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 The Manual of the Three Adventuring ArtsForeword

Welcome to the Majestic Fantasy RPG. What is it, and what sets it apart? It is meant to do a few things. It supports my setting, the Majestic Fantasy Realms. It is built to run sandbox campaigns. And it is written to be useful for people running fantasy games regardless of edition, setting, or rule system.

The Majestic Fantasy Realms grew out of the fantasy campaigns I have been running for my friends for over four decades. I kept the same setting across successive campaigns, with different groups and even different systems. Over time, that produced a fair amount of original material. The Majestic Fantasy Realms is the setting portion of that work. The Majestic Fantasy RPG is the rules portion, adapted to classic Dungeons & Dragons.

What makes this a sandbox RPG? In a sandbox campaign, the players act as their characters and decide what matters. The direction of the campaign comes from the choices they make. The referee builds the setting and serves as a neutral arbiter. My book How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox explains how to build a setting. The Majestic Fantasy RPG focuses on how to describe that setting in game mechanics, how to adjudicate the players' choices, and how to keep the world in motion. What it does not do is tell you how the campaign ought to go or what choices the players ought to make.

I have always kept my campaigns grounded in the medieval fantasy of classic Dungeons & Dragons, no matter what system I was using at the time. Decades later, medieval fantasy and D&D tropes still sit at the heart of most fantasy roleplaying games.

Throughout the text you will see Rob's Notes. These are short comments explaining why I wrote certain sections the way I did. By laying out the thinking behind the rules, I hope the material remains useful even if you do not adopt the system as written.

Over the years, and after reading more about how Dungeons & Dragons developed, I came to believe that most campaigns are hybrids to some degree. By including Rob's Notes and structuring the Majestic Fantasy RPG as four books, I want this game to be useful even if you only use parts of it.

Thank you for reading. Let's step together through the door and see what kind of world you and your players will build.

Introduction

The Majestic Fantasy RPG consists of four books: The Manual of the Three Adventuring Arts, The Doomsday Codex, The Legendarium of the Fantastic, and The Tome of the Mundane, Strange, and Arcane. The book you hold, The Manual of the Three Adventuring Arts, is the player's handbook of the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

Here you will find the rules that govern the Martial, Mundane, and Magical Arts as they apply to creating characters and adjudicating their actions. This includes the classes they may pursue, the workings of arcane and divine magic, the equipment available to them, the resolution of combat, and advice for players exploring the Majestic Fantasy Realms or any setting your referee creates.

Everything here assumes a medieval fantasy setting. Its historical foundation rests between the fall of Rome and the Age of Reformation and Exploration, when firearms and long ocean voyages began to appear. Onto that foundation are added the familiar elements of Dungeons & Dragons: Vancian magic, dragons, and the strange creatures found across its various editions.

With modest work, these rules can also support campaigns set in earlier periods or later ones up to the first industrial revolution.

Previous Section: Part 1

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A quick health update - I had a few different treatments this week, and all is well. I keep on keeping on, and I actually start my five-week substitute teaching gig tomorrow, so that's something.

Regarding gaming - as is my wont, I was tinkering with a supplement for Hack'D & Slash'D and things got out of control. Therefore, I have officially begun work on the second edition of Hack'D & Slash'D. You can follow along with progress on the game in the link. It's my up-to-the-moment draft, so odds are decent that when you pop in I will be working on it.

Part of it is just MORE - more tags, more signature spells, and more monsters.

But a more important part is that it's more nuanced, and has a layer of fiddly bits. As a for instance, I have added a few combat options like disarming your opponent, knocking them down, or pushing them back, with a simple way to resolve these situations, and a tag that allows a character to be better at these sorts of combat options. I'm adding abilities for monk-like characters, and rules for dabblers who only progress in magic half as fast as true casters. My previous goal was to get 80% of what D+D can do into 10% of the space. Now I'm aiming for 95% of what D+D can do in 15% of the space.

