Tabletop Gaming Feeds

The Revenger Trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Alastair Reynolds. In a future millions of years hence, there is a spacefaring civilization amid ancient habitats that form a Dyson Swarm around the sun. Sisters Adrana and Arafura Ness flee their stifling life of wealth to become "bone readers" aboard a solar sail privateer searching for ancient, technological artifacts. 

Things don't go simply easily, as their ship falls prey to the infamous pirate, Bosa Sennen. From that encounter, the sisters are propelled into danger and more adventure than they ever wanted, and ultimately, the deep mysteries of their civilization.

The books are highly enjoyable in their own right, and the world would make a great rpg setting, but beyond that, I think that, in part, they are excellent inspiration for dungeoncrawling sort of adventure in any setting.

Working Class Treasure Hunters

The "dying in holes in the ground" aspect of low-level D&D beloved by old school play is poorly represented in the fiction of Appendix N, but the Revenger series very much portrays this sort of thing. Privateer crews are typically hard luck folks with scars, missing limbs, and stories of former comrades lost in the pursuit of that elusive big score. Such crewmembers have specialties: readers, openers, appraisers, to be efficient in the unglamorous work of seeking out treasures. These treasures are often strange--not as strange as things brought from the Zone in Roadside Picnic--but things that the current civilization can't make nor sometimes even guess their intended purpose. In these novels, these items often function as low level, utilitarian magic items.

Dungeon Lore

Having good intelligence on Baubles is a crucial part of "cracking" them. Baubles are surrounded by force fields that only open at certain times and openers rely on information from other privateers and their own readings and calculations to augur the time and duration of openings. Acquired maps are also essential for efficient and profitable "delves." Baubles have colorful names like His Foulness, the Cuckoo, Wedza's Eye, and the Yellow Jester, and their own internal arrangements and hazards.

Creative Uses

I mentioned before items brought out of Baubles, well their are obvious things of value like quoins (their unit of money), robots, or energy weapons, but also things that can be used less obviously in the privateers life. Bosa Sennen's dread ship has near invisible black sails made from catch cloth found in Baubles: a material that responds to some unknown and otherwise undetected emanation of the sun. Privateers prize even small peices of look stone, a strange glass-like substance that when peered through allows the ability to see through solid object. 

The Revenger series presents, in part, professional treasure hunters focused on resource-oriented and practical aspects of their trade. There are few "monsters" presented--just the pirates and one other threat I won't give away. The dangers are traps or merely hazardous aspects of the environment.  These aspects make more solid inspirations for elements of D&D that don't usually get much of a showcase in fiction.

As I’ve been looking back at my last 40 years in the tabletop hobby, especially the transition from playing at home to getting involved in the wider community, this just wouldn’t have happened without Daniel Perez, known to many in the scene as Highmoon.

Daniel gave me this card at Gen Con 2011. I don’t think the contact information is current, but I keep the card!

I first crossed paths with Daniel back in the early 90s at Metro Comics. We had a lot of friends in common, though surprisingly, I don’t think we actually rolled dice at the same table back then.

Daniel eventually moved to the US, and we lost touch for a bit. But right around 2006, the internet did its thing. We reconnected while he was writing TTRPG supplements, posting about his games, and co-hosting a podcast about the origins of the Puerto Rico role-playing scene. He was always a key figure in supporting the island’s gaming scene in those days. Seeing him again at Gen Con in 2007, even just briefly, was fantastic.

Shortly after that, he invited me to join a group he had just created on Facebook in the early days: Puerto Rico Role Players.

That invitation completely changed the trajectory of my gaming life. Daniel brought me on as an administrator and relentlessly encouraged me to get online, connect with other gamers, and start blogging. He was the catalyst that pushed me out of my immediate circle and into the role of a community organizer. Without his initial push, my involvement with PR Role Players, my writing, and the connections I’ve made over the last couple of decades wouldn’t exist in the same way.

Daniel could not be with us at the first Geeknic in 2010, but we printed this.

Daniel is still pouring his creativity into his projects today. He has a fantastic collection of his own TTRPG games, zines, and supplements available online. If you appreciate indie creators who have been championing this hobby for decades, you absolutely need to check out his work.

You can find his games and zines over on his Gumroad page here: https://danielmperez.gumroad.com/

Take a look, grab a few PDFs, and support one of the foundational voices of the Boricua Gamers community!

 In the gritty, retro-future setting of Hostile, Ekranoplans represent the perfect middle ground between a slow-moving cargo ship and a high-maintenance aircraft. Utilizing Ground Effect—an aerodynamic phenomenon where a wing traveling close to a flat surface experiences increased lift and decreased drag—these "Wing-in-Ground" (WIG) craft are the workhorses of frontier ocean worlds like Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 Adapting Lovecraft’s Elder Things (or Old Ones) for a Cepheus Engine (or 2d6 Sci-Fi) campaign turns a cosmic horror story into a fascinating "Xeno-Archaeology" or "First Contact" sandbox. This blog post picks right up from Elder Things: Lovecraft's Ancient Aliens For Stars Without Number rpg & Cepheus Engine rpgSince they are essentially biological machines with a star-faring past,Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

In ancient times, the region was crossed by famous trade routes, and many nomadic groups passed through on their way to distant destinations. Today, the area lies mostly deserted, though it still bears traces of the once-great Anhurak. Among the sunken ruins, a few half-buried houses remain visible. At the center of the settlement rises the Hollow Tower, once home to the fabled Star Devourer.

