in a game of D&D there needs to be some way for the players to circumvent or overcome it. A pit trap you always fall into no matter what is boring.

The Monolith is all risk, no reward. As a player, if I wandered all the way to the Monolith, explored it’s creepy-ass interior, and then escaped broken and maimed, i’d probably be a bit annoyed that I wasn’t coming home with buckets of money. The only treasure of note in the adventure is a magic-user’s head—and you need to eat it to reap its rewards.

Placing the Monolith in a sandbox game with a warning to never go there still might be interesting. You could have NPCs who have visited the Monolith, now afflicted by its curse, wandering the countryside leaving trails of dead bodies in their wake. It could be a source for all sorts of crazy out of context monsters and super villains. The players may feel compelled to sacrifice their characters to destroy the Monolith and put a stop to all this evil, which sounds like it’d make for a good story and a fine way to cap off a campaign.¹

You can tweak the adventure to make it more fair. You could provide more clues about what’s going on. You could drop some of the encounters that don’t really belong in a game that is supposed to be fun. The thing is, at what point would the adventure cease to be scary? How do you fill your players with a sense of existential dread if they can overcome all obstacles presented through smart play? It seems like a true horror game is at odds with one of the most important parts of a good D&D game: letting the players make meaningful choices.

So, here’s the rub: I liked this module. Crazy, right? You’re probably wondering why you wasted your time reading everything I wrote above. That terrible owl encounter I mentioned previously is really well written. The whole module is. The art is fantastic and totally unlike anything else i’ve seen in an RPG book. I read this module a couple days ago and it’s really stuck with me. This is a terrible adventure to spring on your players, but i’m not sure the adventure itself is terrible. Confused? You should read The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time.

“Solutions? Explanations? The Monolith owes you none.”

I am currently reading Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions by Vincent Baker. It’s the first of the LotFP adventure modules I helped fund last summer to ship. Between then and now the book somehow ballooned from a 32 page adventure to this 100-something page splat book about wizard’s lairs.

The book is full of tables upon tables to help you come up with your own wizard’s seclusium.¹ The book opens with some discussion on magic and seclusiums. Baker than details three particular seclusiums, the titular Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions being the most fleshed out of the three. These three example seclusiums show the reader how to go about using the tables presented in the last part of the book to create a seclusium of their own from scratch. The evocative is mixed with the mundane to help you come up with a cool adventuring location. It is all very Jack Vance.

There is D&D the the role-playing game, and then there are all the meta-games that surround that game. For some players trying to min-max the ultimate character is more fun than actually using that character in a game of D&D. For others drawing and stocking a dungeon is all they want to do. In some ways making a seclusium is its own mini-game: you roll some dice and see how it evolves, imagining its backstory. In this way The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions reminds me a little bit of How to Host a Dungeon. Though the later is clearly presented as a game in its own right, I think it’s particularly appealing to those who enjoy imagining what’s going on in the dungeon they are growing. Similarly one could take The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions and add more elements to make it more of a game in and of itself.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in the book when I first heard about it. There were other adventures I had hoped would fund. The reviews for this book have been a little bit mixed², but I quite like it. I own nothing else like it. I’m really glad it funded after all.

Update 2013-08-21: Alex Schroeder has posted a great follow-up to his earlier review on his blog. His opinions of the book now more closely mirror Zak’s.

Update 2013-08-23: I got the actual book a couple days ago, and it is so damn nice in real life.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess ran a Kickstarter campaign several months ago in order to get a new adventure printed and included as part of Free RPG Day. Their goal was to get a minimum order of the adventure printed so they could participate in Free RPG Day, with stretch goals letting them make bigger and bigger print runs. They ended up hitting their big goal of being a Platinum Sponsor of the event, alongside Frog God Games and Paizo. This Kickstarter was interesting because getting the actual printed adventure wasn’t one of the rewards. The logistics of printing and shipping the module to Kickstarter backers as well as the people running Free RPG Day was too costly. Instead rewards were PDFs or print copies of four new modules from LotFP.¹

My first stop on Free RPG Day was The Silver Snail, a comic book shop here in Toronto. They were running some Pathfinder games for Free RPG Day that had already started when I arrived, and simply giving away random bags of RPG stuff to customers who asked about the event. I ended up getting a copy of Better Than Any Man this way.

Better Than Any Man is a mammoth module. It’s more or less a mini-sandbox campaign. It’s bigger than almost everything else LotFP have put out thus far. There are several adventure sites for the PCs to investigate, several towns to explore, and an invading army to deal with—or not. The over-arching ‘hook’ is that a group of women sorceresses calling themselves the Seven have taken over the town of Karlstadt. Of these women, the one who calls herself the Mother has more sinister goals than the rest. She is hoping to revive the Insect God, and is using the current chaos to mask her true intentions. The module describes the town of Karlstadt in detail, has a pretty fantastic (and inspiring!) countryside encounters table, and several adventuring sites related to the Insect God cult, which all lie beneath a place called Goblin Hill. The two main places to explore are an ancient shrine to the Insect God and the headquarters of the cult. There are three additional locales discussed in the book: an abandoned farmhouse now home to bandits; an ancient mound now home to a creepy magic-user; and a magical tower with an infinite number of levels. There is a ton of stuff to play with in this module.

Better Than Any Man was meant to showcase what LotFP is all about, and here it clearly a success. The book features everything you’d expect to find in an LotFP product: sex and violence, cannibalism, some dudes dong, magic items no one will want to use, monsters you probably shouldn’t fight, etc, etc. It also highlights the more recent changes to the line: the implied setting for the module is a bizarro version of Europe, circa 1631; demi-humans and humanoid monsters aren’t to be found, though their former existence is implied; there are some brief rules on guns. The book is a great example of what your typical LotFP module is all about.