I want there to be a simple enough game that if I just want to play a fighter with a big sword, I can make my character in five minutes and have very little to keep track of during play. If I want to play a hybrid caster/warrior with a variety of options, I can spend fifteen minutes to make sure I've got everything balanced out the way I want it.   

As you might expect, I'll use this space to talk about the process as I go. The first step was to get a draft together that was the first edition along with all of the notes I've been gathering and the material I'd developed for the Companion. Now that I'm there, I can start cleaning up and fine tuning.

Dungeon Module A3
Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords
by Allen Hammack

Hey, we finally get to fight these guys ... right? Right??

Imagine you had to write an adventure for a tournament, whose express purpose was to overpower PCs without fail at the end, setting them up for the jailbreak premise of the final adventure. You might be forgiven for thinking that whatever the players did up to that wouldn't matter. So, go ahead and fill dungeon maps with fights, tricks, and traps, to kill time until the big plot twist. 

That's the best explanation for the step-down in quality we see in A3 compared to its two predecessors. A1 and A2 delivered believable, unruly slaver posts whose failures were excesses of creativity. This module, from Allen Hammack, delivers the same kind of funhouse environment that this experienced tournament writer had already delivered in the previously published TSR module, Ghost Tower of Inverness. Very little work, compared to the previous modules, went into improving A3 into a better place for campaign play.

It's not that we've lost the trail of the slaver organization in A3. Far from it -- the players are assumed to have picked up one of the four different clues to the location of the final stronghold scattered around A2. (To a modern designer this seems like wise deployment of clue redundancy, but it's actually a byproduct of A2 being built from four tournament tracks that were originally run in parallel, so each track had to furnish the clue to advance to A3.) The clues lead to a mountain where the trail of the slavers ends and you find a trap floor that dumps you into the dungeon through a slide. Eventually you find the level boss and go through a secret door in his throne room to the town of Suderham, hidden in the mountain's volcanic crater, that is the slavers' HQ. 

Leaving aside the homage to the multi-cave opening of the original tournament grindhouse, Tomb of Horrors, this path makes no sense. The players have picked up the directions that the slavers use to get to their lair. Why not follow the actual route that the caravans and cargoes take, rather than this route that, by the module's admission, is a difficult side tunnel that the Slave Lords only defended as an afterthought? The reworking of the A-series modules for 2nd edition D&D, Scourge of the Slave Lords (1986), plugged this plot hole; in it, the players are tipped off to the cave entrance by a renegade priest working to subvert the operation from within. As with the help players get from escaped slaves to enter the A1 and A2 complexes, the logic of the unruly stronghold is not optional. The party needs some kind of leg up against a competent defender.

The theme of A3's first dungeon, such as it is, raises the stakes in the humanoids game. Whereas A1 abounded in orcs, and A2 in hobgoblins, A3 turns to the next strongest type, gnolls. Along with their giant hyenas, the gnolls go along with the final boss, Yeenoghu! No, not the actual demon prince of gnolls, but an illusionist casting his image to rule over the credulous hyena-men. The rest, however, is less creatively deployed.

We enter the dungeon through a trap - the front of the party is dumped into a salt slide. This trap screws them seven different ways that make no sense. You see, the salt is left over from a long-dry underground river, and in combination with the magic fungi in the tunnel, it casts a slow spell on you, unless you avoid contact with it by using one of the two leather toboggans, and also you have a chance to lose an item, or break a potion. And it dumps you into a welcoming party of hostile gnolls.

The twists and turns of the conventional-looking dungeon maze take you past the gnolls' usual giant hyena pets, symmetrical areas where you encounter stalactite monsters (AD&D's ubiquitous piercers) and a stalagmite guy (a roper, or rather a variant -- a STOroper!), and a few more tricks like an electric arch that shocks you unless you coat yourself in liquid latex from a pool. Eventually you get to the illusionist, find the secret door, and are through to the mountain's volcanic crater wherein nestles the next stop on the ride  -- the slavers' town of Suderham.