This sixteen page adventure uses two pages to describe thirteen rooms in a tower with a one room tomb nearby. Overpowered opponents and lots of backstory detract from simple, plain rooms, also full of backstory. Worst of all, for a book telling you how to devour stars, there is no instruction on how to devour stars. 

Ok, so, there’s also a small number of hexes. The giant ant hex is a page long, with ¾ of it being backstory and explanations.  It ends with “When reaching the lair, roll 4d6 to determine how many Giant Ants are there. If the PCs find a way to explore the lair, it’s possible to find 1d10 × 1,000gp of gold nuggets, mined by the ants” That’s what you get. That’s what you get for a page. 

And that’s the story of this adventure. There are TONS of backstory and padding. The first real page of the adventure is number six, with backstory, with the tome up till then full of forwards and title pages and the like. I get it, PDF pages are free. But the actual adventure has to the focus on the writing. All of this trade dress, the seemingly deriguour of putting together an adventure, simply distracts the designer. You odn’t need it. Any of it. Put the effort in to the actual adventure.

Another hex has a simple one room tomb of The Star Devourer. Open the casket inside and you meet the 6HD AC2 dude. “He will speak to the party, pleading his case and complaining of the injustice he suffered.” I’m not sure why he is pleading. He’s already been freed by the time you speak to him. But, whatever. He sets about destroying your level ones. 

The main focus here is a small tower in a ruined city. We’re looking at four floors with about thirteen rooms. Exciting rooms such as “Kitchen: Where the servants plotted the coup. Contains three wall counters, a large central table, and flour sacks. 1d6 x 50 gp wine bottles are on the counters. The first time a bottle is taken, a Yellow Mold releases a spore cloud.” The coup being the plot to trap the dude in the tomb. Backstory. A very plain description. “ervants’ Quarters: Dusty, abandoned, and filled with simple beds.” Look, these sorts of rooms can work. Empty rooms serve a purpose in an adventure. And, certainly, an empty room doesn’t need to have the most evocative description ever written. But when the ENTIRE adventure is like that I have to wonder, where did things go wrong? What led someone to think that two pages of rooms in a sixteen page adventure was a great idea? 

We’re told in one place there are ghostly sightings in the garden. There are no ghostly sightings in the garden. There’s a room with three doors. “Right door” leads to a cold, frozen, empty region.” Huh? There’s a fucking stone golem in the tower. Level one?! Sure, sometimes a monster is actually a trap or a special, but this isn’t that. This is just a small tower with a stone golem in it. How do you do this?

The dude, the dude in the tomb, the central point of the adventure, The Star Devourer. Yup, he ate all the stars. Hope your game doesn’t have any. But, more to the point, room one has a book in it called “How to eat the stars”, detailing how to eat the stars. That’s it. Nothing more. Well, how do I eat the stars and what happens when I do? Yes, I realize we’re told the book is incomplete, but, what if I follow the instructions anyway? 

There’s no real adventure here, not really. There are some things to stab. There are some keys to find and doors to open. But it’s all in this extremely minimalistic style that provides absolutely no specificity at all. And, of course, all surrounded by lots of backstory.

I gave this one a shot because of the whole Star Devourer thing. I was wrong.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seven pages, which means you get to see all of the boilerplate shit and a page of backstory. Bad preview; it needs to show us what we’ll actually be playing so we can make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540864/fortnightly-adventures-0-the-hollow-tower-ose?1892600

My mission: to read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to the end of Crisis. This week, I'm looking at the comics that were on stands in the week of March 7, 1985. 

Best of DC #61: I haven't reviewed these digests since the earliest days of this blog series, but since I have mentioned this issue many times and how great I thought it was in my childhood (and I still do), I thought I should note it. If you only wanted to read one anthology of late pre-Crisis DC material to judge what it had to offer, this would be the one. We've got "Anatomy Lesson" from Swamp Thing, "Who is Donna Troy?" from New Teen Titans, "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?"from Legion of Super-Heroes, and "Final Duties" from Green Lantern, then lesser, but still notable stories: "Babe's Story" from Atari Force, "Killers Also Smile" from Sgt. Rock, "Viva Nebiros" from Blue Devil, and "If Superman Didn't Exist..." from Action Comics.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #3: I bought this issue off the stands as well. We get introduced to Alexander Luthor, last survivor of Earth-Three and an adolescent now composed of both matter and antimatter. He's in the care of the Monitor. Harbinger, meanwhile, is preparing for her betrayal.
Flash is somehow in the future (his series will get around to this, I'm sure!) and to escape a wall of antimatter, begins vibrating his molecules back in time--which again leads to us seeing him giving a desperate warning to Batman and the Outsiders and the Teen Titans in the 20th Century, as they try to save people from the antimatter wave in New York. Also in the present, though out in space, Brainiac becomes concerned about events and decides to seek out Lex Luthor.
In Markovia in 1944, the Monitor's chosen, Blue Beetle, Dr. Polaris, and Geo-Force, wind up fighting alongside a who's who of DC's war comics characters: Sgt. Rock and Easy, Stuart's Raiders, and the Losers. Those last wind up losing their lives to shadow demons.
Cyborg, Green Lantern, Psimon and Firebrand arrive in Texas in 1879. They meet up with several Western heroes including, Nighthawk, Scalphunter, Bat Lash, Johnny Thunder and Jonah Hex. The two disparate groups join forces and fight the shadow demons. Either what happens isn't clear or I missed something, but somehow Nighthawk winds up in a separate place from the group and is taken by the antimatter wave riding towards a town.
Other heroes fall: Psycho Kid is taken by the wave in the 30th Century. In Earth-AD, Solovar succumbs to his injuries suffered last issue. We're only 3 issues in and things are looking bad for the heroes!