If you missed Free RPG Day Better Than Any Man is now available as a PDF. The PDF version of the module is in many ways nicer than the print version: it’s less dense, with large chunks of the book being set in a bigger font and in a single column; there is a pretty extensive appendix at the back that collects a lot of useful information from the module; and it’s full of hyperlinks that let you jump between sections. There is really no good reason not to get this book.

Courtney Cambell, of Hack and Slash fame, recently published a new D&D supplement for dungeon masters, On the NPC. The book is essentially a look at two things: creating interesting non-player characters, and then managing the interactions between your players and those NPCs.

The later section of the book is probably the least likely to cause consternation from D&D fans. To start there are a plethora of random tables to help construct an NPC quickly, or help get the creative juices flowing. For example, Bulgar the Brave has large hands, thinks the gods are constantly watching him, and loves his pet excessively. I’m sure you can picture this fellow already. Once you have your ever so slightly fleshed out NPC ready to go, you then set up up some personality “locks and keys”: things the NPC will do or give the players based on their interactions with character. (i.e. if the players gamble with Bulgar he will tell them the location of his secret McGuffin.) Following that you can also set up a reaction track: things the NPC will do as their reaction to the players changes. This section of the book is about producing something you can use at the game table right away, that can be fleshed out more during play if required.

The discussion on interacting with NPCs is probably the more interesting of the two. The book opens with a look at the reaction roll: rolling 2d6 and adding a charisma modifier to determine how people and monsters the players encounter react to them. Courtney takes this idea and runs with it—very, very far.

Interactions with NPCs are governed by performing social actions, the number of actions determined by the number rolled on the initial reaction roll, which also determines a reaction modifier (as usual). The basic social action rule is as follows “Make a reaction (2d6) roll, modify by Charisma and current reaction.” The results are tabulated as follows depending on the roll: Failure, Rejection, Undecided (Counter-offer), Success, and Total Success. The GM can decide what these things mean in the context of their game and the action being attempted. If you are playing a version of D&D without more explicit skills, this seems like a good way to adjudicate situations you want to roll for.

These ideas are then further expanded upon to produce a more complex rule mechanic for social interaction. Various social actions (Drink, Grovel, Converse, etc.) are described in greater detail: each requires different rolls modified by different values to succeed or fail with varying results.¹ A small one page table presents all the rules in one place. The specific details feel very much like something out of AD&D 1st Edition. That’s both a complaint and a compliment.

A PC might declare the action he in attempting to take explicitly, or a DM may map what a player describes his character is doing back to this set of social actions. The goal seems to be to turn an encounter with an NPC into any other puzzle that can be navigated through careful play—that doesn’t hinge on social skills of the player. You might know the thing to do in a given situation is bribe the guards and then lie to them, but you don’t know how to articulate that well. Instead a player could declare the actions she wants to take and see where the dice takes her.

I’m still not sure how I feel about resolving this aspect of the game mechanically. It feels a bit retrograde, but I’m having a hard time articulating what I don’t like about it. I don’t have any problem with someone saying “I hit it with my axe” in combat, so I don’t see why I should complain if someone simply wants to say no more than, “I grovel to the goblin,” outside of combat.

I’ve been playing a lot of 4th Edition D&D over the last few years, and it’s very common to see players reaching for dice in situations I personally feel they shouldn’t be. Everyone wants to use the skill on their character sheet their trained in. A part of me feels that itemizing the actions one can take is limiting, even if the goal is simply to highlight a sampling of the limitless things one can do. Sessions end up becoming a handful of dice rolls between long bouts of combat.² I’d be curious to see if the rules presented here might actually encourage those sorts of players to do more when out of combat, or to treat what happens outside of combat as a first-class citizen in D&D. Adding this extra mechanical weight to the social side of the game might actually get people to treat it as important. A lot of people think D&D is a game about combat simply because the rules for combat are so fleshed out.³

One complaint I have is how the book is organized. The FAQ is in the middle of the book, and discusses stuff that comes after it. It probably should have been an appendix, perhaps the last one. Similarly, Appendix D is general advice which would probably have been better suited to be part of the actual contents of the book. There is a lot of good content that shows up after pages and pages of random tables. The overall format of the book is quite good, though. It’s a small A5 booklet. A lot of information in the book is summed up neatly in a handful of tables you can quickly reference.

The amount of dungeon mastering I do as my gaming approaches infinity is a big fat zero, so this is definitely a book I could do without. Nevertheless I picked it up because I enjoy Hack and Slash and buying the book seemed like a reasonable way to say, “good job on that blog”. More so, I’m always up for reading something interesting about Dungeons and Dragons. I haven’t actually sat down and used these rules in a game, so i’m not sure how qualified I am to say much of anything about this book. That hasn’t stopped me thus far. Buy this book: it’s full of interesting ideas, and who doesn’t love random tables?

I quite liked Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney. I enjoyed it so much I wrote a very long review of the book split over several blog posts. To make sharing the review with other people easier I’ve collected links to each blog post below:

• The Mysterious Carcosa
• Carcosa’s vile black magic
• The Monsters of Carcosa
• A Tour of Carcosa

I followed that up with a discussion of the book after using it to run my OD&D campaign set in Carcosa: Carcosa Review Reprise.

If you aren’t interested in reading all of that noise just go buy the book already. There isn’t anything else quite like it.

I recently purchased both of the modules put out by Chaotic Henchmen: F3: Many Gates of Gann and the F1: Fane of the Poisoned Prophecy. The modules are a throwback to AD&D adventures of yore, but with much better typesetting and layout. In fact my main impetus for picking up the adventures was to support someone who took the time to put together a good looking well laid out product. This is something sorely lacking in a lot of RPG books I buy.