The module feels a need to hurry up at this point, so (in tournament play at least) the party automatically finds a group of silk-clad slave buyers, overpowers them, and disguises themselves in their fancy robes -- all in narration. Using this age-old adventure trick, they pass the super-tight security of Suderham and enter a town adventure.

Thus led by the nose through the gates, our heroes are left to find the secret entrance to the Slave Lords' lair on their own. Fortunately, in this less-than-unruly stronghold (garrisoned by 600-plus soldiers!) there dwell a few  snitches and infiltrators who drop unnecessarily cryptic clues to the location of the secret entrance in an empty bordello chamber. Lots of space is dedicated to listing shops that are closed and one-sentence residences. While there are a few places the party can get into trouble, the town is admittedly just there to get you to the final dungeon with little fuss. The best thing about it is an NPC called Samovar, who absolutely must be played as a hefty Russian homebody.

Most of the art is by Willingham and Dee but you'll also see a few of Erol Otus' creepy freaks

There's not much theme to these latter catacombs, though each encounter is interesting in its own right, combining a by-the-book monster with inventiveness in its environment: hell hounds on a heated floor, a pit with a gelatinous cube in it, a minotaur with a crossbow who stalks the players through a maze, and so on. Finally, we arrive at the moment when -- in tournament play -- the party is trapped between two magic walls and knocked out with sleep gas. In campaign play, there's instead a rumble with the high-level Slave Lord NPCs. But even if the good guys win, we're told the situation is hopeless. No matter where they go from there, the party will end up in the prison scenario that starts A4.

A3 feels rushed, full of B-movie cliches, dungeon tricks that work "just because," and railroaded action. It's not an unruly stronghold so much as a staged one. The impulse to make a stronghold messy comes from the overpowered and uninteresting action that comes about once you realistically think about how the bad guys would defend their lair. Here, the overpowering is part of the point, but there's also a need to give some adventure. Hammack resorts to the standard D&D playbook, rather than any kind of naturalism, to do that. Even the one "new monster" isn't that new -- it's just a higher-statted book monster along the lines of the "margoyle," "greater basilisk," and other creative failures that would end up padding out the pages of the Monster Manual II. Apart from the town layout and the Slave Lord characters, there is very little here that I want to use for my own campaign, as my players make their way to the island where the slavers they've been chasing for three years of play make their base.

By Eric Jones
Ludibrium Games
OSR
Level 1

Tragedy has befallen the Kingdom of Ambarge—the king is dead; long live the king! Yet strife in the realm has only just begun, for the sole heir is nowhere to be found. The fate of the entire kingdom now rests with the grit and guile of a few humble caravan guards in a far-off land.

This 32 page adventure presents a ten events caravan journey It feels more generic than perhaps it should, given the subject and the NPC’s. Almost as if it’s one step away from the specificity that would bring the entire thing home.

This is a reissue of the 2011 adventure Kingmaker, “significantly expanded and revised from the original version.” It looks like I reviewed Kingmaker ages ago. I’m going to review this and then go back and read my other review. Let’s see how a new reissue compares to an old review?

After the death of the king the royal consort/mom smuggles her son, the heir, out of the kingdom to get him out of the way is assisination attempts. Mom and son are in disguise as a wealthy merchant/son and taking a caravan to Another Kingdom. They’ve got a few hired guards, none of who know who they are. Oh, hey, Mr Party, how about we hire you also? A few more never hurt. The caravan is almost immediately discovered by a witches familiar, part of a band of mercs to hunt the boy down, and then nine more scenes play out until the next town is reached. It’s the party and their merc caravan against the witch and her mercs, as she tries to get at the boy and/or whittle down the caravans guards. 