Atari Force #18: Baron and Bareto/Villagran open with Tempest escaping from detention on New Earth, but he spends much of the issue lost in weirder corners of the multiverse until Dart is able to guide him to Scanner One. Scanner One has to get back home because supplies are running low, but the navigational path is a treacherous one. Dart, based on her vision, volunteers Blackjak for the task, and ultimately, Martin relents. Blackjak's new eye makes it an all but impossible task, but the Tazlings restore his mechanical one in time for him to get them to safety.
In the Hukka backup by Manak and Rogers/Delbeato, Young Christopher Champion takes Hukka with shopping with him to buy some action figures, but Hukka stays behind and the store closes. He gets chased by the security patrol dog. Christopher, realizing his pet is missing, uses his phasing powers to rescue the critter.

DC Comics Presents #82: Bates's story here is pretty good but elevated by Janson's art. Alanna is having recurrent nightmares and when she begins to mumble in Kryptonian, Adam Strange calls in Superman. It turns out Alanna is possessed by a Kryptonian demoness called Zazura, who is out to destroy Rann. When they figure out her presence on Rann is due to it passing through the area of space where Krypton was when it was destroyed 30 years ago, they are able to use a crystal harvested from Krypton's dust to weaken and destroy her. Superman also gets a chance to commune with other spirits of his lost homeworld, those of its people.

Fury of Firestorm #3: This issue isn't Kayanan's or Kupperberg's best interior art, though the cover is nice. Perhaps it was rushed? Storywise, Conway picks up where last issue left off, with Firestorm having been left for dead, Stein silent, apparently unconscious, and the Killer Frost/Plastique team headed for Niagara Falls. Firestorm pursues them, and luckily, he's helped in this second round by Firehawk. He takes down Plastique while Firehawk deals with Killer Frost. Later, Ronnie visits Stein in the hospital as he recovers from a concussion. Though he will miss him when the Professor moves to Pittsburgh, he now feels better able to go on without him--but when Doreen mentions college to him, Ronnie begins thinking that they can both go to school in Pittsburgh!

Jonni Thunder #3: Turns out Red Nails isn't just an exotic entertainer and club owner, she's also very much in the know regarding the statue and apparently able to put together an electrical super-weapon to threaten the city, cribbed from Tesla's notes! Jonni and Harrison Trump have to make common cause to escape Red and her Glamazons (that's what they're called!), then thwart her super-weapon. In between all that, 'Slim' Chance makes yet another attempt to steal the Thunderbolt statue.

Justice League of America #238: In the beginning of the issue, Conway and Hoberg/Patton address the continuity problems created by Superman, Wonder Woman, and Flash being away for "weeks" while the old JLA was disbanded and a new one formed, all while having ongoing adventures in their own titles--and Flash even being on trial. The solution: "Crisis did it," which may make this the first appearance of that explanation that will get used quite a bit in years to come. The issue ends with the 3 going back in time via Flash's treadmill to not "create a paradox."
That out of the way, we get down to Vixen having her final confrontation with her uncle. He kidnaps Mother Windom to provoke her, and Aquaman seems to use his telepathy to briefly stop her from going after him, but Martian Manhunter intervenes and reproves him for his coercive tactics. Maksai dies as a result of his actions, and Vixen's father is avenged.

Shadow War of Hawkman #2: The editorial notes in place of a letter column in this issue make clear that Isabella is engaged in sort of Thomas-like retcon and streamlining of the Hawk mythos, which I suppose makes this the first in an almost continuous history of such from the mid-80s on. In the main story, the Shadow War continues with the murder of a mutant who is just practicing with his flight powers. In Midway City, Katar Hol prepares to go after the attackers. He tracks them to their cave hideout and meets their leader Fell Andar. He first has the upper hand, but they manage to capture him when he is shocked by his discovery that they are Thanagarians.