And now for some spoilers.

The F3: Many Gates of Gann describes a fairly large dungeon built by a wizard to house a terrible weapon. The wizard has since moved on, but left a small army of servitor apes to run the place. Oh hells yes. The layout of the dungeon makes it perfect for round about exploration. There are all sorts of ways of interacting with the apes that manage the compound. In addition to the apes there are a faction of snake monsters that have snuck into the compound through a lower level and a few of their minions. There are plenty of groups in the dungeon to befriend or fight. There is lots to love in this module. It’s a little bit quirky and different than your typical fantasy dungeon.

F1: Fane of the Poisoned a Prophecy is another interesting setting. An oracle who has set up shop in an ancient crypto-moon temple has been kidnapped by werewolves who have descended into the temple from the moon via a lunar staircase. Read that again and tell me you don’t want to play that game! This dungeon is smaller than The Many Gates of Gann, but it is surrounded by a few smaller environs for players to explore. The main dungeon itself is also well laid out, and like F3 encourages some round about exploration.

Both modules have some interesting traps and mechanics that take them a step above your typical dungeon crawl module. Chaotic Henchmen have done a great job with two modules. I think I like F3 more than F1, but they are both worth checking out.

The first module for Geoffrey McKinney’s new imprint Psychedelic Fantasies is Beneath the Ruins by Alex Fotinakes. The module describes the first level of the vast ruins of Kihago. One might describe the dungeon as “gonzo”: there are laser pistols and weird science, mutant men, and yeast monsters.

The dungeon is divided into three main zones. Two of the zones are controlled by warring factions: the Luminites, who worship ancient alien technology and believe nothing exists outside of the dungeon, and the Tribe of Yrtuk, mutant men who have lived in Kihago for centuries. The third zone of the dungeon is a no man’s land, both tribes considering it too dangerous to explore. There are two optional sub-levels that can be used if you want to run the module as a self-contained unit. The author also recommends using the dungeons as the first level of a large complex. The booklet concludes with a handful of new monsters and stats for lasers guns.

The module is 16 pages long, printed as a long skinny booklet. This is a really great format for an adventure. (Though, I think it would have worked well as a two-column digest sized booklet as well.) The cover contains the map and is detachable. Each page holds a fair amount of information. Room descriptions are short enough I could imagine running the adventure with almost no prep. The type is a bit small, but I don’t think its hard to read. Some thought has clearly gone into the layout of the booklet. Room descriptions rarely cross pages–I found one exception, and here the break is clear as it happens mid-sentence. When a monster appears in a room its stat blocks is separated from the room description making it easy to pick out which rooms have monsters. All in all its clear this module is meant for your gaming table.

Beneath the Ruins is probably one of the better modules I’ve purchased recently. It’s also incredibly cheap. You should check it out.

I’ve been reading through my DCC RPG adventures recently. I’ve been buying them as they come out, mostly for the covers, but there is probably some aspect of comic book collecting at play. Each adventure is titled with a giant number indicating where it fits in the sequence of DCC RPG modules. There’s probably something deep in my subconscious that makes me want to buy DCC 68 because I own DCC 67, and then buy DCC 69 because now I own DCC 67 and 68. So it has gone for the last few months.

In Sailors of the Starless Sea (DCC 67), an abandoned keep sits atop an ancient underground sea, where beast men attempt to summon their demonic god. Next we have People of the Pit (DCC 68), in which mutant cultists worship a tentacled Cthulhu monster that feeds on fair maidens. This was followed up with a raid on a wizard’s home in The Emerald Enchanter (DCC 69): a bright green wizard communes with dead sorcerers, uses imprisoned demons for power and resources, and spends his spare time building emerald golems–sometimes out of innocent villagers.

I think it’s fair to say that all of the plot hooks in these modules are pretty fantastic. The adventures are very pulp-fantasy. I could picture running these modules in the world of Carcosa or a game set in the Land of a Thousand Towers just as easily as I could in a more typical fantasy game. For the most part each modules is a well realized set pieces.

There’s a lot to like in these modules, though they all share a very linear structure and a combat heavy focus. To be fair, this is more or less how the adventures are billed by Goodman Games themselves.

Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics don’t waste your time with long-winded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren’t meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.

All the adventures end with a ‘boss fight’. Regardless of how messy the maps might look they can often we unwound into a series of rooms the players have to walk through. After reading through modules with more interesting layouts the DCC RPG dungeons can feel a bit lacklustre.

The modules themselves are well put together. They’re 8’x11.5’ softcover books. They have thick glossy covers and paper the modules are printed on doesn’t feel flimsy. All the modules feature fantastic covers by Doug Kovacs that are worth the price of admission alone. Each module is about $10. I’m pretty sure if I wanted to buy a glossy Doug Kovacs print it’d cost me more than $10. The fact the covers come with adventures is a nice bonus. The interior art for each module is just as strong. As objects the modules don’t disappoint.

The Emerald Enchanter is my favourite of the first three modules from DCC RPG, but they are all enjoyable reads. I feel like you could turn them into something more open-ended if that’s the sort of thing you like, and they each have some interesting ideas to steal.

Delving Deeper was released as a set of PDFs yesterday. It’s a retroclone of the Original D&D rules. The only other edition i’m aware of that is similar in scope is the Sword and Wizardry White Box. Unlike the White Box, Delving Deeper stays much closer to Original D&D in its rules. I also think it’s a much better laid out and organized product. The White Box PDF feels more verbose than it need be. That said, some of the additional exposition is good for getting a better understanding of Original D&D. The White Box also feels like a neglected product, with Sword and Wizardry seemingly more interested in their other products.

