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.

Game Review: Entity

Author: Peter Scholtz
Publisher: Candlenaut
System: Ironsworn-based d10 System
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG 

Entity caught my attention when it appeared in my recommendations on DTRPG. I looked at it, and wrote it down as a possibility for a future review. Then it started to haunt me: I heard it mentioned again and again in discussions with solo gamers, on TTRPG podcasts I follow, and even unexpectedly in ChatGPT windows. The other night, I was surfing DTRPG and found it front and centre on my recommendations once again and on sale, and decided to heed the gods.

I'm glad I gave it a try! My playtest was a little slow to start, but once I got into the rhythm of the game, I thoroughly enjoyed my journey across the bizarre, desolate and dangerous world of the game. It played fast, put interesting challenges in front of me, and things often came together with compelling serendipity. 

In Entity,  you play an IAP, an android built for deep space exploration by NASA in the late 21st century,  and that has served human expansion for 10,000 years. After a Rogue primordial black hole destroyed the Solar System,  IAP crews became the scouts who serve the dispossessed remnant of humanity by seeking out new places to settle and resources to help them survive. The campaign begins when a  mysterious alien pyramid capable of bending gravity destroys your vessel, and brings your escape pod down on an alien world full of strange vistas, unexpected perils, and ancient ruins.

You conduct missions to gather resources and perform research that will allow you to construct a colony that might make the world survivable for you and potentially safe for human habitation.  As you progress in building your colony, you also begin to discover secrets about the purpose of the alien ruins, the pyramid, and the planet itself.

Entity is built entirely as a solo game, and intended to run through 10 procedurally generated missions of varying complexity. Individual IAPs can be destroyed, but the campaign can continue with the same facilities and discoveries carried over between PCs.

Game Review: Tales of Argosa

Author: Steven Grodzicki
Publisher: Pickpocket Press
System: (Highly Modified) OSR Compatible 
Marketplace; DriveThruRPG 

Tales of Argosa is a new edition of Low Fantasy Gaming that has taken years of community testing, design feedback, and setting development and honed the game into a fast, action-heavy game built for kick-in-the door play and low-to-zero-prep GMing.

My Thursday night group recently switched to Tales of Argosa from Blueholme Journeymanne. It has been a bit of a homecoming for the group, as we started the campaign give years ago as a Low Fantasy Gaming campaign, and returning to it really feels right after two years of Blueholme. There are some things that LFG, and now ToA just do a lot better than a vanilla OSR game.

Game Review: Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition

Author(s): Omer Golan-Joel, Richard Hazlewood, Josh Peters, & Robert L. S. Weaver 

Publisher: Stellagama Publishing

System: Classic Traveller / Megatraveller

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 Cehpheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition is a retroclone that mixes elements of Classic Traveller with Megatraveller and a few more modern upgrades to make it play a little more smoothly.

About two years ago I ran a campaign using White Star: Galaxy Edition as a base set on a starship called the C.H.V. Natani, and posted play reports here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It was meant as a short game to give us a little break while some of our players dealt with life issues that made dedicating time to our heavier more involved Silver Gull campaign was difficult. While I was playing White Star with my friends, however, I kept running up against the limitations of the system.

My players didn't find starship battles in White Star as exciting as they wished they were. A couple of players wanted to dabble in mercantile endeavours, which White Star wasn't built for (heck, one of my players was a gmae dev' on Elite: Dangerous and was hoping for a game experience like it) And while they enjoyed some of the silliness of space-faring rockstardom and jedi powers to an extent, they ultimately preferred the adventures where the characters' odd superpowers didn't come into focus. In other words, they really would have been happier playing Traveller.

And so I looked for a Traveller-based game that I could grab in hardcopy at a reasonable price, because I am fed up with .PDFs. Ideally I wanted something I could get both physically and digitally, and so I settled on Cepheus Deluxe and I am glad that I have.

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.1)

Stardew Valley is © Concerned Ape Games

My wife has been playing Stardew Valley a lot this summer; a game where you play a young person who has just inherited a farm in a fantastical world that sits at something like 1980s technology. It's what the video game industry, and more recently the TTRPG industry refer to as a "Cozy Game." Meaning it is focused on a small area, the stakes for success are failure are small: you might save a community, but the world is in no danger, and the relationships you build with the characters in the community is very much the focus.

Cozy games are not my cup of tea at all, but the game has sort of cast a spell over the rest of my family. My boys are excited to hear what has gone on in the farm and see the strange new fantasy farm animals and the useful item that my wife's avatar brings up from the dungeon. 

Well, if you want to run a good scenario the key is to figure out what your audience likes, and I got the feeling that something like Stardew Valley might make an appealing draw for a few weeks as we ease back into the school year.

