Zine Review: Black Pudding: Heavy Helping Vol. 2

Author: James V. West & Various Contributors

Publisher: Random Order Creations

System: Labyrinth Lord, OSR Compatible

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG 

 I have been looking forward to reading, using, and reviewing Black Pudding Heavy Helping vol. 2 for a very long time. That I somehow missed its publication is mark of shame upon my standing as an OSR nerd. Especially as Black Pudding: Heavy Helping Vol. 1 was everything I loved about the Old School Renaissance in one place. And doubly so as Heavy Helping vol. 2 is more of the same only better.

Black Pudding HHv2 is the collected material from issues 5-8 of James V. West's Black Pudding Zine  rearranged for easy navigation. BPHHv2 includes character sheets, character  classes, magic items, NPC hirelings and villains, monsters, adventures, a pantheon of gods, a sizable campaign setting, and a set of house rules that can be used in almost any OSR system. 

The mechanics are mostly written with Labyrinth Lord in mind, with occasional references as well to Swords & Wizardry and DCC RPG. As usual, conversion is pretty easy with the exception of the problem that Black Pudding assumes race as class as the default. Even then, extracting the racial traits from the class traits in order to convert racial classes into PC races is incredibly easy.

And as before, the art, tone, and ideas presented in Black Pudding are my kind of off-the-wall gonzo, comic-bookish, and very Punk.

What I Loved

Character Sheets

I first learned about James v West's work through his character sheets, which are frequently circulated around the internet. His intense, cartoony, Payo-influenced work really spoke to me. Whenever I play games with my family I print off some of his wild and wonderful character sheets.

Art

And the Art really does deserve some additional attention: I love James West's art style. It draws a lot from 80s skate-punk aesthetic mixed with French comics and cartoons. It is frenetic, weird, and unique. And it appears on pretty much every page of the 'zines. I don't think there is a bad piece anywhere in the book. It is brimming with chainmail bikinis, muscle-bound barbarians, eyeball monsters, serpents, slime, and cool swords.

Classes

BPHHv2 has a sizable collection of classes designed to be played in a B/X based OSR game.

Alien: a strange martian with the ability to cause potion effects with their mysterious psychic powers. 

Beastfriend: hey character with a supernatural ability to call, calm, and befriend creatures in Wild places. 

Boola: a feminine being who raises, nurtures, and is in turn protected by monsters. 

Death Witch: A Very metal magic user with reduced spellcasting ability and a chance to die every time they learn a new spell. However, they have the ability to speak to the dead and undead, command the undead like an evil cleric, and place a curse on beings that deals damage equal to their current hit points. I also have a chance of coming back from the dead every time they are killed. 

Demodyn: a tiny minor demon with the ability to conjure and manipulate fire, and who exudes a corrupting aura. 

Eyeball: a giant eyeball with arms and legs that has thief abilities and sharp perception but can be blinded by bright lights. 

The fat lady: a heavily armored female opera singer who can enhance her strength, boost her allies, or deaf and her enemies with the power of her voice. 

Feral Knight: a penitent night who has given up armor and weapons after becoming a hermit to repent for some misdeed. As the character advances they gain some clerical and paladin-like abilities, and slowly regain their ability to use the armor and weapons they shed when they became a hermit. 

Fighting wombat: a tough anthropomorphic wombat who has a higher Armor class from behind and the ability to dig at High speeds. 

Flamer: a pyrokinetic character that takes its inspiration from Johnny blaze/the Human torch of the fantastic four. 

Goon Royale: a shaggy humanoid thug with a razor sharp bite that can latch on to his foes and keep gnawing and who climbs like a thief.

Iggy: Iggy pop as a D&D class: a hyperactive bare-knuckle-brawling, shirtless lunatic that never sleeps, is almost never surprised, and gains bonuses when doing things that are stupidly dangerous.

Ninja: a slow-leveling variant of a thief with the ability to use smoke bombs, a high chance of surprising enemies, enhanced ranged attack abilities, and a chance of instant death blows on a backstab.

Norg: A lesser giant with resistance to cold and the ability to communicate with polar bears.

Orbii: tiny, round smurf-like creatures who were once created by a moon goddess to protect her daughters, their holy purpose is long concluded. At first level they get one ability such as a single spell-like power or thief skill. Once per day they can pray for the moon goddess to show her affection and gain a random blessing.

Rat Bastard: a thieving lesser were-rat.

We've already included some Orbii and Death Witches in home games to a lot of laughs. They do a great job of classy setting design to create an off-the-wall gonzo D&D world. 

NPCs 

Like the previous Black Pudding: Heavy Helping collection, this volume includes a section called "Meatsheilds of the Bleeding Ox" with a collection of 33 potential hirelings or henchmen using the classes and abilities published in Black Pudding. A few of these NPCs use classes from the previous volume and may be difficult to use if you don't have the other volume.

This isn't just a showcase of characters that use the new classes, it also includes a few standard OSR-compatible NPCs from classic B/X classes and some truly unique and quirky NPCs, like a damaged alien robot and a haggard level-0 commoner who has an infestation of invisible imps tasked with protecting him no matter what.

The characters here are strange, quirky, and fun. The way they are presented with "turn-ons", "turn-offs" and a 1-3 sentence backstory gives you a lot of material for characterizing them. I've already included several of them in a home campaign.

Magic Items 

BPHHv2 includes 3 unique spellbooks with unusual spells and rituals built around a unique theme and NPC wizard that creates a lot of flavor for the purposes of magic. It also includes 14 named unique magical weapons that are replete with bizarre powers, fun backstories, and an excessive number of puns. They are a prime example of how a magic item can be used to create incredible depth to your game.

