What I'm Up To

 I'm sure it has been missed by no one that I have been having trouble finding time for this blog. And it's anniversary has just rolled past. So I wanted to take some time to let you know what has been keeping me busy, as it is mostly RPG-adjacent.

Gaming!

Death in Space

I'm coming up on one year of an intense campaign in Death in Space. My players have managed to survive long enough to salvage a handful of functional ships, hired a crew of salvage and mining experts and built a network of laser communication satellites; they are trying to become a force for hope in the Tenebris system.

The game started as a one-shot pallette cleanser, and just kept going. So I didn't start posting play reports until it is too late.

The Weirth Campaign 

I've also been participating in a long-running campaign run by Stephen Smith that attempts to reconstruct the early 1970s Wargaming D&D experience. We've shifted systems a couple of times, including playing awhile using the 1973 D&D play test rules that were recreated in The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, fueled with and eventually replaced by Blueholme, and after a few years shifting to a highly home-brewed iteration of Tales of Argosa.

This game uses domain rules that start for fighters at level 2, one-to-one time, patron players, mass combat played in Chainmail and other retro wargames, and a ton of classic modules including the aforementioned Tonisborg, The Tower of Xenopus, Keep on the Borderlands, The Isle of Dread, Temple of Elemental Evil, Empire of the East, Mask of Nyarlathotep, Into the Depths of the Earth, Veins of the Earth, Please Go to Sleep Arthur Cobblesworth, Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Against the Cult of the Reptile God among others.

Home Game

My home game with family has had a couple of false starts, but I just brought a satisfying end to a DCC RPG campaign and am setting up a game in AD&D.

I've also been playing a solo game in Grok?! 2e, amplified by Mythic Game Master Emulator.

Summer Game

Every year in the Summer I try to run six sessions of a classic OSR game with family, friends, and my favorite D&D people. This year I am vacillating between PARANOIA SP1 or running Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands in Swords & Wizardry.

Podcasting 

Two years ago, I founded an audio production company, Stormhead Productions, with terrible timing. The Descript AI changed audio production overnight about the same time I started my business. I was putting up a freelance profile on Upwork the exact same time that the going rate for that work were cut in half and the available jobs shrank by two thirds.

Making a Zine Accessible to the Incarcerated

Okay, fair warning, I am going to go a bit out of character here and speak my mind on a topic that isn't gaming. I keep my blog apolitical because getting involved in discussions of the Political with strangers on the Internet is exhausting, fruitless, and these days attracts bullshit gestapo behaviour from illiberal assholes on both sides of the spectrum. 

Shortly after I made Drakken in 2022 I was approached by an organization in California that was dedicated to promote literacy in prisons. Apparently, Dungeons & Dragons was their most requested reading material from inmates at the time. D&D being expensive as it was at the time was simply not possible, but the potential benefits of TTRPGs for inmates was too good to pass up. They were hoping that I would be willing to let them, for a modest fee, distribute Drakken, remixed a bit to meet their requirements.

I told them they could have it for free.

My Summer was Full of Games

 I realize I haven't posted on here in a hell of a long time! My Summer was a glorious mix of in-real-life and in-game adventures.

Brier Island North lighhouse,
taken from the deck of the Mega Nova

IRL I took a family roadtrip that put nearly 3,000km on the Mazda, and along the way I attended art festivals, live concerts, joyous family functions, long days on the beach, and a whale watching tour where I got to see nine individual humpback whales and a few minke whales.

I also produced a pile of episodes of my solo RPG podcast Swords Against Madness, following my heroes getting themselves in pretty deep in their gonzo sword-and-planet weirdness, played in Swords & Wizardry.

It wasn't my only solo-gaming time spent. I took a couple of days of lazy relaxing to play through a massive chunk of Jason Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands, and had an absolute blast! 

These modules are the best example of making 1st level awesome that I have ever had the pleasure to experience. I have both a review upcoming and possible a few bonus episodes of Swords Against Madness summarizing my playthrough... with all of the running and screaming involved.

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.

Merry Christmas!

Readers, you have been a powerful positive motivator for me for the last four years.