So I sat down and asked myself "How can I make this interesting for me, so that I can get myself into the game enough to make it interesting to them?" 

 As I sat and pondered, my mind drifted to a concept that I have been spending a lot of time considering lately: the idea of prep as play.

Game Review: Chasing Adventure

Author: Spencer Moore

Publisher: Self-Published

Engine: Powered by the Apocalypse

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG (free vers), game hompage

 Back in November I found myself with a very long series of waits on my hand on buses, in cafes, and in Hospital waiting rooms. I am trying to cut my screen time way back, so I decided instead I would grab Mythic GME and a book off my shelf and play a solo game over the course of the day.

I decided to give Dungeon World another whirl. I was not disappointed: I rather enjoyed the narrative complexity that came out of a storygame played solo (even if my players are still not interested in them.) I came up with a fantastic tale of a young princess, a squire, and an apprentice magician playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with dwarf terrorists in the Underdark. I gave the overall experience a 7/10, it was a good solo run, but in a lot of places it was marred by some of the flaws of the system, such as how easy it was for a bad roll or two to turn into an quagmire of bad events, and the fact that magic was often fickle and ineffectual. I made a pile of notes about how I would tweak the game in the future.

In March, I had to move house, and as I packed, hauled boxes by the dolly-full between houses, and unpacked every day for a month, I found myself binging a lot of solo semi-actual play podcasts that I was behind on, including the entire third season of the amazing The Lone Adventurer by Carl White. TLA tells a cohesive story of spies, thieves, and manapunk fighter pilots that is deeply engrossing. And one of the things he does that I really enjoy is that he periodically changes game systems to suit the kind of adventure he wants for the specific arc of the story. When he wants Bondesque action he plays D&D5e; when he tells crime stories he uses Blades in the Dark; when he is engaging in a long skyship voyage he plays Ironsworn; and airship battles are played in Warbirds. And for each he works very hard to explain the system and how it is producing the story he wants. After a few episodes in a given system, you have got a pretty good sense of how to play it and how it plays.

For one recent segment of The Lone Adventurer, Carl switched over to Chasing Adventure, a PbtA fantasy adventure game that was designed to work similarly to Dungeon World, but was intended to smooth off DW's rough edges, be mechanically a little lighter and more free-flowing, and a little less beholden to Dungeons & Dragons. Listening to Carl play got me quite intrigued, I went out and grabbed the free version immediately, and liked it enough to buy the full version a few days later.

Game Review: Along the Leyline

Author: Cole Wilkinson 

Publisher: Piranha Squirrel Productiind
Engine: Custom variable die roll over
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 I was recently sent a copy of Along the Leyline with the most Gen-X review request I'd ever seen. 'Here's a role playing game I made, I like your reviews. Have a copy, review it if you like.' It made my withered 80s kid heart grow two sizes. 

And so I was quite happy to sit down and peruse Along the Leyline and I have to say, I am glad that I have this game in my collection. Of all the games I've picked up in the last year, it is in the running for my favorite alongside Death in Space and for very different reasons.

While Death in Space is a beautifully designed book with a simple and elegant rule system and incredible production values, Along the Leyline is what what "roll your own" looks like! It is built with such incredible love and enthusiasm that it is impossible not to be charmed by it, even if it is full of simple hand drawn sketches, doesn't use any fancy layout or information design, and has rules that feel a little kludgy. Those just make the effort put into creating this from an army of one feel all the better. 

Atari Philosophy - Yars Revenge and Cairn 2e

I have been dealing with general chaos, sick family, family functions, friends in need, and an endless series of stressful diversions this month. While I get by fairly well on meditation, art, prayer, exercise, and reading, some times a guy just needs a diversion to help you blow off steam.

I am also trying to further disconnect from Social Media, because I don't see the point in just making myself angry for no profit. And what else does social media do these days? It sure as hell doesn't inform you of anything. So I have been looking for a habit to build to replace the habit* of popping on to X on my phone.

And I have found a great activity for both!

I recently picked myself up an Atari Pocket Player Pro, a little handheld device that was released for Atari's 50th anniversary by My Arcade.

Any time I need to take a quick brain break, instead of checking my feeds, I grab the gadget, and I play round of an old favourite like Asteroids, Warlords, Solaris, Yar's Revenge, or Missile Command. It takes me only a few minutes to have a satisfying round of Yar's Revenge, unlike a modern game it is easy to put down, and I will come out of it feeling happy and satisfied, rather than grouchy.

This is not a review of the particular device, but if you want some quick observations I will leave some as a comment. Why I'm bringing it up here is that I had a revelation about why I still love and enjoy these games so much, and why, even given the incredible limitations of the technology of the time, they were so darned good.

Red Tidings at Yule, How I Finally got the Never-ready Module Out!

