Help Tiago Rolim Fight the Bug!

You guys know me, I don't sell much of anything here. I don't even try hard to sell my own stuff here, so bear with me...

Tiago Rolim, the creator of Numa, is sick in hospital with COVID-19 and having trouble getting the coverage he needs.

The Rolim Brothers are friends of Welcome to the Deathtrap! Tiago's brother, Lucas was the first writer to send me a book to review, and both have relentlessly promoted me to their amazing Brazilian OSR audience. I consider the Rolims friends. 

To help him cover medical expenses Guilherme Gontijo, who created one of my favorite resources for game developers, has put together a bundle of 72 books from the BROSR's coolest developers to help Tiago pay the bills. It costs only $10 USD, but it will go a long way for Tiago. 

If you haven't yet got Pacts & Blades after all of my gushing, this is your chance!

Grab the Bundle here!

... And expect a lot of reviews of Brazilian products on W2tDT in the near future! 

Zine Review: D8 Monthly - Issue 0

Zine Review: D8 Monthly - Issue 0

D8 Monthly Issue 0 Cover Art
By Dean Spencer 

Editor: YumDM
Marketplace : YumDM.com
Engine: Edition Agnostic Dungeons & Dragons 

Russ from YumDM and I banter occasionally on Twitter, and I have been keeping an eye on this project of his since it first crossed my feed. Now that it is finally out, I thought I would spread the word by giving it the full W2tDT treatment.

D8 Monthly is intended to be a free monthly 'Zine with locations, tools, tables, NPCs and content for use with any edition of Dungeons & Dragons.  It definitely has that cool O5R vibe of making cool Old-School content available for 5e players.

The pilot "0" issue is not entirely an army-of-one project, but a lot of Russ' style and a good chunk of his campaign comes through. And that is a good thing: he keeps it straight to the point, and uses evocative language that makes the most out of fluff.

Most of the articles in Issue 0 are interconnected; they flesh out the town of Dolfar, which serves as a low-level "home base" town. 

There is lots worth stealing here.

Alternate Magic Systems

Image by Kentos78 from Pixabay

In my campaigns, Magic is usually pretty rare; while I like running the odd high magic setting, I generally default to one where magicians are either initiated members of secret societies of wealthy elites or they are isolated mystics that hand their secrets from Master to Apprentice or in small cults. They may be familiar with one another, but usually only by reputation or correspondence.

In such campaigns, spell craft is an exceptional talent. Magicians make up less than 1% of the population, and 70% of those are hedge magicians, alchemists, and cultists who might only cause magical effects through the creation of objects, brewing of potions, or lengthy rituals. Only a gifted few can cast spells, and they are unique and strange. 

To keep magic feeling magical, I like having a few alternative systems on hand to allow a PC or important NPC to have strange surprises. In a world where no two Magic-Users are guaranteed to use the same list of spells - or even spells at all, no one really knows what to expect from a magician.

Right now, I keep a few options to use with my fantasy games. 

The first is the Pact Magic system that I lifted from Pacts & Blades and twisted to be a little more compatible with vanilla B/X-based systems.

I also have jacked an Alchemy system from Pathfinder 1e and toned it way down for B/X-derived systems to serve as an alternative healer to the Cleric. 

More recently I have borrowed an ultra-free-form Sorcery system from The Dozen Dooms and adapted it for Low Fantasy Gaming. 

(You can see that in PDF here.) 

Yesterday, I read a fantastic article from Ian Slater at Dweller of the Forbidden City on a specialized class he designed called the Gyre. Like both the Pact Magic system above and the Sorcery system it does not use spells, and is fairly free-form, but each Gyre is bound to one conceptual magical focus. Read it Here. 

This last one is perfect for creating a broad range of hedge-magicians, sorcerous priests, and psychics, each unpredictable and different. And none of them are bound by the typical Vancian structure. 

Book Review(s): Hot Springs Island

Book Review(s): Hot Springs Island

The Dark of Hot Springs Island 
Cover by Gabriel Hernandez
©2017 Swordfish Islands 

Author : Jacon Hurst, Evan Peterson, & Donnie Garcia

Publisher: Swordfish Islands

Marketplace: Swordfish Islands

Engine: System Agnostic

Hot springs island is a set of two books from Swordfish Islands and is written by a team that includes Jacob Hurst, Evan Peterson and Donnie Garcia. The first book, A Field Guide to Hot springs Island is a purely fiction book detailing the eponymous Hot Springs Island, one of a handful of islands in a chain called the Swordfish Islands. The second, The Dark of Hot springs Island, is a hex crawl module containing seventy-five locations, and twenty-six mapped dventure sites to be discovered. It also details seven factions with a network of alliances, rivalries, outright hostilities, and conflicting interests.

Some of the locations and factions in this book have been republished in smaller modules: The Lapis Observatory and Toxic Elvish Smut.

The total content in the book would easily make up an entire campaign, although, given the lethality of the setting and the power level of many of the enemies, it is probably a scenario that you would want to hold off on until your characters were mid-level (assuming a D&D-Based System.) 

