The Golden Heresy: Known Threats of Rustidium

Rustidium

World 937, nicknamed "Rustidium" by the Celestial Cartography Guild is an example of a world where industrialization went horribly wrong. At some point a mix of tainted magic, pollution, and disease pushed the dominant civilizations into a resource rush, and then into global war. Biological, chemical, necromantic, druidic, robotic, and eventually "dirty" atomic warfare between Superpowers led to a massive collapse of several nations. Full-out atomic war followed, leaving a planet incapable of sustaining civilization at all.

Tainted by wild magic, roaming undead, lingering disease, and radiation, Rustidium would be the list of Forbidden Planets, but the Guild, at the urging of the Chaos Wizards has kept an observation station over the planet to let the world serve as an exemplar as to why certain technologies and magics are forbidden, even to the Godless.

Accordingly, many of its most significant threats are catalogue by the CCG to assess dangers to forays both on Rustidium and similar worlds.

Old School Essentials Setting: The Golden Heresy

I originally posted this as an unlisted page, as it was just a doodle, but I decided to repost it and share with all my readers, as I would like to further develop the setting where it can be tagged. 

Prelude

Valthane Torion of the Cosmic Dreadnought Amber has a simple task; hunt down the last echoes of the Urzav Heresy; ancient magical machine intelligences that bend lesser material planes to the design of the Cast-off God. They shape whole worlds, life and all to a paradigm inimical to the Chaos Wizards. 

Such polluted worlds are hard to get into, harder still to survive. No army can be brought to eliminate the heretical neo-Gods, the Fae, or the Paladins spawned by an Urzav Engine so long as the Engine itself functions well enough to keep directing probability.

And so it was with the reality he had been probing from the edge of the Vortex. The Engine there was weak. Fading. He could have stood by until it collapsed, but by the Demiurge, that was not his way. For every year he waited, new "Chosen Ones" and blessed knights, new ascended goddesses, new weaponized prophecies will arm the world against The Great Liberation, and the reign of the Wizards. More bloodshed, more mothers crying. More corpses cast into the Reactors...

He would have that Engine shut down and soon.

His Scyre had found a way. A burrowing link through realities that made little sense. This new world was accessible by way of an unstable region of World 937: Rustidium. A burnt-out atomic wasteland of mutants and dinosaurs.

From there, if a small team of spies could make it by way of the link, then they could enter into this heretics planet and destroy the Engine.

"Theryx," he addressed his docent. "Get a car, and some weapons. A cybernetic Lesser Chaote. I am going to equip a team."

As the twenty-eyed shadow bowed to obey, he placed his hands on the Scyre and put a call into the Vortex.

Game Review: Mausritter 2e

Mausritter 2e Cover by Issac Williams 
©2020 Losing Games 

Game Review: Mausritter 2nd edition

Author: Issac Williams
Publisher: Losing Games
Marketplace: Itch.io, Games Omnivorous 
Engine: Into the Odd (modified) 

Mausritter is a roleplaying game about mice having adventures in a modern or Medieval fantasy story followingthe vein of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Redwall, Mouse Guard, or The Tale of Despereaux. It is built on the idea of tiny heroes that have all the odds stacked against them overcoming the limits of their size and their fear to do great deeds.

Mausritter is big on creating an old-school Gaming experience. It uses the Into the Odd engine as it's base, which is one that does two things extremely well:

• It makes combat exceedingly lethal
• It forces you to look for narrative advantages everywhere in order to ensure that you do not leave things to chance.

Mausritter takes it a step further by starting characters with low statistics to stack the dice against the PCs. If they want to stay alive, they need to constantly seek ways to avoid having to roll the dice. They learn to seek every advantage and seek every clever workaround to overcome a dangerous situation. This suits the feel of being tiny creatures like mice almost perfectly.

Adventure Review: Frostbitten and Mutilated

 Adventure Review: Frostbitten and Mutilated

Frostbitten and Mutilated Cover by Zak Sabbath
©2018 Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Author: Zak Sabbath
System: Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG, Amazon

The Usual Disclaimer: This is a review of a pretty Edgy product that covers some pretty grim topics. And it is the center of a lot of controversy. Neither the book nor my review of it are recommended for children of any age.

Spoiler Warning: Do not read this if you are going to be a player in FB&M... it will spoil the fun!

Frostbitten and Mutilated is a Campaign written for Lamentations of the Flame Princess by Zak Sabbath (Zak Smith) that takes player characters into a grim subarctic wasteland full of hostile intelligent animals and where the forces of nature themselves are hostile to outsiders. There they get caught in a time loop that can only be broken in two equally difficult ways; one of which might bring about the Apocalypse.