I wanted to mention to anyone looking for some weird fun over the Holidays that my Holiday module, Red Tidings at Yule is PWYW!

Spreading some Holiday Cheer

Back in 2020 I wrote a 0-level funnel for DCC RPG. I ran a solo play-test myself and was very happy with my results, but I was having a hell of a time creating a good map for it, and I couldn't get together a group to play it that year, much to my disappointment. I really intended it as a way to keep some friends of mine who were going to be alone for Christmas thanks to the lock-downs close in spirit if not in person.

It's a fun piece that borrows from Christmas & Yule folklore from across Europe:

• The main villains are the Kallikantzaroi, Greek Christmas goblins.
• They are teamed up with Krampus, the well-known Norse Yule demon.
• They are collaborating with Belsnickle, a grumpy Christmas figure who hands out both presents and whippings from Germany.
• They are  able to meet Knecht Ruprecht a Swiss / German figure who rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless.
• They can receive a magic item related to Morozko, a Russian fairy-tale figure often related to Christmas.
• They can rescue the Scandinavian Christmas Gnome.
• They can free Risia a pagan winter goddess from Scandinavian / Slavic myth.
• It also contains some beats from classic DCC adventures like They Serverd Brandolyn Red. 

With no chance to play it, I took my notes and wrote them up as a module, with an eye to share them the next year.

Revised Pact Magic for OSR games.

First off, let me say that spinal headaches suck. I have been out of commission for two weeks with the mother of all migraines after getting a lumbar puncture. 3.2/10. Would not recommend. 

Second, a big thanks to Johnny Price for alerting me to some link rot that has occurred on my early articles. My old version of my Pact Magic system for Ær is gone, and so I wanted to share a newer version.

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 1)

 

So I am starting a new campaign this weekend, and I have an idea for the world that I want to develop.

I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.

But to do that I needed a starting place.

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.

Tailoring a Campaign: My Player Resource for Running Hot Springs Island

I am in the process of setting up for my Summer game of Hot Springs Island. One of the first things I wanted to do aside from sending out the pitch document that I shared with you last week, was to write a guide for the players. This guide had to tackle some basic tasks:

1. Cover how to make a character
2. Reiterate at least some of the house rules in the pitch document.
3. Expand on the information in the pitch for players who have bought in.
4. Add in any new content relevant to the players.

So I started by reiterating my character generation process. I added in firearm rules cribbed from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and a gear list that brings the characters into the 17th century, including some era-appropriate armour and equipment.

Game Review: Hero Quest (2021)

Creator: Stephen Baker

Publisher: Avalon Hill

System: Hero Quest

Marketplace: Amazon

I received a copy of Hero Quest (1989) for my birthday when I was 11. A product of Milton Bradley in conjunction with Games Workshop, it was designed as a tool for introducing young people to the concepts of role-playing games, but with minimal amounts of the play-acting and dramatic storytelling.
Hero Quest consisted of a board, and a collection of minis and frogs, along with cardboard tiles and specialized diced resolve combat. The combat system was loosely based on Warhammer Fantasy Battles, with various icons on the dice representing one and six, two and six, and three and six chances of success on a d6 roll.

The symbols were variously a skull to represent a wound (3 in 6), a shield to represent a hero deflecting an attack (2 in 6), or a skull to represent a non-heroic unit deflecting an attack (1 in 6). 

Original 1989 box

How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable

 When I was a kid, I taught myself to play Dungeons & Dragons from the Red Box. I have a lot of praise for the design of the Mentzer Basic set: It was the first version of Dungeons & Dragons with a really clear how-to play guide, as well as two introductory adventures played solo in a way that was pretty familiar to a Choose Your Own Adventure addict like me. Castle Mistemere was a pretty clever design as well, giving you the first floor of the dungeon, a map of the second, and mostly a question mark for the third, it eased the Dungeon Master into learning how to play their role; perhaps not as well as Keep on the Borderland, had but it gave you a more methodical approach. 

There was one way adventure with Aleena at the beginning of the book was deeply flawed, however. As a tutorial it was great, even as a piece of fiction it was pretty good. You got attached to Aleena, and then her death broke your heart, especially if you were 6 year old boy at the time...

...But, it also set up the idea that you were going to be playing the hero in a high fantasy narrative. You had an evil sorcerer, on the run, and, if you carried on with the PC you started with, were hunting them. You had a friend to avenge. Castle Mistemere reinforced that by suggesting that Bargle will be placed somewhere in the lower levels of the dungeon as a mastermind. 