Original D&D is an incredibly simple game. Delving Deeper would be a great edition to use to teach someone how to play D&D. There are only a few mechanics for resolving problems, there are only a handful of character classes, and all the rules and spells fit in a 34 page booklet. People complain Original D&D is a bit ambiguous at times, and it certainly can be, though I think that’s part of its charm. If you have one player who knows how to play D&D I think the ambiguity won’t be a problem.

Delving Deeper is available for free so you should certainly check it out. The PDFs by Simon J. Bull are really well done. I heartily recommend it. If I ever run a game I think I’ll use this ruleset.

The Magnificent Joop van Ooms is the most recent supplement from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The supplement describes 16th century Amsterdam, the enigmatic Joop van Ooms, and a few of his hanger ons.

Historical Amsterdam could probably be turned into any bustling port city. A D50 random random of encounters offers up some things to do while wandering around town. There are a couple tables for dealing with buying and selling things on the black market. I could imagine this would be useful in all sorts of settings. The later half of the book describes Joop van Ooms, what makes him such a strange and magical figure, his home, and a few of his compatriots. The character is a magical renaissance man, with all that might entail. Van Ooms could be used as a patron for a group of heroes: he’s rich, magical, and has an interesting world view.

Like most of the recent stuff to come out from LotFP, it’s a gorgeous little booklet: the layout, design, and illustrations are all top-notch. Jez Gordon has done a great job here. The PDF is fully bookmarked. (If you read it in Adobe Acrobat, everything that’s a multiple of 8 is hidden from view, as van Ooms would like it.) Like most A5 books, it looks great on the iPad.

The Magnificent Joop van Ooms is a magnificent little book. It’s a quick read and well worth checking out. If you’re looking for a fully fleshed out adventure, this isn’t going to satisfy. The Magnificent Joop van Ooms a book of ideas. I picked up a copy of The Magnificent Joop van Ooms to pad out an order from LotFP, and for the price I heartily recommend you do the same. The cover art is amazing: for $7 bucks you can frame the book and hang it on your wall.

1507: On a lifeless island of black stone stands the alien city of Carcosa.

A silhouette of this city is featured on the cover of Carcosa. The city is only mentioned once in the book, in this description. It’s certainly an evocative sentence.

Carcosa concludes with a tour of its world via a hex map and descriptions of those hexes. As has been a running theme in my reviews of the book¹, the details of each hex are quite terse. Geoffrey McKinney continues to say the bare minimum needed to convey anything at all about the world he has created. There is definitely something old-school in this sort of presentation.

Each hex description includes two possible things the PCs could come across. The first description is written by McKinney, and was the only description presented in the original booklet version of Carcosa. The second set of descriptions were created by fellow gamer and fan of the setting Chris Robert; he had previously published these descriptions as a free PDF, Strange Sights of the Doomed World Carcosa.

McKinney’s descriptions are very matter of fact. There is a village here; there is a disgusting monster there. Occasionally he will hint at something sinister or exciting, but it’s just a hint. Robert’s descriptions are somewhat similar in tone, but are a bit more varied in their execution. I can imagine coming up with my own set of encounters, using Robert’s take on things as a good example of how to proceed.

The hex descriptions of Carcosa can be split into three types of encounters: villages and citadels, spawns of Shub-Niggurath, and the “weird”. That last category is broad, clearly.

402: Here looms the great and extinct black volcanic Mount Voormith’adreth, honeycombed with weird and outré caverns, and beneath which bubbles and heaves Shub-Niggurath.

This is a pretty important place in Carcosa. It’s home of Shub-Niggurath, the creator of almost all the important species on the planet. Spawns of Shub-Niggurath are one of the most common creatures encountered on the planet. This little passage is all that McKinney dedicates to their creator’s home.

1610: Village of 370 Red Men ruled by “the Lover of Peace,” a lawful 5th-level Sorcerer.

This is your typical village description: here are some men and this is their leader. You can often get a sense of what the village will be like based on the leader’s alignment and title.

1609: Citadel of 83 Bone Men led by a chaotic 6th-level Fighter.

Some times descriptions are even more terse. Who knows what this village is like? The village is 6-12 miles from the citadel. Maybe there is a relationship there? Carcosa encourages thinking like this.

1513: Ulfire Mold.

The tersest hex description possible? The alternate encounter for this hex, by Robert’s, is a bit more meaty.

1513: The undying and practically invisible brain of a chaotic Bone Man Sorcerer lies shallowly buried in the reeking fens of this hex. It is eager to find new flesh, though discriminating enough to consider only a fellow Bone Man as an acceptable vessel. Any Bone Man coming with 100′ of the brain must make a saving throw vs. magic. Failure indicates that he is compelled to unearth the brain, tear his own brain from his head, and replace it with the Sorcerer’s brain. If this occurs, the Sorcerer will take the first opportunity to escape to his secret lair in hex 0715, there to resume his experiments into the forbidden.

There are lots of interesting little encounters to be had throughout Carcosa. Even if you weren’t interested in running a game in the settings there is definitely stuff one could steal here.

The book concludes with a short adventure and random tables to aid a DM in running a hex crawl on the planet. The adventure is presented as a keyed dungeon and a mini hex-crawl. Besides wandering monster tables, we also get a table for creating alien technology, one for making spawns of Shub-Niggurath, and one for making random robots.

If it’s not clear by now, I really liked Carcosa. The book is physically fantastic. It’s definitely worth buying for Rich Longmore’s art alone. His illustrations of the setting are incredible. The pictures i’ve used in my reviews are a small sampling of the stuff in the book. The fact the material itself is also quite good was a nice bonus. I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. I had no real interest in hex-crawl adventures, Lovecraft, weird sci-fi in my fantasy, or half the things that Carcosa is all about. McKinney has done a great job in sharing the things that he likes about D&D. You should buy this book already.