Adventures

BPHHv2 has a selection of location-based adventures in a variety of formats including:

• a full-sized dungeon: "The Rat-Queen Dies Tonight" 
• a five-room dungeon style game: "Ghilki's Hole"
• a one-page dungeon: "Climb the Ice Stairs to Discover your Fate" 
• A detailed and well-designed single encounters: "A Trolling We Will go" 
• and an outdoor hex crawl: "The Standing Stones of Marigold Hill" 

All of which have tie-ins to material (classes, monsters, or magic items) presented elsewhere in the compendium, and have the uniquely manic, comic-book energy that makes Black Pudding unique. You can see the full range of popular adventure structures common in the OSR all in one place.

Settings

Beyond the single adventures, BPHHv2 includes a pair of extremely large evironments that are better thought of as campaign settings filled with smaller adventure sites.

"Underground Down Below" is a massive underdark "mapcrawl" style adventure that reminds me a lot of "Into the Depths of the Earth", a labyrinth with numerous small caverns and wondrous locations that have their own factions and ways of interacting to make it dynamic.

"Adventures in the North" is a massive hex-crawl in a barbaric frozen frostfell style environment complete with encounter tables, unique monsters, settlements with complex NPCs, rumor tables, and a handful of faction conflicts. It is bare-bones because of limited space, but would be more than enough to start a campaign and keep it rolling until the mid-levels.

It also has a Black Pudding Gazetteer detailing a world that fits the wild, gonzo material in the magazine thus far. The world of Yria is presented in a large world map with various regions given 1-2 paragraph details, while major city-states are given their own page with a number of random tables with encounters, sights, sound, and weather designed to do a lot of heavy lifting on world building.

Yria also has a fairly sizable pantheon of a dozen gods and a mythos that describes how the interrelate and how the gods relate to the world and each other, along with a creation myth in brief.

Random Tables and Rules Hacks

I love the random tables in Black Pudding; they are often very case specific, odd, and many of them would rarely be useful except for brainstorming, but they are great for mining for inspiration in much the same way Jason Sholtis' The Dungeon Dozen books are.

Tables with titles like "The goblin touched your stuff and now it...", "Then a robot walks in...", "The Wizard is Pissed Of and You are a Target of...", "Overheard Drunken Conversations", or "The PCs Run Across an Island of Hot Amazons..." can lighten up even the most taxing prep session and immediately lighten the tone of any adventure design.

Layout

The Black Pudding zine is hand-drawn and hand written with frenetic energy and fun art. It may not always be the best organized, but every page is fun to look at and brimming with creativity.

Growth Points 

I want a Tank in D&D Now...

One of the villains presented in the bestiary in Black Pudding Heavy Helping volume 2 is Zasto Fillistan, a viscious, ill-tempered wizard with an appetite for destruction, and a wide range of strange objects stolen from other planes of reality. Among his extraplanar curiosities is a "Wand of rapid fire" (an assault rifle) and "Shar-Man, the Rolling Fortress" (a Sherman tank enchanted to burn wine for fuel). While Earthly objects are far from unusual in D&D, that one is a pretty wild choice; and I know for a fact that my players would stop at nothing to get their hands on it, and woe betide the foolish GM who lets it fall into a PC's hands. But seeing it has made me desperately and irrationally want to include tank warfare in my current DCC campaign. 

Reliant on Content from BPHHv1

Okay, now for a serious complaint. There is a lot of material here that refers back to material in earlier issues of Black Budding. You will not be able to use about 10% of the book without either earlier volumes of Black Pudding or a copy of Black Pudding Heavy Helping volume 1. This is to be expected when you are buying a compendium of magazines, so I suppose it is to be expected, but it is something that one should be aware of before buying, and is worth mentioning on the sales page.

Consistency

Black Pudding does not really stick to one set of conventions for OSR gaming. Some classes and monsters are clearly built for Swords & Wizardry, others for Labyrinth Lord or Old School Essentials, and yet others include elements for DCC RPG or OSRIC. With a 'zine that is definitely a raw, creative endeavor I am not really surprised that it includes material that is for whatever takes the contributor at the moment, but I would love for it to be a tiny bit more consistent so that there is less conversion work to do.

Definitely Not for Serious Campaigns 

While some of the magic items and monsters could be dropped into a campaign world, Black Pudding in general is focused on weird, gonzo, and decidedly silly game play. Add almost anything from it is going to definitely make you game sillier. That's not a bad thing, but it is something that people need to be aware of.

The Underdark Map

The map for "Underground Down Below" is really dense and can be hard to read. It desperately needs to be put on a two-page spread to make it easier to process. There's just too much going on to be contained on one page and still be easily interpreted.

Nothing for Gozr?

Black Pudding's early issues had a myriad of rules hacks and suggestions that accumulated in a very tightly-presented "Black Pudding RPG", a light, fast-playing B/XD&D based game. Eventually this was separately published by James V. West as GOZR. I am truly surprised we hear practically nothing about GOZR anywhere in BPHHv2 at all, it seems like it would make a lot of sense to point players to GOZR for reference to material that had also appeared in early issues of Black Pudding, and it seems like a lost opportunity not to draw attention to it and use Black Pudding as a platform for expanding GOZR specifically.

Conclusions 

I have come to really look forward to new installations of Black Pudding. It is  frenetic, silly, gonzo, Punk AF D&D that isn't afraid of a little edgy humor. In fact, I deeply appreciate that Black Pudding knows exactly who its audience is: it is rich with spicy humor, chainmail bikinis, naked sorceresses, and goofball 'metal references. It doesn't apologize once for being very much for 80s kids who have no time for politically correct, family friendly D&D. It is happy to say "Look, we're all adults here... adults who want to take a break and be a bit childish and a little stupid" and I love it.