The NPC’s, the good guys and the bad guys, are all covered up front. There’s a little description and a stat block. Something like “Mundencain’s partner, Oading Whitebones, would be tall but for a terrible hunch. The road-weary but loyal soldier has accompanied Mundencain on various adventures since they were small boys dueling with wooden swords.” I’m just having a hard time getting behind them. Road-weary, loyal, hunchback. That I can do. As a quick reference its lacking.

The encounters are decently open ended, in general. The DM is given a situation, maybe half a page or so, and then  you run it. Importantly, the evil party and the NPC’s in the caravan are not really covered. Well, they are, here and there, but it’s minor issues or just leading to something else. For the most part , if the room description was something like “orc main room with cooking fire and six orcs” and nothing more, then I’ll let you, the DM, determine how the previous information about the NPCs, good and evil, fit in to that. The entries are not that short, but, the point I’m making is that they generally do not deal much with the NPC’s.

You must cross a raging river. You meet merchants. There is a cart full of bodies on the road. How the party wishes to overcome these things is up to them. How they wish to use it against the party following them. How it gets used against them by the evil party to harass the good party. The adventure is not going to give you much to work with here except some personalities and general goals, spiced up by some specific remarks here and there,

As event based adventures go it’s not the worst. There’s no real railroad here, except for maybe the first encounter where a bird flies by, discovering the party for the witch. You can kill off good caravan members, or do pretty much anything. If the kid dies, or you turn him over early or something, well, I hope you got paid well for it by the witch? Just beyond the ten static events is a little section on other events that the DM can toss in. Less events, i think, and more how to handle party actions, like, we want to talk to the baddies, or other actions to toss in to spice things up. This is all then further augmented by a terrain and weather table to add additional spice. So, a lot of tools, from good guy npcs, rto baddies, to terrain, to weather, to static encounters to tossed in encounters, all to mix in together for an adventure.

The only thing that REALLY doesn’t work for me is one of the early encounters, a gnome, polymorphed, controlling animals via a potion/fungus, attacking the party. Meh. It’s a little prescriptive and renfaire fantasy for my tastes. 

I think, though, this comes off a little bland. The evil mercs are mostly just dudes. Fire arrows. Hit and run. The personalities are not there to sell a desperate chase. Nd I’m not sure tha the personalities for the good guys are there, cemented enough, either. Yeah yeah, dour, tacitern, boisterous, the obligatory traitor. I think, though, in the years since this was first published, other adventures have come along and done the evil party chasing us thing better. 

This isn’t a bad adventure. It’s certainly easy to read and follow. I just can’t get in to it at all. There’s a little too much work on the DM, I think, and/or that lack of specificity that I enjoy. I’m not mad at this, I just don’t see a reason to run it.

This is $8 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Boo! Boo! Stick in a preview Eric! (Also, I seem to recall loving Ironwood Gorge?)

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555687/queen-s-gambit-osr-version?1892600

I think it started with watching Lanterns episode 2 last night. That must be it. It got me thinking about cosmic-powered supers, and that ultimately led to Stardust the Super Wizard. This morning I awoke after a dream where I was back in college playing Ali Hakim in a production of Les Miserables that had to be moved to a library after the theater was closed. My college friends were all there, mad at me that I didn't understand how my part fit into the story.
Over coffee, I started thinking about what would happen if Stardust the Super Wizard handed a fragment of his power to a young Peter Parker, gave him one cryptic clue, and then disappeared. You'd end up with Kid Stardust, who believes that with untold power comes untold responsibility.
  

By Onslaught Six, Roz Leahy, Maeve Murray
Tidal Wave Games
OSE
Level 2?

Engage with multiple factions of orcs, beastmen, rodentia, and cults. Infiltrate the followers of a doomed machine. Fall prey to a vampiric lord. Escape from the moat monster. Fight deadly monsters of chaos. Get treasure. Get out alive.

This 44 page digest presents one level of a dungeon with seventeen lairs comprising about 120 rooms. It’s a weirdly worded and padded out hack with secret doors being your only exploration, in spite of a balrog AND demon lord both being present. 