Tales of the Teen Titans #54: Buckler does interior pencils here, though Barreto proves the cover. The trial of the Flash uh, Terminator continues, and it isn't going well, because in the New York state of the DCU if they don't have an admitted super-criminal super-soldier with links to a terrorist organization beyond a reasonable doubt on a murder wrap, they've just gotta let him go! So decides Judge Adrian (Vigilante) Chase. Anyway, Slade is helped in escaping justice by the mysterious impersonator who creates doubt that he is in fact the Terminator. This turns out to be Gar Logan using Mento's helmet to project an image. He wants Slade free to he can seek his own justice. Meanwhile, Azrael pines for Lilith and Lilith wonders about his past. This stuff might build tension if it all hadn't been explored in the past couple of issues of the sister title.

Vigilante #18: After painting Linnaker as a relentless killer last issue, Moore and Biakie move to at least humanize him a bit by revealing his thoughts in a letter he wrote to his daughter from prison. As he searches for a way to get out of town with a terrified Jodie, Fever and Vigilante keep up their uneasy partnership to try to track the two down. In the end, Vigilante and Linnaker engage in a brutal fight, but Jodie grabs a gun and shoots Vigilante, not her father. Fever runs over Linnaker with a car, however, and keeps on doing it until he's definitely dead. Jodie in horror starts to shoot her, but Vigilante takes the gun. In the aftermath, Vigilante is trouble by all of this, and by what he read in Linnaker's unsent letter, including attacks on the hyprocrisy of society and the nature of judgement. 

I got the chance to run my party out in the wilderness of the Borderland's wilderness and wastelands. They encountered a hunter's cabin and things went down hill from there as they lost one fighter and a cleric. If you'e running a Barrows & Borderlands session and want to drop in the "Warning Signs" from the 1980 cult classic Without Warning, you're looking at a Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By 2007, I had been playing at Sammy’s house for about two years. We were deep into my second D&D 3.5 run, having just wrapped a Tri-Stat dX sci-fi game—set in the same universe as an Alternity campaign we’d played years prior. But I wasn’t just there for my own sessions; I was constantly dropping in on other games at Sammy’s, too.

The Hideout of the Mequetrefes

To the best of my knowledge, Sammy’s house was the original location of the first FLGS in Puerto Rico: The Role-Playing Emporium. I’ve erroneously identified it as the Gaming Emporium in the past, but more on that later! Although the store had closed years before, Sammy kept the old shelves and some inventory in an apartment at the back of the house. It was anchored by a gaming table with a large, gridded, erasable board affixed right to the top.

Sammy and Tato at the Lair of the Mequetrefes

It was a mix of game room, man cave, and den of iniquity, with a rotating crew of gamers, young and old, sitting at that table. He called his crew the Mequetrefes (good-for-nothings or busybodies).

Peter, a longtime friend and former regular in our group, had moved on to other campaigns at Sammy’s. I believe he was the one who started organizing the trip to Gen Con 2007, though I heard about it from one of my players, Luis Alvarado.

I had always wanted to go to Gen Con, so I was immediately on board. In 2007, along with Sammy, Peter, Luis, Tato, and Piwie, we made the pilgrimage to the holy land of gaming in Indiana. It was a magical time, and honestly, it deserves its own separate post. Strangely enough, I didn’t meet many new gamers there; I mostly stuck to my pack and didn’t branch out much while in Indianapolis.

From left to right: Peter, Luis, Roberto (me), Piwie, Sammy, Tato, Roberto (me again!), Sammy, Piwie, Daniel, and Tato

I did, however, run into a long-time friend: Daniel Perez, better known as Highmoon.

The Highmoon!

Let’s rewind. I met Daniel at Metro Comics in the early 90s. He came to my house a few times, and we had friends in common, though I don’t think we ever actually played together back then. He also spent a lot of time at the Role-Playing Emporium, so Sammy was another link between us.

He eventually moved to the US, and we lost touch for a while, but social media helped us reconnect. Daniel was a key figure in supporting the Puerto Rico gaming community in the early 2000s. By around 2006, he was writing TTRPG supplements, posting about his games, and hosting a podcast with our mutual friend, Braulio.

I listened to at least two episodes where they discussed the origins of the PR TTRPG scene. Braulio actually owned a store called Gaming Emporium—a tribute to Sammy’s Role-Playing Emporium. (And there lies the source of my confusion between the two names!) I remember talking to Daniel back then about wanting to do more for the island’s gaming community.

Seeing him at Gen Con in 2007, however briefly, was amazing. We stayed in contact, and in the early days of Facebook, he invited me to a group he had created: Puerto Rico Role Players.

Boricuas Roleros

That group was transformative for me. It connected me to a broader gaming community, some I knew, many I didn’t. Daniel made me an administrator and encouraged me to get online, connect with other gamers, and start blogging.

I wasn’t quite ready for the blogging part yet, so I poured my passion into growing Puerto Rico Role Players. Slowly but surely, the group expanded. Around 2008 or 2009, we tried to organize a Thanksgiving meet-up. I know Vincent (a fellow admin), Gilberto, and others made it, though I couldn’t attend. By 2009, members were meeting informally at small-genre cons on the island, and we decided it was time to organize an official event to promote the group and teach new players how to play.

While this was going on, I began reading blogs and leaving comments, which led me to another pivotal figure in my life.