Finding Art for Undeadwood

Every week both before and after I run a session of Undeadwood Weird West RPG, I work on the book. It has been a truly enriching and enjoyable experience taking so much time to build up a game, and fine tune it. I now have 6 months of playtesting under the belt, too, and I will very soon be ready to both update them development podcast, and release the full version of the game. 

It will come bundled with a VTT-ready 3D map of the sample adventure, a form-fillable character sheet, and a couple of other extras to make sure I am giving people a great head start with the game. 

If you are interested, there is a preview version of available on Drive-Thru RPG at the moment. That will eventually be updated to serve as a quick start kit for the game.

One of the biggest joys in building Undeadwood has been the way I have been hunting for art to fill the manual.  I have been pouring over pulp magazines dating from the 1870s through to the 1950s to find images to integrate into the manual. Because of it, I feel that I have created a very visually pleasing book. 

Uncredited cover from Spicy Western Stories,
A Western Pulp that ran 1936-1942

I wanted to share with you all the method I use for finding the art I am using in undeadwood so that you can use it to find artwork for your own role-playing game materials. 

Now, there is a caveat to this. I am working within the framework of Canadian copyright law. It is a slightly more restrictive form of copyright law than many countries have, but also less constrained than American copyright law. Check your own local laws before you proceed. 

Magazine cover by Rudolph Zirm (1894-1952)

In Canada, a work of art falls into the public domain 50 years after the artist's death if they died before 1973. After 1973 we updated the laws so that the work does not pass into the public domain until 70 years after the Creator's death. This means that currently, anyone who passed on before 1972 has had their work enter the public domain. Anyone who died in 1973 or later will not have their work enter the public domain until the 2040s. 

If a work is uncredited it passes into the public domain 75 years after the date of publication. 

Music and video recordings are not included in this: they enter the public domain 90 years after publication, meaning any recording after 1935 is still not available in the public domain in Canada. 

In order to find large color pieces, I started by looking for exciting pulp covers. Thankfully, there is an amazing blog that publishes nothing but on a daily basis: pulpcovers.com. Every piece of art is well tagged, and if the artist is known it will be mentioned in the tags or in the comments below the piece. 

Uncredited magazine cover for Western Short Stories
Which was in syndication from 1936-1957

Another option is to simply download a pile of pulp magazines to scour for images you like. Archive.org has a vast pulp magazine archive. To be on the safe side, I don't download any from earlier than 1950 for that purpose. 

If the artist is known, the next trick is to go to pulpartists.com and check the biography of the artist. Out of respect, I tend to do my homework on the artist in their life. It's always good to know a little more, and it feels less like a ghoulish activity. 

Interior magazine art by James McKell (1884-1956)

Magazines from before 1936 often didn't publish the artist's name anywhere in the magazine. And before the 1950s they often only credited the cover artist and none of the interior art. It pays to look up the staff artists for magazines of that era to do your own due diligence. If the artwork is signed, it's not considered anonymous even if the magazine does not present a clear signature for you to work with. (Google lens is very helpful for hunting down signatures) Some artists can be quite hard to pin down; either because they use pseudonyms, or were very private people.

Most of them are somewhat easier. If they aren't featured in pulpartists.com, certain Arts auction sites or newspaper archives can be very helpful. 

Once you feel safe that the artist is in the public domain, it pays to look at any other art of theirs available on the internet. And to look at magazines where they were frequently featured artists. It may give you a larger selection to work with. As pulpcovers.com tags by artist, this can be very useful for finding a selection of art you like. I absolutely fell in love with the art of Albin Henning, and was very fortunate to find almost four dozen of his pieces on the internet and in archived PDFs of pulp magazines. 

Now, the photostats of pulp magazines are rarely good quality, and often have a great deal of print on them. Especially in work published after 1930-40 or so, where book design trends had changed. pulps from the 1920s and earlier tend to have better separation of texted image. 

If your image is in a PDF rather than being simply a downloadable image, you may need to use the print screen button on your keyboard to collect a copy of the image at the highest zoom you can manage.

This is where Photoshop or GIMP can be very handy.  I recommend looking up tutorials on repairing images, as it would be hard to provide a good tutorial here. 

Once I got this method down it was easy for me to find hundreds of excellent, thematically appropriate art for my projects, and I thought it might be a helpful tool for the rest of my amateur designers.

An Atari-inspired Campaign for Traveller/ Cepheus Engine

I have been tinkering with a new campaign to play at home with friends and family inspired by my current binge of old Atari games and retro sci-fi. I wrote it specifically for Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition from Stellagama Publishing, but it should run with almost any form of Traveller with a few tweaks.

8 want something lighthearted that captures the kind of fantastical popcorn Space opera that you see in the premise of 80s SF movies like The Last Starfighter or in the manuals and comics that came with early console games.

The bad guys are vile, the good guys fly cool ships, and the stakes are very high. It is definitely not like the Third Imperium... although I decided to keep some of the best ideas of that setting.

Here's my pitch:

Cepheus: IRATA

Campaign Reports and PWYW Preview of Undeadwood WWRPG

I really enjoyed creating podcasts for my players to summzarize our last play sessions and build up lore for Xen this past Spring. I've decided to do that and take it up to 11 for my current campaign Undeadwood Weird West RPG, especially as I have been building a game for scratch that has turned out to be pretty darned good.

And so, with two episodes now live online that are a mix of developer's blog, world building, and play reports, I wanted to share that podcast with you here. It will be live on major podcasting platforms over the next month or so.

World Building is a Complimentary but Separate Hobby to RPGs

My map of Wonkatonkwa County,
Created using Campaign Cartographer
Poster-sized version below.

I've been going all-out trying to get Undeadwood ready for my play testers this week.