This is great Dungeons & Dragons; don't get me wrong. But, unlike Keep in the Borderland, you don't start as a mercenary looking for a quick score. Nor do you start as an escaped prisoner, or a castaway. From the beginning, the introductory adventure and castle Mistemere create the kind of plot are that we now associate with the kind of ""trad" play that was soon thereafter refined by Tracy Hickman in Ravenloft and the Dragonlance saga. In other words, it was a heroic journey,  not a sandbox adventure,

Game Review: Death in Space

Author: Christian Plogfors, Carl Nibeaus

Publisher: Stockholm Kartel, Fria Lagan

Engine: Mörk-Borg Compatible (OSR)

Marketplace: Fria Lagan, Amazon, DTRPG

Death in Space is a sci-fi horror game set in a distant future where the Universe is beginning the process of heat death, and humankind, after aeons of expansion across Space, are now in steep decline.

The game's setting, which is heavily baked into the structure, is the Tenebris System, a star system that had been at the heart of humanity's final war; many powerful mega corporations and space empires fought for centuries over gems found on moon in Tenebris which were so flawless and possessed such fantastic properties that they would revolutionize the manufacturing of spacecraft, computers, and hyperspace gates 

By the time the war was over, humanity was so beggared and in such steep decline that it didn't matter anymore: no one had the means left to use the gems.

Now humanity is clinging on to an existence where they make nothing new: everything has been repurposed and recycled over and over again. An alien force, the void, is creeping in, infecting, tainting, and mutating everything it touches, and that can be heard in strange whispers on radio waves across the Universe.

 Humans live in poverty in the wreckage of their once great empires. In Tenebris, most of the population lives in The Iron Ring: a hoop of fused hulks of space stations and starships in orbit around the moon where the gems were once discovered.

Scrap: Remind me Why I'm Doing This Again?!

 Two articles ago, I mentioned my project Scrap. I have been itching to create a campaign set in a dreary Sci-Fi crapsack world where space colonists sent through wormholes in the 1980s have been cut off from Earth and met a series of disasters that have forced them to abandon all but a few of their colonies and break into six dystopian factions. PCs are young people who have never known Earth, and are now serving their faction by plundering old planetary outposts for food, water, air, and technology in hopes of holding on long enough to rebuild.

The major inspirations being Duskers, Lethal Company, We Fix Space Junk, Kakos Industries, and Dining in the Void. 

In Search of the Best Crapsack Future

 

So I have had two (video-) gaming obsessions and three podcast obsessions that have managed to collide in a perfect storm of inspiration

And that has had me grinding away like mad at my google docs for about a week now.

Japanese TTRPGs for Beginners

Deedlit is one of the original 
Record of Lodoss War PCs, &
an icon in Japanese pop culture 

 About a year ago, I did a deep dive into the history of Japanese tabletop role-playing games ("table talk games") out of curiosity.  I shared what I knew, and what I learned, on a Twitter conversation, but my attempt to turn it into a post for W2tDT fell by the wayside when I fell ill. I am finally putting down what I know for those interested.

TTRPGs are a hobby that has had a small, dedicated fan base since the 1980s that has been intimately paired with their video gaming culture.  The two have had feedback loop that has given them something of a unique flavor.

Comptiq, Group S.N.E., and Forcelia

In the early 1980s Comptiq (a portmanteau of "computer-boutique") was Japan's up-and-coming PC magazine. While they started off with a focus on hardware and applications,  their audience quickly steered them more towards computer entertainment.

P.C. video games at the time included a lot of attempts to simulate D&D and Traveller. Series like Wizardry and Elite. A small portion of the PC gaming community took an interest in the pen-and-paper antecedents to popular gaming series, and became the first market for Japanese translations of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Traveler. A fair chunk of Comptiq's reader base took at least an academic interest in TTRPGs, and Comptiq became a hub for discussing them. With the pace of life being what it was in Japan in the 1980s, however, finding a group and he time to play was a pretty big ask. 

Record of Lodoss War

In 1986, one of Comptiq's PC gaming correspondents, Hitoshi Yashuda, persuaded Comptiq to help him put together a gaming group and publish a series of articles about the experience of learning and playing B/X D&D.

A Dungeon Crawl Fabula Ultima Style

 I'm currently running some Fabula Ultima at home. If you are not familiar with it, it is a TTRPG based on the Final Fantasy video games,  which have had an immense influence on the gaming culture of the 80s and 90s.  It uses a pretty funky fusion of the Japanese TTRPG Ryuutama and Blades in the Dark to create a game that captures the kind of storytelling that made Final Fantasy IV - XII such compelling games. As my wife and I are both long-time fans, and my oldest is just finishing his first ever playthrough of a FF game (FFIV - I am making sure the boy is classically educated. )

I like the game,  even if it is a little heavier on Storygame conventions than my personal tastes ususally run.

Today, I had the challenge of setting up a dungeon crawl as our heroes must brave the ruins of an extinct Dwarf civilization to get to the mountain peak.