Sometimes when you bring together random games as a bundle, you find some stuff that really interests you. Then, you see it has a Powered by the Apocalypse title and you cringe ;) That just happened to me with the Cornucopia 2023 Bundle over at Bundle of Holding.
I'm actually interested in most everything in this bundle aside from World Wide Wrestling. There, I said it. I hate wrestling and I detest the Apoc Engine with a passion.
Adventurer! In time for the American Thanksgiving holiday, we present this all-new Cornucopia 2023 Bundle, our eleventh annual offer of top-quality tabletop roleplaying game ebooks. For just US$14.95 you get all four complete rulebooks in our Starter Collection (retail value $68) as DRM-free ebooks, including the swinging superspy dimension-hopping RPG Agents of Concordia; Apollo 47 Technical Handbook by Tim (Thousand Year Old Vampire) Hutchings; The Design Mechanism's Casting the Runes, a GUMSHOE game based on the ghost stories of M.R. James; and Scratchpad Publishing's create-your-own-world superhero RPG Spectaculars.
And if you pay more than the threshold price of $30.35, you'll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with four more hit games worth an additional $84, including the cinematic action-hero extravaganza Outgunned from Two Little Mice (Broken Compass); Chris McDowall's newly revised Into the Odd - Remastered from Free League Publishing; Unbound, the universal system from Rowan, Rook & Decard (Spire); and the 2022 Second Edition of World Wide Wrestling, the Apocalypse Engine game from Nathan Paoletta.
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There are zines, and there are ZINES! KNOCK! is a ZINE!
KNOCK! issue 4 is ready to go to press, just waiting for you to pledge. You know the formula: no theme, all mean. Once again, we've cobbled together a bric-à-brac of game design insight, random tables, rules suggestions, monsters, classes, maps, adventures… the lot. We've also added a short series (12 pages) aimed at post-WotC meltdown 5E refugees (or just your friends who you’d like to bring over to the adventure gaming side of the divide).
The book is 212 pages (A5 format: 5.9’ x 8.25’, slightly bigger than digest size) in beautiful full colour, printed on quality paper (coated 130 gr, with a cover on coated 300 gr) by Olivier's neighbours in the South Basque country.
The KNOCK! Issue 4 Kickstarter is about 17 bucks in PDF and 29 bucks in Print plus PDF.
I gotta admit, I love my KNOCK!s.
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“In THE BLACK PARADE you play the character of Hume, a hardened
criminal who was sent into exile as a punishment for his crimes.
The year is 833. You are now back in The City, a sprawling metro-
polis of soot-caked brick, greasy fumes and noisy machinery, with
many a sinister conspiracy whispered behind closed doors. Lost and
without a penny to your name, you are back to your life of thievery
and must find your old associate Dahlquist. Shadows and silence are
your allies. Light is your enemy. Stealth and cunning are your tools.
... And the riches of others are yours for the taking.”
Regular readers of the blog may know I am a Thief: The Dark Project fan – indeed, it is my favourite computer game of all time, and one I have made a handful of fan missions for. Thief, today 25 years old, is a rich, complex and challenging stealth game that combines tight gameplay with excellent level design and top-notch mood. It is also a game which holds a lot of interest for old-school gaming: its roots lie in trying to simulate an AD&D-style thief on the computer, and there is much you can learn about dungeon design, open-ended scenarios, and even city adventures by playing it. A small but active level design community exists around the game (AD&D adventure designer Anthony Huso was one of the early greats in the scene), and there has been a steady flow of user-made fan missions over the years, from very simple thieving scenarios to full mission packs. However, not since T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age (2005) has a campaign approaching the scope and quality of the original Dark Project been attempted, let alone completed. (Your truly had tried and failed with The Crucible of Omens, a never-ever for The Dark Mod, a Doom3-based Thief spinoff.)
Until now.
Dark MysteriesThe Black Parade is a new, full, ten-mission campaign that has been released for the game’s 25th anniversary, built over seven years by some of the best level designers in the scene, and made freely available for download. Set slightly before the events of The Dark Project, TBP focuses on the adventures of Hume, a former convict, as he becomes entangled in a dark plot concocted by forces beyond his control, and must use stealth and guile to survive and come out alive from the ordeal. The dark depths of Thief’s nameless City, a corrupt industrial metropolis, serve as the story’s locations: dimly lit streets, crumbling mansions inhabited by the idle rich, haunted crypts and thieves’ dens populated by the dregs of society. I had the privilege of beta-testing the pack (there were several rounds of testing by both old hands and new players), and I can report it is very much worth the trip.