I know it is not the most efficient way of going about it, but I have been arranging and laying out the manual as I work. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment when the rules and ideas that I am putting out there look good and are easy to read.

Hunting through old pulp art for illustrations has been an engaging way to keep me inspired. And has got me reading some great 1930s Western pulp for fun.The end result is that I now have a pretty good-looking 60-page manual that is growing rapidly as I hammer away at it whenever I have a free moment containing a game engine that is custom tailored to the exact campaign experience i want

• It is designed to be extremely fast and robust.
• it is entirely player-facing.
• The way rolls are played out feels at least a little like shooting craps at a casino table.
• It is saturated with cowboy slang and mechanics to evoke the conventions of the game.
• It puts a heavy emphasis on players making hard choices when 
• Mechanics to make the environment as deadly as combat is.
• It is a system where there is magic, but it is not complex, and does not rely on things like complicated spell lists.

I embraced the Free Kriegspiel Revolution philosophy that "we are playing the World and not the Game," by making every design decision in service to making sure my players were experiencing the Weird West setting in as high a resolution as I could manage.

It is very liberating making the game to suit the world rather than the world to suit the game. You stop wondering about how you can fit or modify magic-users in your setting, and instead wonder about how exactly magic works in your setting, and how you can represent that without creating snarled and unweildly rules.

I also found that once I had a map, it was much easier to figure out what content I needed. I made some random encounter tables for Olvidado flats, the central desert area east of the big river on the map, and suddenly I knew that I needed stats for Skinwalkers and poisonous snakes, because I knew that they are something I wanted PCs to have to worry about at different times of the day.

In the ghost town in the centre of the map, I decided that there would be a haunted well with a lesser Lovecraftian horror down at the bottom of it that had infested the aquifer for miles. One that whispers terrible secrets if you have the guts to be out in the town after dark. What and how Lovecraftian horrors work in my world is something entirely down to me.

Often, I didn't feel much need to work rules out at all. That is a bridge I can cross when I get to it. If I even need to.

World Building as Hobby

It has left me with some thoughts on World Building as a separate hobby from Table-Top Role Playing Games. And it is a hobby that I enjoy quite a bit. In many ways, I use role-playing games as a medium to help me know where to start in building the world. Which,is backwards from the original AD&D method:

 In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it was recommended that you make a dungeon and a village, or borrowed one from a module, and then built the world outward from the starting point as needed, often using random generation, and only when your PCs are ready to explore outward.

This isn't news, of course. World building first and then exploring later was a passion of many of the fantasy and weird fiction authors that informs Dungeons & Dragons.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth certainly had an influence on D&D, even if it was only a integrated to increase the possible market audience for the game. Tolkein was forever building lore, languages, cultures and history for Middle Earth as a way of exploring a world where the best element of the Pagan ethos could stand side-by-side with Salvation and the Christian ideals of the Divine. It is clear that he spent a lot of time in his head just creating the nuances of the world, and then used fiction to invite others into it.His method of building maps, and then placing stories within them has remained a template for modern World-Building for good reason.

Jack Vance rightly awards for his incredibly rich world building with the Dying Earth. He set a new bar for creating a rich and immersive experience for his readers... and for leaving so many questions you always wish you could go into it and find out more for yourself.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' later Pellucidar and Barsoom books became less about a cowboy story of a hero settling a new and untamed land, and became about an adventurer experiencing a strange world with totally alien history and ways. The Chessman of Mars is a perfect example of this: John Carter takes advantage of the fact that he lives in a world of wonder and ancient advancements, seeks out some lost technology or knowledge that might repair Deja Thoris' broken spine, and along the way encounters strange and terrible beings who breed perfected slaves in order to steal their bodies when they have need of them (Probably the inspiration for Stargate's Goa'uld). This is definitely not the Western saga in SciFi drag that the first couple of John Carter novels were.

 Roger Zelazny's Amber has a rich cosmology of shifting planes in multiple worlds as characters move through. Often taking advantage of the differences in flow of time and availability of resources to make themselves rich and powerful on different worlds. And where the stakes of the game are the cosmos itself, with the enemies taking advantage of their own quirks of the laws of the magic of the setting.It is a compelling and challenging series to read, and deeply immersive precisely because Zelazny had spent so much time exploring the possibilities. 

As kid I developed a fascination with the world of Pern. I honestly didn't have much access to the novels. I lived way out in the country and the public library was a 50 minute drive from home. But, for Christmas when I was 11 my aunt gave me a copy of the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, which is a beautifully illustrated text covering nuances of clothing, creature anatomy, early history, and the geography of Pern. I could look at that book for hours and wish that I had a chance to go and visit it.

At the time I lacked any knowledge of an existing Pern role-playing games, nor did I have the design skill necessary to build one for myself, but I certainly spent a lot of time there in my imagination thanks to the richness of details that that book could give me. 

Thanks to all that detail, I yearned to be able to explore it first-hand.

Role-Playing as Exploration Tool

Role-playing games offer a new way other than reading to enjoy the complex and nuanced worlds that these authors created. And I suspect the opportunity to go fighting Tharks in Barsoom or pitting your wits against the Courts of Chaos in Amber was a big driving force behind the development of role-playing games.

Ed Greenwood created The Forgotten Realms about ten years before Dungeons & Dragons really hit it stride. The original short stories created a view of Waterdeep and other places along the Sword Coast from the viewpoint of a canny merchant living in a fantasy world that once connected to Earth by magical portals, but those portals had become mostly closed, connected to realms of darkness, or were taken over by evil cabals. He saw the potential in Dungeons & Dragons to allow him to step into and explore his world and share it, and so adjusted the Realms to fit the D&D paradigm, and shared it through The Dragon. And his efforts eventually led to The Forgotten Realms going from his private World-Building creation to the default setting for D&D.