There’s this old template complex and blah blah blah a year ago something happens and monsters move in. There are now seventeen different “zones” in this dungeon, each with about five or rooms in them. Yeah man, like I said, a year. And seventeen zones worth of monsters. So, you know, they’re motivated, I guess? 

So, the map. One level. It’s got loops? No? Maybe? The seventeen or so zones are all like little mini-maps. Imagine you took seventeen dungeon geomorph tiles, each of which had five or six rooms on it. Then, connect those geomorph tiles with, like, a hallway in to it and a hallway out of it. I think a few of them actually have a THIRD hallway leading in/out of them. Pretty cool stuff, eh! No? Not? Not. And, then, I want you to use the TINIEST fucking font on earth to label each room. Chill? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah yeah, “bryce has old eyes” Fuck you. Well, maybe. But, also, more than one thing can be true at the same time. The fucking font here is TONY for the map keys. There is absolutely no way someone looked at this and said “yup, looks great!” which means that no one looked at it. Also, the map lists “0.1, 0.2” and so on but the text lists “a.1 and a.2.”  

How about the room entries Mrs Lincoln? “This room contains a library of tomes purported to contain magical secrets. Taking the time to read the books reveals they are all hoaxes or inaccurate. Empty hooks, designed to hold shields and weaponry, line the walls of this room.” That is a typical room entry. If there’s a monster in the room then there would be a stat block also. So it’s not really read-aloud. And I’m not sure it’s really DM text either. The concept of a room? The concept of 120 rooms? How about “Rotting wood shelves endure upon the walls Hurrath “ Nice and purple, yes? Or “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work.”

This is a kind of interesting style of abstraction that pops up from time to time. It’s not the normal generic abstraction that shows up usually but more of a, oh, I don’t know, I think I’ve compared it to writers note for an episodic tv series. “Kirk is a brash officer, a ladies man born in iowa who was the only person ever to pass the blah blah blah.” So, it’s kind of painting a general picture of what’s going on. And, to a degree, that is the point of writing a room, you want to give the DM an idea of what is going on there so the DM can then take the reigns and run it. But it’s almost as if the room is forgotten, the specifics of playing a D&D adventure are forgotten. If we look at the room descriptions “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work” then you get a decent idea. Yes, that is what is going on here, in general, as in that is the kind of activities that take place here. Maybe we could summative it as “throne room” or “command center. “ That tells us the same thing. But, also, not, what the fucking is going on in the room? If he directing his legions and the the party runs in ala New Hope? Does he have a  sand table he is standing over? What the adventure has provided are some very general writers notes. As if it were then to be handed to a different writer who would then create a room, the specifics, from it. “Lou! I need two paragraphs by Tuesday about a room that some dude called the Beastlord oversees his attempts to capture the Myredions.” That’s not a room description. It’s the IDEA for a room description. Not chill.

Let’s see. We’ve got a zombie ogre in this place. He has a pot on his fireplace bubbling away. Can zombies do that? He’s smart? I guess He’s got a pet gelatinous cube.  Wait, what?! Nothing means anything anymore. My kobold has a pet Zeus on a leash. The LG Lich is fighting against the forces of Nirvana and their commander Asmodeaus. Look, man, bend things is you will but you gotta have SOME kind of logic to them. And why the fuck do we need to know that the zombie dude feeds the cube limbs and pieces of its victims. That’s backstory. Better if the cube is guarding something, some passage or some way its stuck, and there’s a crate of limbs and bodies in another room with obvious limbs hacked/torn off. Then it makes some kind of sense.