Enter the Stargazer

Michael and I were talking the other day, and we think we started writing back and forth around 2008. It is strange to have such a dear friend whom I write to almost every day but have never met in person. Over the past 18 years, Michael has become someone I respect and care about deeply.

He invited me to collaborate on his blog. I was reluctant at first, but his and Daniel’s encouragement, combined with the work I was doing with Puerto Rico Role Players, finally pushed me to write my first post.

2010 Was a Great Year

Puerto Rico Role Players at Central Fan Fest 3, March 2nd, 2010

• February 19th: I wrote my first post for Stargazer’s World!
• March 2nd: We held the first official Puerto Rico Role Players event at Central Fan Fest 3 in Cidra, sharing our love for TTRPGs and running demos.
• April 11th: We hosted our first Geeknic—a picnic for geeks where we ate, played games, and bonded as a community.

The first Geeknic, April 11th, 2010

A year later, in 2011, after two more Geeknics, we held a “Geek Caucus” for volunteers and organized a group of admins to keep the momentum going.

Geek Caucus at Sizzler

I continued posting regularly here at Stargazer’s World. In February of that same year, a local newspaper even interviewed me for a special section on hobbies (I’ve been interviewed twice since then for other articles and videos). I also returned to Gen Con in 2011, this time with press credentials, writing coverage for the blog.

Gen Con 2011

In the years since, Puerto Rico Role Players has organized 29 Geeknics, Painting Days, demos at local conventions, Halloween Spooktaculars, and holiday events. I jumped into #RPGChat and joined RPG a Day the year after it began, posting on the blog, social media, and eventually my YouTube channel.

From the Pit

By 2017, I was fully immersed. I was blogging intermittently, the admin for PR Role Players, running demos, and engaging with the online world. Then I had another crazy idea: Why not stream a game?

That year, my friend Carlos Steffens opened a new FLGS, The Gaming Pit. I wanted to playtest the new edition of Alternity, and I thought: what better way to support him and the new game than to stream the adventure live?

The Alternity playtesters

It was a very amateurish Facebook endeavor, full of silly mistakes—like starting the stream with the camera sideways. I only intended to do two sessions and be done, but the group got hooked. Through that game, I connected with two PR Role Players members, José García and Felipe, and reconnected with AJ, whom I knew from the old Metro Comics days.

We decided to keep the cameras rolling, and Desde La Fosa (literally From the Pit) was born.

We played Star Frontiers, FrontierSpace, Silent Legions, the Free RPG Day Torg adventure, World Wide Wrestling, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2e, and I’m sure I’m forgetting others. You can see some of those games on the Desde la Fosa YouTube channel. It was never a professional studio production, but we had so much fun.

And then Hurricane María happened.

It changed everything. That is a subject for a future post, covering the next period in my gaming history.

“But wait!” you say. “This was all about community in the larger TTRPG context. What about your actual weekly game? The people you play with?”

Well, that’s the subject for the NEXT post. You did notice the title said, “Part 1,” right?

 The player's PC's pierced the inner fields of the Mictlin empire & the undead moved as one! The party got into the inner line of the Xibalba. This session picks right up from Aethel, the Sunken Core Inner Earth Sword & Sorcery Campaign Adventure Using both Castles & Crusades (C&C) and Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars (NSW) Rpg - MictlanThe Setting: The Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

A character sheet is supposed to help you play. It isn’t supposed to define the limits of what you can try.
As RPGs have grown, character builds have gotten deeper and more detailed. More abilities. More exceptions. More clearly defined tricks. That gets framed as more freedom, and in one sense it is. You have more mechanical levers to pull.
The problem starts when those levers become the first thing players reach for.
Instead of looking at the room and asking what might work, players look at the sheet and ask what they’re allowed to do. If something isn’t written down, it feels unofficial.
Nothing in the rules says you can’t improvise. But over time, people learn what the system rewards.
Players who’ve seen both styles can push past that. They know the sheet isn’t the ceiling. But if someone has only ever played games where action runs through defined abilities, that structure just feels normal. They aren’t choosing it. They were trained into it.
That’s the real shift.
A tabletop RPG isn’t meant to live inside the four corners of your character sheet. It’s a world with weight, distance, obstacles, and risk. The sheet tells you who you are in that world. It doesn’t tell you what the world allows.
When the sheet becomes the game, choice turns into optimization. When the world comes first, choice turns into judgment.
Those are two very different experiences.

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Endless is the punishment of those that dare challenge divinity… Deep within an endless steppe, a weathered mausoleum stands alone. Its ancient walls, once adorned with beautiful carvings, are naught more than blank stone, marked by time. It would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the incessant howling spewing from its darkened depths.

This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe seven rooms in an old tomb complex. I can get behind the concepts of a couple of the encounters, but the text is abstracted, the tomb small, and the treasure pretty much nonexistent. 

Endless punishment for those that dare challenge divinity?!?!  Qui audet adipiscitur!