As I have mentioned in previous posts about Carcosa, Geoffrey McKinney seems to be working quite hard to say as little as possible about the nature of his “official” game world. There is very little exposition about Carcosa’s history, people, culture, etc. Each section of the book reveals a little bit of Carcosa’s story. The books bestiary reveals the most about the setting, hinting at the nature of the world and some of its history.

The vast majority of the monsters discussed in the bestiary are unique. They are crazy grotesque beasts one might find in a H.P. Lovecraft story.¹ The gods of Carcosa are for the most part absolutely terrifying. These creatures have stat blocks and descriptions, like your typical kobold or goblin, so they are ready for your players to battle to the death. I mean, why give a monster hit dice if its not meant to be killed?

A few these monsters reside in particular places (hexes) in Carcosa. In the PDF version of the book, this is mentioned in their description.² In the hardback you only learn of their home on the planet when reading through the hex descriptions later in the book.

Here looms the great and extinct black volcanic Mount Voormith’adreth, honeycombed with weird and outré caverns, and beneath which bubbles and heaves Shub-Niggurath. – The description of Hex 0402, Carcosa

Of all the old ones that reside on Carcosa, Shub-Niggurath appears to be the most important. Two of the races mentioned in the first section of the book, The Great Race and the Primordial Ones, are spawns of Shub-Niggurath. In addition, 4 other races mentioned in the bestiary are his children, so to speak. The most typical monster found on Carcosa is a Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, which can appear as almost anything. (A disgusting mutant tree? Why not. A horrible giant fish? Of course.) There is an appendix at the back of the book that contains random tables to help the DM with generating these spawns. This one monster description provides a lot of clues into the cosmology of Carcosa.

The remaining monsters of Carcosa provide further insight into what’s happening on the planet. One of the few non-unique monsters are dinosaurs. Of course, this being Carcosa they are expected to be of a crazy mutant variety. Similarly one finds giant jungle ants wandering from hex to hex. Lakes in Carcosa are likely home to to giant lake monsters. These sorts of beasts paired with the descriptions of the 13 races of men hints at a King Kong style world.

As mentioned at the start of the book, there are space aliens. From their description we learn that they originally crash landed on Carcosa a millennia ago, but since then they have established bases and come and go as they please. It’s their presence and their technology that makes the world a little bit less King Kong and perhaps a bit more Flash Gordon.

There are all sorts of slimes, puddings, and oozes similar to those encountered in your typical game of D&D, but with a Carcosa twist. Many of the unique monsters discussed in the bestiary are also some variation of disgusting ooze-like thing with tentacles. If it’s not a giant-mutant-monster it’s probably a creepy slime.

The illustrations by Rich Longmore really bring this portion of the book to life.

The bestiary ends with a brief description (without stats) of the long extinct snake-men. Here we learn some more of the history of Carcosa.

For tens of millions of years the civilizations of the Snake- Men were mighty upon the planet of Carcosa. They delved deeply into the arcane mysteries and laid the foundations of the systematic practice of sorcery. From shambling man- apes the Snake-Men bred the various races of humans to be sacrifices efficacious for their sorcery. At the height of their powers, the Snake-Men destroyed themselves by releasing ultratelluric forces impossible to control.

What else is there to say?

Finally we get to the hex descriptions, which is what it’s all about.

Carcosa is an impressive piece of writing, but people seem to get fixated on the small portion of the book that is filled with all sorts of rape and human sacrifice. Wait, what?

Magic in the world of Carcosa is (literally) all about the Cthulhu monsters. The planet is apparently filled with Cthulhu monsters of one sort or another. You can summon them, torment them, commune with them, and banish them. There’s no Magic Missile. There is no Fireball. If you want to play a character who shoots stuff at people you will need to find some laser guns.

Flip through the sorcerer rituals presented in Carcosa and it’s a sea of human sacrifice. When I first read the book I quickly skimmed this section and decided it wasn’t worth looking at in detail. The descriptions can be repetitive, clinical, and a bit of a downer: kill these Green men; rape and kill this Blue woman. Magic in Carcosa is evil and generally unpleasant. A whole chapter saying as much seemed unnecessary.

The only spells that don’t involve sacrifice are the rituals that exist to banish the Cthulhu monsters. This suggests one option for playing a lawful sorcerer: only cast banishment spells. I had assumed this was done on purpose, that McKinney didn’t expect players to actually use the spells outlined in the book, that they would be reserved for evil NPCs. In a recent interview I learned this wasn’t the case. In his home game he did have players who ran around the planet rounding up men and women to be sacrificed all the while looking for rare ingredients for their spells. That’s definitely a departure from traditional D&D.

There is another level to the rituals that is easy to miss because they are so repugnant. In Carcosa the rituals are another way Geoffrey McKinney shares his fantasy world with us. They hint at quests to embark on, monsters to fight, and sorcerers to vanquish.

Many rituals mention specific regions (hexes on the map) of Carcosa. They might discuss some rare ingredient that is required for the ritual that can only be found in a particular hex. They might mention a monster that can only be found in a particular place. Often times a ritual’s description of a hex is more detailed than the hex description itself. The description for hex 1513 is, “Ulfire Mold.” (I mentioned the writing was terse, right?) If we look at the ritual that binds the Fetor of the Depths, we learn that there is a “vile cave in the swamps of [the hex],” which is where that spell needs to be cast. The description for hex 416 is “7 Giant Frogs.” Looking at the ritual that conjures the Fetor of the Depths we learn that this hex contains the subterranean lair of the monster. Here I’m looking at two random rituals that relate to one of the old ones. This sort of thing happens throughout the chapter. There are numerous examples where the ritual description adds a whole other layer to what otherwise might sound like a pretty boring hex in Carcosa. This is all easy to miss if you dismiss this chapter as I had initially.