This Holiday season, you gave me a fantastic gift.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, and I hope I will be able to keep sharing the awesome for another four.

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.

Heroes & Homelands v.0.9

v.0.9 cover art by David Revoy (CC-BY)

 I just updated Heroes & Homelands on itch.io!

The big version changes I have uploaded include:

Version 0.6

• Added the illusionist class.
• Added an Illusions chapter for spells cast by the illusionist.
• Presented my unique Phantasmagoria rules for what happens when illusions go wrong.

Version 0.9

• Adds the Bard class, inspired by the AD&D2e version of the class.
• Adds the Carl class: a semi-skilled dabbler, perfect to use for Hirelings, henchmen, and recurring NPCs that need simple stats. Loosely inspired by the NPC class system of D&D3e.
  
• Adds the Monk class, based on the OD&D and AD&D versions of the monk, but with fewer powers to make it simpler to play.
• Adds a Warlock class based on the D&D3.5e version of the Warlock - a dark an thoroughly gothic class. My version has mechanics to determine what the warlock's patron demands od them, and why they might recruit a warlock in the first place.
• Adds a chapter on Incantations that gives a list of spells for bards that is mostly inspired by the role of Bards in Celtic society - a mix of Druid and Clerical magic with a few illusions mixed in.
• Adds an Invocations class that gives a list of spell-like powers a Warlock can earn from their patron.

You can download Heroes & Homelands v.0.9 in PDF from my Google Drive.

Or you can get it in .PDF, .HTML, .DOCX, and .ODT formats on itch.io.

I am also tinkering with POD options on Lulu right now, but before I would be willing to release it in something as permanent as print, I would want to see a copy for myself, which means waiting out the postal worker strike here in Canada. And I might want to both add a few more character options, and be started on a GMs Toolkit for H&H, too.

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. 3)

 Over the past two weeks I have created a simple D&D retro-clone called Heroes & Homelands that is intended to be easily copy/pasted and edited to make new bespoke games as I need them. You can get the current version of it in .PDF here, or in .PDF, .html, .odt, and .docx formats in a PWYW bundle on itch.io.

Then I sat down and brainstormed a campaign I called "Into the Mistlands", a surreal magical adventure into something like a weird psychocosm. Here is the pich:

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.

Trans-Real News is Complete at 41 (Gamable) Episodes

I wanted to point my readers once more to my podcast Trans-Real News. It is one of the main reasons why this blog is being so scant lately. And I hope that you will find that it was a worthy diversion. It is now complete with 41 episodes averaging about 8 minutes in length.

Trans-Real news is my surreal science fantasy comedy audio drama. It follows the lives of the cast of a daily news show as they attempt to report on a world where time, space, and reality has malfunctioned. Please to things like rampaging hordes of barbarians coming back through time too eliminate people they think made humanity weaker, much of the Monterey Bay area of Northern California turning into a swamp full of Carboniferous life forms, Los Angeles turning into a shining 1950 science fiction-style Utopia, and a hive mind of talking insects taking over hollywood. 

If I were to try to describe it, I might do so as a Murphy Brown and meats Bill & Ted, while a selection of comics from Heavy Metal play out in the background. 

Throughout the series, I make a lot of references to Dungeons & Dragons. There are even a couple of scenes of the characters playing it. And one of the things I have tried to do with it is make sure that it is gamable.:

I tried to create a podcast where every episode might give a dungeon master six or seven new ideas for adventure hooks or strange events in their campaign world. 

Throughout it, I also  did a lot of World-Building, and there is definitely a setting all its own there where modern people are facing fantasy and science fiction dangers while trying to learn to navigate time travel, alternate dimensions, and the world where magic is coming into its own. 

It is my intention to start working on a setting book for it based on an in-world book a couple of the recurring characters wrote. I would love feedback from my readers as to whether or not this is something they would be interested in. 

I will post the trailer here. You can find it on most of your podcatchers, such as spotify, youtube, Podcast Addict, and itunes. 

If you have a few hours to spare, I would love to have a chance to entertain you!