This is a small tomb that always has a howling sound coming from it. It’s got a couple of things inside of it that are almost quite good. We’ve got some undead trapped in a room, screaming, their hands reduced to bloody stumps from clawing at the walls to get out. In another, undead beg to be released from their curse, holding armsfulls of charms and amulets and stuff draped from their hands. Very nice specificity there. That’s a great example of brief specificity that can really ground an encounter and make it come alive. IN another place you’ve got these two desert nomads trapped in a room, jailed there, so to speak, by the local nomads while they try and figure out what to do with them. One “Kidnapped multiple infants and left them to die in his anger about his own lack of children.” and will backstab the party if they find any significant treasure, while the second killed her brother in cold blood and “Stands by what she did, will help in a fight but is headstrong and does not like being challenged.” Again, great specificity that really gives the DM something to run with while playing them. If the entire adventure was like this then I’d be in a much different mood this morning. There’s also this little wandering table for an encounter in the desert leading to the tomb. The people encounters on there are integrated in to the rumor table, so, if you give the nomad, who is asking for water, some then he will give you a rumor. That’s a nice touch.

But, alas, it is not.

The tomb is quite small, with its seven rooms. These small adventures don’t really have room to breathe, so encounters like those two nomads are not really going to have much room to play out. There are these limitations that come with these short dungeons and they don’t mesh really well with the more dynamic and potential energy that something like the nomads could bring. And, of course, there’s not much exploration complexity here with only seven rooms. You’re looking at a simple star design, with a central room and six rooms hanging directly off of it. The central room has a puzzle that opens the last door, to the core heretic, so there is at least some not stabbing here. 

There’s a disconnect here between the dungeon environment and what’s actually going on inside. The setup is that the tomb “howls”, but you don’t really get any howling until you open the final door. Those undead clawing at the doors? Nope. The nomads locked in their room? Nope. This should be a noisy place but you’d never know it from the text. I really don’t like a “oh, yeah, you hear a lot of yelling” that only happens once you open a door and the DM gets to the text they need to read. This kind of light/noise/monster reactions are a sort point for me, in review after review. A room is not stand along thing, it exists in an environment and the DM needs help understanding that environment without making a lot of map and margin notes themselves. 

Each room leads off with a short one to two line sentence (in italics. UG! Tis the old wound ..) that is … I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s read-aloud or a summary or what. “The mausoleum’s ancient stonework is slowly succumbing to the elements. Spine-tingling howls echo from the decaying doorway.” This is not the most evocative description ever. “An angelic statue sits behind a stone sarcophagus that emits the constant, ear-piercing howl that gives the tomb its name.” Nor this. “Four statues of ancient gods adorn this long, dry chamber. Their judging gaze falls upon an elaborately carved door at the far end.” It just seems abstracted to me. A summary of the room, not a brief description. Maybe the lack of adjectives or adverbs to liven them up? The entrance is super bring, that “slowly succumbing to the elements.” It has a bend of fiction writing to it, rather than adventure writing, a common ailment with designers. I know evocative writing is hard, but this is something else. Like people are afraid to actually write a description of the room that means something. 

And the details of the room fall in to this same problem. Ancient gods? Which ones? How do I know they are ancient gods? Gods of what? It’s like someone write “there’s a temple to a god here,” Uh. Ok. That could mean anything, and it’s little better than ‘you enter a room.” 

Trease is light. VERY light. This is, I think, a symptom of “OSR.” It can mean just about anything these days, from treasure light to gold=xp or something similar. “Each deserter holds d4 religious paraphernalia such as charms and rosaries worth 5gp each.” We all know the real treasure is in the lairs, but this IS he lair. The final room does get you some magic plate and sword, but up till then it’s mostly drinking money. 

It’s constrained by its size and the descriptions tend to be abstracted. Good bulleting to help the DM run it, but the lack of specificity is jarring. And, space is wasted on explanations. Spending a third of a page on the heretics backstory buys us nothing. Wasting space on a shrubbery table doesn’t help us. This needs to be trimmed and the extra space focused in. The end result of this is a rather bland adventure.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Show us an encounter so we can make an informed purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555055/the-howling-tomb?1892600

With our Land of Azurth campaign nearing its conclusion, I've been thinking about what might come after. Or more truthfully, I've thought of several things that could come after in the last few months as I've felt the end was nigh.

Currently, I've been considering a variation on an idea I've had before: a high adventure occasionally dungeoneering fantasy world inspired by Japanese Standard (Western) Fantasy. Magitech will plan a big role in the setting, and there will be a loose approach to anachronism (even looser than standard D&D settings). This sort of setting will also support the expansive "ancestries" available these days in 5e and high action combat.

The incursion of "demons" (more like the broader D&Dism of fiends than the specifically chaotic evil variety) in service of a Demon King that will reside in the dark side of the physical world rather than a separate plane. I think the world will be shape like an inverted bowl with the demon world being within the concave surface. The "rim" will be the Terminator, a region that never sees more of the sun than twilight and holds numerous lonely fortifications to watch for demonic incursion.

To the extent that it will be variant from standard D&D, I don't worry much about my players accepting it. They've been playing in Azurth for over a decade so that shouldn't be a problem! I do want it to be distinct from Azurth though to provide a somewhat different experience.