The Tomb of Black Sand
Cover by Gabriel Hernandez 
©2019 Swordfish Islands 

One of the simplest hooks offered by the campaign setting to bring the player characters to  Hot Springs Island is that they work for the Martell Company, an Enlightenment era-style trading company that operates off of a nearby island, and is very interested in exploring and pillaging the ruins on Hot Springs. There is a another adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 5e published by Swordfish Islands that also involves working for the Martell Company entitled the Tomb of Black Sand, which could serve as an excellent lead-in to help build up some of their abilities to be ready for Hot Springs Island.

The setting of the module is in a ruined jungle island covered in volcanic fissures, geysers, and, of course, hot springs. It is scattered with the ruins of a lost elvish civilization that has mastered a level of magic and attained wealth unknown anywhere else in the campaign world. The location is so lavish in gold and jewels, that they become effectively meaningless to the player characters after a time, unless of course, they live return to the mainland alive. In fact, the theme of the entire setting, if it were expressed in two words, they would be excess and decadence.

Everything about the setting is lavish, strange, and mysterious. While there are a few familiar Dungeons & Dragons style monsters, it has a bestiary of unique creatures to the island. And where it does use ogres, salamanders, imps, and dire animals, it significantly rethinks them and their role in the campaign setting. Nothing can be taken for granted, and players running on the expectations they might have from a Forgotten Realm or Greyhawk-styke setting will find themselves making deadly mistakes.

Cover: Winds of Fire (WIP)

 I wanted to share a an art commission I have been working on for a friend here:

This is created with Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 using Public Domain Images downloaded from a mix of Pixabay and Koliektsiya.ru (as archived on Archive.org)

Art ©2020, Brian Rideout.

Fostering Creativity

 One of the things I most want to do in any given role playing game is to be able to appreciate other people's creativity. Maybe it's my childhood spent around talented artists and craftspeople, or my hedonistic life philosophy, but nothing impresses me and fills me with joy so much as seeing someone else come up with a beautiful way to bring more themselves into the world... or creative way to solve a problem.

"The Pinnacle of Virtue" by Scrap
Princess from the Planescrap
Primer ©2020 byScrap Princess. 

This is the reason why I have come to love the OSR community so much. Creativity is King. It doesn't matter whether you have the slick production values of some of the a-rated products, or if your style is technically perfect. If you have a new and clever idea, people want to hear from you. Artwork like the incredible creativity of Scrap Princess might not be as technically sophisticated as Wayne Reynolds, but it has such vibrancy that I would take it anytime.

And, that is also why I love the older style of role-playing games. With fewer rules and a faster flow, the GM can offer the players more information about their environment and their equipment, and then let them come up with their own solutions to problems. That is what D&D and most OSR games are specifically designed to do just that. Combat is a fail state. Player characters die so easily in Basic- & Advanced Dungeons and Dragons that if you pick a fight without having some kind of advantage and intelligence, you are playing your characters like they have a death wish. Creative problem solving trumps mastery of the rules in any game with a GM who has a strong sense of fairness, an open system, and faith in the Rule of Cool.

This has been at the heart of most of my module designs. I don't give easy and immediate solutions, instead I give a lot of possibility. Although, l sure that there are at least a couple of non-violent ways to solve the problem. When you present a problem with no obvious solution but lots of options, players really shine.

Book Review: The Dozen Dooms

The Dozen Dooms cover: "Swamp
Dragon"by Bob Greyvenstein. C 2020
Bob Greyvenstein, Grim Publishing

Book Review: The Dozen Dooms 

Author: Baldrage 
Publisher: self-published
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG
Engine: OSR Compatible (B/X) 

First off, I want to say two things: Curse you, Baldradge, for beating me to such an awesome book idea! And curse you, Professor Dungeon Master, for being so damn good! 

The Dozens Dooms is a book rule hacks and modifications to apply to B/X Dungeons & Dragons or its clones to create a faster, more flexible, and in some cases, more granular TTRPG experience.

While it is not a retroclone unto itself, it is designed so that if you applied all of the rules in The Dozen Dooms at once to something like OSE or Labyrinth Lord, you'd have a unique and cohesive play experience that would definitely it's own role playing game. 

However, all but one section of The Dozen Dooms is presented modularly and always in such a way that it can be applied to an OSR game without relying on any of the other rules in the book. Where he rules do work well together, The Dozen Dooms has notes on how to use them in tandem.

The Dozen Dooms as a set of rules most of their inspiration from Dan "Professor Dungeon Master" DeFazio and his channel Dungeoncraft, which is one of my favourite YouTube channels. Is dedicated to a mix of designing minis and terrain, and modifying Dungeons & Dragons, both 5th edition and earlier editions to play much more smoothly, and have a more gothic, grimdark feel.

I will not be able to go into every alternate rule or hack here. there's simply too much in this book to give that specific a review. Instead, I will pick out the standouts, and make some honourable mentions aside.