When Carcosa was first released it was mired in controversy because of this section on sorcerer rituals. The warning on the not-quite-a-dust-cover of Carcosa is no joke. The book is filled with depictions of vile black magic: buyer beware. Some of the ritual descriptions are particularly disgusting, but that is clearly the point. McKinney never explicitly tells us, “magic in Carcosa is evil.” Instead he shows this to the reader by outlining what it costs to cast a spell. Some people might not care one way or another about killing fictional alien space men, so McKinney goes the extra mile when it comes to some of the rituals: there is rape, killing babies, torture. These things are all upsetting, but Carcosa isn’t about a real place where real people are committing real crimes. The way these rituals are described is not gratuitous. As far as I can tell, McKinney isn’t trying to come off as edgy by mentioning a sorcerer needs to kill a baby to cast a spell; he’s not trying to express his anger towards women by mentioning a sorcerer needs to rape and kill a women to cast a spell. If you read Carcosa it seems clear that McKinney wants you to close the book knowing that magic in his world is evil. I think he succeeds here. Reading anything more into this section of the book is disingenuous.

If you skip ahead in the book you can read about aliens riding dinosaurs and shooting laser guns. How are people taking anything in this book that seriously?¹

As with the sections that proceed it, the chapter on sorcerer rituals subtly reveal more about the world of Carcosa. There is a lot about the rituals that is left unsaid, leaving a lot of room for a dungeon master and players to make them and the world of Carcosa their own. I should add that the hex descriptions that come later in the book do mention potions and other magic items that perform the same function as some of the sorcerer rituals. This presents another avenue for players to conjure and torment monsters without some of the unpleasantness associated with doing so the traditional way. One can imagine quests that involve trying to reproduce a ritual via some other means.

And yeah, there are crazy mutant dinosaurs on this planet. They deserve their own blog post. My epic review of Carcosa will continue.

Carcosa, by Geoffrey McKinney, is ostensibly a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons. Carcosa was originally released as a stapled booklet entitled Dungeons & Dragons Supplement V: Carcosa. Both the name and its form were a homage to the original 1974 D&D books. As I understand things, McKinney would print off copies of Carcosa on his laser printer when he got an order for the book. When his laser printer broke he stopped selling Carcosa. This re-release by Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a much grander affair. As a physical object Carcosa is nothing short of perfection.

Carcosa describes a fictional alien planet of the same name. I’m used to campaign settings of the 2nd Edition variety, where anything and everything a dungeon master could possibly need to know about a place and its people is revealed. For example, I have a very good sense of what the fantasy world of Dark Sun is like from reading all sorts of splat books. If you approach Carcosa expecting that same level of detail you are going to be sorely disappointed. The world of Carcosa is hinted at obliquely. That’s not to suggest the book is light on material: it is both dense and terse.

Carcosa opens with a discussion of various changes to the D&D rules. In the world of Carcosa there are no non-humanoid player characters. There are instead 13 races of men, each identified by a different skin colour. Three of these colours don’t exist on Earth: ulfire, jale, and dolm. (And here skin colour is quite literal: a Blue man is blue like the dance troupe.) There are only two classes players can play on Carcosa: fighters and sorcerers. The difference between the two is that sorcerers can cast rituals¹ that were devised by a long extinct race of Snake-Men.

There are no magic items in the world of Carcosa. Instead one finds all sorts of crazy technology scattered over the planet. The book presents example artifacts from: the space aliens, the Great Race, and the Primordial Ones. The technology of the Great Race and the Primordial ones is so foreign to humans that most people will have no hope of understanding what an item does or how to use it. (Mechanically, you need an INT score of 17 to have a 5% chance to use one of these artifacts.) I should point out that at this point in the book, there has been no real discussion whatsoever about space aliens, the Great Race, or Primordial Ones.

After reading this opening of the book, which is something like 30-40 pages long, you do have some sense of what the world of Carcosa is like despite the fact McKinney has explicitly said very little about it. We have a blighted world where humans are clearly the weakest in a long line of civilizations that have inhabited Carcosa. There is a gonzo sci-fi element to Carcosa: your characters might encounter space aliens in their travels, and the plater’s only hopes for “magic” weapons come in the form of space bazookas and ray guns. There is also a Lovecraftian undercurrent to to the world and its people. Everything you learn about Carcosa in this opening section of the book is gleamed through sideways glances.

Carcosa really comes alive in the sections that follow. The bestiary helps the reader visualize what populates the world of Carcosa now. The hex descriptions are often single sentence affairs, but they too give some colour to the world. The sorcerer spells are almost all tied to particular Chuthulu-esque monster found on Carcosa, and often discuss specific hexes in the world. I found how deeply interconnected these three sections of the book are surprising. I haven’t encountered another D&D supplement structured this way.²

I have so much more to say about Carcosa, but we have to stop somewhere. For now, anyway.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit was the last book in my recent LotFP shipment I read.¹ Zak Smith has packaged some of the things he’s learned running city based adventures into this short treatise. The book is more or less clearly delineated in to two parts: the book begins with the Vornheim of Zak’s adventures, a crazy-ass city; the book ends with how to build your own Vornheim. Both sections work well together to produce a terse look at city adventuring.

To quote Zak, “This book is not about Vornheim, it’s about running Vornheim.” The city is described at a high level. After reading the book I know that Vornheim is a sprawling city of towers and bridges with a massive palace (called the Palace Massive!), a giant cathedral, and a wyvern that lives in a well who answers questions. There is the sort of detail about the city and its culture you might find covered in a few pages of a guide book. You learn enough about Vornheim to have a rough sense of what it’s like, but not so much you feel like you’re memorizing names and places.