 Gemini saidAdapting Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné for the Barbaric! RPG (a lightweight, 2D6-based system) requires capturing his duality: he is a physically frail sorcerer who becomes an unstoppable engine of destruction when fueled by his soul-drinking blade.In Barbaric!, characters are defined by their Traits (Combat, Sorcery, etc.) and Boons/Flaws. Here is how to build the White Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 Here is the artwork for Silas Vane, "The Glitch," depicting him in his chaotic underground workshop, surrounded by the prototypes and bioware described in his NPC profile. This profile picks up right from Superpowered! Supplement for The Quantum Engine rpg & The Pulp Hero The Master of Men The Spider.Since the 2d6 Superpowered system thrives on characters with high utility and Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

When I got into gaming in the 80s, my other gaming friends and I used to say "shotgun game" when we got together and had no plans and decided to play some D&D. "I'll run a shotgun game" was a common phrase. It just meant you were going to run something on the fly, zero prep or low prep.

Comes from the idea of a shotgun wedding, where a guy knocks up a girl and then her father forces him to marry her, at the point of a gun. The idea, I think, is that since you are typically the DM, you're kind of forced into the arrangement when you friends wanted to game all of a sudden.

I've fished around online for this phrase and I can't find where it is in use in this context. If anyone knows otherwise, has used it themselves in the past, or understands where it came from, comment and let me know. I'm just curious about it.

Is this hyper local RPG lingo? Maybe just my gaming friends invented it. I don't know. I picked it up from them, though. I didn't originate the phrase. I believe one of my original DMs got it from some older kids who taught him how to play D&D in the early 80s. 

By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

In a lonely glade stands the abandoned tower of a once-legendary wizard. They say he kept great wealth and magical wonders hidden inside, but he vanished long ago and with him went the secret location of his treasure. Is there something to these rumors, or is the tower merely the sad legacy of a dead wizard?

This nineteen page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe about 35 locations in a small wizards tower and the dungeon underneath. Hidden depth without extreme obtuseness, it follows up on classic hiding place and delivers on both Ruins vibe and Magical Wonder vibe. 

I’m gonna botch some, right up front, and then tell you about the things this does right, which is quite a bit. This needed a very hard pass in editing to trim the text. It’s not really engaging in any of the classic bloated text issues, it just needs a real hard pass to get the focus tightened up and perhaps just a tad more in the way of formatting to help focus the DM in on the important bits. I think the text is probably just a tad too conversational, which combines a bit with a need to work on the evocative writing.  The evocative bit gets a pass, it’s hard, I know, but it also needs to be there. Here is “Kitchen”, for example: “Between a pair of open windows on the NE wall stands a battered iron stove with a toppled pipe. Next to it is an empty coal box. A pile of debris and smashed furniture clutters the SE corner. More kobold tracks enter and exit the room. [Para Break] The debris includes the remains of pantry shelves, a butcher’s block, and a shattered porcelain basin. Concealed under the pile is a trapdoor in the floor which opens into an enclosed stairway down to the cellar (T12).” Focusing just on the writing, this isn’t terrible but the sentence structure is a bit passive in places. “Between a pair” , and almost certainly irrelevant. It needs a few more adjectives tossed in and a bit of the padding tossed out. It’s decent, but I always want to see magnificence. \

There’s also this mania present, that is seen from time to time with certain designers, with dimensions. “Throughout this adventure, measurements are described in terms of feet (‘) and inches (“); dimensions in terms of length (l), width (w), height (h), depth (d), diameter (dm), and radius (r); and cardinal directions in terms of North (N), South (S), East (E), and West (W). Map grid scale = (5’sq) in the tower and (10’sq) in the dungeon.” Dude has some unresolved trauma, obviously, the same way I do with Castle Greyhawk. 

Ok, done bitching I guess. 

The vibe here is really old abandoned wizards tower. Like, three stories high. Walls crumbling, Holes in the roof. Getting close to “mostly ruins.” And those tower levels really bring that vibe. Vines growing about. Weakened floors if you cross over the middle of them, treacherous stairways. Dust. A giant spider lurking. A couple of centipedes. It has that classic ruined gatehouse vibe going on, with debris and vermin. And then, if you pay the fuck attention, it transforms. You might gain entrance to the dungeon level. Which is a full on Colored Mists.archways/magical effects everywhere place, complete with illusory wizard welcoming you. Congrats, you made it to the ACTUAL adventure! All of that hard work and cleverness up top in the ruins paid off and now you can really dig in to the twenty rooms in the dungeon. 

I’m really up on the classic elements, especially up top. Holes in the walls and roof, vines up the side of the tower for alternate entry points. The center of the floor being weak so you better walk along the edges. A chimney, with giant centipede up it if you go poking around for treasure (which there is.) Old moldy ragged falling apart carpet, waterlogged. With a key hidden under it. And the vines up the side? Poisin fucking ivy.  Whens the last fucking time you saw poison ivy in an adventure?! I fucking love it. You are embedded in the mundane rather than exoticism, at least in the tower ruin. The whole of the encounters, the challenges, work to create this awesomeness of a grounded vibe.