Essentially each room is just a combat. The various zone leaders DO have some goals. Like “Bob wats the eye of moloch” but the roleplaying notes and faction issues really are not present much, except maybe in an occasional note like “Mary hates everyone. Thus, each room is just the concept of a room. You go in and kill something. You pick up some genero treasure. “An unusual hat made of peculiar material.” YES. Not why the fuck is the hat unusual and what’s it made of?!!?!!!?!?!? A foppish beret made of liquid jade. There, done. See how I named the hate and why it was unusual, instead of just saying its a weird hat made of something unusual? That’s the fucking difference.

Hack hack hack. Abstracted text.

Oh, also, 2d6 wizards are summoning a balrog in this, who WILL show up, as well as some cultists summoning Moloch Archduke of Hell. Who will then go on a tear killing like every following of Tenebrous in the dungeon and then the world. So, you know, better to just kill everyone then talk to them anyway, about their goals and what their needs are.

Little to no interactivity beyond stabbing. Abstracted room and treasure descriptions. Move along move along nothing to see here.

This is $10 at DriveThru. Taint got no preview. Boo! Boo I say! Show us what the fuck we are buying, a sample of it, before I spend my assistant crack whore trainee monies on it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562586/monster-condo?1892600

After a long hiatus, during which my role-playing table defeated all that A2 had to offer, I probably should wrap up with a critical review of the dungeon part of the module.

Like the fort level, the dungeon is built around two "railroad" sequences of rooms which are shaded on the TSR map. Each is similar in structure, leading the players at first through a sequence of traps, trick ambush fights, and difficult problem environments. Each sequence culminates in a boss-group fight that (like the climax of the fort level) is laid out tactically for the GM in a then-innovative detail map showing the location of each foe and furnishing.



Also like the fort level, these tricks and traps are for the most part shamelessly silly. This is D&D funhouse material with no care for naturalism. There's a magnet trap in the wall, punishing plate mail and capturing blades while hobgoblins run out and hit you with wooden clubs. There's a gauntlet of oily grille-bars through which a colony of boggles, the dimension-hopping menaces used as hound dogs in the fort, will stab and pickpocket you. There's a cave that can only be traversed by finding the sawn-off tops of stalagmites that cross an abyss filled with obscuring and sometimes scalding steam. There's a room with beehives, but no flowers; a room for cheesemaking, with nothing remotely milkable.

Indeed, if the module's dungeon were laid out just with the two railroads connected end-to-start, the whole ordeal would be a ridiculous way for the bad guys to run their operations - tortuous, snaky, running visitors and reinforcements through deadly steam, giant spiders, and bees. But in the first improvement over the fort level, the published edition of the dungeon adds sensible secret passages that both make more sense of its layout and allow more discovery and choices in play. There's a secret shortcut around the boggle grille that can be deduced by watch the scary but harmless ghost of an elf act out its last actions on Oerth. There's another that allows bypassing the steam and bee perils, leading from the first boss fight to the newly developed back area of the second boss fight -- an area that itself is laid out in a branching, not railroad, way.

Some of the other trickery works remarkably well in play. The boggles in their grille-gauntlet get to use their limb-phasing ability for good effect, not wasted as it is in the fort level. I played it like this: for each 5 x 5' wall, floor or ceiling surface a player is exposed to, they have a 1 in 6 chance of being spotted by a boggle (and can then attack its face, if they are watching and ready in that direction), once spotted, they have a similar chance of coming under attack from each surface they're close to, with an even chance of being stabbed or pickpocketed. I was able to drive the players to some truly wild levels of spell-based problem solving to get the more vulnerable members across. One even had a prized weapon stolen from him, which in the bounce-back world of 5th edition stings much more than 10 or 20 hit points damage would. The hives and their honey-bucket trap, as silly as they are, also lead into creative solutions (5th edition makes it easy to talk to the bees and that's the way my nature-loving players went.)