Skullduggery and DeceitThe Black Parade spares no expense in constructing this world: the ten missions you will play through are sprawling, complex, and rich with detail. These are all open-ended, exploration-heavy missions offering multiple ways of achieving your objectives, built by a team who get Thief’s gameplay loop, but also know how to make missions that, while difficult, are never unfair or needlessly obscure. (They are a step up from TDP, but that is to be expected.) They are rich in navigation-oriented challenges (verticality, waterways, obscure entrances and hidden byways), tense stealth situations (from dodging patrols and sometimes security systems to shadowing a lone figure through the City’s streets), and careful decision-making between stealth and exposure. The missions, although connected by a joint plot and a dedication to superb quality, are very varied in theme and approach: the hands of multiple authors with different design styles are visible, but so is the refinement that comes from teamwork. These are all interesting, high-quality missions, and there are two in the lineup I rank among the very best ever made.
Corrupted SplendourBut the excellence of The Black Parade goes beyond level design (although that is the most important element). The campaign comes with well-animated cutscenes between missions; numerous new voice lines, textures and objects; new AI types (including some once considered impossible) and game mechanics. Many previous fan missions have done one or a few of these; but very rarely all, and never at this level of quality. In all cases, the updates to The Dark Project extend the original game while remaining entirely faithful to its mood and style: at no point does something stick out like a sore thumb. Thief has always been heavy on the mood, and this campaign pack returns to that level of quality, while taking advantage of the technical advances which allow a 1999 game to transcend the limits of its antediluvian engine and quirky level editor (as the quote from one of the original devs, goes, “Once upon a time, not only would DromEd crash, but it would go out and kill your family afterwards”). In its consciously low-poly architecture and grainy textures – no ill-advised attempt has been to make this look like a mid-2000s experience – The Black Parade builds scenes of labyrinthine complexity and deep SOVL.
A Labyrinthine PlotThis is also one of those rare mods that takes writing seriously: the main story was meticulously plotted before the levels entered the building phase, and the levels were then filled with fragments of readable texts, environmental storytelling, AI conversations and the evolving objectives Hume will face during the course of the missions. Although the writing quality tends to be high in the Thief level design community, this is a standout even by those standards. While the cutscenes convey the main plot, much in gameplay is information you need to piece together on your own – from clues that will help you reach your objectives, avoid deadly hazards or find carefully hidden loot; to pieces which reveal more about the surrounding world in an unobtrusive way.
There is much more that could be written about The Black Parade, and I suspect it will be widely discussed in the following weeks and months. For now, though, this introduction should suffice. You can download the campaign here. A trailer, and a handful of screenshots by yours truly, follow.
I've mentioned before the list of the elements of Vance's Dying Earth stories as outlined in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg:
Some of those I think are present in Baum's Oz books, but there are others that have analogs. These are the ones that I think are most prominent:
Odd Customs. In the Dying Earth this relegated to cultural practices. In Oz, the people themselves may be odd not unlike the mythological peoples seem in Medieval or ancient travel tales. Still, the central aspect of using a culture taken to the absurd as an object of satire is present.
Weird Magic. This is all over the place in Oz, with many of the protagonists being products of it. The powder of life made by the Crooked Magician or the "Square Meal Tablets" certainly count.
Strange Vistas. Exploration is as important part of Oz as the Dying Earth. The weird underground world of the vegetable Mangaboos lit by glowing glass orbs in the sky would count, as would the the Land of Naught where the wooden gargoyles dwell.
Ruined Wonders. Oz doesn't have many ruins, but they do have Hidden Wonders, like the city of the China Dolls or the radium decorated city of the subterranean Horners.
Foppish Apparel. It isn't emphasized as much in the text, but it goes through in the illustration...
The other elements are less present in Oz, but Heated Protests/Presumptuous Claims has its analog in humorous exchanges and bickering. Oz isn't as cruel a place as the Dying earth--it shows up in children's stories after all--but it isn't without cruelty. It's a cruelty of the fairytale sort really where axes enchanted by witches might chop off a woodsman's limbs and an evil queen might desire a little girl's head enough to have it cut off.