It is about the most 'Metal take you can create if you were to take a chunk of Norse Mythology, the plot of the first Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser novel, a splash of 80s slasher flick, and a GWAR concert and mixed them together.

Race as Class: Why I Use It.

Demihumans by Larry Elmore 
From the Basic Dungeons & Dragons Player Rules Guide
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules Box Set, ©1986 TSR

My favorite version of Dungeons & Dragons is the Rules Cyclopedia version of BECMI. As I have rolled over Editions, I have gotten rid of my old books. (I move a lot and often have little space.) But the one book I have always held onto is that Rules Cyclopedia. There is no version as complete and useful, in my opinion. For several reasons:

• No other version of Dungeons & Dragons I have read has thorough rules for both building and maintaining a Stronghold... With a system that rewards wise rule and turns a stronghold into an adventure-generating tool (aside from Birthright) . 
• No other Version of Dungeons & Dragons has as crunchy a system for mass combat.
• Combined with Wrath of the Immortals, it has the complete arc of a character from poor nobody to hero, to king, to god.
• The Rules Cyclopedia includes a totally divergent set of rules for Proficiency and weapon specialization that did far more for adding interest fighters than AD&D ever did.
• All four of those subsystems can be ported into AD&D without modification. 
• The stronghold and mass combat rules can work with some tweaking in Dungeons & Dragons 3rd and 5th edition as well, 
• It has a 5 minute character generation time.

It isn't perfect, and I am open to reading any OSR compatible or OGL system that does a better job. But since 1991, the Rules Cyclopedia has come out for every long-running D&D and Pathfinder campaign I have ever run. 

Cover of Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, 
by Jeff Easley; ©1991 TSR

But it is also the version I can never sell on my players because of one detail. Race as Class; pelayers live to hate the idea that they must play a human unless they are willing to accept a limitation to the class choices.

Game Review: Tiny Cthulhu

Game Review: Tiny Cthulhu

Tiny Cthulhu Cover Art by 
Tom Brown; ©2020 Gallant
Knight Games

Author: Alan Bahr
Publisher: Gallant Knight Games
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG
Engine: Tiny d6

I am a Cthulhu Mythos fanatic, and have a bookshelf full of Lovecraft's fiction, and the work of his circle and modern "Lovecraftian" authors to show for it. One of my all-time favorite campaigns in any system was one I ran designed as a mashup of The Silver Key, The Festival, Celephais, the video game The 7th Guest, and the anime series Witch Hunter Robin.

Oddly, I have never played the original Chaosium Call of Cthulhu. I found the version of the rule-set I got my hands on was unappealing. But Call of Cthulhu d20 was one of my favorite systems, and still sits on my shelf.  The problem is that Eldritch Horror just doesn't jive well with a level-based and combat-heavy system like d20. and the charm of that adaptation wears off pretty quickly.

I've tried to capture the Cthulhu Mythos in a lot of systems since: Mage: the Ascension, the new World of Darkness, GURPS, Cypher System... All with mixed results.

I am also an Arkham Horror junkie. 

I have a theory that the Mythos really does need a purpose-built system to work. Games built to make characters the heroes, or at least give them a fighting chance often fall flat. And I have been looking for a good CoCd20 alternative to tell my Weird Tales. I was thrilled when I heard that Alan Bahr was taking a stab at the Mythos in the chatter after my recent interview with him.  I've been watching the calendar for my shot at this review for months. And I am not disappointed.

Game Review: Alan Bahr's Tombpunk: Low-Fi Roleplaying

Tombpunk Cover Art by
Nicolás R. Giacondino & Jeremy D. Mohler,
©2020 Outland Entertainment LLC

Game Review: Alan Bahr's Tombpunk: Low-Fi Roleplaying

Author: Alan Bahr
Publisher: Outland Entertainment
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG
Engine: Custom d12

Alan Bahr's Tombpunk: Low-Fi Roleplaying is a roleplaying game designed for a very specific style of play: quick and dirty gaming that is going to happen for a few sessions in a row. It's the sort of game you would play on a family vacation, a long road trip, or while camping. It's rules are minimalistic (as I would expect from Alan Bahr), and designed to work with practically zero planning by the GM. It is probably best played totally off the cuff looking at a randomly generated map... Or just making it all up as you go along. It has mechanics to help you know when a specific improvised adventure is ready to wrap up if the room is giving you no indication.

The premise of Tombpunk is simple: you play characters in a gritty fantasy world where poverty and overtaxation have forced your character to give up a hand scrabble peasant life for the dangerous and dirty work of clearing haunted dungeons for the treasure that the monsters bring with them from the underworld.