I think that is also why we saw the incredible success of Dragonlance. Not only did you have the Dungeons & Dragons modules, but you also had the deeply engaging novels by Weiss and Hickman that created a world that one would really want to go see and explore. Characters one would love to be able to meet. Then D&D offered you the portal to do exactly that.

I also think that you can safely say that Matthew Mercer's World building in Critical Role is a good portion of its success as well. There is not a session of the first campaign that I watched where he doesn't build up some details about the culture, people, and landscape of Tal'Dorei, and there were a lot of fans who enjoyed that part of the viewing experience, even if they weren't Dungeons & Dragons players. Prices back at the colossal sales of the Tal'Dorei world books for D&D were in part people who never had and never intended to play Dungeons & Dragons, but we're intrigued by his world building.

I have yet to have a chance to look at Daggerheart, but, I expect that the richness of the material that is being built out of helps build a game that has some interesting flourishes and nuances that will set it apart from its Pathfinder / 5e roots. 

Why Understanding That World-Building is a Separate Hobby is Valuable

When you understand that World building can be its own hobby, and that there's a rich tradition and a great number of examples and tools available for you that are not directly linked to role-playing games, you suddenly will find yourself with an incredible range of resources available to you

And when you embrace the idea that rules are, and ought to be hackable, or the FKR idea that you play the World first and let the rules be subordinate to its logic, it can allow you to create a far more tailored role-playing experience for your group.

And as a corollary to that, as they are separate hobbies, you needn't necessarily engage with World Building if you don't want to. It isn't required in order to run a fun, loose, beer and pretzels kind of game. So much DMing advice is actually rudimentary World building advice that doesn't need to be there..

It's one of the reasons why I recommend anyone who runs role-playing games check out the AD&D1e Dungeon Master's Guide. It had within it an endless supply of tools for building a game that didn't need the world to exist a priori. It allows the DM to explore and experience it as well at the same time. Chaos, after all, is one of the best sources of fun 

Back to Undeadwood

In Undeadwood, I started building the game in order to create a fast and easy system for building Cowboys who fit into a pulp Western as you might read and Lariat, 44 Western, or Spicy Western Stories. 

The game didn't start really developing the richness it now has until I had what I needed to offer that character generation mechanic to my friends then put the rules aside, and instead drew a map.

Once I had a map broke it into 10 sections, I made promise to myself that would make it last four pages of each area, complete with two settlements for each, several points of interest, and some terrifying supernatural threat lingering at each location. Once I staterd on that project, the game really started to come into its own, and I really started getting excited about making it.

And it made the rest of the project flow so much more quickly, I no longer need to ask what the game needs in it. Now I just need to get the time to get these ideas out of my head and onto paper.

Over the next couple of them articles, talking a little bit about the World Building separate from role-playing games, then the complexities of role playing games using role-playing games to explore them, then discuss how to play a role-playing game without the burden some task of building a world in the first place.

In the meantime, check out this awesome map!! I am very proud of how it turned out. Created with a mix of Photshop, GIMP and Campaign Cartographer.

Enlarge it to see more!

My A.I. Gm Experience: "Day Tripper" pt.1

 It is no secret that I love playing around with machine-learning models to create images, songs, and the like. "Generative A.I." is entertaining, even if its products are usually dull and uninspired. And you can get some damned good results with ethically sourced tools.But the moment you try to create anything too complex with it you end up witnessing otherworldly horrors beyond human comprehension.

(Believe me, if my hand's weren't fucked up, I would be doing my own illustrating! It would be less traumatic.)

I seriously doubt that an A.I., especially one trained by a large corporation, could do a great job running a game. But could one carefully trained by an indie developer do a halfway decent job? Recently I tried out the Scifi LLM "A.I." role-playing experience "Day Tripper" by Tod Foley, designer of Core Micro and Uniquicity, (and generally fun interlocutor.)

I am still processing my experience with "Day Tripper" and I am going to present a transcript of my first adventure here. And then I will pick Tod's brain to clarify my thoughts, and share my analysis of the experience with you in my next post.

The Trans-Real News

 

I just realized that I wasn't sharing my podcast here with the people who might appreciate it the most!

Trans-Real News is my weird fiction audio-drama podcast framed as a newscast from the Astral Plane as time, space, and reality is collapsing.

Over the course of the 40 episodes I have planned (10 are already recorded and edited.) The newscasters will slowly go from unscrupulous hacks and shills to heroes in a war against supernatural authoritarians.

It isn't TTRPG material (yet), but I hope it will inspire people looking for gonzo setting ideas to steal from it.

Here are my first three episodes:

Sourcebook Review: Fabula Ultima TTJRPG Atlas High Fantasy

Author: Emanuele Galletto

Publisher: Need Games

System: Fabula Ultima

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 I have been playing a lot of Fabula Ultima: TTJRPG lately. I am about 8 adventures in to a campaign that has been nothing short of epic. I can add to my observations, having played it as long as I have that combat is terrifying in Fabula Ultima despite its twin roots in the combat-heavy Final Fantasy series and the cozy storygame structure of Ryuutama.; I have never seen so much fleeing in terror, running and screaming on the behalf of PCs as I have playing Fabula Ultima. And that is while balancing the game to be within the parameter recommended by the system. Also, that the storygame elements don't suit my play-style very well, nor are they my favourite as a GM, but my most important player, my wife, is loving them, and they have been useful for hacking a particularly complex sequence in White Star as well.

It is painfully prep-heavy, but once you get into the rhythm of designing NPCs it speeds up dramatically.