Swords Against Madness

 Swords Against Madness, my new gonzo OSR solo TTRPG podcast launched today, and I have to start by saying that I have never felt a more warm welcome for anything I have ever done. Abel from The Iron Realm, Simon from Legend of the Bones, John from Tale of the Manticore, and T15 from Legends from the Fireside all dropped by and said hello, and asked me how they can help and promote me. I am blown away by how awesome a crowd this is already.

Swords Against Madness is played using Swords & Wizardry Complete and a bevy of tools from tables stolen from ICRPG to the Pendulum World-Building Assistant, to the Dungeon Dozen. I am turning the gonzo weirdness is going to be turned up to the max.

If you are interested in Swords Against Madness, you can learn more here! Or listen to it through YouTube here:

Welcome to the Deathtrap: Year 4 in Review

I have been writing Welcome to the Deathtrap for four years! I can hardly believe it has been so long!

In the last year I've put out a couple of light games, like Drakken and Dragonette, I've nearly completed my complete edition of Deathtrap Lite, and have a couple of other rules light games in the works in my spare time. I haven't spent nearly as much time as I would have liked on reviews. I have a backlog of books I've read, or have almost finished readings, but haven't had much of an opportunity to review.

The ebb and flow of the 'blog has definitely reflected the good and bad times in my life. In the past year and a bit, I have partially lost use of my hands, feet, and lips, and developed chronic fatigue due to a brain injury, I've been forced to move once, and nearly had to do so a second time. I've lost 28 lbs. I've tried to go back to work, and found myself too ill to do so effectively. I've learned a new skillset, and I'm starting a business.

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:

Sale on Deathtrap Lite

 Starting Friday,  Nov. 24th, 2023 my dark OSR fantasy game Deathtrap Lite will be on sale for $0.99 USD on DriveThruRPG. The sale will last until Monday the 27th.

Classy World-Building Phase 2-0

 

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

After my test run of the Drowned World fizzled, because the mechanics of BECMI D&D didn't quite match the promise of the character class descriptions, I sat down and I wrote a whole new role-playing game to accommodate it: Drakken RPG.

I have shared a copy of Drakken using just the classes from B/X D&D on itch.io.

From its inception, however, Drakken RPG was meant to be the backbone of a Drowned World campaign (take two). And even before I finish fully writing out the B/X D&D compatible version of it, I had already adapted all the classes I had shared last month and earlier this month to it. I could sit down tomorrow and play a version of the drowned world that probably better reflects the tone and intended experience of the Drowned World.

But what is the point of sharing the BX version of the classes, and my "Sword & Sorcery" version of Drakken RPG if I'm not also going to share a finalized version of Drakken RPG for the Drowned World?

As it is, in my Google docs I have a 100% ready game. I could pick up and play the Drowned World with friends with no problem at all. Sharing it, however, requires me to have enough of a gazetteer of the drowned world that anyone else could pick up the book and play it too.

And so, in order to finish the book I'm working on, I am going to have to build a gazetteer other people can use.

I'm currently working on the first part of that, describing how the world was drowned and what is left of it. Including introducing the major players in the game's pantheon.

Once I have established those core elements of the setting, the next step is to have places that the players might visit or be from

Thankfully for me by building the world using classes specific to the setting I've already done a huge portion of the work.

Many of the classes I've designed, like the Wobun alchemists, the Windlass machinists, or the mysterious Demalion time wizards all come with the idea that they are from a specific place and a specific culture that teaches them their abilities. For each of those classes I can describe a particular Homeland that has nurtured them.

For a few others that are members of a secret society, like the thieving Braid, they suggest an urban environment in which they might have arisen. Likewise, the sSorched gunslinger Rangers suggest their own wild West like Homeland where the firearms they use first of rose and are now a jealously guarded secret and part of their culture.

I can easily make one land per character class, give a sense of where it is on the world map, what the people who haven't ascended to the lofty ranks of level one adventurers are like, give it a few quirks, and name a few people and places in it, and have a gazetteer every bit as good as the one in the Dungeons & Dragons 3e Eberron Core Setting Book, which I consider the gold standard for campaign setting designs for Dungeons & Dragons.