The end-of-railroad fights, like the one in the fort level, show off principles of a good tactical challenge that would become codified in advice to Dungeon Masters over the coming decades - variety of opponents, terrain features and obstacles (stairs, balconies, tables), and weaponized hazards (falling chandeliers, brine vats, caged monsters). By the early 80's it could no longer be taken for granted that DMs had a devious wargamer mind, so each fight comes with a detailed playbook of the foes' positioning, moves, and spells. These instructions may have been created out of a wish to standardize the running of the combat in tournament situations, but they also came to serve as examples for DMs who wanted to write and run their own memorable combats at home.

In the fort level, many of the added areas beyond the tournament gauntlet seem like dead ends or afterthoughts. In the dungeon, the added areas are much better done. They include the living quarters and operations of a varied group of slavers, led by Markessa, the boss of the final fight. As in the preceding module, there is an area of cages, as well as living quarters for the slaver NPCs. In full realism mode they include a kitchen, mess hall, and latrine. 

We also find the lair of Markessa and areas supporting her operations. This evil elf is already memorable as a mad scientist -- she is responsible for many of the mutant creatures in the dungeon, and the fight takes place in her lab. Her home area has the details that establish her as one of the best villains in the TSR modules. There's a cloned body double, a surgically enhanced perfect lover and bodyguard, plenty of secrets and tricks, and a whole cave complex full of mutant humanoids, the cavelings, who worship her as a goddess. 

The caveling area is the most underdone part of all this. The map places their caves in a tightly arranged 100' square, but the description of their environment deserves a more sprawling, abstracted or procedurally generated maze of tunnels to live in. The cavelings also are meant to fuel the unruly-stronghold dynamic. Not only are they subject to various mental derangements, but they steal and eat slaves from the cells from time to time (how exactly?), and they explicitly can be turned against the slavers and even their creator Markessa. How the rabble-rousing is supposed to happen, when to get to the caveling area you will have to fight through both the slavers and, probably, Markessa, is not clear. Still, the intention is there.

When you run out of space in the corner of the graph paper

A better unruly element is the gang of slavers nominally allied with Markessa, whose leader, Blackthorn, is an ogre mage who affects a creepy-barely-human shape. Like his name-alike in James Clavell's Shogun (Japanese ogre, get it?), Blackthorn is ambitious and might work with the party to betray Markessa. In his barracks are some werewolves and a group of slavers who mostly embody the banality of evil - an architect, an accountant, an alchemist, all keeping the wicked operation running. 

 Blackthorn is a more credible early encounter, as his area can be reached through one of the secret passages early on. But Markessa has a way of spying on him -- a telepathic potted plant with hidden mutant eyes and ears which, although absurd, is memorable and perfectly in character for the mad scientist.

Overall, the dungeon level presents a fun challenge marred by implausible excess and less-than fluent strategic design. I have to also mention the obvious repetition of elements from the fort level. This is understandable if the level was designed to be run in parallel, but it creates jeopardy if the whole place is run as one adventure. These repeats include:

• Were-creature henchmen (boars above, wolves below) 
• A kitchen with a grumpy cook
• A trap with a rolling danger (bear on wheels, pile of logs) and a pit behind
• A slave gone insane (escaped in the fort, caged in the dungeon)
• An apparition tied to the trauma of its death - represented by two different monster types, the haunt and the less dangerous phantom, both intended to be less difficult than the official high-level Ghost monster.
• An NPC found sitting behind a desk, who pretends to chat with the PC's in good faith for a while, then flips the desk and attacks

As well, there's material that repeats well-known beats from other TSR modules of the era. There's a wholly gratuitous delegation of drow and a tunnel leading down to the underdepths. Obviously, this calls back to the culmination of the Giants series, but tends to undermine Markessa as the most evil elf-type around. The masquerading ogre mage is maybe just a good use of the monster type but recalls a similar climax at the end of one of the railroads in White Plume Mountain. 