One of the most useful parts of the early game is in the section on collaborative world-building (which, as an activity, I have mostly just thrown out, tbh.) In that section it describes the most common modes of play that have appeared in Final Fantasy games, as well as other Japanese RPG video game series like Ys*, Phantasy Star, Dragon Warrior, and Earthbound. Namely High Fantasy, Natural Fantasy, and Technofantasy. It covers the tropes, plot structure, world design, and antagonist character development principles of each of those subgenres.

When it was clear that my family was hooked on this particular Fabula Ultima campaign, which I had decided to go whole hog on the High Fantasy tropes for, and I saw this come out only a couple of weeks after the campaign got rolling, I decided that I needed to grab it. I have found it a very useful and well-designed tool, and I have referred to it quite a bit over the course of the campaign so far.

Game Review: Fateweaver

Author: Omar Aazam

Publisher: self-published

Engine: Tarot-based storygame

Marketplace: Itch.io

Fateweaver has been on my radar for awhile now. I have a lovely collection of Tarot cards and made a living as a psychic for one of the happiest years of my life. The xcuse to break out my favorite deck and the Mythic GM Emulator was hard really appealing.  I was pretty chuffed when Omar Aazam approached me, asking If I would care to review it, even though he knew that old-school games were more my bailiwick.

In Fateweaver PCs play characters from an Edwardian Steampunk world where predestination is an accepted fact for most of the population.  Their whole culture is built around teaching the masses to accept their Fate. The PCs are members of a rare group of blessed people called Fateweavers, who can choose their own destiny,  deny Fate, and even call upon supernatural powers to pursue their own path.

Every action of the Fateweaver has a butterfly effect on the world around them: their actions can let another person escape their predestination,  setting them on a new course in life. This means that Fateweavers are forces for Change, Dynamism, and Chaos. They are taught to use their powers cautiously and recruited by factions who have a specific philosophy as to how their powers might best be used for the public good... or personal gain. 

Tinkering and Tumult

 It has been a crazy week for me, readers! My youngest son started school, and I am suddenly back on the job market and trying to figure out where my skills can best serve the world after years of being focused on my children full-time. I'm pursuing a lot of different angles as I get back into figuring out what I want to do "when I grow up."

Honestly, getting back into life coaching with focusing on making lifestyle changes to help handle chronic pain might be the best way to put the last year of difficulties to good use... but I can hardly resist the lure of going back into tech.

To that end, I have been using my role-playing creations as a touchstone to working on reviving and updating old skills and developing new ones.

Machine Learning technology has been a big part of that focus. After all, engineering a good prompt and understanding how "AI" processes language is a new, and probably very useful skill. And I have learned a lot about both generating images and content that could be useful for TTRPGs.

I am going to share a bit of my AI experimentation here, and also talk about why I have decided to ditch some of it.

Using AI Art for TTRPGs

So here's a controversal topic that will annoy the Hell out of some of my readers.

Recently I have run across several controversies over the use of AI artwork in TTRPGs. One was over a module that I reviewed where the creator used AI-generated Art on a cover and was positively brigaded for it.

Another was my recent review of the OSR game Beneath the Sunken Catacombs. I rarely go a month before I see absolute mayhem explode from some quarter of Twitter or another about someone using AI art in their product. Selling a TTRPG product that includes AI Art is guaranteed to draw backlash.

Game Review: Beneath the Sunken Catacombs

Author: Paul Bantock
Publisher: Self Published
Engine: OSR-Compatible
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG, Amazon 

I recently spotted Beneath the Sunken Catacombs in my Amazon Recommendations. Its marketing promised a game that wasn't a retroclone, but instead was a fresh take on the original 1970s gaming experience with some modern and innovative touches with regard to classes and magic.

Beneath the Sunken Catacombs is sold at near cost for $10 (C) on Amazon.ca, and is PWYW on DTPRG as a PDF.

It uses a Modlvay B/X D&D base, and at first glance it looks like a pretty standard retroclone, but as I read it I found some little flourish, tweak, or minor redesign on almost every page of the game, most of which I will detail below.

You will see nothing different on the character sheet of the system: It uses the standard six ability scores, ascending AC, levels, AC, 1-axis alignment, and hit points. Like Swords & Wizardry it uses only one saving throw. Characters retire at level 10. The XP system is pretty standard and uses gp-for-xp. It's Encumbrance system is a bulk system similar to that in Castles and Crusades.

Instead of different hit points for the classes, all PCs and monsters use d6s for hit points, and gain hit dice at different rates: Warriors and Dwarves gain hit dice every level, Priests, and Elves at a rate of around 2:3, and sorcerers and halflings gain a mere 1d6 every 2 levels.

There is a lot ot like about Beneath the Sunken Catacombs if you are looking for a light, fas, well-contained TTRPG. I would consider it a solid contender as a TTRPG I might give to a kind looking for a first D&D-syle game. It is very well suited for introducing D&D4e or D&D5e players into the old school style of play. It takes the heart of some of the best ideas from that era and makes them work in a B/X structure very well.

What's in Drakken? Designing Bespoke Games for Campaign

[Note: the game QuAD RPG has been changed to Drakken]

I am going to just share an article on my design rationale and choices for my new game Drakken RPG,.

Drakken came out of the fact that my wife and kids are dissatisfied with some of the quirks of BECMI Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Fantasy... especially the slow Thief Skill progression. When I ran my first session of the Drowned World Campaign, I got a bad reaction on how poorly those skills performed. I tried replacing them with the pips system from Lamentations of the Flame Princess to make it easier, but that still starts PCs with abysmally low success chances.

Nor did my Skullduggery Die improve things, The Paradigm of the low chance of success for Thieves was baked into the core of any OSR game that includes the thief. And ones that do not are rare.

So I sat and thought about their frustrations and asked myself "given that I want this to be high fantasy with a liberal dose of anime silliness, is D&D working as a system to give the PCs the stories my campaign brief expected?"