The opening of the book is followed by a detailed look at three buildings/areas in the city: the home of a medusa, the Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng, and the Library of Zorlac. These are presented in much the same way a small dungeon would be presented in an old school D&D module: maps, room descriptions, monster stats, and some background. I feel these mini-modules serve two purposes: they provide more insight in to what Vornheim is like, and present good examples of what traditional dungeon crawl adventures would look like when moved to a city. All three set pieces are unique and interesting. Even if you have no interest in adventuring in the city, they’d probably bo worth stealing and injecting into your campaign.

Smith presents just enough flavour for the reader to extrapolate what other parts of the city would probably be like, how NPCs not mentioned probably would behave. If you want to play a game in Vornheim, there is enough information for you to make the city your own. You can have your own “official” Vornheim that grows organically from play.

What makes the book work is that Smith then goes on to show you how to go about running a city game. The later half of Vornheim is where it really shines. The book ends with procedures and tables to aid a GM when running a city adventure. It’s quite clear Vornheim is meant to be used at the gaming table: it’s nice and small; all the tables for the DM are at the very back of the book, one after another; the book’s cover itself is a gaming aid, meant to have diced rolled on it. In the D&D Next play test I participated in, our DM used the “I search the body” table to good effect. I’ll have more to say once about this side of things once i’ve actually used it in a game.

I actually can’t think of another book that fills this niche. The Advanced Fighting Fantasy book Blacksand is certainly similar. (It outlines a fictional city and discusses running city adventures.) Blacksand seemed to encourage building out your city before hand.² As such, it doesn’t lend itself to helping you creating a realistic sprawling mess of a city the same way Vornheim does. Still, if you’re looking for something else about this subject it’s definitely worth a look.³

I do have one complaint with Vornheim, and that is its solid black margins.⁴ There are other layout choices that probably would have helped make the book more legible. It sometimes feels a bit too dense. Smith’s paintings also seem to be particularly dense, so in some ways one can view the book as an extension of his artwork. You can definitely tell it is his book.

I don’t think I’ve read a bad review of Vornheim. It’s something like $15 so i’m not sure why you wouldn’t have bought it already. If you’ve been waiting patiently for my opinion on the matter, now you have it: go buy this book.

Update 2019: my thoughts on this book haven’t changed much, but my thoughts about Zak have.

I received a package all the way from Finland. It contained: Carcosa, Vornheim: The Complete City Kit, and the boxset Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying (Grindhouse Edition). I had been reading through the PDF copy of the Grindhouse Edition while waiting for these books to arrive, so I will write about the books contained within the boxset first.¹

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying is a roleplaying game by James Raggi. (The game will be referred to as LotFP hence forth, because Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying is a lot to type, and that seems to be the acronym of choice on the Internet.) The Grindhouse Edition boxset collects: the rulebook for LotFP, a book for dungeon masters on how best to run the game, and a tutorial book for players and dungeon masters about role playing games in general. The boxset also includes some (tiny) dice and some very well designed character sheets. If you bought this boxset you would have everything you need to play the game, you’d just need to find some players.

The boxset is (surprisingly) small. (It’s smaller than your typical hardback novel.) The three books within are all A5 in size, half as big as your typical 8x11 D&D book. Because they are perfect bound softcovers they feel even smaller. Unlike your usual gaming product these books are ideally suited for use while playing: they take up next to no space, they are light, and they are easy to flip through. The rulebook actually has a bunch of important tables for the game right on its back cover, so even while closed it serves a useful purpose.

I do have two small complaints about the books as objects: the three books are quite nice, but I think they would have been nicer with thicker covers and softer paper; the title font, while appropriate for the contents of the book, is a bit hard read. It’s a very nice boxset, but after seeing Carcosa I can imagine a future edition of the rules that will truly be epic.

The first book in the boxset is the Tutorial book. It begins with a discussion of what a role-playing game is and what the deal is with all the funky dice. It then proceeds to a sample adventure that steps through some of the the mechanics of the game. The adventure also sets the tone for LotFP: it’s dark, creepy, and full of death. This is then followed by a choose-your-own adventure game that walks you through even more of the game’s mechanics. The second adventure is a sequel to the first: it’s your very first LotFP campaign!

After the adventures Raggi discusses RPGs in more detail. There is some exposition on how role-playing games work, in a most general sense. There is a lot of discussion that ultimately boils down to a look at the relationships between players and their characters, and players and the dungeon master. It’s a short section of the book, but I think it manages to convey a lot about the sort of role-playing games Raggi feels are most effective. More than anything this section seems to be about letting players and DMs know that they shouldn’t play like assholes.

Finally we get to an example of a group playing LotFP. These sorts of dialogues are found in most role-playing games books, and they usually preset a far too idealized example of play. The example presented here works well because it’s funny, and is a pretty accurate look at what a role-playing game is like. There is petty squabbling, people complaining about dice rolls, people being inattentive, people forgetting the rules, etc, etc.

The books ends with an Appendix N of sorts. There are a series of essays on a few authors that Raggi felt best exemplify “Weird Fantasy”. I thought the essays were interesting, presenting a little bit of background on each author, pointing out what makes them important to the genre, and also suggesting good first books to look into.

The Tutorial book is pretty great. The whole tone of the book is really friendly and positive. This book, like the others in the set, features some pretty explicit art work. This makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the text. I don’t think the artwork in the Tutorial book is nearly as gruesome as the stuff found in the Rules and Magic book, but it almost feels more gruesome because it’s sandwiched between feel good advice about having fun with your friends. The Tutorial book almost seems out of place in a boxset such as this. I can’t imagine anyone buying this game who isn’t already intimately familiar with Dungeons and Dragons. That said, i’m really glad Raggi thought to write it. It makes the Grindhouse Edition boxset a surprisingly good introduction to roleplaying games.