As a whole, A2 is a more ambitious, unbalanced, and overstuffed experience than A1. The unruly elements don't quite rule out the danger of a total party kill on the fort level, while the dungeon level is both less railroaded and less amenable to a complete mobilization of the defenders. The creative and naturalistic challenges of A1 take a turn for the worse, into absurdist funhouse territory. Markessa is a much better final boss than the underwhelming Sturm Bluchholtz of A1 (who's not even named in the first printing). As proof of her appeal, in the Slavers sequel module from 2000, the idea of a self-obsessed villain who creates a line of clone henchwomen led to some righteous excess, with different color-coded Markessas roaming the Flanaess.

The Stockade can be said to outdo the Undercity, but that's not always a good thing. In any event, we are past the high-water mark of the series now, as we prepare for the least worthwhile module of the quartet, A3 - Assault on the Eyrie of the Slave Lords.

Echoes From Fomalhaut #15

I am pleased to announce the publication of the fifteenth issue of my fanzine, Echoes From Fomalhaut. This is a 64-page zine dedicated to adventures and GM-friendly campaign materials for OSRIC and other old-school systems. The cover art was provided by Graphite Prime, and the interiors by Ferenc Fabian, Cameron Hawkey, Jason Blasso, and the Dead Victorians. The current issue features a larger wilderness scenario, a port town, two  smaller articles, and plenty of gardening advice! The following materials are included:

The Hanging Gardens of Pasquino Babilonio (levels 4–6, 32 keyed areas), a large wilderness scenario set in a mysterious hanging garden left behind from the late days of the Empire. A masterwork of garden design, this place is more than it seems, and hides a long-lost secret which reveals Pasquino Babilonio’s true design.

Pellagris, Port of Plenty (35 keyed areas). A pleasant coastal town on the borders of fair Frabotia, Pellagris has survived centuries of turmoil without much destruction. An orderly mafia town and noble resort, it is a fine place to rest and plan new adventures – but there is enough local intrigue to keep a group occupied or send them on far-flung adventures.

Significant Ships: A collection of 20 ships to be encountered in port, or on the high seas.

The Garden of Punches (levels 2–4, 9+18 keyed areas), a fighting school which has taken over an abandoned village. What conflict lurks among the school’s pugilists? What is the secret of the old lighthouse? And what can we learn about gardening in this place? Find out HERE!

The Illustrious Index of Incline: A catalogue of Echoes #01 to #15, also available here.

Two foldout map sheets with player and GM maps.

* * *

The print version of the zine is available from my Bigcartel store; the PDF edition will be published through DriveThruRPG with a few months’ delay. As always, customers who buy the print edition will receive the PDF version free of charge.

US Shipping Options

Freedom is Coming!
(But Freedom Ain't Free)I am happy to report that US shipping is once again available through my storefront. I am less happy to report that these shipping options are not yet a return to the normal shipping possibilities that were available previously. What we have for now are substandard solutions and workarounds.

Option #01 – Postal Shipping: Currently, due to the elimination of postal De Minimis exceptions last August, commercial mail, which was a cheap and reliable shipping option, is not yet available, and after a year, it is doubtful if it will be. I can currently ship to the US through commercial EMS packages. These start at a high threshold at the equivalent of $75. They scale up well, so a very large box containing most of my books is not much more expensive than one containing a single zine. Therefore, all US orders will ship for $75. I will make up the difference as a form of discount, but I cannot charge less. This is not a good way to order a single zine (for that, I may recommend Option #02), but it may make sense for a larger batch. On the upside, EMS packages ship fast, usually arriving within a week of postal dispatch.

I will keep investigating alternate shipping options; unfortunately, those I have found on the Hungarian market have not been better than the Post.

Option #02 – Ordering Through Dark Future PDX: As a shipping alternative, I can recommend checking out Dark Future PDX, where this product will be available in a few weeks. Dark Future are a small store, so they may not have everything in my catalogue all the time, but they restock regularly, and they have amassed a good reputation. They will also be carrying the forthcoming Gamemaster’s Guidelines Beyond Fomalhaut. Orders through Dark Future are also eligible for free PDFs.

The Perfidious Port of Pellagris

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