Well... no.

So how could I "fix" the game in a way that it gave the experience I was looking for?

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG might have worked for most of it... the skills for thieves are a little generous, and the warriors are a blast. Using their mechanics for my Drowned World PCs might have worked... but its magic system, and its lethality made it a dubious option.

What I wanted was:

• Simple
• Fast
• Low reliance on dice
• Accomodates a lot of non-standard classes
• PCs feel competent,  but not superheroic
• Magic that is powerful, but limited and dangerous.
• Different gods produce radically different clerical powers.
• Took as little possible time for administrivia and planning. 
• Compatible with my OSR material. 

It seemed like I might have to customize the game a fair way from vanilla D&D...

Time to Build a Custom System

Zine Review: Black Pudding Heavy Helping vol. 1

cover to Black Pudding Heavy Helping 
©️J.V. West

Author: James V. West w/ various contributors
Publisher: Self-published
System: Labyrinth Lord / Doomslakers (OSR compatible)
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG 

 Black Pudding Heavy Helping vol. 1 is a collection of the first four issues of the Black Pudding zine edited and mostly written by James V. West.

Black Pudding is a series of cartoonishly illustrated light-hearted material for B/X Dungeons & Dragons clones, such as Labyrinth Lord, Old School Essentials. It includes lavishly illustrated character sheets for a broad range of OSR games, character classes, monsters, magic spells and spell books, magic items, and dungeon adventures. It even includes West's house rules sets which altogether make an entire OSR clone, Doomslakers.

Collecting the first four volumes of Black Pudding gives you substantial book, it weighs in at 127 pages of nothing but content.

Black Pudding doesn't take Dungeons & Dragons too seriously. Most of the content is lighthearted, silly, or exaggeratedly over the top in Saturday morning cartoons meets heavy metal kind of way. And well the compiled additions give you an entire osr role-playing game, the content is perfectly compatible with Labyrinth Lord and similar B/X clones. It is material that is ideal when you want to play a game no you don't want hard feelings as your characters are crushed by the meat grinder. And where you want a laugh at over the top crazy scenarios.

What I Loved

Character Sheets

One of many awesome Character Sheets
From Black Pudding ©️ J.V. West

I have been using James West's character sheet designs for years now. Ever since I first discovered them by Googling "OSR character sheet." I love the wild cartoony borders, weird layouts, and frenetic energy that they inspire. Whenever my son is playing a game with me, I made sure he has one of those sheets, because they capture the imagination. They are exactly what I wish I could have done with my character sheets when I was a teenager.

The sheets include specific ones for single saving throw games like Swords & Wizardry and the OSR clone in Black Pudding. It also has level zero sheets for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and character sheets both with and without spaces for race for use with either AD&D or B/X clones.

Pulpy Classes

I don't like every class in Black Pudding, but the good ones easily outnumber the bad. My favorites of the classes are the ones that really tap into the pulp fiction inspirational materials for Dungeons & Dragons. I would be very happy to run a campaign full of black knights, chainmail chicks, shield maidens, wardens, blind guardians, and sinewy barbarians. They each feel fun and well-designed. They're just a mechanically a little tougher than the base B/X D&D classes to enhance the puply feel, but are far from superheroic.

I also appreciated the classes that pastiche some of my favorite '90s subcultures. There's a witch that is most clearly borrowed from the culture around Wicca in the 90s, and the Raven Heart, and almost perfectly typed black magic wielding goth girl. It is like seeing my high school clique expressed as D&D characters.

Let's Build an RPG! (pt.3)

"Tom’s father begs Merlin the magician
to give his wife a child" 
by Leslie Brooke (1922)

 About a month ago, my youngest son asked to play an RPG with him like he sees me do with his brother.  My first inclination,  after years of gaming with my oldest, and trying Kid-oriented Fantasy RPGs such as Hero Kids, First Fable, and No Thank You,  Evil! was not to reach for a system at all, but to break out my diceless FKR-style system, Square Dungeon.  

Rules constrain and distract. They can become a sticking point for new and young players especially.  The whole point of a good TTRPG is to facilitate a game of narrative exploration and creative problem-solving. If you are too caught up on what The dice mechanics cover, and looking for the solution to all of your problems on the character sheet, your game is failing you.

The Best System is a Minimal System

Thus, the best game for a new player is the one that is not much more than a task resolution system and a fail state.

Rules otherwise serve mostly to enforce a consistent set of constraints to make play more complex and challenging,  and to help express the limitations and possibilities of the game world. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons,  for example create a world in which magic works a certain very simple way, in which combat has a certain level of peril, and resources have to be managed in specific ways. This makes the game both more challenging to play, and helps create a  certain kind of Fantasy world more effectively. 

Thus, when working with kids this young you can let the rules slide, and focus purely on the fundamentals of game-play. Then work your way up to D&D,. Then onward to other systems as the player advances and needs more challenges and variety.

Getting Too Fancy

 There's been a lot of engaging conversation between some of my favorite osr YouTubers and Twitterers over the last few days. Especially after WotC released hey preview of their new virtual tabletop recently. And, I wanted to relate an experience I had this week that seems relevant.

(I am including some of the most poignant tweets and videos I've seen in the article.)

My Punk-Ass Gen-X Take on the Whole WotC Debacle

 I am in the middle of moving house at the moment, which has forced me to neglect my blog, much to my frustration. Especially as so much has been going on in the hobby as of late. Especially with Wizards of the Coast doing their level best to alienate the Dungeons & Dragons fan base at every turn. I really only have one thought on WotC left with sharing. I might even sing it:

There's no vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end

When we all disintegrate, it will all happen again, yeah

If you came to conquer, you'll be king for a day

But you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away

And believe these words you hear when you think your path is clear

We have no control

We have no control

We have no control

We do not understand, you have no control

You are not in command

-Bad Religion, No Control 

(©️1989 Polypteric Records)

Or perhaps, "See you WotC, enjoy your decline!"