The Rules and Magic book is the meat of the boxset. The two sections of this book contain what you actually need to know in order to play a game of LotFP.

LotFP is basically a simplified (and extended) version of the rules found in the original Dungeons and Dragons books. It’s certainly not a retroclone, but it’s also not a big departure from the system it’s clearly built upon. You have your usual six ability scores, you have saving throws tables, you have armour classes and hit points and all of the minutia that makes up D&D.

I haven’t played old-school D&D in a very long time, so I really can’t pick out every rule change that Raggi has made. The most obvious would probably be the change to the rogue class, called the specialist in LotFP. The common thief skill checks from D&D, and a few additional skills new to LotFP, are decided by rolling a D6. For most characters there is a 1 in 6 chance for success. Specialists can spend points that they earn every time they gain a level to improve their odds. The specialist is a much more broad character than your typical D&D thief.

There are other more subtle changes throughout the rest of the rules that I noticed. The only one worth pointing out is that AC is ascending: just the way it god damn should be.

The magic portion of the book outlines the various spells the cleric and magic user classes can use in a LotFP campaign. There is a mix of your typical D&D spells, like magic missile, along with all sorts of new stuff. The changes here seem to add to the tone of a LotFP game. For example, you can summon a crazy-ass demon you probably won’t be able to control as a 1st level magic user. What? Magic in LotFP is dangerous and probably a little bit evil. The spell lists help reinforce that.

The last book in the boxset is the Referee book, LotFP’s Dungeon Masters Guide. It similar in tone and style to the Tutorial book. James Raggi is preaching to the reader about what it means to be a dungeon master, and what makes for an enjoyable and successful role-playing game. The book is full of advice for the rookie DM.

Beyond the advice, the book also focuses on explaining what makes a fantasy game ‘weird’. There is no bestiary in the boxset.² Instead, there is a discussion about how monsters should be as unique as possible, and that their use in your game should be kept to a minimum to highlight the fact that monsters are in fact pretty strange. Similarly, there are no long lists of magic items. In an LotFP game there should be no such thing as a generic magic +1 sword. Besides being boring, items like that take away from the mystique that surrounds magic. (More so, who are these wizards churning out +1 swords?) Magic is a dangerous thing. A magic item should be a creepy-ass artifact, not some Vorpal sword.

One thing I liked about the book is that it acknowledges that there are other RPGs out there. There is a section of the book that looks at how you can incorporate material from other games into an LotFP game. The book explains possible rules changes that a DM might need to make when using material from other books, or when using LotFP material within the ruleset of another game. (There’s also a short table to help convert between the slightly different AC rules everyone seems to use.) This section ends with a shout out to some indie game publishers putting out old school D&D modules that would work well with LotFP.

The referee book closes with a short adventure, A Stranger Storm. This boxset really does include everything you need to start playing a game. The Referree book rounds out the boxset nicely.

I would be remiss not to mention the artwork in the Grindhouse Edition. It is probably what has earned LotFP the most notoriety. The art is amazing and unique, but also particularly violent and explicit. I never thought I’d see a dudes schlong in a RPG rule book, but here we are.

The books are all in black and white, so for the most part the artwork is black and white illustrations, sort of reminiscent of the stuff you’d find in old D&D books, but much more dark and twisted. The rules and magic book has a few pieces of colour art work separating the two sections of that book. My favourite piece of art in the book appears here: a medusa has just turned a man who was in the middle of enjoying himself with her into stone; throughout the rest of the room you can see other petrified men, clearly frozen in the middle of some sexual act. Another piece that’s pretty great is a woman whose fingers and a leg have been melted off by some sort of ooze. I have heard Raggi on a podcast talking about how he felt the art work presents a more realistic look at the life of an adventurer. If you go spelunking in dungeons filled with monsters and traps that story is probably going to end kind of bloody. Another theme of LotFP is that the players aren’t playing superheroes. The art with all the death and maiming really reinforces this.

To properly appreciate a game you really need to play it. Hopefully i’ll get a chance to do just that soon, and can then provide a fuller review of the game. Putting that aside, I have no qualms with recommending the Grindhouse Edition to anyone looking for a simple old-school D&D role-playing game system.

Yesterday I received my copy of Crawl!, a fanzine for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. In a surprise move the fellow behind the zine, Dak Ultimak, mailed out limited edition copies of the zine to people like myself who pre-ordered. The cover of the zine mimics the cover of the limited edition DCC RPG book: it’s black on black, with a little gold foil sticker. It was a pleasant surprise.

The zine is 20 pages long, and features 4 articles filled with new ’crunch’ for your DCC RPG game. The opening article discusses tweaks to the character creation rules that will help create a more traditional sword and sorcery feel for your DCC RPG campaign: dropping demi-human classes, and moving the skills and features of the cleric and thief classes elsewhere. This article is followed by one about a new patron for wizards. Apparently this character came about from Dak’s actual home game. The third article presents rules for variable DC: easy ways to randomly make a mundane task difficult or a difficult task easy. The zine ends with some rules on converting OSR material to the DCC RPG system. Subsequent issues will expand on some of the material presented in this issue. I thought the articles were all quite enjoyable. The article about the new patron really stood out. It features a great backstory along with some humorous wizard corruption descriptions.

For a bunch of paper and cardboard, the zine’s actually very well put together. Running contrary to the classic zine aesthetic, Crawl! is a well designed little book. The layout is quite well done. The articles are laid out neatly, and there are lots of great little illustrations throughout the issue. For a DIY publication it feels pretty professional. Well, except for the fact it’s cardboard and folded paper, I suppose.

The zine is $3.50. How have you not ordered it already?