There are other similarities not really accounted for here. Outlandish, unnatural monsters haunt the wilderness in both (and in both they are often capable of speech). Habitations are separated by wilderness and isolated cultures seem to exist along well-travelled roads. For the most part the societies of both settings seem fairly static (Oz a bit less so than the Dying Earth), in contrast to epic fantasies where world-changing events are part of the narrative. Overall, I think these could be summed up is that both settings seem perhaps descended from fairy stories, Oz more directly, and the Dying Earth through the fantasies of Smith, Cabell, and (maybe) Dunsany.
I remember seeing Dragon Warriors advertised in Dragon Magazine in the mid 80's, and damn but if it didn't look good. I could never find it here in the States, and then I found Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which consumed me for a while and satiated my desire for a British Fantasy RPG.
I never did forget Dragon Warriors, though, and purchased the PDF a number of years ago on DTRPG. I never gave it the proper read-through, but the core rules are now PWYW and there is a free solo adventure for it, Hunt on the Borderlands (which was released today) (edit - did I mention the solo is hyperlinked? Well it is). I snagged the hard-cover Print copy of Dragon Warriors for 20 bucks plus shipping. Not bad at all!
Enter a world of magic, folklore and danger. Here, superstition covers peoples' lives like autumn mists cover the moors, and terrifying monsters with bizarre powers lurk in the shadows. The king is a weakling, barons scheme against each other, and lordless knights, back from the Crusades without the honour or riches they were promised, roam the countryside in search of adventure - or prey.
Ruined castles and barrows are the lairs of the supernatural, or newer, more sinister masters. Labyrinthine underworlds lie forgotten below ancient temples and city cellars. The dark places of the world hold riches for those who would search for them, and the keys to great power, and death.
These are the Lands of Legend, and they need heroes. Brave knights, courageous barbarians, cunning sorcerers, mystics trained in the powers of mind and body, sword-wielding warlocks, elementalists who command the fabric of reality itself, and assassins trained to bring death to the deserving. All these will be your comrades on the path to glory - and perhaps your enemies too.
Will you accept the challenge of Dragon Warriors?
Dragon Warriors is a classic fantasy roleplaying game, originally released in 1985-6 by Corgi Books, relaunched in 2008 by Magnum Opus Press, and now published by Serpent King. This rulebook contains full details for creating characters and all that players need to adventure in the Lands of Legend. It also holds information on over 110 different monstrous species, 192 spells from four different schools of magic, and more than 80 unique magic items, artifacts and relics, as well as sections on jousts, crime and punishment, disease and madness. There's advice for novice Games Masters and players, suggestions for building your own game-world tailored to your tastes, an introductory scenario to begin your adventures in Dragon Warriors, and much more.
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A starting adventure in the old-school style. Written for OSRIC or your favorite OSR game system - with a 5e compatible version too!
I'm always interested in peeking at new publishers of old-school material. You just never know if one is going to strike lightning in a bottle.
ToD1 Lair of the Silver Rings Kickstarter looks interesting. Priced at 5 bucks in PDF, and 15 bucks in Print plus PDF (with 5 bucks shipping in the US), I would say this adventure is competitively priced.
This adventure takes the characters through a series of encounters into a dungeon complex and on to a corrupt noble's manor. Both areas are fully detailed in old school style blue/monochrome maps with more detailed colored versions available in the 5e version.
The module is designed to be easily inserted into an existing setting. It takes place in a city which can be any city you decide. However, proper names are given for them under the full story Appendix where the details of the full campaign are provided.
While the intended hook and direction of the module has the two locales set in a city, you could feasibly drop them anywhere. They could even be used separately as different one-shot adventures.
The module layout is designed to emulate the old school style and is setup for ease of use. The encounters and overall flow of the dungeons are in the same vein as the old school modules with the encounters having been tested but not always balanced. Although, the 5e conversion is tweaked with more balanced encounters.
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The latest D&D Studio update on the 2024 core rule books should have excited me, but it just made me apprehensive.
Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons started as a game with a strong foundation, strong enough that when I imagined the changes that would best improve the game, I just wished for replacements for the annoying spells, overpowered feats, and toothless monsters—the game’s features atop the foundation.