I am, by all accounts the quintessential Gen-X slacker, I have had almost no employment with big corporations and didn't enjoy the environment. I have spent most of my life working for myself. I am suspicious of Sentiment, but enjoy Beauty. I am cynical towards ads, news, and mass media, yet I tend to communicate and think in pop culture quotations. I prefer to DIY where I can. And nothing is cool until I can personalize the Hell put of it. I have no interest in plastic,  cookie cutter corporate bullshit or brand names. D&D as a stopped being interesting to me when it was clear that it had gone from a vibrant small community hobby to another Brand Name™️ a few books into 3rd Edition. 

I walked away long ago. I don't care about the logo on the book. I briefly got sucked in with 5th when it looked like they were trying to connect with the lost fan base. I saw the error of my ways after buying one sourcebook.

I don't buy books for the sake of collecting.  I don't care to have mounds of sourcebooks. I brew my own worlds.  And until I had to balance kids and a small business, I didn't use adventure modules. What books I do buy, I buy to hack or to review. And I buy very few. Most of my 5e collection were gifts.

You can't sell D&D to me.

Game Review: Fabula Ultima TTJRPG

Cover Art for Fabula Ultima
by Catty Trinh
©2022 Need Games

Author: Emanuelle Galletto
Publisher: Need Games
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG
Engine: Fusion of the Ryuutama engine & Forged in the Dark

 Fabula Ultima is a tabletop role-playing game designed to simulate what is often referred to as the Golden Age of JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games). That is, fantasy console video games such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Phantasy Star, and Earthbound.

If you are not familiar with these types of games, they primarily we're found on the Super Nintendo and Sony PlayStation and were mostly made by the Juggernaut companies Squaresoft and Enix. (Now Square Enix) They featured Dungeons & Dragons-inspired gameplay primarily driven by option menus. While the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games were very clearly clones of OD&D, the developers found that they needed to adjust the way the games worked mechanically to adapt to the limitations of the medium, which evolved into their own unique tropes and conventions. Some examples include such as creating jobs systems that let characters change what they could do, simplified Magic based on expanding point pools, and having most character classes add one or two menu options.

Obviously, the video games of the time couldn't offer player characters an open or even procedurally generated world. This fundamental difference from Dungeons & Dragons was a glaring flaw in the first couple of games of the genre. The developers discovered that they could compensate for the lack of the player characters' freedom by using the game as a medium for crafting elaborate, interactive fantasy novels with complex plots and large casts of characters.

The cultural back and forth between Dungeons & Dragons and JRPGs, especially the Final Fantasy series, and especially for Generation X is something I've written about here. I would argue that Final Fantasy IV in particular had a massive impact on how Dungeons & Dragons was played among what we now are calling "Trad" style players.

I surmise that a lot of the impulse that led to the story game branch of our hobby evolved from love of the way JRPGs told stories and structured their narratives.

Fabula Ultima (Latin for "Final Fantasy ") is precision-engineered to capture the feel and story structure of those JRPGs in the table -top format. It draws must heavily of the Super Nintendo-era Final Fantasy titles, but echoes of other series such as Ys, Phantasy Star, and Dragon Warrior are also pretty evident. It leans heavily into video game tropes such as boss fights, multiple damage type systems, and readily available  healing potions, bombs, and magical implements.

One thing that did surprise me is that they did not move into the idea of death as an easily remedied state. But more on that in a moment.

I want to note that there is a free starter document for Fabula Ultima, Fabula Ultima: Press Start that has the rules necessary for players to learn the game free for download at DrivethruRPG and the Need Games homepage.

The System

Fabula Ultima is based on the Japanese tabletop role-playing game Ryuutama and, aside from the eponymous Dragon-spirit guide and the wellness roll, almost the entirety of that game engine has been carried over. This was an incredibly smart choice, as Ryuutama borrows many of its mechanics from early Final Fantasy games. 

Adventure Review: DNGN Weird Fantasy Megadungeon #1

Cover for DNGN Issue#1
Art by Chris Malec
© 2022 Vasili Kaliman and Singing Flame.

Author: Vasili Kaliman
Publisher: Singing Flame
System: Old-School Esssentials
Marketplace: Drive-thru RPG

When I saw DNGN released a few months ago, with its amazing art credits and cool concept, I decided that I wanted to grab it right away and give it a review. Once I started reading it, however, I decided that what I really wanted was to play it through as a solo play project.

DNGN is a very old-school megadungeon project. It is 10 floors with between six and twelve rooms each. The encounters are often strange and a little incongruous with each other at first. It feels like the old "funhouse" dungeons of early Dungeons & Dragons. As you delve deeper DNGN starts showing some interconnectedness: the weird encounters begin to make their own strange sense.

DNGN is intended to be a multi-issue affair, with each room adding an additional ten floors to an ever-deepening dungeon.

Tool Review: Dungeon Alchemist

 Dungeon Alchemist by Briganti SV is a tool I have been watching since I first saw a Kickstarter for it a little over a year ago. It is a map drawing tool designed specifically for TTRPG mapping.

When I saw it was in early access on Steam, I put it on my wish list. My younger brother, Level 0 Luke, pulled through for me, and it is a lot of fun to use.

Here is a map I have designed with my son's as a larger-scale example of what can be done with it:

Much of this map is animated with sparkling water, crackling electricity, and turning water wheels when actively I. The program works a lot like Dungeon Scrawl: You choose an overall room style, such as castle, village, desert settlement, or ruin, and a terrain type.