Are you paying the fuck attention? Cause upstairs, in all the dust, is one spot in the floor WITHOUT dust, that contains an invisible cabinet. Downstairs, in the kitchen, that pile of debris? Did you move it? Cause there’s a trapdoor under it to the basement. And if you find the trapdoor, and the invisible cabinet, and some other shit, then, in the basement, you can find the entrance to the dungeon.

And we have a full on wizard illusion in the entryway that is all “Welcome Adventurers!” He’s hidden his great treasures here … and it’s a puzzle/challenge dungeon. Not my favorite genre. But, as there things go, not terribly done. 

“Surrounding the central column but concealed by dust and found only by sweeping the area clear, is a pattern of 16 wedge-shaped stones (10’dm).“ You did sweep the dust in the room, right? To find the concealed holes on the floor? No? This isn’t Knutz bad, as far as the hidden depth shit goes, but it’s also very clearly for people paying attention. The puzzle rooms can get long, think a page or so, and there are decent number of them in the twenty. There are clues in the dungeon in one place that lead to solutions elsewhere. Obtuse clues. “Anyone viewing the tapestry for more than 1 round sees the scene animate: The wizard and his mount race alongside two more horses that enter the frame (3 horses total). This is a clue to the button code in D7 (Summer = #3).” 

But the magical effects here are wondrous also. In that same room, a gallery, there’s a picture of a knight and green dragon battle “The viewer sees the figures animate in battle, but when the dragon rears back and unleashes its breath weapon, an actual cloud of chlorine gas fills a (20’dm) area in front of the painting. Anyone in the area must save vs. Breath or die. If all affected creatures make successful saves, the cloud transforms into a shower of 500 gp instead.” That’s fun! It FEELS like magic. The puzzles are tough. The place is deadly. But it doesn’t feel unfair or gimpy, just unusual in 2026. . 

I’m going to leave you with this room description. You tell me what’s interesting.”Smashed furniture, dirt, and leaves pile up against the walls. Between the open windows on the SE wall stands a mildewed stone fireplace, long cold. The floor is filthy, though a moldy, rotten rug covers the middle. Pieces of a wooden chandelier dangle limply from the rafters.” I’ll wait, lah lah lah. Tradoor under the debris. Centipedes up the chimney, along with a treasure. Key under the rug. That’s a decent amount of interactivity in one room.

Classic ruins, classic dungeon. Decent enough room descriptions with great interactivity. Hard as fuck, from a “are you paying attention to findthe hidden shit” standpoint. Could use tightened up, a lot, and maybe a few more adjectives sprinkled in. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and shows you the upper rooms and several dungeon rooms. More than enough to get a chance two see the two vibes, the hidden depth, and what the puzzles can be like in the dungeon. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553734/bergummo-s-tower?1892600

 Gemini saidIn H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, the Elder Things (also known as the Old Ones) represent a shift from supernatural horror to science fiction. Unlike the chaotic, god-like entities common in the Cthulhu Mythos, the Elder Things were a highly advanced, biological race that governed Earth millions of years before humans existed.Physical AnatomyThe Elder Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

I love old school D&D, but I don't want to tie all my work to it. The setting implied or described in Black Pudding is important to me and I want it to have its own original RPG at some point. Of course the Black Pudding Play Book will always be around, but I'm probably going to do another game at some point for the world of Pan-Gea > Yria.

Here's a system I'm mucking around with right now. It's from 1998 or so, before I even got online. It's very basic, which is what appeals to me. I ran it many times back then and it was mostly GM rulings because there was almost no rules written down for it other than this:

Spend 20 points on any kind of traits you like. Roll 1d20 + Trait vs. a target number or an opposing roll. Each adventure you earn 1-3 points and you can spend them to add or improve Traits.

In recent times I've developed the idea further to give it more tooth and grit. I like it.

Of course it's also very possible that the game will use GOZR rules. Right now I'm torn between these two darlings of mine. Story of my life.

But both feature rolling 1d20 + mods vs. a target number so you can call me a basic bitch all you want. It's fine. I own that shit.

In the Latter Ages of Earth, it is known that the scientist mages of more lucent eras spoke of an invisible, co-existing realm. Scholars know this as the Plane of Shadow. It is long been rumored that there are artifacts allowing minds or shadows to be translated into this shadow realm. These legendary artifacts are known as black mirrors. 

The Plane of Shadow is no ethereal realm, but a place of matter as solid as any, but it remains aloof and invisible. It only interaction is with gravity, so that there might well be whole ecologies of this shadow matter upon the Earth unknown to the mundane world. 

If the black mirrors truly exist, it implies that there is or once was, a civilization or entity on the other side capable of constructing some sort of form for a mind passing through. If such a Shadow or intelligence civilization exists, they could well have some means of sending agents into the world of mundane matter as well.

 So lately I've been looking into Quantum Engine's Superpowered! to possibly pull off a Pulp era heroes campaign. And one of the my all time favorites is The master of men aka The Spider. I became aware of the Spider through reading the magazines from my uncle. I inherited the original Pulp magazines. According the Spider's Wiki entry, ' The Spider stories often involve a bizarre menaceNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0