All I would need on top of that is some central location where characters of almost any stripes might end up  a borderland setting with lots to do and plenty of danger. I could also use one metropolitan setting where characters can go and see people of all stripes and trade valuable goods. And probably one monstrous land of intelligent beings who are clearly not meant to be player characters. Tossing another dangerous and strange wild, and you have a very complete setting.

So this is what I'll be doing over the next few weeks, along with reviews and it connected thinkpiece. I will be building the world those classes suggest in order to put them in a version of Drakken RPG with a complete setting gazetteer. At the end of which, after a little tidying up and editing, I will post it as another pay what you want option.

I I'm quite proud of what I have achieved with Drakken. It plays in a quick and loose way that blends my favorite elements of Crimson Dragon Slayer, Knave, and touches of vanilla Dungeons & Dragons that I felt both lacked in a role-playing game that sits under 30 pages in length.

I imagine I could easily create a space opera post-apocalyptic, or Western version of this game in just a few days. Which would be a great treat for people who turn out to enjoy Drakken in the future.

This is also a lightweight enough project that I can keep doing it well continuing the much heavier work of finishing the eternal ocean in the background.

In a perverse irony, of course, I built a dark fantasy Knave setting to use for my home campaign until I was ready to do take two of the drowned world, and my wife is utterly hooked on it. Go figure. Might be another thing worth sharing at the end of the day.

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

QuAD RPG: Classic Sword & Sorcery

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

So, I started a campaign in the Drowned World, using the classes as I shared them here, along with a custom magic system, and the LotFP Specialist Skills as an add-on to BECMI D&D. And my players were a little disappointed. They loved the world and the design, but the mechanics were not to their taste.

They didn't find the rules congruent with setting and experience that I had set out to create.

I asked for a couple of weeks and went back to the drawing board, looking for something simple and more heroic feeling. I started with Venger Satanis' Crimson Dragonslayer d20 for a test game, and then started hacking the hell out of it... adding stuff from DCC RPG, from Black Pudding Heavy Helping, from Knave, Maze Rats, ICRPG.. even Talisanta, until I had a cobbled-together OSR rule-set that would feel at home with the world I wanted to create.And was extremely rules-light. I named it Quick And Dirty RPG, or QuAD for short. Then I discovered that the name had been taken, and rebranded it as Drakken.

After a week of hacking, refining, and writing it all down I had something that was pretty playable, but to share it I would need to put together a Gazetteer of the Drowned World that could take a little more time... 

Thankfully I did have everything I needed to make an OSR clone here and now.

So I took a couple of extra days to polish it up, pull out the Drowned World material that was integral to it, and then added, as a bit of an experiment, some Ukiyo-e art from a favorite artist, and put it up on Itch.io to share.

I am pretty proud of this one, I must confess. It is fast, you only need a sheet of paper to track HP and inventory. I hope you will have a look and give me a little feedback.

A Drakken: Drowned World is now in the works.

Get Drakken: Classic Sword & Sorcery as a PWYW title on Itch.io here.

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.

Diving Back into the Eternal Ocean

I have added another 30 monsters to Dragonette this weekend all the ones listed at the end of this article.) I am feeling far more satisfied with the project.

Last night after my Sunday gaming group, I decided to sit down and work on The Depths of the Eternal Ocean for the first time in awhile. In retrospect, I am amazed at how much I bit off when I started to design this game.

The planet Rusalka has millions of years of history,  hundreds of adventure sites, interdimensional influences,  multiple alien intelligences, and a lot of mysteries... most of which are only hinted at in the Eternal Ocean setting book. Most of the heavy lifting for the game is going to be done in the third Campaign book, The Depths of the Eternal Ocean. 

Oddly, this is the least important book from the perspective of most GMs. The first book, Wreck, is a self-contained TTRPG for exploring Ocean Planets. It's the only one you'd need to play the game I'm envisioning.

Eternal Ocean sets up a detailed set of worlds that the PCs might hail from, with enough culture to make the setting interesting. Then it sets up Planet Rusalka, a setting for adventure ideal to use with Wreck. It has factions, political tension, mysteries, and natural hazards - all presented purely in fiction, without mechanics. It is, in essence, a book of creative prompts. With this book, players can make their own PCs, and the GM can make their own Planet Rusalka based on the ideas presented in the  book.