So far, the playtest and design team’s reports excited me, because the preview showed that the team understood the pain points in the 2014 game and sought ways to relieve them. But now I’m concerned.
Until now, only one change struck me as a bad idea: The design team chose to strengthen 1st-level characters in the worst way. Instead of making new characters more durable by giving them a few extra hit points, the designers opted to make new characters more complicated by adding an extra feat.
To welcome new players, 1st-level characters need to become a bit more durable—just another 5 hp or so. This boost would spare them from starting as fragile as soap bubbles. D&D should not prove deadliest at 1st level. Sure, some of us love the challenge of 1st level, but to a new player who invested time creating a character often with a personality and backstory, a quick death just feels like a major loss. Such failures push players away from the game. We all know the problem. To avoid such disappointments, the D&D team seems to love the now worn trope of starting characters safely at a fair or carnival. I typically contrive a way for characters to gain the benefit of an aid spell as reward for a good deed.
At conventions and game stores, I’ve introduced hundreds of players to D&D and a key lesson stands out: Simpler characters work better. The 2014 design team made a winning choice when they kept new characters streamlined, but the 2024 redesign adds complexity by giving new characters another feat to choose and to play. For new players, the addition risks making the game feel overwhelming. Maybe that’s fine. New players confronted with a pre-generated character always find it overwhelming, but at the end of the session, they typically feel comfortable with the basics.
Surely, lead designer Jeremy Crawford can point to Unearthed Arcana surveys that show the sort of super-invested D&D players who spent an hour completing the playtest surveys love the extra feat, but that just proves players who mastered the game enjoy characters sweetened with more power. Candy isn’t always good for us or the game.
D&D fans already knew about the extra feat and I accept that not every aspect of D&D will suit me. However, another reveal from the studio update leads me to worry. Jeremy Crawford says, “We’re making sure that every major piece of class design does appear in Unearthed Arcana at least once, but there are going to be some brand new spells that people won’t see until the book is out. There are a bunch of monsters people won’t see until the books are out. There are magic items people won’t see until the books are out.”
Apparently the team feels that class features deserve the scrutiny of the D&D public, but spells don’t. Apparently the team failed to learn from the public playtest leading to the 2014 core books.
In D&D, if you play a spellcaster, your spell list forms the bulk of your abilities. So every wizard tends to prepare the same powerful spells on the list. Spells deserve the same scrutiny as class features. In 2016, when I looked at the most annoying spells in the D&D game, I learned that none of the problem spells appeared in the public playtest documents. Back then, the design team figured their in-house playtesting would suffice for these spells. That proved wrong. Thanks to the power of certain annoying spells, the spells weighed on just about every session with a character able to cast one.
Now the team seems to be falling victim to the same overconfidence. Perhaps the team would say they’ve learned from 10 years of experience and can better evaluate new game elements. Surely that’s true, but still they recently released twilight domain clerics and silvery barbs, so I see a some hubris behind touting all the new surprises in the new books.
I don’t want all new surprises. I want a game polished to perfection because it benefits from 10 years of play.
Related: The One D&D Playtest: Big and Small Surprises and Why I Like the Controversial Critical Hit Rule
I used to think Sly Flourish releases were overhyped. Then I picked up The Lazy Dungeon Master, and I was hooked. 5.95 for three of Sly Flourish's DM self-help books? You simply can't beat that price. You get 4 more books of content, and 4 books of art, for a bit more than 20 bucks. Damn good deal!
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The system uses a simple 2d6 roll to resolve tasks, though characters can spend Resolve (which also serves as Stress/Hit Points) to either reroll or move a failure to a partial success or a success to a greater success. It also has only player rolls and minion rules, both things I've enjoyed in Broken Compass/Outgunned.
It's only about $5 on drivethru, so worth checking out if that sort of system sounds interesting to you.
Anyway, we only did characters this session, but I'm looking forward to bringing a touch of Star Wars ripoff space opera in the vein of Battle Beyond the Stars and Micronauts to Light of Xaryxis.
Because this last week was Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, I'd been thinking of community celebrations and even mercantilism.....BUT I'm not going to share any of those thoughts that had been on my mind for a couple of days.
As I'm sitting down to perform this weekly duty, my home smells absolutely-effing-delicious, savory even. A buddy had gifted me a venison leg roast and I needed to get that thing out of my freezer and into my crockpot. It's been cooking since this morning and won't be ready for several hours more. The smell has been making my stomach grumble and my mind has been churning as well.
This venison was shot locally and it's been a while since I've dined on wild game. It got me thinking about hunting on the trail, in game of course. The earliest mention of foraging or hunting for food I can find in D&D is from back in 1983, specifically in the Expert rules (page 21 if you want to see for yourself). Of course I think it's a little too simple (TL;DR move 2/3 rate for the day and only a 1/3 chance of finding food). The next mention is in the 1986 Wilderness Survival Guide (page 53) and I won't bother to summarize it here because it's way too cumbersome. Holy crap, the foraging and hunting rules went from two small paragraphs in Expert to over three pages of content in AD&D.
First off, I'm definitely going to have to create a d30 Hunting/Foraging table that falls somewhere between these two extremes. Not sure I knock it out in a week (I have stuff going on this week) but it's officially on my to-do list. I've got some ideas.....
First off, I think the rules for foraging are a little light...period. Mostly because the simple side of the equation includes not just foraging for vegetation, but also meat from small game. I like the time cost personally, but I think 1/3 success rate, generically, is too low. Don't even get me started on the WSG data. Holy crap, it's way too complicated and success rates are abysmal.
I really think that both sets of these rules are a bit skewed, presumably due to current ideas of foraging/hunting, especially in more densely populated areas that make up the majority of the US. When you're talking about a less populous fantasy world, I think small game has to be in abundance, probably to recockulous levels sometimes (read some frontier/early American accounts....bison herds to the horizon or flocks of birds that took days to pass overhead). Factor in the plethora of monstrous humanoid species and just, well actual monsters that populate the various encounter tables. Tons of monsters, if not apex predators, tend to be towards the top of the food chain and in order to be towards the top, well, there has to be a substantial base.
While I get that there would be background vs. environmental factors (like an Elf underground), the average PC probably has a much more...rural(?) background than we as players do. Foraging for food wasn't so much a "thing", as just a minor aspect of life in general. It's much harder to forage as a thing these days (illegal in some places, overharvesting, etc.), but it still exists. In an environment rich with wildlife, there should be a corresponding increase in edible vegetation as well (you know, stuff my food eats).
Anyway, as I typed earlier, I've got me some ideas......hopefully they will coalesce well.
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Without further ado, here are today's Doorbuster Offerings at DTRPG:
Fantasy RPG Deals for Black FridayThere are other titles on sale, with discounts ranging from 20 to 40%.
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In his Mars stories Burroughs went for relatively short (mostly 1-2 syllable), two part, phonetically simple names. Though they don't mostly sound that way to modern ears, I suspect Burroughs was after what he thought of as an "Oriental" feel. They also wind up being very simple for English speaking readers to pronounce. Examples: Kantos Kan, Gan Had, Ras Thuvas, Sab Than, Sojat Yam.
Burroughs uses a not hugely different style in many of his Planetary Romances.
Edmond Hamilton was clearly influenced by Burroughs in a number of ways and the naming practices in several of his works are similar, though they are a bit more phoentically diverse and have more consonant blends. Here are some names from his Captain Future series: Sus Urgal, Re Elam, Thuro Thuun, Rok Olor, Si Twih, Brai Balt
Typically, he doesn't always try to be so "exotic." Sometimes he seems to be trying to convey future developments of English names. This tact he shares with other writers of the 1940s-1960s, including the various creators of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes in DC Comics: Irma Ardeen, Rok Krinn, Garth Ranzz, Tinya Wazzo.
Jack Vance tends to take this latter approach in some of his science fiction, too, though his names are more often multisyllabic and have a first-name last name pattern with each name sometimes made up of more than one element. Still, they have a similar vibe I think to the Hamilton and Legion names. These are from the first two Demon Princes novels: Miro Hetzel, Conwit Clent, Lens Larque, Sion Trumble, Kokor Hekkus, Kirth Gersen.
Star Wars names aren't the product of one individual, though later writers have obviously tried to fit the standards of the original trilogy. There are more straight up English names in Star Wars and of course some pseudo-Japanese ones, but a number could easily have been characters in Captain Future stories, like these: Ric Ole, Sio Bibble, Pondo Baba, Plo Kloon, Nien Nunb, Mace Windu, Sy Snootles.